Tag: Trinity

Love is God, but not like you think

Love is God, but not like you think

C. S. Lewis famously proclaimed,

“Love ceases to be demon only when it ceases to be a god.”

He was quoting M. Denis de Rougemont. But just two sentences later, Lewis writes the following in his own words:

“the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God” (The Four Loves, p. 7).

In one sense, I agree – as do scores of Christians who assert some version of the following: God is love, but love is not God.

For instance, A. W. Tozer:

Equating love with God is a major mistake which has produced much unsound religious philosophy and has brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely out of accord with the Holy Scriptures and altogether of another climate from that of historic Christianity.

Or (after a quick Google search), the “Fierce Marriage Podcast,” which describes an episode like this:

“God is love… but, love isn’t God!” In this episode we’ll look at the wonderful, counter-cultural, biblical idea of love.

The idea here is that we often make an idol of what we call “love”—as defined by feelings of romantic ecstasy, emotional attachment, sexual desire, or a piercing (almost painful) longing for another creature—whether it’s for a boyfriend, a child, or a Labrador Retriever.

There’s truth to this danger, especially because most of us—whether we know it or not—are more children of Romanticism (e.g., Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Disney, Nicholas Sparks, Taylor Swift) than we are of a cold and sterile Rationalism. What’s more, the danger is not that we would love too much, but that our loves become misdirected and disordered, so that we chase endlessly after a particular feeling, and end up worshiping created things instead of the Creator. Ironically, to do so may also destroy the objects of our love (and ourselves) because created things cannot possibly bear the weight of divine expectations.

In response, Lewis, Tozer, and “Fierce Marriage” have this to say: God is love (1 John 4:8), but love is not God.

AUGUSTINE’S REBUTTAL

It may surprise us to learn, however, that the greatest theologian in church history disagreed, at least in one sense.

Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne

Saint Augustine wrote this in reflecting on 1 John’s claim that “God is Love.”

“[V]ery Love is God: for openly it is written,
‘God is Love.’”
~ Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 98.4.

If his assertion seems flimsy, Augustine then returns to 1 John (and other texts) for additional proof: “whoever abides in love abides in God” (1 John 4:16). For Augustine, it’s crucial to note that Scripture is not here describing a flowery human emotion, but a divine person (more on that in a moment).

Hence, if (1) God is Love, and (2) abiding in Love is abiding in God, then it follows inescapably that (3) Love is God. On one level, the argument may be read somewhat like a math equation. You cannot say 2+2 = 4 without also affirming that 4 = 2 + 2. If Deus (God) = dilectio (love), then the converse is true. And that fact does not care about your feelings.

LOVE AND TRINITY

But… (and we must not miss this “But”) Augustine’s argument then takes a turn that makes it very different from a pop song, fused with a Nicholas Sparks novel, drizzled with a sugar-free glaze of suburban spirituality.

He begins to think about the Trinity.

His question is as follows: If God is Love, and if Love is from God, and if abiding in Love is abiding in God as God abides in us (all of which are taught in Scripture), then which person of the Trinity ought to be identified as the divine Love that simultaneously fills us even as it links us both to God and other people?

Augustine’s answer is the Holy Spirit,

“by which the begotten is loved by the One who begets him and in turn loves the begetter.”
~Augustine, De Trinitate, 6. 7.

After all, Augustine’s favorite Bible verse was Romans 5:5:

“God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” ~Romans 5:5

WHO IS RIGHT?

So, should we side with Lewis or Augustine?

In the end, it depends entirely on whose definition of “love” you’re willing to accept, and which god you’re talking about. Augustine writes of Love’s divine origin, Lewis speaks of creaturely echoes. One is the pure spring, the other is the creaturely river that flows invariably through tainted soil. Lewis thus explains:

Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. It’s voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself (The Four Loves, emphasis mine, p.7)

In the end, Lewis, Tozer, and “Fierce Marriage” all defer (in differing degrees) to a fallen and culturally-defined account of the word. Hence, they speak of it as a “demon” when it assumes the place of a “god.” I get this move. And I’ve probably made it too.

But it comes at a cost, not just because it risks sounding like illogical nonsense (2+2=4 but 4 ≠ 2+2), but because it means we’ve settled(?) for a fallen definition in place of the real thing. Dare I say, for “mud pies in a slum because [we] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

Augustine defines Love in light of the Trinity, so “demonic” definitions are ruled out from the start.

Of course, that’s no defense of twisted, selfish, or sinful expressions of what we call “love” down here. (Augustine knew that better than most.) Instead, it’s an invitation to let God define the word that is itself definitive of God’s holy character, poured out by the Holy Spirit, into our hearts.

In other words: Love is God, but maybe not like you think.

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God is not male (or female)

God is not male (or female)

For Christians, one danger of not knowing the tradition is the chance that you might set out to defend it with great boldness, only to discover that you are actually contradicting it.

Like, blatantly.

We might call this the Saul of Tarsus model of apologetics: boldly going in the wrong direction. And for the record, I’ve done it.

I was reminded of this danger recently as I watched an online argument in which a few Christians argued quite strongly, on “conservative” grounds, that “God is male.”

Yet the irony is that if you showed up at the councils of Nicaea or Constantinople with that argument, they wouldn’t call you a conservative; they would call you a heretic.

In fact, the Christian tradition has never claimed that God is male.

On the contrary, God is beyond gender, not least because God does not have a body.

“THEOS” AND THE FATHER

To be sure, Jesus (the second person of the Trinity) is male—and Scripture is clear that he retains his maleness to this day. After all, he ascends bodily to heaven. Yet while Christ is fully divine, the term theos (“God”) is almost always a reference to the first person of the godhead (a.k.a., the Father).

Things get confusing, of course, because “Father” sounds pretty “male” too. Yet the tradition has always viewed the label as a metaphor, just as it has the masculine pronoun “he” when used to speak of God the Father.

As with all metaphors, these come with a whisper of “it is” and “it is not.”

In other words, when applied to God, such labels shouldn’t be over-literalized. To call God “Father” doesn’t make him “male” any more than to call God “Rock” (Ps. 18.2) makes him a lump of granite out of which to make a countertop.

AN IRONIC CONTRADITION

As at least one person pointed out during this online conversation —there is an ironic contradiction in the (so-called) “conservative” contention that God should be seen as male.

In its simplest form, the contradictory logic runs like this:

  1. Sex and gender are connected to “bodily” realities.
  2. God does not have a body.
  3. Still, God is male.

To be clear, I actually agree with the first two points (as I’ve noted elsewhere: here and here). Yet to try to add the third point to the list is about as consistent as yelling “Meat is murder!” one minute, and “Down with vegans!” the next.

It’s contradictory.

And it has no precedent in orthodox theology.

ON FEMININE METAPHORS

Since God is not male, the next question is often whether we should complement our masculine pronouns with female ones.

In truth, the Bible does supply some feminine metaphors for God. These include likening God’s protective heart to that of a mother bird sheltering chicks (Ruth 2.12; Ps. 91; Mt. 23.37). While Isaiah likens God’s cries to those of a woman in labor (42.14), and God’s comfort to that of a mother with her children (66.13; 49.15).

Even so, Scripture stops short of calling God a “she.”

To do so in the ancient world may have risked certain problems in a culture filled with fertility cults, goddess worship, and copulating deities.

If one were going to supply a feminine pronoun to one person of the Trinity, the Spirit would be the most likely candidate. After all, the Hebrew word for “Spirit” is feminine; and the Greek is neuter. Yet not even this means that we should think of the Spirit as predominantly female.

To do so, would be to make the same error that was previously made with the unorthodox conception of “the Father.” And it would also be to forget that masculine and feminine nouns (in Greek and Hebrew) do not equate with “male” and “female.”

After all, the Greek word for “table” is feminine, but this hardly means that we should think of that thing you sit around for dinner as having “xx” chromosomes.

As the feminist theologian Sarah Coakley notes, to speak of the Spirit as a “she” may not even be advantageous to the cause of women’s equality—first, because it could simply replace blanket male stereotypes with unhelpful female ones, and second, because the church has often (tacitly or overtly) subordinated the Spirit to the other members of the godhead.

This too runs counter to orthodox theology– and it has resulted in what Coakley sees as the Spirit being drawn and painted as an ever-shrinking “pigeon” in our hierarchal artwork.

CONCLUSION

In the end, one takeaway from all this is that it is important for Christians to actually know the tradition before seeking to defend or overthrow it.

And on this matter especially, the tradition is not nearly as “patriarchal” as one might have been led to think.

Likewise, it is important to remember the “otherness” of God when discussing such matters.

To cite Karl Barth: “God is not ‘man’ said in a loud voice!”

And the same goes for “woman.”

 

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