Love
Love is an attribute of God that is increasingly being interpreted, not in light of the Biblical witness, but in light of contemporary experience. Love has developed into a word with an extreme range of meanings, from a deep, committed decision for a lifetime of relationship to something that is little more than “stronger than average fondness” or “lust.” Another particularly popular understanding of love is “never having any kind of confrontation” or “never taking a stand.” In modern times, there are various groups that lobby for one or another of the meanings that the word “love” can have, with either more or less dependence on the biblical witness to provide the content of the word.
Another tactic, which gets a little closer to the truth, is to draw attention to the fact that, in Greek (the language of the New Testament), there are three distinct words for “love”: ερος (eros), φιλιω (philio), and αγαπη (agape). The point is made that ερος is primarily used to describe romantic love between two people (the word is the root of English words like “erotic”), φιλιω describes brotherly love (the root of Philadelphia) and αγαπη describes unconditional love. This account of the Greek distinctions is only partially correct.
It is deficient because it treats the words as if they had truly fixed meanings in every context. This is not true for any words, let alone these words. Additionally, there is a much broader range of meanings for ερος than this treatment would suggest (and even more so than the English words derived from it would imply). ερος is not simply romantic love, but it is the word that philosophers used to describe deep passion for the truth. This kind of driving, almost obsessive love was a concept articulated by ερος. When this is taken into account, the sharp distinction between ερος and αγαπη, especially that considers the former to be completely incompatible with divine love, is difficult to maintain.
What is good about this approach is that it points out that our words carry unintended baggage. The word used for “love” in the New Testament is overwhelmingly αγαπη. However, it was not used because it already bore the meaning of “unconditional, selfless love.” Before the New Testament was written, αγαπη was seldom ever used. It was nearly forgotten in the Greek-speaking world. It was not used as the primary word for love among philosophers, nor was it the primary word used to describe other interpersonal relationships. What is important to notice is that αγαπη acquired its meaning from New Testament usage. The biblical authors did not use αγαπη because it already meant what they wanted to say, but, through consistently using it to describe the selfless and gracious activity of God, it was radically reshaped and redefined so that it bore this new meaning. αγαπη derives its content from the gospel, not the other way around.
Having considered these linguistic issues, we can turn our attention to the actual content of the love of God. Again, the love of God cannot really be considered apart from what God has actually done. There are two particularly helpful declarations in the New Testament that concisely articulate what is the real core of the Christian understanding of the love of God. The first of these is Romans 5:6-8, where Paul says, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Paul here contrasts the love of God with the lack of love among humanity. Human beings do not, by nature, show love simply to show love. Love is something that must be requited at some level or another. However, this is not how God is. God loves humanity even while it is steeped in sin. God does not wait for us to become holy before loving us, nor does Christ die in order to allow God to love us; after all, Christ’s death is indeed an act of this love, as Paul has said. We see in Christ the depths of God’s love for us, in that God was willing to die, even before we had given any evidence that we would be a good return on his investment, so to speak.
The other particularly helpful declaration is in 1 John 3:1. “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.” If the passage from Romans emphasized the external dimension of God’s love for us, that is, God’s being willing to die for us, this statement emphasizes the internal dimension of God’s love, an emphasis that God’s love penetrates into the core of our being and transforms us. It is one thing for the death of the Son of God to make some kind of juridical transaction possible. It is another thing altogether to actually incorporate sinful humanity into the family of God, to make us, as Paul says, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17). God’s love is demonstrated in that God became flesh, lived among us, died our death, rose from that death, and poured out the Holy Spirit upon humanity so that God, who needs nothing at all, might not be without us. We would never have been able to anticipate the overwhelming nature of the love of God, and yet we see it born witness to in the New Testament. The love that actually is is far greater than the love that we would have invented.
Eternity
The eternity of God (which for our purposes is primarily the pre-existence of God over the everlastingness of God, though this is also important, but is a less difficult concept) seems at first glance to be something that is not dependent on the Father/Son relationship to help us understand. After all, does not the very opening passage of Genesis say, “In the beginning, God…,” implying that God is pre-existent and, thus eternal? And yet, though this seems logical, it is more complicated than this.
For example, according to Greco-Roman philosophy, God was eternal, but so was creation, meaning that God does not predate the created order. To say that God is eternal would have been granted, but it would have been argued that this is nothing unique, as all matter is equally eternal. God’s eternality is a given, but it doesn’t tell us anything. It might be argued that the key texts that speak of God as being eternal and especially pre-existent are Old Testament texts (again, such as Genesis 1:1), and thus the eternity of God is just as much a Jewish conviction as a Christian one, and is therefore not dependent on the Incarnation of the Son of God for clarity.
What is interesting is that, though Christians do indeed refer to Old Testament texts to support their views of the eternity of God, the Jewish community did not come to widespread doctrinal agreement on the doctrine of creation out of nothing (Latin: creatio ex nihilo), which is a strongly related conviction to the unique eternity of God, until the late middle ages. This has to do with the fact that the idea of “creation” in the Old Testament often carries with it a sense of “ordering” more than creation in its most narrow sense. However, though there were doubts within the Jewish community, Christians were convinced that God created the universe out of nothing from the very beginning and this was the case because of the Incarnation.
In the New Testament, Christ is continually referred to as the one through whom God created everything (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 1:2, to give just a few examples). This links the doctrines of creation and Incarnation together in a deep way and intensifies both of them. It places the Son of God on the Creator side of the Creator/creation relationship (to be discussed further below) and emphasizes the pre-existence of God (both the Father and the Son). This is not to say that it is utterly impossible to arrive at a doctrine of the pre-existence or eternity of God without a doctrine of the Incarnation, but it was indeed the historical impetus that pressed this belief on the mind of the early church and pushed them to place a high importance on such a connection.
There are many other topics that could be discussed under the heading of “Attributes of God,” but we will stop here for a few reasons. First, because the primary point of this section is to emphasize the methodological concern for understanding God in and through the Incarnate Son rather than independently of the concrete revelation of God, which tends to lean more on secular philosophy than the actual revelation of God. Another reason to hold back from engaging with every conceivable attribute is because this form of doing theology as a whole seems to be based more on “What is God like” as an abstract question rather than “How has God revealed himself to us.” This does not mean we cannot learn about God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and other attributes from the Incarnation, but that these ideas are far less central to the Christian faith (though not to be totally ignored) and are less burdened by philosophical baggage (the baggage that is associated with God’s omniscience overlaps considerably with that associated with God’s omnipotence). In light of these considerations, we will move on to another important observation that bears upon our contemporary situation.
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