God is love.
That is either a tautology or it is an assertion. It can’t be both.
If it’s a tautology, then it tells us nothing about the nature of God or of love. It’s like saying Fe = Iron. That tells us nothing about iron except that Fe is its symbol, and nothing about Fe other than it represents iron. If it’s a tautology, you have to bend your understanding of God to match your understanding of love, or you have to bend your understanding of love to match your understanding of God (or some of each), but the statement itself provides no guidance. IMO, “liberal” Christians lean toward the former, and “fundamentalist” Christians lean toward the latter.
If God is love is an assertion, it can only work in one direction. You take something mysterious (God) and say it is the same as something familiar (love). The text itself supports this reading:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. . .(16) God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. [1 John 4, NIV]
And if we need a reminder of the nature of love, Paul does a nice job in 1 Corinthians:
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
So to recap so far: The Bible asserts–it clearly tells us–that we are to understand God in terms of our understanding of love; and not that we should understand love in terms of our understanding of God. And anything that is incompatible with love–as we understand it and as described beautifully by Paul–is not God.
It’s my understanding that love is the core message of Christianity. I know some of my fellow atheists disagree with that, and maybe some of the Christians here disagree with it as well. But that’s my take. One of our thoughtful Christian CMs recently made the point that “The best interpreter of scripture is scripture. To properly pull the truth from a scripture it must be understood within the context of the segment it’s in, the chapter it’s in and the book as a whole.” IMO, as an outsider now but one who was raised in the church, a proper interpretation of any scripture requires reading it in the light of the passages quoted above.
Questions:
- Do you see “God is love” as an assertion or a tautology?
- Is there any possible scenario in which a loving human parent (as Paul describes love) would condemn even his worst imaginable child to an eternity of torture? (Assuming the parent had the ability and the right to do so.)
- If your answer to number 2 is “no,” then in light of the Scripture quoted above, how should we understand Biblical passages which describe a place of eternal torture ordained by God? How should we understand other passages which depict a God engaging in behavior that cannot possibly be undertood as loving, per Paul’s description of love?
- If your answer to number 2 is yes, help me understand that, ‘cause it’s pretty hard for me to see.