Let’s talk about love. Not just any love, but true love; the kind of love that shapes who the Christian God is, my God (and your God if you’re in Christ). There are all kinds of popular and sentimental parodies of love at work in our world today; mostly lust is mistaken for love in our day and age. There is also a more developed conception of love amongst people in the world that believes that there is some sort of creaturely independence about love that is shared between two people (like in a marriage or boyfriend/girlfriend relationship). Indeed, there is this kind of bond, and a created one, that ought to inhere between a man and a woman (by way of God’s good creation and recreation, in Christ). But is it enough to say ‘I do’ to another, if the ground of that ‘I do’ is not intentionally and consciously centered in the love of Christ as the Son of the Father in and through the communion of the Spirit?

The divorce rate in America (and the world, but I will focus on America since I am an American) does not suggest that a kind of independent creaturely love (and I mean one that is not shaped in the ‘bosom’ of the Father of the Son) has any kind of committal force or dynamis to it. Instead the statistics on marriage in America suggest that a love without the cross of Christ and cruciform shape (which is the kind of sacrificial other focused love that shapes God’s intra-Trinitarian life love) has no staying power. At bottom this kind of love, devoid of the Spirit as it is, can only and always seek it’s own good; it cannot, definitionally, seek anything else because it loves the darkness rather than the light (according to John 3:16ff).

So I will simply make the assertion and thesis statement: That there is no true ontology or conception of love apart from its ground in the Triune life of God in Christ. Further, that human love has no purpose (or telos) if it is un-tethered from the life of God through the Spirit anointed mediating gracious humanity of Jesus Christ. The conclusion, then, is that human love as an end in itself has nowhere to finally look but back at self (homo in se incurvatus); because human love was always already intended to find its verve and slide in and through Christ’s Spirit empowered love of the Father.

Thomas Torrance provides a helpful description of what God’s Triune love is; he writes:

The fact that, as St John tells us, God is Love, who has manifested his love to us in sending his only Son into the world so that we might live through him, does not meant that God is Love in virtue of his love for us, but that God is in himself the fullness and perfection of Love in loving and being loved which out of sheer love overflows freely toward others. It means that the Love that God is, is not that of solitary inactive or static love, whatever that may be, but the active movement of reciprocal loving within the eternal Being of God which the one ultimate Source of all love. That God is Love means that he is the eternally loving One in himself who loves through himself, whose Love moves unceasingly within his eternal Life as God, so that in loving us in the gift of his dear Son and the mission of his Spirit he loves us with the very Love which he is. In other words, that God is Love as this loving One in Christ and in the Spirit, means that in their interpersonal reciprocal relations the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the Communion of Love which the One God eternally is in himself, and indeed is also toward us. It is as this ever living and acting Communion of loving and being loved that God is who he is, the perfection and fullness of Love that will not be confined with the Godhead but freely and lovingly moves outward toward others whom God creates for fellowship with himself so that they may share with him the very Communion of Love which is his own divine Life and Being. [Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, 5-6]

As Torrance highlights, and in agreement with what I have been sketching previously, God’s Triune life is the only category of love available. We have been created and recreated in Christ to participate in God’s life of Triune life of love which as revealed in Christ is cruciform in shape. If we are not actively participating in this life of love, we cannot anonymously claim to be actually loving. A relationship without being grounded in participation in God’s life through Christ will only spin hopelessly and endlessly back to self. It won’t find its true orientation, as Augustine noted when he wrote: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” Hearts that are seeking union and communion, one with the other; hearts that are not the new ‘fleshy’ hearts (II Cor. 3) that we have in and through the heart of Christ cannot find rest and true union, but only disarray and destruction (ultimately).

God is Love. Amen.