God is love. This is a seemingly simple, but a most profound statement made of God; and it comes to us in a small letter, written to a small people in the whole realm of the Roman Empire. The implications that arise from this reality are rife with a depth dimension that far surpasses the mind’s eye on its own; it requires the sight of faith, the faith of Christ in order to begin to envisage the ineffable scope of it all. God is love. He is this precisely because He is a tri-unity of hypostases in such a way that the interpenetrative relationship inherent to the ‘persons’ shapes the unicity or ‘oneness’ of the ousia of this God. God’s being as One is a being shaped by multiplicity rather than absolute simplicity, as the philosophers would have it. And so, the Christian theologian thinks this God as He has Self-revealed/exegeted Himself for the world in Jesus Christ. It is from this Self-exegesis that the Christian has come to know God as love; as Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. From here, the Christian seeking for intelligibility comes to the development of a particular grammar in order to attempt to understand how it is that God is one and three / three and one in correlation with the notion that this relationship in oneness constitutes what in fact love is. That is to say, in order to think ‘God is love’ entails an elucidation of how God’s inner Self-differentation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitutes love as the very esse of who God is.

In one modern effort to bring elucidation to the notion that God is love, Eberhard Jüngel presents a rather phenomenological distillation, such that ‘God is love’ might entail an emphasis on how receptivity for the other-in-the-One might be the ground and grammar for giving the intelligibility that the Christian might desire in their pursuit towards knowing God. In the following Bruce McCormack offers a sketch of Jüngel’s treatment, and then provides some constructive critique of his own:

We return to the identity statement “God is love.” This is a true statement because it is in and through God’s act of identification with Jesus that “the being of God realizes itself as love.” It is to be noted just how are removed Jüngel’s conception of divine being is from the idea of “being itself.” It is a relational concept, clearly. More importantly, it refers to a relation that is realized in history, in the event of the cross and resurrection. For this reason, both Jüngel’s Christology and his doctrine of the Trinity find their ontological root in that event. The question of where the being of God is to be found must precede (logically) the question of what the being of God is.

According to Jüngel, God can be love only where God is both “the lover and the beloved at the same time.” To say this much is to suggest that the act of “identification” on the part of God is an act that differentiates God. “God is thus one who loves himself. But this love cannot be misunderstood as the self-love of an I. God differentiates himself in that he loves himself. . . . In John’s language, he is God the Father and God the Son.” 

We have reached the point where the “preunderstanding” of love achieved by Jüngel’s phenomenology begins to fall short as a description of divine love. The uniqueness of the love that God is begins to emerge. The love of the Father for the Son is a sending of the latter into this world “to a certain death.” Why? Because the still greater selflessness of the love that is God cannot be contained. It overflows, so that the Father’s love for the Son is intrinsically, by its very nature, a love for others. Indeed, it is God’s love for these others that motivates the self-differentiating love of God. “God would then be love in that he does not desire to love himself without loving his creature, that absolutely other who is his counterpart. That is the eternal and divine motivation of God’s self-differentiation, apart from which his identity with the man Jesus would not be conceivable.” In any event, the uniqueness of the love God is lies in the fact that it leads to a “separation” of Father and Son in an event in which the Son remains “closer” to the Father “than he is to himself.” “God has himself only in that he gives himself away. But, in giving himself away, he has himself. That is how he is.” So understood, the love that God is, is a love that is self-communicating and self-emptying — even to the point of suffering a death that separates Father and Son.1

The final clause offered by McCormack in regard to the ostensible separation between the Father and the Son that inheres on the cross (at the point of death) takes us further than concerns us in this moment (suffice it to say, BLM gets into that in the following paragraph and beyond). For our purposes what is of interest is the emphasis Jüngel, according to McCormack, places on the inherent Self-differentation between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one that obtains more classically we might say with reference to the processions or ‘origins of relation’ within the inner-life of God. That is to say, what we see in Jüngel is a classic orientation, but one that focuses on the correlation between the ad extra or outer economic revelation of God as reflective of the antecedent character of God that has always already been the reality.

At the end of the matter, what Jüngel rightly emphasizes, per my lights, is that our knowledge of God as love is, is indeed the ground of our knowledge of God in toto. In other words, according to Jüngel, we only know God as God is freely for us. God is only freely for us as He is for us in the Son in Jesus Christ. It is here where we exclusively have access to know who God is, just as sure as we understand where He comes from in the inner-life of God; and we only know God in this way such that He has come to us, in the ‘far country,’ as the other for us in God’s life. Jüngel, according to McCormack, understands this encounter with God as the only basis by which the Christian might know God. And what this encounter necessarily imposes on the knower that God is love, is precisely because He shows up to us in accord with who He is in His inner-life as the God defined, in his singularity, as the God-in-the-other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 173-74.