Can God love?

[Angrboda]

This whole idea that God would love me 'if', is, I think, rather beside the point.  If God chooses not to let me near because of some supposed flaw, or whether he cannot, is, I think an irrelevant distinction.  Love, in order to be real, has to actually involve, you know, "loving" the other.  If God neither does actually let me near, regardless of whether he simply won't, or because he can't, then God's love for me is never actualized.  Love that is never tested isn't really love, it's just the idea of love.  We have no idea whether God would or would not embrace me in spite of my flaws because he never actually does.  So this idea that God has agape for me is hollow, empty, and meaningless.  It is like the teenager's "undying love" for her boyfriend that turns out not to be so undying after all.  God's love cuts and runs at the first sign of trouble.  How Christians consider that agape, or anything at all, is beyond me.  That's not love, it's just a romantic notion.  It's the idea that God would love you if he could, but he can't, so he shan't.  It's nothing real, it's just empty words.

God has certainly 'actualized' his love for everyone even prior to any one person's salvation experience:

1. John 3:16, For God so loved the world...he died to atone for anyone's sin. Romans 5:6-8, God proved his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
2. God continually preserves this message of hope and constantly orchestrates events so that people hear it. Mark 4:3-20 (the parable of the sower/seeds)
3. When a person's heart is receptive to this hope, he is waiting there to respond. I John 1:8-9


So, your whole point above is wrong: God has already shown his love for us. There is no "God would love you if he could, but he can't, so he shan't."

My references are not exhaustive, rather are just one of many places in the NT where you get the same principles.

Try to keep your eye on the ball, Steve. The question was not does God love a certain class of people who meet his conditions, but rather does God have agape toward the unbeliever, who, according to you, he is metaphysically unable to approach. And the answer to that latter question is no, he doesn't have agape toward them, for the reasons outlined. As for the other class of people, his love toward them is conditional, so that's not agape either, though for different reasons.

But let's get something else out of the way. Your God did not die for anybody's sins because your God did not die. And he knew he wasn't going to die. That's the same lie that Christians have been telling for 2,000 years and no matter how many times you repeat it, it's still a lie. Jesus was temporarily inconvenienced for my sins, maybe; but what is that to an eternal God? Fuck if I know. Generally when it comes to God's pseudo-sacrifice, the explanation breaks one of two ways. Either Christ's "death" was merely symbolic in order to facilitate our rapprochement toward God, or it was in some sense metaphysically necessary. In the first case, it being symbolic, it wasn't necessary, it had no substantive effect upon God's relationship towards man, and was little more than a calculated PR campaign. In the second sense, Jesus' crucifixion becomes some sort of magic spell, requiring the right physical ingredients and saying the right magic words. Why God needs a cantrip to forgive someone is never fully explained, it's just an ad hoc supposition required to make sense of the story. That's not how the rest of the world forgives. Me, I just will myself to forgive, and it's done. Apparently, if God wants to forgive someone, he has to sacrifice a goat. Your God is the most emotionally inept God I've ever heard of.

Regardless, the Christian is always attempting to make disbelief some kind of moral failing for which we are culpable. It's not, so all the gymnastics attempting to justify God's justice ultimately fail. At the end of the road is a God who loves some people and not others, specifically because of who they are. That's not agape, no matter how you slice it. Since you've abandoned the possibility that God is capable of other kinds of love right out of the gate, the final conclusion is that no, God does not, or cannot, love.