General questions about the Christian idea of God and love

[Michael B]

1. What do Christians mean by God's love or God is love?
2. Is God's love conceived as conditional or unconditional?
3. If it is unconditional, how can one ever divorce themselves from it?
4. Does God continue to love those whom he has reserved hell for?
5. If God is omnipresent, in what sense is it logical to speak of the absence of his presence in hell?
6. If God is immutable, how can any love he possesses for us ever change into wrath?
7. If you have/had a child who disowned you as a parent, and you therefore reacted by revoking any extension of love you possessed for them, in what sense could your love be considered unconditional?
8. If God's love is conditioned on our actions or beliefs about him, is it fair to say that God's love is inferior to the love that many human parents do in fact possess for their children?

Interesting questions!

I'll just start with question 1 which seems rather key.

When you ask what Christians mean by God's love I think it's important that words we use about God must have a parallel to how we use words normally. There will always be limitations to how we can talk about God but if we start saying that God's love is somehow very different to how we talk about love between people, for example, then language seems to have lost its usefulness. So I think the love of God must have parallels to how we generally think about love, and that would be along the lines of:

* How we as parents love our children.
* How we as husbands and wives love each other.
* How we love our family and dear friends.
* How we show charity to those in need. And that would include not only those whom we know and like, but those whom we may not know or whom we may even know but dislike.

So when we say 'God is love' I would say that we mean that those characteristic of love are integral to God. When we recognise love we are recognising something of God 'himself'. To know love is, John says, to know God. And so from the Christian perspective one of the answers to the question 'how can I see God?' is to say 'recognise love wherever you see it'. Indeed one of the great ancient hymns of the Church begins 'Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est' or 'where there is love and charity, God is there'.

Let me throw out a little additional speculation for the fun of it: The phrase 'God is love' comes from John the letter-writer who we believe was also probably the primary author of what we call the Gospel of John. In that Gospel John appears to show knowledge of Greek thought, describing 'the Son' (who would become incarnate as Jesus) as the 'Logos', that underlying order to the universe that Greek philosophers described. Perhaps, then, John was also aware that the Greeks saw virtue as something distinct and apart, so that Euthyphro posed the question of whether God defined virtue or whether God obeyed a pre-established idea of virtue. John, then, sidesteps both horns of the established Greek dilemma and goes straight between them saying that God neither defines goodness (love) nor obeys a predetermined goodness, but that God is goodness/love.