It's typical of the Christian conception of God that "God is love," that God is the alpha and the Omega when it comes to love. Indeed, in the New Testament, his two greatest commandments are to love God (love here being the Greek concept of agape), and to love thy neighbor. So it would appear that love is in some sense fundamental to the Christian God. Moreover, if God is perfect, that seems to imply that God loves and experiences love to the fullest extent possible.
Unfortunately, there appear to be some serious obstacles in his way. First, he is a solitary being, and only knows relationships through the trinitarian godhead, or with beings that are inferior to him. The trinitarian godhead offers some escape from the question, but presents other problems. In the trinity, God meets his equal, but he does so with omniscience and concurrence of act, if not thought. The whole question of trust as it relates to intimacy seems to disappear as a result. Moreover, there's the specter of self-interest in that ultimately God would be in love with himself, which would seem to undermine the whole enterprise in many ways. Is self-love even comparable to romantic love, filial love, brotherly love, platonic love, or agape? I think the trinity by its nature presents as many obstacles to the full expression of love as it does offer potential avenues of resolution. At the very least, it offers God experience of one or two types of love to the exclusion of others. And that brings us to the question of the forms of love embodied in romantic love, amour, and that embodied by friendship or platonic love. The first obvious problem being the question of equality of standing. The trinity doesn't so much resolve this as sidestep it. Perhaps the question of equality is necessarily bound up in the nature of trust and intimacy. Relationships as we experience them are a curious blend of both certainty, in the faith one has in the other, with uncertainty, in never knowing completely where and how things are going to turn. It seems that love without this blend of certainty and contingency would be a far different creature than what we currently understand as love.
So, given the obstacles in his path, can God love fully and completely?
Unfortunately, there appear to be some serious obstacles in his way. First, he is a solitary being, and only knows relationships through the trinitarian godhead, or with beings that are inferior to him. The trinitarian godhead offers some escape from the question, but presents other problems. In the trinity, God meets his equal, but he does so with omniscience and concurrence of act, if not thought. The whole question of trust as it relates to intimacy seems to disappear as a result. Moreover, there's the specter of self-interest in that ultimately God would be in love with himself, which would seem to undermine the whole enterprise in many ways. Is self-love even comparable to romantic love, filial love, brotherly love, platonic love, or agape? I think the trinity by its nature presents as many obstacles to the full expression of love as it does offer potential avenues of resolution. At the very least, it offers God experience of one or two types of love to the exclusion of others. And that brings us to the question of the forms of love embodied in romantic love, amour, and that embodied by friendship or platonic love. The first obvious problem being the question of equality of standing. The trinity doesn't so much resolve this as sidestep it. Perhaps the question of equality is necessarily bound up in the nature of trust and intimacy. Relationships as we experience them are a curious blend of both certainty, in the faith one has in the other, with uncertainty, in never knowing completely where and how things are going to turn. It seems that love without this blend of certainty and contingency would be a far different creature than what we currently understand as love.
So, given the obstacles in his path, can God love fully and completely?
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