Can God love?

[robvalue]

Nope. The character displays all the signs of a narcissistic abusive partner who uses "love" as just another form of manipulation.

[emjay]

Funnily enough I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment that covers this subject, comparing, contrasting, and logically analysing three concepts of love; Plato's eros, Christian agape, and Aristotle's philia.

Where in a nutshell eros is deemed man's route to God, and agape, God's route to man. Eros is acquisitive love based on seeking value... 'the good' (whatever that may be for a person). The logic goes... as I presently understand it... you cannot want what you already have except inasmuch as to keep it into the future, therefore you want the good and you want to keep it forever... ie you want eternal good... and therefore immortality. So where to Plato the Gods are both immortal and want for nothing, they cannot themselves love but only be the objects of man's love, hence man's route to God.

And where, in comparison, agape is God's route to man, conceptualised as a value-creating rather than value-seeking type of love.

So far in my reading, Plato's concept of eros makes a lot of sense to me. I mean I'm not seeking metaphysical immortality but I understand and agree with the psychological principles behind what he's saying... that you seek value and seek to maintain it... which is essentially seeking immortality if only in the moment. It's just that nonexistence poses no threat to that, in the sense that it is the absence of seeking full stop. In other words I understand seeking that sort of 'eternal good' in life, but ceasing to exist poses no threat to that.

Anyway, as it stands agape makes less sense to me, but I'm not even half way through the book yet. So it remains to be seen, how coherent that will be as a concept to me.

[Godscreated]

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?

1st Corinthians 13:1-13 explains love, agape love, in a way man can understand it, however God's love goes beyond this to a point we can not understand. You said it right to start with "God is love", it is who He is not what He does. God has to love to be true to His nature and God can't go against His nature, if He could He would not be God.

 You are trying to bring human emotion into God's love and that just want work because as you said we are inferior and can't wholly love as God does. How is it God has obstacles in His way when He is love itself. We have the obstacles because we are selfish and full of needs that we can't get past. On the other hand God has no needs and thus has no hindrance to love, He loves because it is who He is and He loves completely. 

GC

[robvalue]

It makes me worry about the kind of "love" people have received, and what kind they might pass on, if they think the character in the bible is loving.

[Fake Messiah]

"God is love" is a sick joke. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you", is little more than propaganda to cover up God's true nature. It's a bit rich, don't you think, coming from the mouth of someone--Jesus--who would send most (if not all) of human beings that ever lived to hell? The god of the Bible is a dangerous deity and deserves to die. That is to say, belief in the biblical god is dangerous to one's mental and moral health and deserves to fade from memory.

[robvalue]

Just saying "God is love" is inaccurate or dishonest, of course. If that's all God is, then we don't need another name for it. If God is "love and [some other stuff]" then the existence of love (as a concept at least) does not prove the existence of the other stuff; nor that they have anything to do with each other.

[The Grand Nudger]

It;s not bad as far as rebranding goes, though.  I can think of worse directions for the christer faith to move in.

[robvalue]

Sure, I'm all for it if it's actually followed up, and all the stupid threats and archaic rules are dropped.

[brewer]

god is love is another mental crutch. Just like all of the other "god is .........".

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, I'm all for it if it's actually followed up, and all the stupid threats and archaic rules are dropped.

They have been.  

The entire premise of modern fundamentalism, and the source of it;s apocalyptic presentism... is that the body of the faithful have lost their way and no longer believe in the right things to a sufficient degree...and they;re not wrong.