Carson, D. A. 2000. The difficult doctrine of the love of God. Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books (Available as a free pdf here)
I don’t normally just post book notes, but I just read this one and since I am not a trained theologian or scholar of hermeneutics, I fear anything but mere reflection on the text and careful application. For those readers only interested in matters regarding Christian-Muslim relations, see the last paragraph in this post.
I’m not sure that anything that D.A. Carson writes is easy to read, nor is any of it irrelevant. This book was originally developed and presented as lectures, hence is colloquial structure.
He begins by listing 5 reasons why the doctrine of the love of God is “difficult”:
- Since most deists of any sort in Western civilization assume that God must be a loving being, it is difficult to distinguish in present culture what the Bible means when it says that “God is love”.
- Western culture also has devalued God of most anything that it deems uncomfortable. This has led to belief in an overly emotional God devoid of any awkward or unpleasant characteristic (i.e., his lordship, his justice, etc.)
- Postmodern reinforces “the most sentimental, syncretistic, and often pluralistic views of God, with no other authority base than the postmodern epistemology itself.” (p. 14)
- The love of God is itself very difficult even for confessing Christians to grasp without precarious imbalance and disproportion to the Bible’s teaching.
- Often, the doctrine of the love of God is portrayed over simplistically.
He then lists 5 ways the Bible speaks about the love of God. These 5 ways are the conceptual and theological underpinning for the rest of Carson’s book.
- The peculiar love of the Father for the son, and of the Son for the Father
- God’s providential love over all that he has made
- God’s salvific stance toward the fallen world
- God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect.
- God’s love is sometimes conditional upon the obedience of His people.
He admonishes the church not to absolutize or make exclusive any one of the different ways that the Bible talks about the love of God. This only leads to theological imbalance and pastoral carelessness.
In chapter 2, Carson rearticulates his argument that the “agapeo” word studies are a methodologically flawed manner of grasping God’s love. This argument first appeared in his book Exegetical Fallacies (Baker Academic, 1996). “What is now quite clear to almost everyone who works in the fields of linguistics and semantics is that such an understanding of love cannot be tied in any univocal way to the agapeo word group” (26).
He then exegetes John 5:16-30 in order to explain nuances of the intra-Trinitarian love of God. His main point, in the end, is that the intra-Trinitarian love of God is the theological under girding for understanding God’s love for us and how we relate back to God and to Jesus. I.e., Jn 3:16 and Romans 8:32 make sense and are good news because we know how much the Father loves the Son.
As a quick critique: I find it fascinating that in the chapter on intra-Trinitarian love the Holy Spirit is hardly mentioned, even in passing. Why?
In chapter 3 Carson establishes 3 points:
- God may be impassible, but only in the sense that he is without unconstrained and self compromising emotions, but he is certainly not emotionless – in fact, the whole corpus of Scripture illustrates emotion from his perfection. The doctrine of God’s impassibility is “trying to avoid a picture of God who is changeable, given over to mood swings, dependent upon his creatures” (49).
- God is sovereign and transcendent as well as personal. These two parts are givens. Elevate over the other and you have yourself a nice destructive heap of heresy.
- God has emotions, but they are perfectly constrained as a function of his own perfection and holiness. He is impassible “in the sense that he sustains no “passion”, no emotion, that makes him vulnerable from the outside, over which he has no control, or which he has not foreseen” (60). Passages like Eph. 3:14-21 are not using anthropopathism. God’s love, to go back to the argument over the agapeo word grouping, is not just willed altruism. In fact, his passions are perfectly unified with his other perfections. Specifically, God’s love is presented in the biblical text as tied to the other perfections of God. God’s love is one of His own perfections of being. In other words, his love is not dependent on the loveliness of the loved.
Chapter 4 is a meditation on God’s love and wrath. While God’s love is part of His perfect being, His wrath is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God (though He is perfect and holy when filled and when displaying his wrath). His wrath is a function of the rebellion of His people. He then delves into a strong discussion on the intent of the atonement. Is it limited or for all? He argues for a distinction between general and definite.
Carson is strongest in this book in the last few pages. Therein he takes the 5 ways that God’s love is described in Scripture and reflects on those ways elicits our love for God and for fellow mankind.
Finally, I find it fascinating that Carson feels drawn to make a comparison with the God of Islam (p. 39). He states that Allah is not eternally other oriented in the same sense of the Triune God in whom each Person exists in perfect submission, appraisal, and affection with the others. Since Allah is not plurality-in-unity, only when in time he created all things did he have the capacity to love something other than himself. The theology aside. Isn’t it amazing that this renown Christian theologian finds it appropriate to make a pedegogical comparison between the Biblical and Qur’anic God while doing the same with no other deity of another world religion?!
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