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[Newbie]

Speaking on a human level (not in a Godly sense), loving all people unconditionally sounds wrong to me. If you love everyone unconditionally, then the term "love" becomes a standard and loses all of it's meaning. Loving everybody, as most Christians do—or claim to do—sounds dangerous and unhealthy. How do you differentiate loving a terrorist and loving your parents? If there are different levels of love, then the definition of love changes, and again, becomes arbitrary and useless at that point. I would like to hear a Christian's viewpoint on this. Thanks.

[jimwalton]

Unconditional love is a misnomer, and while we use the term to explain what we think we see in the Bible, it's at times helpful and at times detrimental to our understanding. First of all, we should establish that love is an incredibly multi-faceted word, not easily defined, and undeniably contingent on context for accurate apprehension. Loving pizza, loving friends, loving a spouse, loving enemies, and loving life all mean different things, and we all recognize that. Secondly, "unconditional", in this context, is also multi-faceted. Putting the two together, then, is not a simple matter of linguistics, but is part of communication theory subject to contextual interpretation. Thirdly, the phrase doesn't appear in the Bible, but is an epithet we use to describe a characteristic.

When the Bible says (John 3.16), "God so loved the world," it means that love is one of his attributes—part of his nature and inexorable character. His attitude towards the world is one of love: concerned for their well-being and willing to sacrifice to bring about goodness. Now look at John 13.1: "...Having loved his own who were in the world..." This is a different definition. This describes a personal love for those who follow him. It's undeniably a different sense than Jn. 3.16. But it's not just that he loved his friends. Matthew 9.36, describing the crowds who were not following him, says, "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." He loved them, but we get a different feel than the word that was used in John 13.1. And of course we all know the text in Matt. 5.43-46 about love your enemies. "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?" This is obviously yet another definition of love, because we don't love our enemies as we love our spouses, or as we love God.

We are remiss to read the Bible as if it's uniplanar. It's multi-dimensionsal and contextual, and we have to read it with both intelligence and interpretation.

When Christians talk about God as "loving unconditionally," what they mean is that he is not a respecter of persons, with his favorites, and filled with prejudice and bias toward others. We mean love is inexorably a part of his nature, and he approaches all humans with compassion, a desire for a relationship with them, a willingness to forgive, an interest in their well-being, and with a will to join with them in a unified relationship. It doesn't mean that love becomes a flat plane of ambiguous definition, equality of expression, and, frankly, quite stupid. There is a world of difference between loving a terrorist and loving one's parents. Because love is multi-faceted doesn't mean it's either arbitrary or useless. Your love for your parents and your love for pizza aren't the same, and you can live with those distinct definitions without rendering them useless. We do the same thing with many words.