Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ 1 John

[Millionaire]

How does a God that is love, hate? I get the God is all things, but how does Love hate? That always bothered me. I say it makes no sense. Especially considering that He made everything. Love and Hate. What are your thoughts?

[jimwalton]

1 John 4.8 tells us in no uncertain terms, "God is love." It is his very nature, and he can do or be nothing different. Marvin Vincent says, "Love is the expression of his personality corresponding to his nature."

Proverbs 6.16 says just as clearly, "There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him." Worse than that, Malachi 1.3 (cf. Romans 9.13) tells us that God hated Esau! Is God a lover or a hater? And if he is love, how can hate be in him?

This is easily sorted out when we recognize that "God is love" is not the complete truth about God, according to the Bible, but that his character and nature include more than this attribute. God is love, true, but he is also holy and light (moral purity). All sentimental ideas of love as indulgent, benevolent softness have to be rejected. J.I. Packer says, "God’s love is a holy love. He is not indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity. He will not take into his company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life (Mt. 5.48), and submit to drastic discipline to attain the godliness they seek (Heb. 12.6-11). God’s love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved. …But 'God is love' is the complete truth about God so far as the Christian is concerned."

In the Proverbs verse, it is no problem to claim that God loves people but he is an enemy of the things that would harm the people he loves. Any mother who doesn't stop her child from walking into a street heavy with traffic isn't showing love but lunacy. If a mother loves her child, she will hate dangerous roads with lethal traffic.

There are strong words used in Prov. 6.16 that shake the doorposts and rattle the thresholds of our lives. Emanating from the deepest part of God’s being rises the most profound abhorrence possible for those parts of ourselves that do us harm. Since everything about God is eternal and complete, this abomination is a universal and unmitigated obscenity to creation and His being.

God has designed the universe to be whole, complete, perfect, and ultimately in holy balance with itself and with Him. What is it in our sin that skews the balance of the universe? Self-orientation, injustice, and a false perception of the truth of God's being—who he is and how he acts. In other words, when we act in orientation to self rather than God, and when we create our own ideas about God rather than conform to His revelation of himself, we cause an imbalance in the universe that must be righted. God is the one who can right such imbalances, and he does it by his acts of judgment, grace, mercy, and redemption, those finding their ultimate expression in Jesus Christ, where all things will be made "right" once again.

When all of creation, each piece of which reflects some part of his nature and glory, is groaning with weight, and when humans, each of whom is created in God’s image and is loved with unsurpassable love, are in rebellion and separated from Him, then out from God's soul (the very word used in this text) emanates a rage at the atrocity ruining the people He loves that grieves and breaks the very heart of God.

In the Malachi text (1.3), love and hate are covenant terms. The context defines them for us, not from moral philosophy but from the conditions of the contract and the character of God. In other words, this is the expression leading us to understand that God turned towards Jacob in choosing him as the child of promise, and turned away from Esau in not choosing him. That’s all; it’s not an expression of moral judgment or emotional response. God's hate is not hate in the sense of despising another. It expresses and describes the spiritual separation between God and the people who have chosen to reject him.

This is no contradiction with the truth that God is love.

[Fishface]

"God is love" is a nonsensical statement unless you borrow from an outside world view and show me "that is love, and God is like that". Saying God is love is saying God is God.

[jimwalton]

Well, I easily disagree with you, and I'll explain. The Bible (Judaism and Christianity), as far as I know, is the only holy book (of the major religions) that says any such thing. The Muslims don't believe that God is love. Hindus don't. Buddhist don't even believe in God. There are many notions of God that don't include love. Therefore saying "God is love" is not comparable to saying "God is God." Judaism and Christianity are the only major religions that claim love is God's nature. What 1 John 4.8 is saying is that God has the nature of love, that is, God is a loving God. It is his nature to be loving.

In contrast to what you are saying, our outside world view doesn't define or explain the love that God is, but the exact converse: the nature of God has defined love for us and our world view has borrowed from that. I take the position that we understand virtue and morals because the character and nature of God have shown us what love, patience, goodness, gentleness, forgiveness, right, and justice are, not that our definitions of these attributes define God for us.

[Fishface]

You miss my point. Love by what standard? God is the only standard for morality in your world view, correct? To say God is anything is to say "God is God" because no standard can exist outside of God. So to say "God is love" is to say "God is God". It's incomprehensible because by definition love is whatever God decrees. It's the ultimate subjective divine command.

[jimwalton]

Thanks for your patience, but I believe you have misunderstood as well. There are many ways that God has been variously defined, and so the term "God" is too ambiguous to stand on its own. For each belief system, "God" must be defined by the attributes recognized in Him by the belief system itself. To say "God is God" is a meaningless tautology, but to say "God is love" is bringing a descriptive definition, as recognized by Christianity, to an otherwise ambiguous term.

"Love" also is a multifaceted term variously defined by context and definition, needing explanation in each usage. To claim love for pizza is a different dynamic than to claim love for a spouse. So also, the phrase "God is love" is not the ultimate subjective divine command (it isn't a command at all, but an admission of an attribute), but a recognition of a character trait, as I said in my previous post.

You are also mistaken to assume that the phrase "God is love" is a decree. Love is not whatever God decrees, as if it's a version of the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Therefore, to say "God is love" is not to say "God is God". It's to say that the God of the Bible, in contradistinction to other gods, has love as a character trait, and every action he takes has love in its grounds because he cannot act contrary to his loving nature. His love finds expression in everything He says or does.

[Fishface]

> There are many ways that God has been variously defined, and so the term "God" is too ambiguous to stand on its own.

True, but that's not my problem and it's also a non sequitur. You'll see why in a moment.

> To say "God is God" is a meaningless tautology, but to say "God is love" is bringing a descriptive definition.

No it doesn't. Not unless you already understand the label "love", and love means whatever God says, therefore God is love means God is God. Love as a label cannot exist outside of God, in your world view, so what do you point at to explain to somebody what God is like? The love for a child? Why? Is that love because God says so or does God say so because that's what love is?

> Therefore, to say "God is love" is not to say "God is God". It's to say that the God of the Bible, in contradistinction to other gods, has love as a character trait

So how do you explain this character trait to an outsider to Christianity? What do you point at and why, to exemplify the label? See, any way you articulate it you inescapably go back to the same root cause: the trait is meaningless without context, but according to your world view there is no context outside of the nature of God. It's a circular and self-refuting argument. God isn't love. God just is.

[jimwalton]

Wrong again, my friend. To describe God with attributes is nowhere near self-refuting. A personality is describable, by definition (a personality without a description is not a personality), and it's illegitimate and false to declare that all descriptions are circular and self-refuting, at least any more than is inevitable. All questions of existence—or, more accurately, knowledge of existence—are fundamentally circular. In order to know a thing, we have to know what it is, and we also have to know HOW we know what it is. To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false, which is what I have been saying. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know know whether it really does succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are caught in a circle.

You can't verify your procedure without first having knowledge, but you can't get any knowledge without first verifying your procedure. Kant would say the only option is to pick one or the other and run with it (choose a procedure that you assume but cannot prove will yield true knowledge, like positivism does with science; or choose some tenets of knowledge that you assume are true even though you can't verify them, which is called foundationalism and is the process used in nearly all of philosophy). The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself.

My definition starts with an assumption (the concept of God, a philosophical and theological ideal). We have to start with an assumption to have a discussion: God exists. Secondly, we can proceed to how God is defined: "an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, incorporeal, spiritual being who is also holy, just, love, imminent, transcendent, and personal, the creator and sustainer of the entire material universe. He exists outside of space and time, and yet can function within them. He is consistent within himself and cannot be or act in self-contradiction."

Let's talk about this. I can't talk about love without establishing God first. This is not circular or self-refuting because I have begun with assumptions (God exists, he has certain immutable attributes) that are not the conclusions (therefore God exists, therefore God is God), but they do presuppose certain properties of God. The Christian portrayal of God is love, when other notions of God do not portray him as such (competing presuppositions of first principles).

In other words, you want both the knowledge AND the means by which it is obtained. You're ASKING for a circular argument, and that's what is self-refuting. You're putting me in an artificial box of your own making, and then refusing to let me tell you I'm in a false box.

You want to know how I exemplify the label. It's as if you asked me to define a triangle for you, but refuse to let me tell you that it's a close geometric figure with three-sides, and may have similar angles, but not necessarily. If I said to you, "A triangle is a triangle. A triangle just is," that would be meaningless. But when I define it for you, you claim I'm being self-refuting. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

The first premise of any ontological argument is that existence predicates idea. The theological premise is that God exists. That premise stands alone as an ontological reality. In addition to his existence (like the ideal concept of triangle), I can add to that reality by defining the characteristics of that reality (closed figure, 3 sides) by saying God is love, meaning his actions are moral, good, and just, making willful choices to selflessly and sacrificially serve others for their benefit and welfare. This is how I would explain this character trait to an outsider to Christianity. God has these properties because these can be observed from the way he interacts in history with people with whom he has established a relationship, as recorded by the prophets. You call this self-refuting, presumably because you've rejected the metaphysical premise of ontological knowledge, and have a priori already rejected any possible answer. My argument isn't circular or self-refuting, at least any more than is inevitable. At worst, my first principles are not coherent with your, but that's no surprise. The burden of proof is on the coherence of the system, not on the truth of the first principles; these are arbitrary and untestable, by definition, for all systems. The expression "God is love" is coherent with the ontological claim that God exists, and that he exists not in a nebulous form but with immutable attributes. It's no different than claiming there is an ideal figure we call a triangle, and that this figure can be understood by explicating its definitional attributes. When you say "God isn't love," it's as if you are saying "A triangle isn't three sides. A triangle just is." Nonsense, by reasoning. We understand its ontological reality because of the definition, not without it.

[Fishface]

Okay, so if you say "God is love" and I say "I don't know what you mean", how do you respond?

[jimwalton]

I would respond, "I think you're not telling the truth. You certainly know love because you have experienced it, both in receiving and in giving. You have been loved by someone in your life who selflessly cared for you, who sacrificed for you, and who put your welfare above their own. You have observed moral goodness and justice in others. By the same token, you have shown love to others, displaying these same attributes towards another."

Our ability and propensity to engage others in loving relationships is a function of our being made in the image of our Creator, who doesn't just behave in love but has love as his nature. He is the source of our drive to engage in loving relationships not only with each other, but with animals and our environment. We are wired for relationship.