Love, Risk, and Relationality

I've written here quite a bit recently about joy, love, desire, the idea of delight in the Beloved bringing joy and fulfilling desire, and what happens when that desire is unfulfilled. Well, yet another one of my books in the "recreational reading" stack has now brought this subject up. That makes three of the five now.

(Yikes! Make that 4 of 5. My latest, Umberto Eco's "The Name Of The Rose", just furnished this observation when comparing a variety of lusts, such as a lust for knowledge, or riches, or power, or affirmation, or pleasure: "Like all lusts ... it is sterile and has nothing to do with love ... true love wants the good of the beloved." Hm. More about the Beloved. Maybe I need a new stack of books!)

Regardless, I offer here an extended quote from "The God Who Risks" by John Sanders, a book in my stack, but a book which I'd also like to include in an independent study class this Summer on the notion of change and relationality in God.

(Incidentally, I ran into a prof at Caribou Coffee on Friday, and nailed down the committment to have him advise me on the class, so now... I have to write the syllabus for him to approve. Hey! I'll have something to do during the Summer Quarter now.) :)

So here's the quote. It's long and a little thick, but good. Thank God for scanners and OCR software. :)

*****

"Brummer identifies four characteristics of love that have some differences as well as some affinities to Vànstone’s. Brummer surveys various ways which Western thought has construed love. He concludes that traditionally it has been understood as attitudinal and as involving three aspects: intentions, evaluations and dispositions.

The attitude of love is intentional because it is something we resolve to carry out rather than something we simply experience, such as an itch. Love also involves an evaluation of the object loved. Love is not blind or indifferent to virtues and vices in the beloved. The lover is concerned to bring about the best for the beloved, and this cannot happen without a realistic appraisal of the beloved.

In theology this idea is usually discussed under the heading of the holiness of God. The holiness of God, it is said, can not tolerate sin and seeks to obliterate it, whereas the divine love brings forth mercy to the sinner. Emil Brunner, for instance, holds that holiness creates distance where love creates communion. Others have removed any form of evaluation from the notion of love, reducing love to sentimentality and permissiveness.

A better approach is to speak of God’s holy love, which cares deeply about the harm that the beloved does to herself. The anger, wrath and judgments of God are expressions of his caring love. Justice, holiness and wrath should not be placed alongside love as though they were equal attributes.

Rather, love is the preeminent characteristic of God and holiness and justice qualify the type of love God has while wrath is God’s response to particular situations and is not an attribute at all. God does not simply let us go our own way, for God desires to redeem us.

Love is not blind to the reality of what we are as sinners, nor does it dismiss us from the relationship without further ado. The divine caring is manifested in evaluating our situation and in God’s concern to open it to new possibilities. Finally, says Brummer, love is dispositional, or habitual, rather than occasional.

From time to time we may feel happy, grateful or afraid, but love is not a passing state. It is more like a policy that we publicly carry out in repeated actions with the intention of achieving the goal of a mature relationship.

Brummer adds a fourth characteristic to the three just described: the desire for reciprocation. This is important, he says, if we are to grasp the fact that love is more than a mere attitude;
it creates a relationship.

Love seeks the response of the other yet respects the personhood of the other. The lover desires that the beloved reciprocate the love and so bring to fruition the goal of the relationship. In this sense, love is between persons.

Persons in relation for the purpose of reciprocating love (the divine project) become the lens through which we view the type of providential relationship God has elected to have with the world.

The nature of love, as just defined, is evident in the life of Jesus. His love was persistent, dependent on the ability of others to receive it, evaluative and vulnerable. Everything did not go precisely as Jesus intended. His concerns were rejected by many who did not desire the new possibilities he sought to bring forth.

Nonetheless, he endured rejection, demonstrating the way of love as the way to a redemptive fttture, In this light it is possible to think of the apostle Paul’s description of agape love as applicable to God:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentfiil; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor 13:4-7)

In the Christian tradition God has been described as loving, patient and enduring, but the fact that love does not selfishly insist on its own way has certainly been a neglected theme in discussions of providence and omnipotence. Instead, it has been common to insist, with Augustine, that “the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated.” Consequently, Paul’s conception of love, which entails vulnerability, has been subjugated to absolute power.

Finally, it hardly needs saying that it has not been customary to think of God as “believing” or “hoping” in anything. But if we begin with the understanding of God as bringing into being creatures with whom he desires to enter into loving relationships, then it is quite permissible to speak of God’s believing and hoping things will go a certain way.

For instance, the prophets proclaim that God repeatedly hoped Israel would put away its idols and return to him, but the people seldom did. God desired the early church to be made up of Jews and Gentiles, but it did not develop exactly as God had planned.

Paul’s characterization of love is appropriate for understanding the way of God with the world.

God creates in love, elects in love, commands in love, judges in love, incarnates in love and redeems in love."

*****

So... rather than seeing God's love as some altruistic, selfless and abstract concept that we can never hope to attain in this life, we can see God's love as also including that which we normally associate with human love relationships... a desire for reciprocation, a risk of refusal of our advances, and a hurt when love goes unrequited.

Yet God also models for us consistently, what we often do not exhibit: persistent love even in the face of disappointment, and committed love even in a one-sided relationship. We love best in human relationships when we love like God does... including the parts about taking risk, enduring hurt, and hoping for love in return.