God and love?

[ReliStuPhD]

We can only wait and see, I guess.

[DesolationRow]

Kierkegaard did some important work on the understanding of Love. He didn't invent these terms, but helped to examine them in light of what he believed to be the various spheres of existence.

Preferential Love (phileo) is the kind of brotherly love you feel for your friends, your family, and your neighbor.

Erotic Love (eros) is romantic in nature, dealing with intense attraction and the physical expression of that love.

Kierkegaard is weary of these forms of love, and finds them limited to the aesthetic and ethical spheres of existence. He contrasts them with Agape Love, which he believes is the only truly authentic love. It emerges from the religious sphere of existence and includes a universal love of God and of life. It is completely selfless, expecting nothing at all in return. It is all-giving, life-affirming, embodies truth, and is grounded in faith.

[Immanuel Can]

You've got some interesting thoughts there, Desolation. Agape, of course, is not Kierkegaardian but Biblical language, which was being exposited by Kierkegaard. C.S. Lewis also did a book on the four types of love, called "The Four Loves," unsurprisingly.

Agape has only some of the specific features you list, and some you do not. More importantly, though, you seem to say it proceeds from human to human, or even from human to the Divine: but the Biblical order is quite the opposite. It says of God, "we love Him because He first loved us," and John writes, "if God so loved us, we ought to love one another." Agape as a human experience is derivative from the prior action of a loving God. The implication is that it is only those who are loved selflessly who can love selflessly.

As for Blaggard, I don't think he's going to respond. And certainly, if he had had agape in mind, it is a "love" that God infinitely approves, so it would not serve his turn at all.

Good thoughts. Thanks for providing the distinction for us.

[DesolationRow]

the Biblical order is quite the opposite. It says of God, "we love Him because He first loved us," and John writes, "if God so loved us, we ought to love one another." Agape as a human experience is derivative from the prior action of a loving God. The implication is that it is only those who are loved selflessly who can love selflessly.

Yes this is accurate. And thanks for bringing it up because it's important. Kierkegaard would agree and endorse this understanding of Agape. Humans are only capable of this profound love through being grounded in God's love. Accepting God's love allows the person to return that love and then express it to both others and the world. I would add that loving oneself is also vital here. Loving oneself truly is only possible through God's infinite love for us, and so accepting oneself as a creation of God is a moral imperative.

[Immanuel Can]

To further develop what you've said, DesolationRow, let me add the following illustration, if I may.

I've known quite a few adopted children in my lifetime. And one of the things that I've observed in most of them is a great longing -- one might almost call it a hunger -- to know the circumstances of their own birth and the disposition of their biological parents toward them. Many of them have come from wonderful homes (I know a lot of wonderful people), and have always been treated by their adoptive parents with love and respect that would be the envy of many a bio-kid. And on one hand, you might ask why they would not simply be happy that they have landed in such a good, loving home. Still it's like they just have to know: Did my parents want me? Did they choose me? and above all, Did they love me?

It's almost like they can't be free to love others, or to love themselves, as they would wish, until the answer to this question is settled. It goes beyond all articulation and all reason. It's just imperative. It has to be.

In the same way, we all want to know we are here for a reason. That we were not accidents, but were chosen. And above all, that we are loved. Having that, we are much more free to love; and lacking it, we often find ourselves confused and desperate about love...of any kind. The disasters in our hopeless search for real, unconditional love are evident on every side. And disappointment on this score is ubiquitous with the human race.

Yet when one knows agape love, one is made free of these anxieties, and has liberty to love unconditionally. For one's own deepest love needs have already fully been met. And one is grateful. One wishes to act upon that gratitude, because agape is generous and desirous of spreading its benefits...even to the ugly and undeserving. It has in it no element of selfishness or resentment, and no fragility because it has no real prospect of loss.

God's love is sufficient to make us capable of love. Nothing else is strong enough to do the job.

So why does Blaggard imagine God hates love? Is it possible it's because his view of love is of one of the other small, crabbed and empty sorts that we experience when we're thrashing around asking the question, Does anybody love me? For that is always frustrating: and if God didn't want us to go that way, who could blame Him? Would it be an act of agape love if He did?

But absent any response, who can say what Blaggard thinks?

[DesolationRow]

That is beautiful illustration Immanuel. Thank you for sharing that profound insight. One might learn more from a post like that than a whole library of self-help books. The difficulty, I think, is having the faith that God loves you. And not believing, as science and reason would have it, that we're genetic accidents in a lonely, meaningless cosmos.

[Immanuel Can]

Yes. That is the necessary implication of Materialism, of course. We cannot be here for a "reason," because no One had "reasons" to create us, and no One decides how our lives ought to be lived, and no One has any purposes for us beyond this life.

We cannot speak of agape in such a universe. We may speak of desire, of nature, of drives...and even of longings, wishings and making of temporal, illusory "meanings" to give us a sense of temporary peace. But not of hope.

It's also very hard to trust human love under those circumstances. We cannot rest in any confidence that we really are loved, so how can we free be to love others unselfishly. We can love only for a time, and only so long as that love patches up the holes in our soul. But we can count on nothing, and when the felt power of the temporal loves we are experiencing fades, we must move on. For before us stretches only cold, eternal darkness, without purpose, without consciousness, and (of course) without love. Aging then becomes a desperate and hopeless attempt to recover some sense of worthiness to be loved, or opportunity for love, while the looming, inevitable and relentless darkness closes in.

Agape makes us free from all that. I would say, therefore, that Blaggard's totally wrong: in fact, no one is really FOR love so much as God. It's we who try to settle for something less.

[uwot]

You two should get a room. So what is it you do, when you love? What does god do when he loves? And: (quite apart from How do you know?) What is the difference?

[DesolationRow]

You two should get a room.

Snide comments like this don't invite pensive responses.

[Immanuel Can]

Got a serious question, uwot?

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Planet Earth is already proof of his incompetence. The Matrix movie implies that "humans would not be happy in Heaven". Why make humans then? Stop making excuses for this blundering fool known as Yahweh. Change the humans so that they would be happy in Heaven. Fix his mistakes.

[Immanuel Can]

No light to shed on the subject, I see. Just the usual. Thus I'll respond only once.

At the same time, I'll do you a favour. I'll remind you to be careful what you say: for the Bible says, "...by your words you will be judged." You may not believe that now. Now, you may think it's fun to say what you do. But if it's true, then expressions of contempt, no matter how elaborate and spiteful, will not alter any facts. They'll just justify the judgment in the end. Those who despise the love of God get their wish at the end of the day: they die without it.

So think carefully, for your own sake.

[uwot]

Got a serious question, uwot?

Yes. As before:

So what is it you do, when you love? What does god do when he loves? And: (quite apart from How do you know?) What is the difference?

Hello, Desolation Row, nice to meet you.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

No light to shed on the subject, I see. Just the usual. Thus I'll respond only once.

At the same time, I'll do you a favour. I'll remind you to be careful what you say: for the Bible says, "...by your words you will be judged." You may not believe that now. Now, you may think it's fun to say what you do. But if it's true, then expressions of contempt, no matter how elaborate and spiteful, will not alter any facts. They'll just justify the judgment in the end. Those who despise the love of God get their wish at the end of the day: they die without it.

So think carefully, for your own sake.

That's what's Sheol's for. So you can learn to love again, even blundering apathetic idiots who don't deserve love. That's God's wonderous plan, to take the love away from you that you were born with, so you can go through pain and suffering to learn it again, for no good reason, and it was already there in the first place. God is probably the most apathetic and idiotic being in the galaxy, creating millions of beings that would have been better off never existing, and his response is along the lines of "no obligation, there are too many for me to care about, does one care about grains of sand? they should be grateful for their miserable existence, and it's all their fault even though i created them and the conditions of misery which will send them to sheol in the first place."

[Immanuel Can]

uwot:

I take the "you" there as editorial, correct? It means, what do humans do?

In that case, you know the answer well. We all do. It's "Not much." Human love is pretty temporary stuff, even when it's sincere. And very few people will imagine themselves giving themselves up for the good of another person, even in close marital or familial relationships...far less in relationships involving only fellow citizens, or involving citizens of the world generally. Human love goes not far at all. And it lasts not long at all. And it's quality is never really known.

"For one [person] will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us..." (Romans 5:7-8)

How do I know? I would never know. It's not the kind of thing I could even imagine, let alone fathom. God would have to say what His agape love consists in. So all you have to ask yourself is, "Has He said"?

So there's the answer to your questions.