God Is Unconditional Love?

I love this claim.

Because it feels right, in the same manner as if a belief in high-level metaphysical talk or any use of the prefix “meta-” feels right. It is as if writing in pretentious terms makes one feel good — it does me. The only difference with me: 1) I admit it, and 2) I do not only write in those terms, and 3) few people comprehend what they are they’re getting at — including them (good, f’em).

This feels-good-so-is-right derivation seems incorrect to me. The idea of God being love or the source of all love being God, as in God wants a relationship with you. God wants a relationship with everyone, to be in unified, loving communion with the divine in Heaven.

Only a couple of decades or so ago, this was an unquestioned assumption of the population, or most of it, in my country. According to Statistics Canada, in 2001, more than three out of four people in Canada identified with a theistic belief.

Now, that number in 2021 plummeted to a little over 1 in every 2 for Christians, which looks like, if taking the line of best fit and extrapolating ahead from 2021, a decline of the Christian faith to less than half of the population of Canada by 2024. This year! It depends on the frame of Christianity, but, on the whole, given the history, that is not necessarily a terrible thing.

That is unprecedented in the over 150 years of the country or since the formal founding of Canada. We can ignore the crimes and the immigration patterns leading to the mass belief in Christianity. However, we can acknowledge the general increase in the Nones or those who identify as agnostics, atheists, or without religious affiliation in general.

All these and other factors play into the growth of the non-religious. Another is the skewering of the religious talk as assertions about the metaphysical. People are more hip to religious propaganda and double-talk. They’re also more aware of terrible claims about God.

One of those, which is central to this article’s analysis, is that God is love, or rather, unconditional love. This has some ideological content, and it is content that gets asserted quite a bit. On the other hand, it does have a monotheist bias. It has a North American and European interpretation bias. That lens will influence this cultural phenomenon.

This argument for the deity. While at the same time, there is the generalized formulation of this. Even in the polytheistic faiths, some have a singular godhead behind these manifestations of the plurality, the cornucopia of fruity gods. Regardless of the fundamental base definition of God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, aseitous, and the like, we have to wrestle.

We have to take on this moral claim because the valence is in a good/bad axis and stands as a philosophical truth claim. Now, is it true? We can reference Christian scripture, where most Muslims accept most of Christian scripture except the divinity of Jesus Christ/Yeshua Ben Josef, so Josh. At least two passages refer to God as love:

• 1 John 4:8 — But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
• 1 John 4:16 — We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.

With these definitions of the Bible, this can account for a couple to a few billion people, whether now or in the past. With God as love, it is both something projected from God and inheres like the Theity. It is a godly attribution and derivation for everyone, potentially.

However, when stated explicitly, even when not considered in the phrase, the implication is that God is unconditional love from “God is love.” However, we know the conditions within the theology. One must be a believer in some sects or denominations or theological frames.

Which is weird; why would the God of love have favourites? If that is not true, we can consider some extended aspects of God’s unconditional love phraseology. Assume God exists, assume believers were created in God’s image; in fact, all of Man was created in God’s image; that’s fine.

If there is no particularism for this part of the ethic, God loves all. He wants a personal relationship with everyone, hence the need to spread the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all the world’s people.

We must come to the premise of unconditional in the phrase. At a minimum, there is a condition for beings to have a love of God: Existence. Not only that, one must assume the existence of a God with an attribute of absolute, all-encompassing love — an objective reality of the love of all. We can ignore the existence of God and take that as a given in this belief system.

With that assumption, the recipients of this love must exist; without existence, there is no love to receive from God. Their existence is a condition of their getting the love of God at all, even in the most generous, universalist sense of ethics.

Thus, the phrase in its ultimate meaning: “God is unconditional love,” is false in even the most generous of terms, where God is assumed, a God of all love is assumed, and so on. Those beings must exist as a first condition. Thus, the claim, common in culture, is false, as demonstrated.

Where does that leave us? In realistic terms, on our own.

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Photo credit: Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash.