Pauline Dogmatics (3) God of Love

The heart of Paul’s gospel is love. That seems obvious, but Douglas Campbell explains the enormity of what this means in his third chapter.

At the heart of the universe is a play of love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

The nature of God is revealed definitively by the death of the Son on the cross for us at the behest of the Father and the Spirit. There the Father has offered up his beloved only Son to die for us, doing so, moreover, while we, the objects of this costly mission, were rebellious and hostile. Before any response had been offered, then, the Father undertook this ultimately costly act for us, which the Son obediently carried out. And this proves that the Father’s love for us is utterly fundamental to his character, and limitless, as is the Son’s and their Spirit’s. This God will stop at nothing order to reach us and to heal us. God undertook this supremely painful action—the Father’s sacrifice of Son—to save a snarling and ungrateful humanity. Astonishing!

Paul is well aware that this divine dimension is nothing short of mind-blowing. So he even prays at one time that we will be granted the capacity to begin to grasp it with the help of the Spirit. Without this revelation, effected by God, we lack the ability to understand the enormity and power of the divine compassion.

The way that God relates to us is mindboggling too.

The definitive encounter between God and humanity now takes place completely on humanity’s terms. As a result, God does not overwhelm people. People are met where they are, as human beings, by someone who is like them, who bears their very nature. And this act respects humanity. There is now no coercion in the relationship, whether physical or metaphysical. We are not overawed; we are not struck; we are not pushed or pulled around by an overtly superior being. God respects our humanity, including our free responsiveness, profoundly by meeting us an equal, which necessitates an incomprehensible lowering on God’s part. And yet this mode of humble engagement makes perfect sense. God is a God of relating and a God of love. And a God of love would relate to us in the most gentle and noncoercive way possible. Loving relating is gentle, not coercive, and it entails equal relating.

This explains how God reaches out to people who have not received a revelation of his love.

It follows from this remarkable insight into the nature of God that of course God the Father, the risen Jesus, and the Holy Spirit would delight in continuing to reach people through other people, gently and noncoercively, on their terms, walking alongside them, through other people.

Our God loves to relate through people. This is how a loving God operates.

When I thought about my coming to faith, I assumed that it was just me and God, perhaps because he had elected me. In hindsight that is fairly arrogant. Thinking more about these quotes, I realise that it was the prayers of my mother, the prayers of my wife who had chosen to marry a Christian man who turned out to be an atheist, and the prayer, faith and witness of our Christian friend, which allowed the Holy Spirit to break into my life, when I was looking the other way.