The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God
The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God
By: D.A. Carson
[Fulfilled ‘Book by an author whose last name is also a first name’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
“The love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.”
If you feel confused by the idea that the love of God is a ‘difficult’ doctrine, it’s possible you’ve drifted into a sentimentalized view of what God’s love is.
This book, less than 100 pages, may be a great way for you to evaluate the way you think about what you mean when you talk about God’s love. Clearly we can’t reduce or comprehensively do justice to all that God’s love entails, but, for such a short book, Carson does a really good job of covering some big pieces.
Carson provides a framework— the five ways Scripture distinguishes the love of God:
The love between the three members of the Trinity
God’s providential love over his creation
God’s salvific love toward a fallen world
God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect
God’s love in the sense of being conditioned on our obedience
I won’t include all the biblical references for all of these here, but you’ll find these all throughout all of Scripture.
So one of the main themes of this book is how Carson reveals what happens if one of these is emphasized over another.
“It is easy to see what will happen if any one of these five biblical ways of talking about the love of God is absolutized and made exclusive, or made the controlling grid by which the other ways of talking about the love of God are relativized…
We must not view these ways of talking about the love of God as independent, compartmentalized, loves of God…we must hold these truths together and learn to integrate them in biblical proportion and balance.”
We need to learn how to identify in Bible passages which way God’s love is being talked about, and that will help us understand places where it seems like God’s love is contradictory.
I won’t talk about each of these in my review because there’s one particular chapter that is grabbing my attention right now, but I do want to at least mention:
In regards to the Trinitarian love chapter, it might be helpful to also check out the last chapter of Tim Keller’s book The Reason for God called ‘The Dance of God’ which talks about that in a little more accessible way if you find this book more complex on that chapter.
In regards to the chapter on the relationship between God’s love and his sovereignty, I would also recommend a couple other books: Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J.I. Packer and Chosen for Life by Sam Storms. This is where the Arminian vs Calvinist theology is discussed. It is also a discussion on his immutability— can God change? or change his mind? I will include three quotes here that are important to these questions.
“A God who is terribly vulnerable to the pain caused by our rebellion is scarcely a God who is in control or a God who is so perfect he does not, strictly speaking, need us. The modern therapeutic God may be superficially attractive because he appeals to our emotions, but the cost will soon be high… God himself is gradually diminished and reduced from what he actually is. And that is idolatry.”
“Closer to the mark is the recognition that all of God’s emotions, including his love in all its aspects, cannot be divorced from God’s knowledge, God’s power, God’s will. If God loves, it is because he chooses to love; if he suffers, it is because he chooses to suffer. God is impassible in the sense that he sustains no “passion,” no emotion, that makes him vulnerable from the outside, over which he has no control, or which he has not foreseen.”
“Our passions change our direction and priorities, domesticating our will, controlling our misery and our happiness, surprising and destroying or establishing our commitments. But God’s ‘passions,’ like everything else in God, are displayed in conjunction with the fullness of all his other perfections”
The chapter on the relationship between God’s love and God’s wrath was probably my favorite at the time of this reading because (if you’ve been following along on other books I’ve recently read) I’ve been thinking through the theology of Progressive Christianity which has a real problem with God’s wrath.
I won’t define Progressive Christianity here (read THIS review if you want to go into it more) but the primary adherents can’t reconcile a God of love with a God of wrath.
They say things like: How could a loving God sanction genocide? If it’s wrong for me to murder, it’s wrong for God to murder. How could a loving God send people to hell? God is not retributive, he’s restorative. Jesus changes the image of God and ‘corrects’ the wrath from the Old Testament.
The thing is, whether you like it or not, God’s wrath is real and it is portrayed throughout the whole of Scripture.
But I like how Carson points out that God’s love and God’s wrath are not on the same spectrum. More love doesn’t mean less wrath and more wrath doesn’t mean less love. They are not opposing forces.
“Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God’s holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath— but there will always be love in God. Where God in his holiness confronts his image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God he claims to be, and his holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God’s wrath is diminishing his holiness.”
It is hard for us not to apply human experience with emotions to God as if humans and God must or do function the same way. We do not. Just like it’s appropriate for God to be jealous and to receive praise, it is wrong for us. There are ways where God’s emotions function and work differently than ours— he is the Creator and we are the created. We can’t lose sight of that.
“God’s love is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time.”
Carson corrects the misconception that the New Testament ‘corrects’ our understanding of God’s love and wrath, but that, instead:
“The reality is that the OT displays the grace and love of God in experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the new covenant writings. Similarly, the OT displays the righteous wrath of God in experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the new covenant writings. In other words, both God’s love and God’s wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new.”
Carson corrects the misconception that God is full of wrath and Jesus is full of love and thus mollifies the stream of constant wrath coming from God towards his people.
“Here it is not that God is reluctant while his Son wins him over; rather, it is God himself who sends his Son. Thus (to return to Hebrews), even if our great high priest intercedes for us and pleads his own blood on our behalf, we must never think of this as an independent action that the Father somehow did not know about or reluctantly approved, eventually won over by the independently originating sacrifice of his Son. The Son himself comes into the world by the express command of the Father.”
This is also how we must look at the cross. The cross was not God murdering Jesus. God the Father sent Jesus, his Son, to the cross because he loved. Jesus voluntarily went to the cross because he loved. It was a communal act of love, not an egregious act of cosmic child abuse.
Carson clarifies the confusion with limited and unlimited atonement and puts forth the labels of general vs definite atonement. I already held Calvinist beliefs about election so his arguments here confirmed what I already believed about (in short) how the distinguishing reason between those who end up in heaven and those who don’t must reside in God, not in us, lest we have any reason to boast.
I think the biggest surprise of the book was when Carson took on the oft-stated (I confess I’ve used this myself) cliché- ‘God hates the sin but loves the sinner’:
“There is an element of truth in these words: God has nothing but hate for the sin, but it would be wrong to conclude that God has nothing but hate for the sinner… Nevertheless the cliche is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, his wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin and on the sinner.”
“God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God.”
It feels uncomfortable to say some of these things, but that doesn’t make them untrue. We just must do our due diligence to take God at his Word, and all of his Word. His hatred of both sin and the sinner displays his holiness, but his forgiveness toward the sinner displays his love and grace. We can’t emphasize one aspect of God’s love at the expense of another.
There was one section where Carson is looking at the Greek words for love but they are written in Greek and I had no idea which word was which and I had no idea how to even Google words in a non-English-letter language to understand what he was talking about. As I’m writing this, I realize I might have been able to use the translate feature in the camera app, but I would have preferred the English version of the word in parentheses so I could follow along better on that part.
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book, especially for those who struggle with understanding the relationship between God’s love and human responsibility or God’s love and his wrath.
It’s a low time commitment book and there are resources within for further reading, but to boil it down to such a short book, Carson gets the big rocks and includes enough to defend the position that the ‘traditional’ understanding of God’s love and his wrath and his election stands on Scripture and is not in opposition to one another.
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