Is God Love?

Spoiler alert! The Gospel text for this Sunday is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking what he needs for eternal life. Before Jesus delivers the punchline that is clearly both truthful and at the same time emotionally devastating to the young man, Mark says this simple, and simply profound, thing about Jesus: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him."

Near the end of his fascinating survey titled The Evolution of God, Robert Wright talks about the nature of this love, and suggests a simple mental exercise when trying to answer the question "Is God Love?

Love, you might say is, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other.

Sometimes love, in the course of leading to this moral truth, fosters more mundane truths. Suppose you are a parent and you (a) watch someone else's toddler misbehave, and then (b) watch your own toddler do the same. Your predicted reactions, respectively, are (a) "what a brat!" and (b) "That's what happens when she skips her nap." Now (b) is often a correct explanation whereas (a) -- the "brat reaction -- isn't even an explanation. So, in this case, love leads toward truth. So too when a parent sees her child show off and concludes that the grandstanding is grounded in insecurity....Love at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other...

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat at physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love's organic association with truth -- by the fact, indeed that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that. The point is that you wouldn't have to be crazy to say it.
(from Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, 2009)