Will the Love of God Finally Triumph?

"Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered..." A whole biblical symphony of resolute hopefulness, risk-taking trust, imaginative thoughtfulness and not least redemptive peace-making surrounds those words with their own alternative-sounding reality. The love of God, of which we so often speak in terms that are glib, even unthinking, or exclusive, so often lacks the notes of holiness, mercy, justice and judgement. Divine love wins by sacrifice, overcomes by surrender, redeems by self-giving, but in the end is a love that is free and confers freedom, that is powerful but not overpowering, and that is holy and reaches out to hallow and sanctify all that falls short of the glory of God.

All of this was in mind when I wrote yesterday of Stuart Townend's song and the way his words capture huge vistas of biblical vision and Gospel hope. I've just finished a book of essays on the love of God, Nothing Greater, Nothing Better. Theological Essays on the Love of God. The subtitle is accurate, the main title sounds like a bad line from a praise song, but the essays with only one or two exceptions are telling theological, at times pastoral or dogmatic, reflections on Divine love.I am entirely partial, but the essay that is standout for me is by my Doktovater David Fergusson, entitled, "Will the Love of God Finally Triumph".

Here in a short essay is an articulated theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom because love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love. One of the greatest books ever on the love of God (I seldom use such exaggerated superlatives) is W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense. Its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God. That book has provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about love - precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, investment, self-donation, no guaranteed outcome, waiting; and Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky.

Back to Fergusson - I detect in Fergusson's critique of Barth's universalist tendency that same passionate acknowledgement that the love of God is not sentimental surrender to wishful thinking, nor is God's love a trawler net that hauls all human beings into the kingdom choiceless, and regardless of who and what in the end they choose to be and do with the gift of life. The voice of God is consistent with the love of God, 'I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.'Love dies under coercion, and love lives always with the possibility of rejection - the Divine love defines love and though the love of God is unending, there will always be the possibility and reality of those whose choice is rejection, a final self-determining no.

A good example of David Fergusson's theological instincts is when he puts in their place, those wistful non-universalists who desperately wish universalism was true but regrettably cannot make it so:

Such remarks are puzzling. Are we saying that  God's final scheme is undesirable? Are we even suggesting that our own moral preferences are somehow better than God's? Can we claim to be evangelical if we hold that it would be good for universalism while also lamenting wistfully that this is not what God has on offer? There is a good dominical response to this: "If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!" Matt. 7:11

All of which brings me back to Stuart Townend's See What a Morning. What gives the hymn its theological, pastoral and liturgical power is the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus in the way Christians see the world. Love crucified is risen; love survives the violent attempts at its extinction; life says no to death; finality does not rest with despair but with hope; against the closing down of all possibilities, the love of God holds open possibilities infinite and eternal; and love remains love, the free offer of gift and the invitation to response in that same freedom.

"To know the love of God that is beyond knowledge", indeed the entire doxological sections of Paul's Ephesians, is one of the great theological limiters on our intellectual hubris - even what we know is partial, finite, seeing through a glass darkly. We lack words and concepts, ideas and arguments; our imagination and vision and mental stretch and emotional range are inadequate to a different and vaster reality. 

A closing challenge from Fergusson: "If choices are made only when made in the full knowledge of God's love in Christ, it is in the church that the burden of human responsibility is greatest".

The photo is of Schiehallion, early morning, before we climbed it. Shrouded in mystery, much of it obscured but there in all its solid reality, waiting to be climbed but not conquered, providing a standpoint from which to view the world, and remember that this ancient mountain puts us firmly, finally, and faithfully, in our place!

Comments

[Jason Goroncy]

Thanks for another wonderful post, Jim. Indeed, for a string of inspiring posts over the past week or so. I remember reading this book, and for me too the one stand out essay was Fergusson's (I even wrote a wee reflection on it here: http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/will-the-love-of-god-finally-triumph/). Funny enough, it was Vanstone's 'Love's Endeavour' that came to my mind too when I read David's piece. Bless you.