Note: From Biblical Critical Theory (Zondervan 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Thus far we have seen that God is personal, absolute, and relational. But just as there is no vanilla-flavored generic god, so also there is no blank relationship. Relationships can be distant or intimate, explosive or cool, complex or formulaic. What sort of relationship, then, characterizes the persons of the Trinity? If we cast an eye over the verses in the Bible referring to God’s activity before creation, we see that intra-Trinitarian relations are characterized consistently not by discord, competition or rivalry, much less by apathy or a functional focus on just “getting things done,” but by love. This means that we live in a universe in which love, as the Bible understands it, is fundamental and original.
Ultimate Reality Is Love, Not “Loving”
Had it not been for the stubborn presence in the Bible of I John 4:8 and 16 (“God is love”), I think I would have entitled this section “Ultimate Reality Is Loving.” But in the light of John’s repeated statement (in case we missed it the first time!), I feel I am selling the Bible short if I do not make the stronger claim: ultimate reality is not simply loving, but love itself. After all, John could easily have written “God is loving.” Elsewhere in the Bible, God and his ways are indeed described in that way (Psalms 32:8; 144:2). But John didn’t write that. He wrote “God is love,” “the most daring statement that has ever been made in human language” [Emil Brunner, Dogmatics 1, The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 185]. God is not one example of love, not even the greatest example of love, but love itself. As Augustine notes, when we reflect on God as Trinity, we do so with the question, “What is true love, nay, rather what is love?” [On the Holy Trinity, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, p. 122]
So, what is love? It is an important question to ask, because many conflicting definitions circulate in our society. God’s love is not everything that goes under the banner of love today. The love of God has particular contours. Three times John writes, “This is love”:
- This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (I John 4:10)
- In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome. (I John 5:3)
- And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love. (II John 1:6)
I shall be discussing the Greek term agapē – translated “love” here – when I come to the cross. For now, let me draw some brief conclusions from the very statement that “God is love.” For John, love is not defined in the abstract but embodied in action. Each mention of “this is love” is followed not by a definition but by an exemplary action. We know love by what it does. God loved so he sent (John 3:16); we love so we obey (I John 5:3; II John 1:6). When God loves, he does not act to acquire or accumulate; he gives his Son, his very self, for unworthy others (Rom 3:10-12). Trinitarian love is the Father sending the Son and the Son obeying the Father. God’s love “does not seek value, but it creates value or gives value; it does not desire to get but to give; it is not ‘attracted’ by some lovable quality, but it is poured out on those who are worthless and degraded” [Dogmatics, p. 186].
Brunner argues that “the message that God is Love, is something wholly new in the world”; to call Zeus, Jupiter, Brahma, or Allah love would be “obviously wholly impossible.” As for Plato, he “would have met the statement ‘God is Love’ with a bewildered shake of the head,” because for Plato “a god does not have any intercourse with men” [Dogmatics, p. 183]. This wholly new idea that God is love has far-reaching implications for relationships and society, two of which I shall now explore.
Alterity, Violence and Love
The Trinity sets the cat among the pigeons in one of the defining distinctions in twentieth-century thought and society: the ethics of sameness and alterity. In philosophical guise the stakes of this distinction are summed up in Jacques Derrida’s phrase “every other is wholly other” (the French is a little more elegant: “tout autre est tout autre”) [The Gift of Death, pp. 77-78], and in the warning that everything I might try to say about “the Other” is necessarily violent because I am reducing – or “totalizing” – their unique alterity by forcing it into language’s general categories. To speak plainly: I shouldn’t presume to know who you are or what you want or are thinking because that reduces your alterity to my idea of you: I assume that you – indeed that everyone – is just like me. At its height, this fear of totalizing the Other became something of a fetish; in book after book I have read from the 1980s and 1990s it seems that the author fears he or she will not be taken seriously unless they mention alterity or totalization – preferably both – on every other page!
Stylistic excesses aside, there is a very serious and very important impetus behind this recourse to the language of alterity. The danger of totalization comes into clear focus when we consider the politics of phrases like “Oh, she’s a Jew, and careful with her money too” and “The shooting was carried out by a black man.” Wagon loads of cultural baggage, history, and prejudice are freighted in those brief statements, inevitably framing the person who is being spoken of in a particular way by highlighting certain aspects of their identity and not others. Their individuality is reduced to a symbol, their uniqueness to an idea. In its everyday guise, this logic of sameness and alterity has filtered its way into the dominant social imaginary in phrases such as “no one can judge me” and “you do you.”
There is undoubtedly something vital and necessary in resisting totalization. Yet there is a problem with this desire not to do violence to the Other, and David Bentley Hart puts his finger on it. The work of writers who resist tying the Other down by our categories and assumptions, such as Emmanuel Levinas, leads to “a selflessness so hyperbolic that it must ultimately erase everything distinct, desirable, and genuinely other in the other in order to preserve itself from the contamination of need, dependency, or hope” [The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 82]. The Other is left without totalization but also “without theme, context, contour, identity” and therefore is not really other at all. The good becomes identified with an abstract indeterminacy that can never embrace the richness of intimacy.
The Trinity as Model of Love
In contrast to this obsessively cautious honoring of an abstract and distant other, the love relationships of the Trinity provide tools that help us to understand sameness and difference in a way that provides for distinctness, distance, and honoring, as well as intimacy, knowledge, and mutuality. As John Frame points out, for a Christian view of the world “there is no unity without plurality, and no plurality without unity” [A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, p. 30]. The other person is infinite (in the sense that I can never fully understand them) but not infinitely removed from me in inaccessible loftiness as in the logic of sameness and alterity. In a Christian frame, the infinity of the other is found in “the free and boundlessly beautiful rhetoric of a shared infinite” that comes from seeing the other “within and by way of Christ,” as “the object of [God’s] love, the splendor of his glory” [The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 300]. This infinity both draws me and the other together and also makes us utterly irreducible to one another: the other is both my fellow beloved creature and an utterly unique and irreplaceable singularity.
The Trinity provides a model of relating that marries inalienable dignity with incomparable intimacy, distinctiveness with mutuality. As Gilbert Meilaender notes, “In the mystery of that life none of the persons lives independently; yet, distinction remains. Within the life of God something analogous to society exists” [The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical thought of C. S. Lewis, p. 62]. Approaching the Other is no longer an act of threatening violence like Derrida supposes it to be; it is now a doxological rejoicing in a gift. To say that the other is a gift is not to reduce him or her to a possession with which I can do what I want; it is to say that my first mode of encountering the other is a posture of wonder and glory-giving to the God of lofty intimacy.
My language, furthermore, is no longer a totalizing threat to the Other but a means of hospitality and receptivity. Hart explains that “the mediation of thought and language may be conceived not simply as a reduction of alterity to the Same, but as a charitable venture, in accord with an infinite that reveals itself as beauty, and hence the continuous enrichment of difference through peaceful supplementation and discovery” [The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 142]. Thought and language are part of the way in which, to use Miroslav Volf’s metaphor, I open my arms to invite embrace, so as not to seize the other, and re-open my arms at the end of the embrace so as not to absorb them. Now of course, words can still wound, stereotypes still exist, and no human relationship embodies this plenitude of peaceful praise. Alienation and abuse are real, and they will be discussed at length in the chapters on sin. The point I am making here is that the Trinity locates, at the very bedrock of relationality, deeper and more foundational than abuse and slander, not an “original violence” but the openness of irenic wonder, a “determinate word of peace, which loves” and which “corresponds to and participates in and is nourished by the infinite rhetoric of God’s Trinitarian discourse of love” [The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 300].
Note: Published by Zondervan 2022. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Christopher Watkin, senior lecturer, Monash University
