Updating our Picture of God: Part 3, God is More Loving

Over the past several years, I have made three major updates to my picture of God:

God is bigger than I used to picture; God is more loving than I used to picture; and God is more internal than I used to picture.

God is More Loving

There is a verse of Scripture from the Christian tradition that is famous even beyond Christian circles. It reads, “God is love.” This is the final sentence of 1 John 4:8.

Here is the larger context from which the phrase comes (1 John 4:7-8):

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (emphasis added).”

When I was a kid in school, we learned about similes and metaphors -- literary devices used to make comparisons.

For example, “The year 2020 was like a dumpster fire” is a simile. It makes a comparison using the words “like” or “as.” However, “The year 2020 was a dumpster fire” is a metaphor. It makes a more direct comparison. Both are figurative forms of language.

For much of my life, I have thought of the phrase “God is love” as a metaphor. I always thought of this phrase as one of the places in the Bible where we had to read the language as symbolic, rather than literally.

However, as I have updated my picture of God, I have come to wonder if this phrase is one that should be read more literally. God is love. That does not necessarily mean that God is only love.

This subtle nuance, that “God is love” should be read more literally and less metaphorically, has been transformative for me.

Previously my picture of God derived from a balancing of a list of attributes of God. I learned the list of attributes formally during my theological education, but I had learned them subtly long before. So in order to picture God, so I thought, I had to balance the many attributes of God, such as God being eternal, unchanging, powerful, all-knowing, present everywhere, just, holy, and loving. At times some of these attributes may have seemed to contradict each other, but there was no room to question the list. I was taught that the list must somehow be balanced to understand the nature of the divine.

I found this to create a tension. The tension could be compared to the tension in a rope when two opposing teams engage in a tug of war. Both teams are leaning and pulling as hard as they can on the rope. Each team has an anchor on its end of the rope adding to the tension in the rope. Imagine one team in the tug of war represents the love of God, and other similar nurturing attributes. Now imagine the other team represents the justice of God, and other seemingly harsh attributes. The two teams are tugging with all their might creating great tension in the rope. That tension, I believed, was where the truth about God was to be found.

I recognized that tension. It was the same tension that lived in me as an underlying anxiety about life. While I am not prepared to say that my picture of God was the only source of my underlying tension and anxiety, it now seems obvious that it was a contributing factor.

But what if we take the phrase “God is love” more literally. In other words, what if “love” is the overarching characteristic of God? What if all other attributes of God are to be understood only in the context of God’s overarching love? What if “God is love” is the great umbrella under which all understanding of the nature of God is to be found?

Before I updated my picture of God to be more loving, I had found that my old image of God had not led to much transformation in my own life. I had been on the journey for many years, and my picture of God had acted as a helpful prophylactic. To protect myself from God’s more frightening characteristics, I managed to avoid many behaviors that might have proven harmful to me. I avoided some bad habits as a result. But that was not transformation. That was prevention. The parts of me that were already broken did not really change much under that image of God. The tension kept me from making certain mistakes, but rarely was I actually motivated by love.

Then I went through a season that caused me to update my picture of God as more loving. The details are more than I can provide here, but my marriage of twenty-one years came to an end. Though there had been struggles throughout those two decades, the final ending came about rather abruptly. Whether I liked it or not, it was going to end. I grew up in a religious tradition where divorce was considered taboo, yet nonetheless I was now going through a divorce. Our family of five was going to become two families. Such a change was not anywhere in my anticipated life plan!

Richard Rohr writes in his book Falling Upward, “There always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change or even understand . . . . Sooner or later, if you are on any classic ‘spiritual schedule,’ some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower . . . . This is the only way that …God… can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.”

Over the course of the months and years that followed the transition, I encountered a God who was a bit different than the one I had pictured. I learned that there was more than enough of everything that I needed to navigate this unexpected season of life. I learned first-hand, that in the eyes of God, I was enough to get through this season. Nothing was missing once I updated by picture of God to understand the extent of divine love.

I learned first-hand that the universe is, in fact, a friendly place because its Prime Mover is that way. At the root of it all, I was not a victim of my circumstances, but I was empowered by the great Love of the universe.

What I had caught hints of through written words and spoken proclamations, I learned by hitting rock bottom:

God is more loving than the picture I had previously carried. That love carries life-transforming power.

But how could I sustain my newfound understanding of the divine when life settled back in to its new normal? For that I am thankful for the third update to my picture of God, to be described in my next post in this series.