Some helpful observations by D. A. Carson on the love of God:
If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God – however he, she, or it may be understood – is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture.
I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God – to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity. The result, of course, is that 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 the love of God is exclusively portrayed as an inviting, yearning, sinner-seeking, rather lovesick passion, we may strengthen the hands of Arminians, semi-Pelagians, Pelagians, and those more interested in God’s inner emotional life than in his justice and glory, but the cost will be massive.
D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 9-11, 22.
This highlights the danger of over-allegorizing the Song of Solomon (or Hosea 2:14-20) and pressing the Bride of Christ and Christ as Bridegroom metaphors (or any Biblical metaphor) too far -- to the point where the allure of the metaphor eclipses the sober clarity of declarative statements of doctrine (such as Romans 9:18).
Posted by: Keith | 05/21/2011 at 05:02 AM