The Difficult Doctrine Of The Love Of God By D. A. Carson

I found the title, The Difficult Doctrine Of The Love Of God, to be catchy and thought it ought to raise some eyebrows because how is the love of God ever to be deemed “difficult” when the mantra of most contemporary Christians is “God loves you!” especially when they’re interacting with unbelievers with the aim of persuading them to join their fold? How can Gods love be difficult when it is the theme of many a song and beloved hymns of old? Or was the title just meant to be a brilliant little sales gimmick and that there was really nothing uneasy about Gods love?

Sure enough, the author begins the book by addressing such sentiments as I have expressed above and other distortions in our perception of what Gods love is by citing five reasons why this doctrine is made all the more difficult stating among other things that, “the love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized” thus “making the task of the Christian witness so daunting.” He again observes that “if people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that God – however he, she, or it may be understood – is a loving being” and so such people fail to appreciate the awe and surprise elements in the concept of God’s love hence this innate hunch becomes nothing more than a stumbling block instead of being propitious! What is even more disturbing, the author notes, is that “our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable” and so we tend to widely disbelieve the many other complementary truths about God which go alongside the concept of his love thus distortion becomes inevitable.

Against this backdrop the author goes on to expound in subsequent chapters five ways the Bible speaks about the love of God namely: (1) God’s intra-Trinitarian love, (2) God’s love displayed in his providential care, (3) God’s yearning warning and invitation to all human beings as he invites and commands them to repent and believe, (4) God’s special love toward the elect, and (5) God’s conditional love toward his covenant people as he speaks in the language of discipline. This the author does in combination with some of the other attributes of God including his sovereignty, holiness, wrath, personhood, impassibility and providence acknowledging them as “non-negotiable elements of basic Christianity” and thus are required if one is to come to a more accurate understanding of the love of God.

This book shattered my simplistic notion of what the love of God is especially when the author was addressing the tension between Gods love and his wrath. I have come to realize how many of us are guilty of unwittin

gly propagating a lopsided view of what Gods love is because we tend to uncritically juxtapose Gods love with that of humans and approach the concept solely from that perspective. In this sense, the book was a real eye-opener for me.

Though the topic was first delivered as a series of lectures and thus its target audience was primarily people in academia, the language isn’t too technical though the subject matter is weighty and so requires careful reading If one is to appreciate some of the delicate nuance that is replete in the book.

This is a book I highly recommend to everyone especially Christians as a corrective to our skewed notion of what the love of God entails.

SDG!!!