Do you remember the "Love Is" cartoons. Occasionally I show them at the start of a wedding sermon. They were a light-hearted slogan to suggest what love looks like in practice, accompanied by a picture of an innocent-looking boy and girl which wittily goes with the caption. Mostly, it was extremely soppy romantic love. You could accuse them of being shallow, lacking meaning and depth — but they were only ever meant to be a bit of fun.
On the surface, the latest hashtag from the Mayor of London and Transport for London tops every cartoon when it comes to meaninglessness. #LoveIsLove. Why, thank you. Now I know.
TfL is the latest in a cascade of public and private businesses supporting the "Pride" events that take place across Britain at this time of year. I wrote about this rush to lend public support to Pride in a previous post. [TfL may not have invented the meme "love is love", but I first encountered it on their Pride material.]
In this post, I want to think about that hashtag. On the face of it, it's meaningless. It's a tautology that says nothing at all. "Love is love". Genius! If it's meant to speak about intimate human relationships and marriage, maybe its biggest weakness is that it permits everything and forbids nothing. It no more stops a man from marrying 4 wives aged 12 than it does another from marrying his pet goat.
I want us to think a little more closely, and to look what that phrase says. Let's look against the backdrop of what the Christian God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, has revealed of himself. We'll see that he is the God who is love. The assertion that "love is love" is thus a rival claim, which exposes a different ideology which comes complete with its own "god". Our society, especially the proponents of "love is love", are asking us to commit to this god, who is far smaller than the true God; they also offer alternative "love", which is a correspondingly small kind of love.
God is Love
To any Christian, the sentence "love is love" naturally evokes the similar sentence in 1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16: "God is love."
[In 1 John, there are three sentences that assert "God is" something — twice we're told that "God is love", and in 1 John 1:5 that "God is light. We complete the set of "God is" sentences from Hebrews 12:29, "Our God is a consuming fire". This alone reminds us that "God is love" is not intended to say all there is to say about God; he is not "love" to the exclusion of his other attributes. More on that in a moment.]
God does not merely have love. He is love. It's right at the core of his being, his character, his identity.
He is love, without needing his creatures to show love to. That is because, for all eternity, God has always been three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — in an eternal fellowship of love.
Yet God's love becomes visible as he shows it to us.
"This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." (1 John 4:9-10)
We don't need to stay within 1 John; the same message is clear throughout the New Testament:
"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:7-8)
We get it on the lips of Jesus himself:
"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13)
That love then flows out from those who have experienced it. It's where Jesus is going in the passage just quoted in John 15; it's one way the theme of love develops within 1 John; it's the impetus for love within a marriage in Ephesians 5.
God is love. He is love in himself, so he shows love to his people, whose lives are then permeated with that love in all their dealings with others. The best, even the only, foundation for a loving society is the love that God has in himself, the love that God is.
Let's now hold "love is love" up against the biblical assertion that "God is love". I will show that "love is love" is a direct rival for the one true God. To do that, we need to consider two of God's less frequently discussed attributes: his simplicity, and his aseity.
Divine Simplicity
The opposite of something simple is something that is compound — something made up of several parts such that you can separate off the component parts, imagining one part without the others.
God is not compound. He is simple. There are no aspects to God's character that are optional, "accidental", such that he could do without them and still be God. If God were not all-powerful, he would not just be the God he is but with less power; he would cease to be himself; he would indeed cease to exist.
Conversely, every one of God's attributes is "essential", of his very essence (his esse), a necessary aspect of who he is.
This includes God's love. Love is not some external quality, such that we can compare God's character to the quality of "love", and conclude that there is a match and therefore that God must be loving. God's love is an essential part of who he is. As we just noted, God doesn't merely "have" love, he "is" love.
"Love is love" forgets this. It attempts to define love with no other point of reference than love itself. It attempts to define love without reference to the God for whom "love" is an essential and inseparable part of his character.
Furthermore, all God's other qualities are also essential to him. Take God's justice, for example. You cannot have God without his justice. Which means that God's love is necessarily a love that is marked by perfect justice. God's love is also characterised by perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom, perfect power, and so on.
Obviously, our love is a pale shadow of God's own love. Nevertheless, we love because he first loved us. Our love will still reflect the character of the love we seek to draw on. A love that derives from the fact that "God is love" is the richest love the world could ever dream of. A love that derives from the fact that "love is love" is none of those things.
Divine Aseity
Thoughtful children sometimes ask the question: "Who made God?" It's a good question, to which the answer is: "Nobody". The more developed answer is that this is what makes him God.
The Nicene Creed wants to guard against the idea that Jesus is merely the most senior created being. It's not enough to say that we can't say when he was made; he is uncreated, and has always been so. Yet he remains the Father's Son. For all eternity, he's "begotten, not made". Only this secures the fact that Jesus is God; to be God is to be "not made", uncreated.
The Athanasian Creed would use very similar language. Its concern, at this point in that creed, is to stress in lots of ways that the three persons of the Trinity are fully equal in their divinity, and yet there is only one God.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy God uncreate.
…
As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated,
and one incomprehensible.
Because God is simple, we could play this game with any of God's attributes. But one foundational one is that he, alone, is "uncreated".
That sounds easy to say, but it connects to some philosophical debates about the existence of God. Is there such a thing as an "unmoved mover"? If everything must have a cause, then what explains God's existence? If the world is really flat, standing on the back of a big turtle, what is that turtle standing on? The answer, is another turtle. And if you ask what's under that, the answer comes back that it's "turtles all the way down".
You could debate, logically, as to whether "turtles all the way down" is incoherent. The Bible's claim is that there is a God who is the bottom turtle. He was himself not made. His existence does not depend on anything or anyone. Furthermore, this is what makes him God: Everything else was made by him. "Without him nothing was made that has been made." (John 1:3)
Enter the doctrine of God's "aseity". The word "aseity" simply means something that exists in and of itself, by itself, without needing anything else to create it, or to justify its existence. In classic Christian thought, God alone has this quality of aseity. It's what I've just been explaining.
Now let's come back to that phrase, "love is love". That ascribes aseity to the quality of love. What is this quality? It's undefined. But once you've given "love" aseity, it needs to be undefined. If love has aseity, then there can be no external barometer by which we can describe or define love. Love simply is … love.
A thoughtful child might ask the question, "Who made love?" The correct answer is "nobody". Because love is an essential part of the character of the God who is uncreated. The sentence "love is love" also gives the answer "nobody", but for a very different reason. "Love is love" is to make "love" the bottom turtle, the one on whose shoulders everything stands, the one thing that is uncreated and needs no other point of reference.
In short, "love is love" makes a god out of "love" as a direct alternative to worshipping the God who is love.
Yet what a small "god" this is. We're brushing close to the "simplicity" discussion, but we have a god called love, whose only attribute is (undefined) love. This god has no power, no knowledge, no wisdom, no compassion, no justice, no purity, no consistency, no faithfulness. This god can neither judge nor save.
Too Small
"Love is love" sounds harmless because it's meaningless. Alternatively, perhaps it's harmful solely because it gives no boundaries.
In fact it is deeply and deceptively harmful. It sets up both a rival love and a rival god to the real God who is love. By offering us something called love, and a deity, it is an alluring slogan. Yet both the love and the god are fake, too small to deliver what they promise us.
It offers an alternative "love", divorced from the God whose very character embodies love. Such a "love" is no love at all, and lacks all the richness of the wonderful love of God.
It offers an alternative "god", deifying the attribute of "love" as though it could carry the weight only a real God can shoulder. Such a "god" is no god at all, and lacks all the depth and glory of the wonderful God of love.
I'll take the God of love and the love of God any day.
"Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?"
(from And Can It Be? by Charles Wesley)"Love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all"
(from When I Survey by Isaac Watts)
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