What is Wrong with the saying Love is my God?

Is Christian love objective or subjective?

By Dr. Donald Campbell and edited by Dr. Christy Anne Vaughan

Dr. Vaughan teaches Christ-centered pedagogy, senior thesis capstone project, and soon will have a Spiritual Leadership class, co-written with several pastors including Dr. Campbell. https://kepler.education/t/christy.vaughan/?tab=courses

In his nourishing book, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, Thomas Molnar makes the case that Christianity aligns with certain objective words and that all humanistic utopian societies align with three strikingly similar subjective words. Molnar says that Christianity aligns with the phrase “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and when the words are put in that order, the idea of love is a stoutly objective thing. In so saying, God is declaring that His nature and His revealed words express what love is and what love is not, in an objective way. In contrast, Molnar says that would-be utopian cultures are based on the phrase “love is God.” At first blush, these words seem to be identical. But, by reversing the words, cultures and individuals are able to say, “love is my god, and as long as I do loving things, then I am acting morally.” Molnar wrote: “The teaching is no longer that ‘God is love,’ wherein God has many other attributes besides love; rather, the current teaching is that ‘love is god,’ and this is the exaltation to divine status of a personal feeling which is subject to change and whim, which may expand or shrink, which may even turn into hatred” [Molnar, 58]. In contrast to the objective phrase “God is love,” the phrase “love is God” is inherently subjective.

One may think that this contrast is exaggerated, but this author thinks otherwise. For example, the Christian ethicist Joseph Fletcher argues: “Only one thing is intrinsically good, namely, love: nothing else. The ultimate norm of Christian decisions is love: nothing else” [Fletcher and Montgomery, 25-26]. In other words, Fletcher believes that, as long as a Christian’s motivation is love, then they can perform actions that the Bible condemns.

Fletcher specifies that as one acts lovingly, they can ethically lie, steal, commit fornication, or kill [Fletcher and Montgomery, 15]. These vapid ethics are a perfect illustration of the problems that occur when Christians treat love as something that is subjective.

Jesus, Who is Truth (John 14:6), spoke truth lovingly, and yet, He judged people for their sins. In a passage that many modern Christians would find to be provocative, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones makes a convincing case concerning Jesus and preaching sin. Lloyd-Jones states that Jesus’ contemporaries did not crucify Him because he healed the sick, raised the dead, or told people to love each other. Lloyd-Jones drills down and states: [Jesus] said one thing that to the natural man is the greatest insult conceivable, the most offensive remark that can ever be made, and it was this: The Son of man is come to seek and so save that which was lost (Luke 19:10). But surely, you may think, they did not hate that. Yet they did. That is the very thing they hated him for. They did not object to the saving part, but to the suggestion that they were lost, and that they were lost in the sense that they needed to be saved. You see, the very presence of the Son of God in this world is an utter, absolute condemnation of us, every one of us. It is because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, that he ever came, and especially why he had to go to the cross. And this is the source of offense. He tells us that we are failures, that we are sinners [Lloyd-Jones, 50].

The people of Jesus’ day found Him to be an offense (Matthew 13:57; Mark 6:3; Luke 7:23), and He said that, if He was persecuted, that we would be persecuted (John 15:20).  

While most Christians will reject the extremism of a Joseph Fletcher, a growing number of Christians have moderated their views about gender issues and marriage, simply because they do not want to appear to be judgmental. And, whether an individual Christian is motivated by a desire not to appear to be judgmental or not, one can see that, when we nibble away at God’s definitions of love, we have shifted grounds to subjectivity.

Works Cited

Fletcher, Joseph F., and John Warwick Montgomery. Situation Ethics: True or False: A Dialogue between Joseph Fletcher and John Warwick Montgomery. Dimension Books, 1972.

Martin Lloyd-Jones. The Cross. Crossway, 1986.

Molnar, Thomas Steven. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. University Press of America, 1990.