What does it really mean to say God is Love?

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What does it really mean to say God is Love?

Forum: Theological Expressions
Re:

The Holy Spirit manifested like electricity ? (CH )
Re:

Much Ado About Nothing
Re:

God does laugh! (SK)
Re:

God is SPIRIT
Re:

Spirit = no emotions? (SK)
Re:

The Incomprehensible God
Date: 2001, May 15
From: SK

Taken from Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology :-
["Love in us includes complacency and delight it its object with the desire of possession and communion. The schoolmen,and often the philosophical thelologians, tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say would imply passivity , or susceptibility of impression from without, which it is assumed is incompatible with the nature of God. “We must exclude ,” says Bruch, “passivity from the idea of love,as it exists in God. For God cannot be the subject of passivity in any form. Besides if God experienced complacency in intelligent beings, He would be dependent on them; which is inconsistent wiht His nature as an Absolute Being.” Love therefore , he defines as that attribute of God which secures the development of the rational universe; or as Schleiremacher expresses it,” It is that attribute in virtue of which God communicates Himself.” According to the philosophers, the infinite develops itself in the finite; this fact , in theological language , is due to love. The only point of anolagy between love in us and love in the Absolute and Infiinte is self-communcation. Love in us leads to self-revelation and communion; in point of fact the Infinite is revealed and developed in the universe and specially in humanity. Bruch admits that this doctrine is in real contradiction to the representations of God in the OT and in apparent contradiction to those of the NT. If love in God is only a name for that which accounts for the rational universe; if God is love, simply because He develops Himself in thinking and conscious beings, then the word has for us no definite meaning; it reveals to us nothing concerning the real nature of God. Here again we have to choose between a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible, and of our own moral and religious nature. Love of necessity involves feeling and if there be no feeling in God , there can be no love. That He produces happiness is no proof of love....Unless the production of happiness can be referred, not only to a conscious intention, but to a purpose dictated by kind feeling, it is not proof of BENEVOLENCE. And unless the children of God are the objects of His complacency and delight, they are not the objects of His love. He may be cold, insensible, indifferent, or even unconsious; He ceases to be God in the sense of the Bible,and in the sense in which we need a God, unless He can LOVE as well as KNOW and ACT. The philosophical objection agst ascribing feeling to God, bears , as we have seen, with equal force agst the ascription to Him of knowledge and will. If the objection be valid , He become to us simply an unknown CAUSE, what men of science call FORCE; that to which all PHENOMENA are to be referred, but ofwhich we know nothing. We must adhere to the truth in its Scriptural form or we lose it altogether. We must believe God is love in the sence in which that word comes home to every human heart. The Scripture do not mock us when they say, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” (Ps ciii.13) He meant what He said when He proclaimed Hinself as “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and truth.” (Ex xxxiv:6) “Beloved, says the Apostle,”let us love one another: for love is of God....(1 Jhn iv:7-11). The word love has the same sense throughout this passage (of 1 Jhn). God is love; and love in Him is in all that is essential to its nature, what love is in us. Herein we do rejoice and yea, and will rejoice.]
That is why my friend the charismatics are always laughing!!! We're rejoicing in the Lord as commanded by Paul in Philipians! :-)

to: "What does it really mean to say God is Love?"