The Love of God: A Canonical Model
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
2015 Readers’ Choice Award Winner - “For God so loved the world . . .” We believe these words, but what do they really mean? Does God choose to love, or does God love necessarily? Is God’s love emotional? Does the love of God include desire or enjoyment? Is God’s love conditional? Can God receive love from human beings? Attempts to answer these questions have produced sharply divided pictures of God’s relationship to the world. One widely held position is that of classical theism, which understands God as necessary, self-sufficient, perfect, simple, timeless, immutable and impassible. In this view, God is entirely unaffected by the world and his love is thus unconditional, unilateral and arbitrary. In the twentieth century, process theologians replaced classical theism with an understanding of God as bound up essentially with the world and dependent on it. In this view God necessarily feels all feelings and loves all others, because they are included within himself. In The Love of God, John Peckham offers a comprehensive canonical interpretation of divine love in dialogue with, and at times in contrast to, both classical and process theism. God’s love, he argues, is freely willed, evaluative, emotional and reciprocal, given before but not without conditions. According to Peckham’s reading of Scripture, the God who loves the world is both perfect and passible, both self-sufficient and desirous of reciprocal relationships with each person, so that “whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
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- Offers a comprehensive canonical interpretation of divine love.
- Considers both classical and process theism.
- Argues that God’s love is freely willed, evaluative, emotional and reciprocal.
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1. Conflicting Models of Divine Love
- 2. Toward Addressing the Conflict: A Canonical Approach
- 3. Agape vs. Eros? The Biblical Semantics of Divine Love
- 4. The Volitional Aspect of Divine Love
- 5. The Evaluative Aspect of Divine Love
- 6. The Emotional Aspect of Divine Love
- 7. The Foreconditional Aspect of Divine Love
- 8. The Reciprocal Aspect of Divine Love
- 9. Who is the God Who Loves?
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- Scripture Index
The love of God has long languished as the Benjamin of theological concepts. Not only has it not received the sustained attention that it deserves, but it has not always been clear where to locate it—in a discussion of the divine attributes, the Trinity, soteriology, creation, providence, somewhere else, everywhere? Another problem is that the love of God is too often conflated with images of human love. John Peckham rightly takes aim at this mistake and at other popular myths about God’s love. Here is a study of God’s love, based on the whole canon of God, that I admire even at those points (and there are a few) where I disagree.
—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
In view of the universal agreement that love is a crucially important attribute of God, it is astonishing that we so often are content to operate with conceptions of love that are hastily adopted, often from popular culture, without thorough consideration. John Peckham seeks to remedy this state of affairs with a thorough biblical examination of the love of God, bringing the text into dialogue with the multitude of popular conceptions of love. Strongly recommended for all who seek to understand how it is that God loves them.
—William Hasker, emeritus professor of philosophy, Huntington College
What strikes me about The Love of God: A Canonical Model is four things: its learning, sophistication, originality and comprehensiveness. Concerning its learning: the author is impressively conversant with almost all of the relevant literature, so far as I can see. Regarding its sophistication: the author displays a subtle and sophisticated grasp of the issues; he is sure-footed in theology, biblical interpretation and philosophical theology. That combination is hard to come by. Concerning its originality: rather than running with the crowd, the author questions common assumptions on a lot of points, on almost all of which, in my view, he is correct. And concerning its comprehensiveness: the author looks at God’s love from a large number of different angles; every other treatment that I know of is ‘pinched’ by comparison. My judgment is that this promises to be a very influential book.
—Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University