Sunday, January 22, 2012

Wesley: God is Love

"It is not written, 'God is justice,' or 'God is truth': (although he is just and true in all his ways) But it is written, 'God is love,' love in the abstract, without bounds; and 'there is no end of his goodness.' His love extends even to those who neither love nor fear him. He is good, even to the evil and the unthankful; yea, without exception or limitation, to all the children of men. For 'the Lord is loving' (or good) 'to every man, and his mercy is over all his works.'"

~John Wesley

3 comments:

Russ Warren said...

I would say 'yes' except for his comment about love being abstract. In the context of I John, where that particular quote is from, love is anything but abstract: it is incarnation, it is crucifixion, it is resurrection, which are much more powerful than any abstraction for the salvation of the world.

Anonymous said...

How then do you account for the unrelenting horrors of Christian history? Most/all of which was "blessed" and "authorized" by the ecclesiastical establisment(s) of the time and place in which the horrors were deliberately perpetrated!

www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html

www.jesusneverexisted.com/cruelty.html

The horror(s) continue

www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner

Unknown said...

Many terrible things have been done in the name of God--and in the name of countless other ideas and values. Also, it is a maxim of classical Christian theology that full and proper knowledge of the creator cannot be drawn from creation alone--i.e. it doesn't follow from the terrible actions of human beings, even those claiming to act on God's behalf, that God himself is a monster.

Christians believe that the Jesus witnessed to in the four biblical gospels is the normative way to understand God. His mission was "Good news to the poor... freedom for the captives... recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free." Everything that doesn't jive with that, again according to the classical Christian understanding, is manifestly not "of God."