I Want to Know What Love Is (Foreigner 1984)

Is Love a Power? How does Love Change the World?

This meme, by Michael Frost, caught my attention on facebook. Frosty makes the best memes (his facebook page is worth following). I posted it on my fb page (you can follow me on fb HERE), and what followed was a litany of responses, the majority of which revealed the predominant theology of power at work among American evangelicals/post evangelicals. Power is power, and we can’t escape it in this world. So we must get as much of it as we can, in the right places, and put the right people in charge of it (Christians), to make use of it towards righteous ends. This meme, however, seemed to propose that love is another way to get things done. Love is a power? How is this even possible?

And so this meme begs the question: Is ‘love’ a power? What is “the power of love?” (Huey Lewis). Is it true: “all you need is love?” (Beatles). What is love anyway? “I want to know what love is?” (Foreigner) (these music references reveal my age).

Yes to Love, But What Is It?

Love IS the universal solution, so it seems. Which ever culture wars battle we might be in, whether it’s racism, sexuality, politics, gender, or economics, all we need to do is “just love people.” This is what I hear a lot. But what is love? What’s love got to do with it? (HT to Tina Turner on this one).

“Love” speaks especially to the sexuality conflicts in our churches. It speaks to those persons reacting to the hate exclusion, dispossession, disgust, and dare I say trauma, that they have generally experienced within local churches. Reacting to this, LGBTQ+ peoples rightfully suspect any moral instruction the church might have for them. The church’s first call to LGBTQ peoples is to affirm that God is love, that God loves every LGBTQ+ person and affirms them as created by God. Let us love, not hate. Let us love, not judge.

Afterall, “God loves you,” is the starting point for the gospel. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son … (John 3:16)” starts the text most often quoted to summarize the gospel. Much healing and transformation flows from starting with the good news that “God loves you”.

But still, this all begs the question: What exactly is love? Is love a sentiment, a flow of support? Is it affirming someone, and all of given sexual identities? Is it telling someone they are loved, created by God for good things, especially after receiving a lot of guilt inducing judgement, and declarations of their depraved sinful state from their church experience? Or is this just a start? Is God’s love more than this? Is God’s love a force, a power, a transformative presence for changing the world?

Love is More Than

At the very least, we can say with full confidence, when it comes to God, that love is MORE THAN a few things.

God’s love, for instance, is more than a sentiment. Our understanding of love, in relation to God, can get defined by our own human sentiments. In so doing, we’ve limited God’s love to a sentiment, a feeling, of warmth, acceptance, and affirmation. There is much value in such sentiments. Especially with our young children. But the God revealed in Jesus, reveals that God’s love is more than this. It is the giving up of oneself for another (1 John 3:16). Indeed, many of the warmest, truest sentiments of God’s love come as an outcome of a God’s difficult and often hard work in our lives.

God’s love is also more than a privatized personal relation between God and myself. For sure, God loves “me.” He seeks my individual flourishing. But God’s love cannot be personalized, dare I say romanticized, so that it becomes all about me, my wants, my fame, my fulfilment, how great I am. Au contraire, individual flourishing cannot be separated from God’s overall work of inter-relational healing and relationship in the world, the drawing of all things into reconciliation with God. Surely to say “God so loved the world” John 3:16 leads to God loves “me.” But to be loved by God is to be drawn into communion with all creation all He is doing in reconciling the whole world to Himself (John 3:17) And so God’s love is personal, but it is beyond personal. God’s love draws us into something much bigger than myself.

Lastly, God’s love is more than a virtue. To be sure, love is a disposition, a part of one’s character, a disposition one takes on and grows into as a follower of Jesus. When applied to God, it speaks to His character, the way He is, the way He works. His love always directs his actions and care toward us. But God’s love is more than this too.

Love is more than these. As exercised by God, I suggest, love is a force, a presence, whereby God works to change the world. In my book, ‘Reckoning With Power,’ I made the argument from Scripture that there are two kinds of power at work in the world: worldly power “over” characterized by coercion, versus Godly power “with” characterized by relationality. It is God’s love that moves God’s power via God’s presence. How does God’s love correlate to God’s presence and God’s power?

Love is Powerful Presence

The Michael Frost meme intrigued me because it gave a nod to the concept that love is indeed a force that can get things done. As implied earlier, the standard account of power argues that “power is power,” asymmetrical, exercised over people, and it is unavoidable. If we therefore intend to get some things done, let us get hold of that power and put the right persons in charge of it.” But I suggest HERE that there is another power at work in the world and it is God’s power. This power of God is not merely an affirming encouraging sentiment or a privatized personal relation, or even a virtue. It is a healing reconciling force. It is love at work via God’s powerful presence, in which the world can be changed.

There are three things at work here in this dynamic of God’s power: God’s love, God’s presence, and God’s power.

First love. “God is love”(I John 4: 8,16). It is an attribute of His character, similar to the way we say it is God’s nature. It drives his actions towards us. “This is how we know what love is, Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” (1 John 3:16). In that God’s perfect character is love, he chooses (contrary to Thomas Oord for example) out of His character to never coerce, never control or usurp the agency of humans. He works within the world, inter-relationally, in and through all things.

Second presence. Because God is love, His way of engaging the world is through His presence with us. To love is to be present with and for someone. In human terms, presence is this sense of relational space between persons, the taking of one’s attention and gaze off oneself and casting it on the other. It is a transformative spiritual space. I spent the better part of Faithful Presence arguing this case from Scripture and illustrating how this works. If love is God’s character, presence is the means by which God’s love is made effectual in people’s lives and in the world socially. In this space, love is transmitted, conviction/empowerment happens by the Spirit, reconciliation happens, the drawing of one to Christ’s very presence takes place. Presence is the way and the space where God works.

Third Power. God’s power is driven by His love and made manifest in His presence. Because He is love, His power never coerces. This power of God can never be controlled by human persons (contrary to Greg Boyd Cross Vision ch. 15), but rather is released through persons who come “under” His authority through faith, submission, prayer. God works his power through persons via presence in this way. And yet God can also intervene with this power in the affairs of persons (contrary to Oord). He can for instance hold back the forces of sin by His presence, as well as withdraw ‘His protective presence” (Boyd CWG pp113 ff.) thereby allowing the consequences of sin to be unleashed on those rejecting God. His power can raise Jesus from the dead and all of us in the future (Rom 8:11). His power can be unleashed through faith to heal a woman with an issue of blood (Matt 9:20-22) while at the same time the lack of faith and trust by people can inhibit the power of God from working through Jesus (Matt 13:58). This is why presence, through faith, and the making of space for God to work is so important to our cooperation with God.

It is not possible to fully understand the omnipotent nature of God’s power and all that God can do, except that as we come under His authority, just as Jesus came under the authority of the father, we can become the conduits of His power to do great and mighty works of healing, transformation, conviction, social change. These works of power are always driven by love, out of inter-relation. And so when we make space to love, by being present to a social reality or a person, and come under the authority of Jesus, space is made for His power to be unleashed by the Holy Spirit and bring great movements of justice in the world through the victory of Christ.

And so we see how God’s love, presence, and power are interrelated in understanding just how God, through the person and work of Jesus, works to make His power manifest through the Holy Spirit.

In the words of apostle Paul, “I pray… that you may know … what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come” (Eph 1:16-21). In all things however, God chooses to exert his power out of love. He never coerces. His power is not limited to working in and through persons (he can intervene in worldly affairs), but His power always works inter-relationally (even when he works in world affairs), out of love for humans and His creation.

The Power of Love

To say God loves you then is to say so much more than God affirms you. We must be open to His power made manifest in His presence,

Most Christian parents love their children by affirming them as created by God for His purposes, blessing them, applauding them when they do good things. But it goes beyond that. To love a child is also to desire the best for that child, and the avoidance of behaviors, patterns, habits, which inevitably will lead to trouble, even destruction of the child’s life (think addiction to meth or something). And so love carries with it guidance from the parent’s perspective of age, wisdom, a history, and a community. Love guides, love supports, but like God, must never coerce. The child must grow to make his or her own decisions. Each guidance is said with love or it falls on deaf ears. Love does not seek to control. And if the child rebels, or enters bad behaviors, sometimes the protective powers of the parents must be pulled back, so the child can suffer the consequences so as to make some better decisions. When we sit “with” our children, become present to them, maybe in a regular meal, maybe in some other space, praying God’s presence be in this place, real dialogue, conviction, revelation, transformation, healing can take place under the power of the living God.

Likewise, this practice of presence, unleashing God’s power, must be practiced among all the social ills, antagonisms and brokenness of our time, in our lives, in our churches, in our neighborhoods. This is the power of God’s love.

The Church as the Presence and Place of His Manifest Power.

The church is called to love people. Often, however, we have settled for too little in this loving. We have too often settled for sentiment, personal feelings, or even the virtue expressed through our lives. God’s love is what drives His power unleashed by the Spirit that transforms lives. It requires us being present, allowing space for God by His Spirit to work, and then cooperating. Whenever the church has practiced these ways, earth-shaking transformations have happened. Read about the women’s suffrage movements, the abolitionist movements, SNCC meetings that broke up the Jim Crow south, all in the epilogue of Reckoning with Power (buy it HERE).