D: If God's unconditional love towards us entails accepting us as we truly are without any conditions whatsoever (which divine providence would seem to indicate)...then he's showing us what unconditional love truly is. So if we are to unconditionally love God, wouldn't that mean that we have to accept God AS HE IS, not as how we'd like him to be?

T: Unconditional love doesn’t negate conditional fellowship/relationship. Unconditional love means there’s no condition on which God will fail to pursue the restoration of actual lived fellowship. I can love Charles Manson as he is and even visit him in prison and talk to him about Jesus. That doesn’t mean I invite him to live in my house AS HE IS.

Sooo…

D: Simply, is God's continual creation and providence ENOUGH for us to affirm love as entailing unconditional acceptance and appreciation of the "other"? I say that it is.

T: I don't think so. ON ITS OWN continual creation (CC) doesn’t entail UR. It’s perfectly consistent with Edwardsian determinism. You have to ADD revealed love within the context of CC so that we’re able to further define continual creation as INTENDED in a certain way…loving CC. But just saying “God sustains creation” doesn’t logically entail that God is loving or unconditinally accepting of us. Logically speaking Edwards' worldview works. God could be sustaining us just to faten us up for the slaughter.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 11/18/2009 3:36:54 AM (GMT-6)

What does it mean for a human being to love God without any conditions?

I'm not talking about God's love towards us.  I'm talking about human unconditionality of love towards God. 

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...the most striking element of Kierkegaard's argument, perhaps the most striking argument in the book, is that love is commanded by God, and solely by virtue of that fact liberated. How can love, which is typically thought to be organic and spontaneous, be commanded, and yet remain love?

"You shall love." Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.

However joyous, however happy, however indescribably confident instinctive and inclinational love, spontaneous love, can be in itself, it still feels precisely in its most beautiful moment the need to establish itself, if possible, more securely. Therefore the two pledge; they pledge fidelity or friendship to one another. And when we talk most solemnly we do not say of the two: "they love another"; we say "They pledged fidelity" or "They pledge friendship to one another." By what, then, do they swear this love? We shall not confuse the issue and be distracted by calling to mind the great variety of invocations used by the poets, the spokesmen of this love—for in relation to erotic love it is the poet who makes the two promise, the poet who joins the two, the poet who prophecies an Eden for the two and lets them swear—in short, the poet is the priest. Does this love swear, then, by something which is higher than itself? No, this it does not do.... Yet it is easy to understand that if one really is to swear, he must swear by something higher; then God in heaven is the only one who is truly in a position to swear by himself. But the poet cannot understand this.... Therefore this spontaneous love has, according to the beautiful misunderstanding of the imagination, the eternal in itself, but it is not consciously grounded upon the eternal and consequently can be changed.... Consequently, only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secure. This security of the eternal casts out all anxiety and makes the love perfect, perfectly secure. For in that love which has only existence, however confident it may be, there is still an anxiety, anxiety over the possibility of change. Such love does not itself understand any more than the poet that this is anxiety, for the anxiety is hidden; the only expression is a burning passion, whereby is merely hinted that anxiety is at the bottom. Otherwise why is it that spontaneous love is so inclined to—yes, so in love with—making a test of the love? This is just because love has not, by becoming a duty, in the deepest sense undergone the test.... Spontaneous love can be changed within itself; it can be changed to its opposite, to hate.... Spontaneous love can be changed within itself; by spontaneous combustion it can become jealousy; from the greatest happiness it can become the greatest torment.... In this way the "You shall" makes love free in blessed independence; such a love stands and does not fall with variations in the object of love; it stands and falls with eternity's law, but therefore it never falls (p. 44-49, 53).

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2009 2:36:53 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Asher) : 11/18/2009 3:05:00 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2009 3:17:14 AM (GMT-6)

What does it LOOK LIKE for a human being to love God without conditions?  That's what I'm asking about what does it mean.

If I took just this...it would seem that loving God unconditionally would mean to love God regardless of any of his actions or beliefs.

Does that sound ok? So let's tie the knot. 

If I love God, I will obey his commands (Scripture).  God commands that I unconditionally love him. (Scripture)  God can and will put his Spirit in me to obey his commands (Scripture). This implies continuing to love God regardless of anything God says or does to me or anyone else.  So, this would mean that regardless to what God did, eschatologically speaking...the command stands and my love for him through obedience stands.  So...for me to say that I cannot love God unconditionally because I don't think he loves unconditionally...is for me to FAIL to love God in keeping his commands...and to fail to believe in God's power to provide empowerment to do his command.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2009 3:28:01 AM (GMT-6)

D: What does it mean for a human being to love God without any conditions? What does that look like? I'm pretty sure it's part of the Great Commandment, yo.

T: We talked about this a while back. It means nothing we experience, nothing we discover about the world to be true, can amount to a reason to not love God.

Here’s my thing D. To hear God command you “Love me” is meaningless unless you have SOME notion of who or what sort of God is doing the commanding. So we cannot avoid the fact that it’s a particular KIND of being who commands. And for me the determinate content of that commander’s character is Jesus.

I think you want the command to love God to be interpreted context/character free, absolutely, and grounded in sheer command. There’s just this nameless, faceless command that comes from out of the dark, “Love me unconditionally!” That way you can set up a comparison between loving God and all the unimaginably horrible things we might conceivably discover about God, like, that he determines sin in determinist fashion, that he drinks the blood of innocent children, whatever. God is to be loved even were we to discover God was this sort of God. Is that your point?

If so, I disagree. It sounds like you want to say that we should love God while ascribing to him ANY conceivable sort of character. After all, that’s how God loves us, right?

I don’t think this works. Yes, God loves us even if we’re sinners. But were we to discover that God is a sinner, on what basis would we ground our obligation to obey his command to love him? Do you ground that in the sheer POWER of God, the threat of punishment? What?

We ground our obligation to obey his command to love him in the character we believe him to have. So that character becomes a condition upon which our obedience is rendered to God, upon which it’s even possible. This is UNLIKE God’s love of us which is not a response on his part to any command of ours.

Abraham’s offering of Isaac is not a counter-example of this (as I tried to argue in Ty’s SK class). We learn from the NT that Abraham was able to go through with offering up Isaac ONLY BECAUSE he conditioned his actions upon God’s have a certain sort of character, namely, God doesn’t lie and can’t fail to fulfill his promise re: Isaac. Abraham reasoned that if the knife slits Isaac’s throat, God will then just raise him from the dead. But what God would not do is take Isaac from him permanently and renig on his promise.

We can love the GOD revealed in Scripture unconditionally. We cannot love JUST ANY IMAGINABLE SORT OF GOD unconditionally. So the God who commands us in Scripture to love his IS THE SAME GOD who reveals his character, the sort of God this commanding God is, in Christ.

Don’t know if this is getting at your question.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 11/18/2009 3:35:09 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2009 3:43:33 AM (GMT-6)

If there is any context in which a person can see themselves saying this to the Creator... 

"Creator schmeator! by your display of character, I don't feel you are worthy of my obedience or love."

...then for said person, unconditionality of love for the Creator is impossible.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2009 3:45:43 AM (GMT-6)