Defining Love

Thomas Jay Oord’s Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement is bizarre.  He draws on physical and social sciences in his effort to define love, has a chapter on love and biology and love and cosmology, talks about kenosis a good deal, and concludes with a chapter outlining “A Theology of Love Informed by the Sciences.”

For all the talk about kenosis as essential to God’s character, the self-emptying Oord has in mind is always a self-emptying and self-limitation in relation to some creation or another.  The index has only one lone reference to the Trinity, and that’s in a footnote.

This leads him to some odd conclusions, and produces odd tensions.  He wants to affirm God’s freedom, and wants to say that the world is itself a product of love, but he has dispensed with the traditional theological means for underwriting that freedom, namely, creation ex nihilo .  Instead, he argues that God necessarily exists, but that He necessarily exists in relation to a world.  The freedom of God’s love consists not in “that” he loves, but in “how” he loves.  He might have created a different world, but He could not not have created.  Oord bites the bullet of this account, acknowledging that such a God is “influenced by the ups and downs, joys and sorrows, sins and loves of others,” but somehow His “eternal nature is fixed.  God’s nature is love, and that nature never alters.”

Christian theology has always had ways to affirm both that God is the Lord Creator and that He is compassionate and sympathetic.  The doctrine of the Trinity has been central to the task of harmonizing those two, apparently paradoxical, confessions.  Oord has tried to define Love without much attention to the Father, Son, and Spirit whose life is a communion of love.