The Christian experience of divine love is the unnecessary and gracious self-giving of God that makes possible humanity’s response to its Creator. It is rooted in the New Testament declaration that “God is love” (1 John 4:16). The New Testament employs the Greek term agape to connote a meaning of love distinct from eros and philia. New Testament authors deliberately prefer agape for its connotation of a selfless— and, in the life of Christ, sacrificial—love in which the beloved are loved for their own sake, without self-interest. The identification of God with this love in 1 John 4:16 gives rise to the correlative responsibility of persons to love their neighbor—who is seen—as the test case for their love of God, who remains unseen (1 John 4:20), and thus show that they abide in God. Agape is thus both a divine prerogative, revealed preeminently in the Cross and Resurrection, and the task of Christian disciples who, like Christ, love sacrificially, lose themselves in loving others, and, paradoxically but unmistakably, discover themselves in the process (Luke 17:33 and parallels).
The belief that God is love comments at once on the divine life (in se), as a trinity of personal relationships in reciprocal communion, and on God’s covenantal relationship with human beings (ad extra). This is evidenced by God’s creating them for covenant partnership, redeeming them from their sin and self-contraction independent of their own merit, and consummating them for beatific intimacy in the divine life.
The doctrine of the trinity underscores that the divine life is self-giving love, considering that the one God who is one substance exists in three equal and active relationships of love. Rather than tritheism, this dynamic self-differentiation suggests that the divine life is constituted by personal relationships in communion, as the Father who generates the Son (filiation); as the Son generated by the Father who loves the Father in perfect obedience; and as the Holy Spirit, who according to Augustine proceeds from the Father and Son together (spiration) and is the bond of love between them. Richard of St. Victor notably held that God was necessarily triune on the basis of the nature of love, which requires that love between two persons be perfected in their shared love for a third, thus avoiding an enclosed egoism between the two precisely in their shared love for a genuine other.
More recently, divine love and the existence of God have been called into question by the tragic experience of horrendous evils—of which the Holocaust is a symbol—as experiences so devoid of God’s love as to call into question the very existence of God. Theological responses to this challenge focus on human freedom and agency as the cause of human evil and suffering, rather than on divine absence or indifference. Theologians have long sought to immunize God from the blame associated with the vexing problem of moral evil in human society.
