Adapted from a lecture series delivered in 1998, D.A. Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God guides its reader skillfully and devotionally through what has sadly become the most provocative, distorted and misunderstood of God’s predicates. The crux of Carson’s argument is simple: we live within a culture that has by and large embraced the love of God while simultaneously expelling the conception of that love from its native biblical soil. “The love of God has been sanitized, democratized and above all sentimentalized.” Our culture, and all too often even our churches, extol the inclusive warmth of 1 John 4:8 – “God is love” – while scorning the harsh intolerance of 1 John 1:5 – “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.”

In response to this dilemma, Carson offers a clear, pithy and above all context-driven re-articulation of the biblical doctrine of God’s love. Choosing biblical fidelity over conceptual simplicity, Carson identifies five “distinguishable ways that the Bible speaks of the love of God”:

God’s Intra-Trinitarian Love – “the peculiar love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father.”
God’s Providential Love – “God’s providential love over all that he has made.”
God’s Universal Love – “God’s salvific stance toward his fallen world…[his] yearning, inviting, commanding love.”
God’s Covenantal Love – “God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect.”
God’s Conditional Love – “God’s love…directed toward his own people in a provisional or conditional way – conditioned, that is, on obedience.”

Carson’s brief exposition of these various “loves” is alone worth the price of the book. After a brief excurses entitled “How Not to Proceed,” Carson build upon his five-fold model by anchoring what we might call the four outer loves of God in the first and not surprisingly internal love of God. It is God’s internal love, Carson argues – the love God has “in and for himself” – that makes possible all the other various manifestations of God’s outward love. In more theological rhetoric, it is the ontological-Trinitarian love of God that makes possible the economic-Trinitarian love of God. This somewhat ethereal point becomes exceptionally important when we begin asking how God, who is holy and hates the wicked, can love rebellious and guilty sinners. Carson’s answer? “[God’s] love emanates from his own character; it is not dependent on the loveliness of the loved, external to himself.” God loves sinners, in other words, not because sinners are loveable in themselves. On the contrary, God’s soul abhors the wicked. Rather, God loves sinners because God himself is love.

Also included are two helpful sections relating the love of God both to God’s sovereignty as well as His wrath. In connection with the second of these two attributes, God’s wrath, Carson delves briefly though profitably into the nature and extent of the atonement, explaining both its unlimitedness (sufficient for all) as well as its limitedness (efficient only for the elect) by utilizing the third and fourth loves of God respectively.

Concise, scholarly, pastoral and devotional, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God is an excellent book for students, laymen and teachers alike. Exegete

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