Free Write: What Does it Mean to Love God?

I used to think I could find the answers to questions like this. Now I am mostly hoping to learn what everyone else already seems to know and deal with as a part of maturing as a rational and spiritual being.

Theodicy grapples with the inconsistency in a universe created and sustained by a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God that also contains apparently meaningless suffering. This inconsistency is and must be pervasive throughout a life of faith; even more so in the experience of ministry. If God loves us dearly, and he has the power and foresight to prevent suffering, then how can suffering truly exist in this world? And yet who can claim humanity and deny the reality of suffering in the human experience? If we are to affirm the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the reality and atrocity of suffering, then how can we understand him to truly love us?

The major theodicies attempt to attack or justify our concept of suffering, whether as a necessary evil, a function of a higher good, or part of our personal development. We cannot question God's omnipotence or omniscience or his love for us, so we try to deny or re-conceptualize suffering, even though of all the four it is probably the one that we can understand most concretely and completely. Another approach is to attack the attributes of God as a lethal caricature of his person. Hegel, while not generally accepted as orthodox, arguably makes an accurate assessment of the attributes of God when he says that, in replacing God himself, they destroy the spirit of a living God as our object of worship. One might conclude with Wittgenstein's famous line here, "Of that which we cannot speak, let us say nothing."

But to deem theodicy irrelevant under the terms of a completely apophatic theology does nothing to settle the discomfort and frustration that merely finds debatable form in our positive conceptions of divinity. When faith is not only blind but placed in what cannot be known or spoken, it seems like a great deal has been lost. How can a God simply beyond conception or analogy be any more living to us or less of a caricature than the God of many adjectives?

The point here is that perhaps the attributes of God are not only useful but necessary according to the limits of our reality in order to engage with the divine in any meaningful sense. And yet, because they are imperfect analogies drawn from a temporal, spatial experience that cannot contain any true conception of eternity, they will inevitable falter under the demands of consistency of a framework not meant to address their object.

I know that God loves me and that any love I have for him must occur as a function of this love he has for me. The Pope talks about the interaction between divine and human love, the former purifying the latter while the second materializes the first. In order to understand what it means to love God, we must consider what it means for God to love us. At the heart of this query, for me at least, is theodicy and the problem of evil. As we engage the world as Christ commands us to, it is very easy to look around and wonder incredulously that God loves us, not because our brokenness is impossible to love but because in his goodness and power we are yet so broken. If we are certain nonetheless of his love for us, and our love for him is a function of this love, we cannot fail to seek what this kind of love this can possibly be if we are to love him back.