The statement “God is love” is formulated truth. If it is not to be diluted into a formula, then it must be both lived and thought. To think God as love is the task of theology. And in doing so, it must accomplish two things. It must, on the one hand, do justice to the essence of love, which as a predicate of God may not contradict what people experience as love. And on the other hand, it must do justice to the being of God which remains so distinctive from the event of human love that “God” does not become a superfluous word.
“To think God as love is the task of theology.” Theology, if it is to be Christian, must “think God as love.” Christian theology must begin and remain grounded in relationshp to the living Jesus and the tradition of the church’s Christological reflection. For the living Jesus (the truth of whom Christology helps to teach us) is the content of the apostlic declaration: “God is love.” Jesus (in his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension) is God’s final word about Godself, the “exact representation of [God's] being.”
“…love… as the predicate of God may not contradict what people experience as love.” The heart of Jesus’ theology lies in this simple statement:
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! (Mt 7.11)
In that statement, Jesus affirms the continuity between what we experience as “love” and the Father’s disposition toward us. When we say (with the apostles) “God is love,” then we mean something understandable, even if not totally understood.
“[Theology] must do justice to the being of God…” The human experience of love in its various forms does not “do justice to the being of God.” For God is always more. We can know that the experience of God must be something like our experience of love: but it is only something like. As Paul writes, God’s love (that is the same as saying God Godself) is “wide and long and high and deep” and though we can “know it,” it “surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3.17-19).
[...] Jungel has said the task of theology is to think God as love. But he doesn’t leave this predicate, “love,” in abstraction. It is the resurrected crucified Jesus who is the content of this predicate. We know what love is when we see Jesus, when he becomes present to us when we hear the euangelion proclaimed rightly, and in baptism and at the Table. Love, Christ shows us, is kenosis, even to death. And more. But this “and more” is real only in and because of Jesus’ resurrection. [...]