Is God love?

The Christian Union’s ‘What is Love?’ week started with its text-a-toastie campaign, on Monday 17 February. A hall mate texted in the glib “why is it OK for Mary to cheat on Joseph with God but one affair makes John Major a monster?” Fact: the CU is a superior delivery team to ‘Domino’s’. Toasties arrived in record time, and my hall mate’s question dispatched with similar speed (the answer essentially boiled down to “It doesn’t count because it’s God”) but from there the conversation went off on a long tangent.

Almost every topic was debated: original sin, how Christianity calls for other religions to be treated, and the purpose of the Church in search for ultimate truth. And so toasties lead to tea, reinforcements were called in and three hours later, my flatmates and I were philosophising into the night with four CU representatives.

Free food had taken a bite out of my evening, but I decided to go to the lunch bar the following day. Hey, it’s free food. I’m something of a lapsed Christian, but the talks did challenge the deep recesses of my faith. What I still can’t decide if it was positively or negatively.

I remain unconvinced that the answer to the week’s question was solely God.

The two lunch time talks, on ‘Is love impossible without truth?’ and ‘Why can’t I just love however I want?’ were intriguing but unsettling. The latter talk in particular seemed, to me, to conclude with ‘because God knows best’; which is fine for the Christian, but unconvincing for the observer. It was also asserted a number of times that human nature is innately evil, and thus inherently in need of divine redemption. I had always thought more along the lines that we were fundamentally human, and strayed in both directions?

The final talk on Friday evening itself was brief, though the speaker made another challenging claim about the accuracy of the Bible, based on its self-citing claim that it has been ‘carefully investigated’ (Luke 1:3), and also oddly anticlimactic.

The love of the CU itself seems genuine; from the student on Monday who gave me her number so I could text her fears, to the guy who rescued me from utter embarrassment when I arrived on Friday to find I had no one to sit and eat my delicious free food with, their care and consideration was stellar. Despite this, I remain unconvinced that the answer to the week’s question was solely God. So though I leave four meals (and a Bible) better off, it’s a little disheartening to know that the debate on ‘What is Love?’ remains, for me, unresolved.

[divider]
Header Image Courtesy of flickr.com/ countrygirl0