The Problem of Love

Do we live in a world that gives evidence of the existence of a loving God?

Critics usually point to the problem of evil as evidence that the existence of a good and loving God is highly improbable. I don’t want to minimize the force of this question because I think that a lot of Christians have not fully considered it and, to some extent, have ignored it altogether.

But lately I’ve been wondering about how the problem of love fits into this question. Evil is rightly considered a ‘problem’ by any thinking person who observes the many ways in which it thwarts our expectations and mocks our aspirations. But we rarely think about love (or pleasure or beauty) as a ‘problem’ worthy of sustained reflection.

Of course love does not present itself as an immediate problem because we don’t experience it as something negative. But I think that the fact that we all experience and long for it is a remarkable feature of human experience, one that cries out for explanation because it could surely have been otherwise.

So how much love exists in our world? How could you possibly measure such a thing? How could you quantify the love of every parent (or grandparent) for every child, every wife for every husband, every sister for every brother, of every friend, every ’significant other’, every important relationship for which you would use the word ‘love’ as an adjective? If you added up all that love how much would you get? It boggles the mind to think about it.

Christians have usually seen human love as the overflow of the love of God. One of my favourite New Testament passages is 1 John 4 where the connection between our love and God’s is made most explicit. “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Everyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (4:7, . If God is love, if love defines God, then the experience of human love makes perfect sense because it is a reflection of this kind of a God.

My point is simply that the if pervasive nature of evil calls into question the existence of a God of love, surely that pervasive nature of love ought to demand an explanation as well.