Abstract
Frederick Bauerschmidt offers an accessible meditation in The Love That Is God. It is a deeper invitation into the conviction that “God is love is the radical claim of Christianity” (p. 1). Bauerschmidt makes a fivefold argument for the heart of the Christian faith: God is love; the love that is God is crucified; we are called to friendship with the risen Jesus; we cannot love God if we do not love each other; and we live out our love from the community created by the Spirit. (p. xvi)
Faith in the God, who is love, is something upon which we stake our lives. It is, thus, important to specify what love actually is. For God to be love is for God to have a “kindness of such infinite scope that it draws creatures out of nothingness into being” (p. 13). Referencing St. Paul, the God who is love, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (Romans 4:17)” (p. 14). God’s delight is what makes possible our existence. Meditating on the reality of injustice and oppression, Bauerschmidt suggests that God’s love does not simply imply that God is nice, suggesting God permits us to suffer the paltriness of “our inability to align our loving with the love that is God” (p. 15). God not only allows us to experience the consequences of our actions but also takes action against the wicked and unjust. To those who oppress and commit injustice, God’s love appears “as a fire consuming them like chaff” (p. 17). To the defenseless, God’s love is divine vindication and liberation. It is not hard to think about Mary’s Magnificat of praise extolling the subversive love of God that breaks the chains of the oppressed and humbles those with power to oppress. While we may narrow our hearts from the way of this love, hope in God is believing that no heart is so far turned from God or God’s power to heal.
God’s love is crucified love. Asking why this love of God has to take to the form of the cross, Bauerschmidt reframes the question around God’s will for creation and how Jesus’s proclamation of the “kingdom of God” leads to a cross. “The death of Jesus flows from his proclamation of God’s kingdom. . . . The kingdom he makes present is the subversive kingdom of love” undermining all forms of human life built on power and domination (p. 33). The radical quality of Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom he is ushering is what precisely results in the condition of opposition by religious and political leaders leading to his eventual death. Bauerschmidt argues, “God desires that divine love be incarnate in Jesus, even knowing that this will be too much love for a grasping, frustrated, frightened world to bear. God desires that love be incarnate, even if that love must be crucified” (p. 35).
We are called into friendship with the risen Jesus. Bauerschmidt writes a poignant chapter on friendship, considering friendship as a core moral quality. He suggests Aristotle’s account of friendship constitutes the good life. While affinities exist between Aristotle’s account of friendship and Christianity, the author points to the distinction of Jesus spending time with the disreputable kind of people of society without concern for whether they will rub off on him (p. 50). Furthermore, in John’s Gospel, John says, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23). Bauerschmidt argues that inasmuch as it is normative for Aristotle for friends to live together, Jesus’s promise that he and the Father will make a home with them is “a promise of divine friendship” (p. 51). A Christian vision of friendship emphasizes a different footing from Aristotle’s, in which “God befriends us even when our failings should make us God’s enemies” (p. 51). Bauerschmidt emphasizes the gifts of baptism and Eucharist as means by which Jesus continues to nurture and feed us in friendship. In the Eucharist, we remember Jesus’s love for us. It is where we are formed in love and learn what makes for a loving community. In this sacred feast, we become friends with God and our neighbors.
Bauerschmidt argues we cannot love God if we do not love each other. Referencing Jesus’s commandment in John, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12), he suggests the imperative for Christians to love each other as Jesus has loved us. To know the love of God is to learn the challenge to love others not like us. God’s crucified love invites us to love neighbor, “the least among us,” and enemy. Building upon the work of Catherine of Siena, he submits there is a triangulation of love: “from God to us, from us to our neighbor, and from our neighbor back to God” (p. 74). God’s love ends the war of humanity against God and “is to end the war of everyone against everyone” (p. 78). This message is always ever a timely one of hope and spur to faith.
Finally, we live out our lives from the community created by the Spirit. Given our complicated social history, division, injustice, and struggle, the author argues for the unique role of the church as a witness to the Spirit’s work of bringing together unlikely friends in faith. The traditions that make up the church, practices, and prayers done in community, bring together a friendship and peace with one another we might not otherwise have chosen. The Spirit brings together through ritual and worship, a community of friends that is an “embodied foretaste of the kingdom” that “makes possible a friendship that dissolves boundaries or nation, tribe and language” (p. 106).
I appreciate the succinct manner with which Bauerschmidt narrates Christian faith. It is a book accessible to anyone curious about the Christian story, exploring it for the first time or deepening it anew. The sermon he preached inspiring this book is worth the cost of the book alone. He offers a beautiful and inspiring perspective of the Christian faith.