A Tale of Two Deities

What I'm about to say is a recurring theme for me and my "work" (read: sporadic blogging).

When we say that God is love, we are being ambiguous.

God is an eternal being, and all of our words struggle and fail to attribute anything to this being.

When we say that God is love, we have options:

1. We could mean that God [an unknown/unrevealed being] is defined by love [a known quality].

or

2. We could mean that God [a known/revealed being] defines love [a quality we thought we knew until the revelation of God shattered our pre/misconceptions].

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In the first option, God is in the dock and we are affirming him when we name him a lover.

In the second option, the idea of love is in the dock and God disconfirms our concept when he names himself a lover.

You see, God isn't loving in the way that we idealize love. That God is love demands that we define the meaning of love by reference to him (and not to our experiences/opinions).

Is Jesus any help to us here? I think not. If anything, Jesus only confirms the alien nature of love.

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In my opinion, #1 is the dogmatism that dogs all those who constantly bark about dogmatism.

There is no balance to be found between human concepts of love and the name that God gives to himself. He didn't reveal himself as a lover so that we could control him through our ideology of what it must mean to be loving (according to us). No, he named himself a lover to save us from our caricatures.