It might seem strange to describe the doctrine of the love of God as ‘difficult’.  But it is, and D.A. Carson explains why.

1. Because if people today believe in God at all, then they are almost certain to believe that he is a God of love, and yet the very concept of love is likely to be shaped by the surrounding culture rather than by Scripture. For example, in Jodie Foster’s Contact the unexplained intelligence is ‘suffused with love, wisely provident, gently awesome’. But the worldview is monistic, naturalistic, pluralistic. The Christian doctrine of the love of God is not helped, but made difficult, by it.

2. Because many other, complementary, truths about God are widely disbelieved. The biblical view of the love of God cannot survive long if it is abstracted from his sovereignty, holiness, wrath, providence, personhood, and so on. When so abstracted, it becomes sanitised, sentimentalised. When set alongside God’s justice, God’s love becomes wonderful news; without it, it become an ‘of course’. In the mid-80s Andrew Greeley found that 3/4 of his respondents preferred to think of God as ‘friend’ rather than ‘king’. In her survey of Protestant preaching in the USA, Marsha Witten points out that ‘many of the sermons depict a God whose behaviour is regular, patterned, and predictable; he is portrayed in terms of the consistency of his behaviour, of the conformity of his actions to the single rule of “love”.’

3. Developing patterns of postmodern epistemology, which leads people to believe that the only remaining heresy is to believe that there is such a thing as heresy, reinforce sentimental, syncretistic and pluralistic views of the love of God. Ths makes the articulation of a biblical doctrine of God and his love most difficult.

4. Even within Christian confessionalism, the doctrine of the love of God poses difficulties. Two world wars; genocide in Russia, China, Europe, Africa; mass starvation; Hitler and Pol Pot; massive corruption at home and abroad; – all make the doctrine of the love of God less than easy.

5. The doctrine of the love of God is sometimes portrayed in Christian circles as easier and more obvious than it really is.

D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God