The Theater of Divine Love

The only thing better than coming home from a brief out of town conference to the hugs and giggles of children and the embrace of my wife, is to also have a little brown cardboard package full of new books to leaf through! Miroslav Volf is a theologian I have long admired, and based on the cursory glance I have given it tonight, his collection of essays called Against the Tide promises  to be a wonderful read. Here’s an arresting paragraph from the introduction:

[E]verything I write stems from one simple conviction: “God is love.” “Love” describes the very being of the eternal and self-subsisting God; and “love” describes all of God’s dealings with the temporal and contingent world, from its creation, through redemption, to consummation. The Christian Bible makes clear, in manifold ways, that whatever else the world is, it is a theater of divine love—Love whose face shines on creatures; Love whose anger sometimes burns against their all-too-prevalent nastiness; Love who, divine anger notwithstanding, bears human sin and enmity so as to return us back to our original good.