God’s Saving Love: Personal or Impersonal?

Greg Forster makes a great point about the Calvinist view of God’s love in contrast to other views of God’s love.  Either God’s love is a personal, intimate love that embraces some sinners, as the Calvinist says, or it is an impersonal, abstract love that embraces none.  Here’s how Forster says it:

Every tradition besides Calvinism claims that God’s saving love is aimed not at particular individuals but at humanity in the mass. [They say] God may well love individuals, personally.  But that aspect of his love is not what saves people.  Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again because he loved you personally – loving you, the individual whom he knows completely and intimately.  He did it because he loves people in general, in the abstract.

In short, Jesus died on the cross and rose again because he ‘loves humanity.’

It is important to clearly grasp the difference between saying God loves all people – loves each of them personally, as individuals – and saying ‘God loves humanity’ in the abstract.  It is one thing to say God loves you personally, and also loves me personally, and also loves this person, and that person…and so on until we have included every individual in the human race from Adam to the last person born at the end of history.  It is a very different thing to say God ‘loves’ the theoretical concept of ‘humanity’ – that he loves the abstraction, the mass as mass, impersonally.

…All theological traditions besides Calvinism claim the saving ‘love’ for ‘humanity’ that led Jesus up to the cross and down to the grave, and then back up out of it, is a love that does not embrace any specific individuals at all.  If it did, that would put us right back where we started with our problem.  If the love that led Jesus to the cross is a love for any individual people, it is either a love for all individual people or only for some.  We don’t want it to be only for some, because that thought is horrible.  But if it’s for all people then either they’re all saved (which we know is not true) or God’s work fails in its purpose (which we also know is not true).  So God’s saving love is either a personal love that embraces some and not others, or it is not a personal love at all; it embraces no individuals.  It is entirely abstract.

Greg Forster, The Joy of Calvinism, p. 52-3.

Shane Lems