Someone wrote to me this reasonable question: If God has no emotions, then, how can God be Love or God is Love?
My answer was that the imprecision of the English language causes this confusion:
- First, to distinguish between Emotions and Feelings.
- Second, to describe God’s Emotions
- Third, what precisely, is Love? A feeling, emotion, or state of being?
EMOTIONS VS. FEELINGS
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An emotion is a change in mental state necessary to perform some action. This transition requires a brain and a will. “Anger” is an emotion defined as “the power to achieve the difficult good” and might be triggered by external stimulus such as an injustice, or a rational act of the mind followed by the will such as reading about mistreatment of animals.
A feeling is a biochemical response of a body, triggered by a memory or external stimulus. Every feeling has a set of chemicals or neural activities associated with it. Feelings do not require an intellect or a will but are part of any animal’s learning and protection mechanisms. There are many feelings that have twin emotions, such as Anger (Emotion) vs. Revenge/Rage/Hate (feelings) and Compassion (Emotion) vs. Sadness/Depression/Despair (feelings).
There might be a tendency to say that feelings are weak, wimpy, and passive while Emotions are active and strong. This isn’t correct, since the public school shooters are motivated by Feelings of hate and rage, but are plenty active. The emotion of Love is sometimes non-active, knowing that patience will achieve the best results in a particular case. The dividing line between Emotion and Feeling isn’t action, it’s intellect, will, and conscience. God has Emotions, but does not have Feelings. Animals have Feelings but don’t have Emotions. Humans have both, hence the confusion.
GOD’S EMOTIONS
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The Old Testament is full of stories about God being angry. Some toss this off as hyperbolic writing my nomadic tribesmen who have no other explanation for God’s powerful acts. But Anger is not necessarily negative, especially when used to enforce Justice. And the God of the Old Testament regularly smote the wicked, due to his perfect justice.
In the New Testament, God takes the form of Jesus Christ, whom it describes as weeping with compassion at the lack of faith of Jerusalem. In this case, Jesus doesn’t have a feeling, he has an emotion of compassion, which motivates him to act to save the souls in Jerusalem. The emotion is triggered by the sight of Jerusalem from an adjacent hill, followed by the memory of past faithlessness, shaped by his knowledge of what had to be done and set in motion by His will.
WHAT IS GOD’S LOVE?
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Humans tend to think using language. Limit a man’s language and you limit his thinking. English has one word, Love, where Greek has three: Philos, Agape, and Eros. Americans would have far less confusion in relationships (and probably less teen pregnancies) if English had correlary words to Philos/Agape/Eros. We would also gain a more precise meaning of St. John’s “God is Love”. Writing in Greek, what did St. John mean by that?
To start, what does the word Love mean in this context? Clearly “Agape”, divine love, knows no limits and makes no requirements. It is also an active love, not a passive Feeling. It is an Emotion or an action, but never a feeling. The new Testament describes a would-be acolyte who lacked the faith to sell his possessions and follow Christ. Jesus looked at him “and loved him”. This is clearly distinct from the Agape love that God has had for us all since the beginning of time. This is emotional love, stimulated by events, a mental transition created by the will, needed to act. My guess is that the unstated action was salvation of the man’s soul by Jesus, knowing that the acolyte’s faith was insufficient to make the leap without aid.
We now have sorted it all out, risen above the confusion created by the limits of our language. The question answers itself after understanding these points:
- Feelings — biochemical, no will or mind needed, animalistic, needed for survival. Humans have them, God doesn’t
- example: Driver in car sees roadkill, feels sadness for dead animal, stomach ties in knots, drives on
- example: schoolboy gets teased at softball game, takes bat, whacks teammate
- example: bear cub has dog run up to it barking, gets scared, runs up tree, heart beats fast
- Emotions — action of the mind and will to change mental state, needed for action, guided by conscience. God and man have them, animals don’t
- example: Superior Court judge faced with convicted murderer, has angry emotion, sentences him to 25 years
- example: soldier in foxhole sees live grenade come in, has emotion of courage, tosses grenade out at great risk
- example: nurse in hospital sees patient unconscious, has compassion, resuscitates patient.
- Love — can be a Feeling (bonding of puppy/mother, Eros), an Emotion (“God so loved the world”), or a state of being. Even if emotion, there are different types (Philos, agape). Eros is a feeling, not an emotion.
- “God is Love” — God has both the inherent quality of Agape, and the emotions of Agape which spur him to act in a merciful way to everyone, everywhere.
WHAT DOES “IS” MEAN IN “GOD IS LOVE”?
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St. John borrows from Plato, who said that for every object (e.g. “chair”) there was a perfect prototype that existed somewhere in Heaven. Every chair on earth was a necessarily imperfect instance of the perfect concept of “chair”. To understand this, imagine a guy in New Jersey who makes the greatest pizza anyone from Newark has tasted. The locals might call him “Mr. Pizza”. In other words, his physical, actual pizzas are as close as anyone can image to perfection. The separation between perfection and his necessarily imperfect real-world pizzas is small. In contrast, an old, poorly-made, frozen pizza might be far from perfection, better known as cardboard pizzas.
Similarly, we have a concept of love that is pure, selfless, infinite, and powerful. On Earth we experience Love to greater or lesser degrees but human-generated love is far from this standard and we all know it; Cardboard pizza. St. John, by using the word “is”, tells us that there is no separation between the perfect type of love and the love God has. They are so close that there is no separation and God might well be called “Mr. Love”, in first-century Greek parlance.