"The King of Love My Shepherd Is"

Henry Baker

“God is love,” says Saint John, and if you were an ancient Stoic reading that, you’d furrow your brows and wonder whether the Christians had gone mad. For the divine must be beyond such a problematic thing as love, with all its passion and confusion. Now, Christians also believe that God does not suffer, but the Scriptures are really consistent when they say that God loves: and to say that God is love is to shake the very earth beneath your feet. That’s because of a mistake that human beings make all the time. It’s to say that if you love something or someone, it’s because you want to make up something lacking in yourself. But the better way to understand what the Scriptures mean by love is to think about greatness of heart, a love that affirms, “How good it is that you exist!” And when God is the one who says so, he gives you the very gift of existence itself.

You may have heard the claim that there are two deities in Scripture, the one in the Old Testament, who was all anger an…