Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement Review

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Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement ReviewThomas Oord provides here an extensive review of the scientific research and theory germane to the topic of human love and a rationale for continued research on factors contributing to altruism. His theology places love at the center as necessary and essential to God's nature. God cannot not love. In contrast to those theologians who hold that God only expresses agape, Oord sees agape, philia and eros all contained in God's full-orbed love. Hence all three types of love are good and worthy of expression by creatures in God's image.
Oord's conclusions depend heavily on his definition of agape as an intentional response for good in the presence of ill-being. This means for Oord that divine agape must be expressed from eternity in relation to something outside the Trinity rather than between the persons of the Trinity as held in traditional theology. As Oord defines agape, the persons of the Trinity can only express philia within their relationship because there can be no ill-being within the divine unity. This definition allows Oord to characterize God's essence from eternity as necessarily creative and in eternal relationship with an external, albeit dependent, creation. Oord insists this relationship is panentheistic rather than pantheistic because creation, with limited freedom, is outside of and dependent upon God and no individual element is itself eternal. Although God is the most self-determining of beings, God does not entirely determine creation because total control is not compatible with total love. This is in contrast to views of kenosis which suggest that God voluntarily self-limits but nevertheless controlled the universe's initial conditions. In Oord's theology, God is the most powerful of beings, but where love and power conflict, love trumps omnipotence because God's essence is first and foremost love. Rather than creating ex nihilo, he therefore holds that God is eternally creating from the relative chaos of prior universes.
Oord also provides a succinct overview of relevant scientific topics. He delves into research on kinship and reciprocal altruism, as well as possible scenarios for group selection of social behaviors. The importance of attachment theory and early relationships for development of caring behavior is thoughtfully discussed. We become truly human in relationship with others, leading Oord to discussion of character formation and virtue ethics. One addition that might have been useful here is the recent research in rodents showing that good maternal care can actually override genetic disposition through epigenetic mechanisms. Oord might have also noted the contrast between individualistic Western societies and some other more communal societies in which individuals are socialized to a greater extent to work for the common good. Oord uses the concept of anthropic fine-tuning to argue that kenosis is reflected in the characteristics of the universe itself. God's non-coercive activity may be communicated through quantum indeterminacy simultaneously allowing free will and noninterventionist divine action. God woos, but does not coerce.
I found the chapter in which Oord lays out his theory of essential kenosis the most interesting. While agreeing partially with Open theology, Oord finds most versions inadequate to deal with the problem of evil. Oord views the acceptance of creatio ex nihilo as allowing divine coercion. While rejecting an eternal duality of good and evil, Oord accepts Griffin's process view that the loving nature of God by necessity eternally relates to a creation that has, on all levels from subatomic to human, a measure of freedom to develop its own potentialities. The eternal necessity of love demands an eternal creation free to accept or reject love in ongoing relationship.
As one raised all too familiar with intimations of Jonathan Edward's angry God, I found Oord's emphasis on One who cannot not love deeply touching at a personal level. Still, at the end of the book I was left wondering whether the rejection of creatio ex nihilo really provides an adequate answer for theodicy. Theoretical physics continues to struggle with both the existence and nature of time suggesting that part of the problem seen from human perspective may be that we, localized and finite, have difficulty thinking of God as omnipresent in both time and space and yet able to interact with our local particularities.
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