If I was asked to name my top ten difficult doctrines before reading this book, I’m not sure that the love of God would have featured in the list. Right from the start, Carson acknowledges that many readers will wonder why this subject should be deemed ‘difficult’. The book is less than 100 pages long, and is based on a series of four lectures that Carson has given on the subject in various places. As lectures, they expect the reader to be comfortable with theological terminology, and also assume a broadly Reformed readership.

Carson starts by expressing concern that God is being “sentimentalized” in the evangelical church and we are abandoning the multi-faceted Biblical vision of his love and more generally his character. He lists five distinct ways in which the love of God is spoken about in the Bible, and these are key to the rest of the discussion throughout the book. If we make one of them primary to the neglect of the others, we end up with a warped view of God. He warns against the some cliches about God’s love which are at best only half-truths.

Chapter two deals with the statement “God is love”. He briefly repeats some of his arguments from “Exegetical Fallacies” here, claiming that some Christians have proved more than is legitimate about the meaning of agape as opposed to other Greek words for love. He argues that it is the love relationship between the Father and Son that is the standard for all other expressions of love.

The third chapter tries to deal with the issue of the affective nature of God’s love (denied by some versions of impassibility). Here he builds on a foundation of the sovereignty and transendance of God, along with the doctrine of election to affirm “compatibilism”. This is the view that though God is sovereign, we can and must affirm human responsibility rather than adopting fatalism. In this section he also briefly outlines his rejection of the “openness of God”. Carson clearly does not want to actually deny “impassibility” (it is after all in the Westminster Confession), but he wants it “rightly constrained”. God loves with emotion because he chooses to do so, a choice grounded in his own loving character. This is a love that differs from human romantic love – it is a love that is set upon the unlovely, and it is this type of love that Christians are called to emulate.

The fourth and final chapter deals with God’s love and wrath. Another cliche “God hates the sin but loves the sinner” is tried and found wanting here. If God’s love is Biblical, so is his wrath. If his love is emotive, so is his wrath. But he asserts that “there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time”. God’s love and wrath are of course seen most explicitly at the cross. Carson deals briefly with some issues surrounding the atonement here – not seeing Jesus as placating an angry Father, but both Father and Son being intimately involved in propitiation. He also defends limited atonement, though prefers to call it “definite atonement”.

I found this book very helpful in summarising the Biblical material concerning the love of God, and bringing it into balance with other related Biblical themes. The love of God is amazing, and worthy of meditating upon far more often than we do. But lets not exchange it for a sentimental and shallow substitute that ends up denying the Biblical testimony to the character of God.