On Distorting the Love of God — D.A. Carson

“If people believe in god at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this “god,” however he, she, or it may be understood, is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in “the love of God” is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about “the love of God” they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that this is the case… to put this another way, in present-day Western culture many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, the personhood of God, to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.” (http://www.dts.edu/media/play/on-distorting-the-love-of-god-d-a-carson/.)