God Is Love v. Love Is Love

God is the purest and most perfect concretion of love because God is love itself. And 1 John 4:8 tells us just that—“God is love.” Another way to put it is that God equals love. To encounter God is to encounter love. To know God is to know love. 

So why, then, does God, who is love itself, condemn the “love” of homosexuality? How can a loving God condemn a gay couple who share a loving, monogamous commitment? Or, to frame the question just a bit differently, is the Christian condemnation of homosexuality a contradiction of our understanding of the nature of God as revealed in Scripture?

If you have spent any time trying to make a case for the biblical position on homosexuality, then you will have surely come up against this objection. Matthew Vines, in his 2014 book God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, put it this way—“Because same-sex orientation contains the potential for self-giving covenantal love, it’s consistent with the image of God in us.”¹ Is it possible that the Christian opposition to homosexuality is actually an outdated phobia created by an obsession with certain kinds of sex acts? Could it be that homosexual relationships are far more than just sexual fetish and are actually expressions of sincere, mutually committed love—love that is just like the commitment made between a heterosexual couple? And if God is love, then who are we to object to this new expression of love? 

This argument is far more compelling to the modern ear than it should be. And the fact that evangelical Christians do not have enough of a biblical immune system to defend their minds against it is truly problematic. But we must retrace our cultural steps to understand how we got here. 

Where Did “Love Is Love” Come From?

In 1984, the British new wave band Culture Club released the song “Love is Love.” It was a part of the soundtrack to the movie Electric Dreams and was released as a single. Those of us who came of age in the ‘80s probably have no recollection of that particular song (it was only released in South America and had almost no audience in the US), but we do remember Culture Club and its lead singer, Boy George. In 1984, I was twelve years old, and, at that time, Boy George was the first man I knew of who dressed as a woman and openly flaunted his homosexual identity. At first, I think he just came out as bisexual and then slowly opened up that he was pretty much just interested in men. Twelve-year-old me was shocked and grossed out by his presence. 

As I said, the song itself was not particularly popular. But it is the first formulation of the tautological phrase love is love that I can find. And it comes from the lips of a man who was at the forefront of attempting to normalize homosexuality in American pop culture. That term I just used— tautological is important to understand. A tautology is a needless repetition. To define love as simply love is to engage in tautology. It is to define love by denying that there can be an outside standard to which it must answer. Love becomes its own standard. Love defines itself. And for Boy George, that most certainly was the goal—to deny that love must conform to the heterosexual norms of his contemporary moment and to insist that love could simply define itself. 

In 2003, the single “Love Is Love” was included on a rerelease of Culture Club’s 1984 album Waking up with the House on Fire and played widely in the US. Interestingly, 2003 is the year we started to see the phrase love is love deployed in various arguments advocating for the normalizing of homosexuality. From 2003 until 2008, the phrase emerged as a pithy summary of the case for gay rights. Love is its own legitimizer. Love does not need to refer to any authority other than itself. Love is love. 

In 2008, California voters considered a ballot proposition to ban homosexual marriage in the California state constitution. Prop 8, as it became popularly known, was actually victorious at the polls but was later struck down in the court system. And during this period, a strong pro-homosexual movement began, a movement whose rallying cry was “love is love.” To be clear, it was not a matter of simply introducing a particular mantra, but rather the systematic reframing of America’s understanding of how love ought to be defined. Love provided its own definition. 

We found, through research and analysis combined with sifting through years of our own experience and anecdotal evidence, that those people would not be convinced by a case that was mixed, which talked about love and commitment but also talked about health coverage or the Constitution. What they needed to hear was the empathy case, the values case, the “love is love” case. So we worked very hard to get our own team, our partners, the media, and politicians to shift to emphasizing that particular authentic message, the one this next swath of potential supporters needed to hear. That was the famous shift from benefits to love. And that shift did indeed build public support from about 53% in 2010 to 63% by 2015. (Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry and coordinator of the gay marriage legal strategy).²

The argument needed to refer simply to love itself; love disentangled from corroborating arguments, love that claimed your raw empathy and nothing else. 

The lesson learned in the fight for Prop 8 became the foundation for the argument for gay marriage from 2008 up until 2015, when the US Supreme Court delivered its Obergefell decision, legalizing same-sex marriage. Our nation went from 27% of Americans supporting gay marriage in 1996 to 63% by 2015. 

The Redefinition of Love

I want to argue that at the heart of this corruption of American sexual ethics has been a careful redefining of what exactly love is. Where Scripture once told us that if you want to understand what love is, you must look to the moral character of the triune God, now our culture has subtly snipped all of those threads that once led from love to God. Our current culture maintains that if you want to know what love is, you must now look into your own heart, and whatever you find there, that is love. Where the Bible told us “God is love,” our culture has replied, “No, actually, love is love.” 

If our definition of love is acquired simply by looking into our hearts, we are in deep trouble. Scripture teaches that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). Rather than looking into our hearts, if we want to know love, we must instead look to the law of God. The law of God describes the righteousness of God. It describes the moral perfection of God’s character. But isn’t it interesting that two commandments can summarise the law of God—first, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mat. 22:37, 39). Do you notice anything similar about these two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor. Why does God’s law all come down to love? Because, as we have already heard, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Paul tells us that “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10).

Love Is Not a Mirror

This is why the phrase love is love is not just a nonsensical tautology, but it is actually a pernicious idolatry. It takes love, which was meant to be a window opening out on a view of the character of God, and it redefines it as simply a mirror that points back to whatever lustful desires are in a person’s own heart. But the truth remains that God is love. He is love itself. And when we behold Him in the resurrection, we will encounter the purest form of love imaginable. As Paul tells us, “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). The greatest is love, because God is love. And when we stand before God in the resurrection, we will meet love itself. 

Let God Define Love

So, when we see a chasm between where our heart is and where God’s Word is, we are the ones that must move, not His Word. If God’s Word gives the command, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable” (Lev. 18:22) or that lesbianism is a violation of nature (Rom. 1:26-27) or that homosexuals and sodomites will not inherit the kingdom of heaven (1 Cor. 6:9-10), then what those commands describe is what love looks like. And wherever our hearts reject the clear teaching of God’s Word, our hearts are actually rejecting love. 

To detach love from the law of God, to snip all the threads leading from love up to the face of Jesus Christ, to allow for love to become a mirror of itself rather than a window opening up to the God above, is not merely a minor definitional error. It is a fundamental apostasy from which we must turn or repent. God is love.

Footnotes

1. Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian, Convergent Books, 2014. ↩︎
2. “Love Is Love and Other Stories: The Role of Narrative in Winning Freedom to Marry”, Forge Organizing. I highly recommend reading this interview that transparently lays out the play that was being run to normalize gay marriage. ↩︎