Renaming God: If God Is Love, Then Is Love God?

The Bible says God is love. But when everyone claims to act in love, how do we know when “love” is actually God?

When Good Feels Like God

Wayne Dyer once wrote, “Feeling good is feeling God—our good feelings align us with Spirit.” Contrary to many religious notions, God is not the enemy of joy or a deity satisfied only when we wear a sour face. If “every good and perfect gift comes from above,” then we can often recognize God’s presence when we’re experiencing something good. This is why Dyer suggested that when we’re feeling good, we’re feeling God.

But this idea can also mislead us.

Not everything that feels good is God. Revenge, control, winning, being admired—all these can feel good. So can greed, ego, having the last word, addiction, and resentment. So, we have to be careful with quick equations like “God = Good, therefore, Good = God.” And we have to be careful with similar equations about God being love.

Renaming God

That is part of the reason I have been exploring this whole idea of “renaming God.” Not because the old names are useless, but because sometimes a new name—or an old name recovered—helps us see what we had missed. I have written about God as the Way, the Tao, Wellspring, Source, Light, Life, Host, Peace, the Center, the Hold, and the God of My Understanding. Each name opens a different window into who God is. None of them contains God completely. But each can help us let go of a cramped or fearful image of God and move toward something more alive, spacious, and true.

The same is true when we speak of God as Love.

God is Love

1 John 4:8 makes one of the boldest claims in all of Scripture: “God is love.” This does not mean God is merely loving, or that God sometimes acts lovingly. It doesn’t even mean that God has love as one divine quality among many. It simply says that God is love.

God = Love is a dangerous equation if we don’t handle it carefully. Because if God is love, then, in some sense, Love-with-a-capital-L can become one of the truest names for God. If God = Love, then Love reveals the essence of who God is. When we encounter real Love, we are touching the divine.

But the problem is that not everything we call love is Love.

When “Love” is Not Love

People use the word love for all kinds of things. We apply the word to pizza, old movies, our children, spouse, country, favorite team, and the feeling of being needed. The same word stretches so far—from casual preference to holy devotion—that it loses its meaning.

Worse than meaninglessness, love is one of the most abused words in human language.

An insecure partner may say love when they really mean control. A parent may call possession love. A nation may speak of love when it really means violence. Religious leaders may try to silence victims in the name of love. In many contexts, people have experienced shame, manipulation, and fear at the hands of people who claimed they were acting in love. Or even “with the love of Christ.”

So, no—not everything we call love is God.

Renaming God as Love

But maybe this is exactly why renaming God as Love matters. Because, if God is Love, then Love is not however we choose to define it. Love is not just a feeling, or intensity, or chemistry, or nostalgia. Love is not fear of loss or abandonment. It is not the warm glow we get when we receive what we wanted most. Love must be something far deeper.

The question is not simply, “Do I feel loving?” or “Do I feel loved?” The question is, “Does this love reflect the character of God?” Or, for Christians, we might ask, “Does this love look like Jesus?”

What Love Is—And Isn’t

In 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a, Paul gives us the classic definition of love. We hear it recited at weddings so often we can zone out when the passage is read. At the risk of boring you, I’ll share it here:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

This passage becomes not only a litmus test for what love is, but also for what love isn’t.

If it is cruel, it is not Love.

If it humiliates, it is not Love.

If it controls, it is not Love.

If it keeps score forever, it is not Love.

If it demands that another person become smaller so I can feel larger, it is not Love.

If it needs lies in order to survive, it is not Love.

Whatever else it may be—desire, attachment, fear, power, ego, dependency, or loyalty—it is not the Love who is God. Nor is it the God who is Love.

This matters because many of us learned to confuse God with things like divine rejection, abandonment, punishment, humiliation, or threat. Our churches told us God loved us, but too often the love they showed us was mixed with terror.

Perfect Love

Terror should have no place in a Christian understanding of God. 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.”

This doesn’t mean that perfect love never confronts or corrects us. Real love tells the truth, burning away illusion and exposing what is false, selfish, or cruel in us. But love doesn’t destroy beloved children of God in order to make a point. Instead, divine Love heals, frees, restores, and makes room for truth without weaponizing shame against people who trusted it.

The Shape of Love

So, maybe we can say it this way: God is love. Therefore, true Love is of God.

But we must never mistake false love for God. If we do, then love becomes another idol, made not of silver or gold but of our own needs, wounds, fears, desires, and attachments. Cast in this mold, the idol of false love becomes narcissistic and looks like us.

But real Love looks different. It is patient and kind. It tells the truth. It doesn’t dominate, humiliate, or cling in fear. True love doesn’t demand worship or turn another person into a possession. It doesn’t paint cruelty as righteousness. And it never uses Scripture as a weapon so it can call the wound holy.

Love is not sentimentality or permission to do anything we want. It is not the avoidance of hard truth, but the deepest form of grace and peace.

This is why Jesus said the greatest of all commandments are to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. Do this, he said, and you have fulfilled the law and the prophets. This doesn’t mean that love is easier than law, or antinomian (lawless) “freedom in Christ.” Instead, it means that by living in divine Love, we naturally fulfill the spiritual principle the law is based on. Love is what the law was always striving for.

So, by renaming God as Love, we are not making God smaller. On the contrary—we are making our understanding of love larger, truer, and harder to fake.

Love Looks Like Jesus

For Christians, this Love isn’t an abstract ideal. It’s a person. Love looks like Jesus. Jesus touched lepers. He ate with sinners, welcomed children, crossed boundaries, and confronted religious hypocrisy. He washed feet. Jesus forgave enemies and refused to answer violence with violence. He gave himself away without becoming cruel, cynical, or afraid. He said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

This kind of love isn’t passive. Modeled after Jesus, it rejects abuse and doesn’t let everyone else trample it. Jesus laid down his life, but he did not surrender his soul to the powers that killed him. Jesus’s love was not weakness, but the embodiment of courage without hatred. It was truth without cruelty, and power without domination. That is the kind of Love that can be trusted as a name for God.

This understanding of embodied Love gives us a way to test our images of God. If we imagine a God who is petty, cruel, controlling, abusive, or constantly offended, then we may not be imagining the God who is Love. We may be imagining our fear, or transferring an image of our parents onto the face of God. We might be remembering an old pastor or imagining the voice of shame inside our own heads.

But the God revealed in Jesus looks like Love: patient, kind, truth-telling, fear-casting, foot-washing, enemy-forgiving, boundary-crossing, life-giving Love. Love that doesn’t insist on its own way yet somehow remains the Way Itself.

Whenever Real Love Is Present

Renaming God as Love doesn’t make God vague or sappy. It is not to say that whatever feels loving must be divine. It is to let the Love who is God expose every false version of love we have inherited, practiced, feared, or worshiped. Because if God is Love, then Love is not weak.

Love is ultimate reality. It is the ground of all being. It is the divine fire at the center of the universe, the voice calling us out of fear, and the hand reaching toward the wounded. Love is the table where enemies gather to become family. It is the cross, the empty tomb, and the ascension of Christ to the throne of our hearts.

Christians can feel free to rename God as Love—the Bible already did it. And wherever real Love is present—healing, freeing, forgiving, feeding, sheltering, truth-telling, fear-casting Love—we are closer to God than we may have known.