Beloved, let us love one another:
for love is of God;
and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God;
for God is love.
I cite this in the King James Version not out of concern over copyright violations but because that’s how I learned it, back in my childhood at Camp Cilca (yes, this is a Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod camp), where I learned a number of similar songs.
Here’s how it goes:
And here’s why I was thinking of this:
We in the West take this for granted: God is love. We think of this as the basic distillation not just of Christianity (“for God so loved the world . . .”) but of religion, in general. It’s so obvious that it leads so statements like “all religions are basically the same” — that is, because we think that at the core of religion is love: God loves us, and we should love God and each other.
But it’s not.
A while back I read a book called In the Land of Blue Burqas, by Kate McCord, in which the author shares her experiences working for a charity in Afghanistan for 5 years. The book was published by Moody and the author is an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t attempt to convert them to Christianity. She does, however, attempt to understand their world, and to get to know the women in the village she lives in, and learns the local language so that she can converse with them in their homes. She also attempts to explain her world in terms that make sense to them, and describes herself as “a follower of the Honorable Jesus.”
One of the things that most struck me about this book was her description of her efforts to share a message with the women she met — not that Jesus is Savior, but the simpler message of “God loves you.” I got it from the library again to refresh my memory on this point.
Here’s one instance, in which she’s working with a language tutor on a speech that she is preparing for a Woman’s Day event.
I prepared a talk. I wanted to encourage the women, to help them understand tha they are absolutely precious to God, to one another, and to the society at large. I wanted them to hear that God made them unique and beautiful. I wanted to tell them God loves them. . . .
[After reading the speech] my language helper loved it until I got to the last part. I said, “God loves you. God loves you because God is love. Each one of you is precious in the presence of God. God loves us all.”
My language helper immediately stopped and corrected me. “God is not love; God is kind.”
These are very different words. My language helper had assumed I’d picked the wrong word. I hadn’t. I knew exactly how to say, “God is kind.” It’s one of the most common expressions in Afghanistan. There’s a bombing in Kabul and at the end of the conversation, someone says, “God is kind.” A child dies, and after the tragedy has been discussed, someone says, “God is kind.” A man finds a job and is delighted, and someone says, “God is kind.” The only appropriate response is agreement. “Yes, God is kind.”
But “God is love”? No. That’s not a thing Afghans say. Later I read that Muslims can’t say that Allah loves because love implies need and Allah is so great that he has no needs. I agree that God has no needs, but He still loves. (p. 105 – 106)
Now, I’m not exactly sure what the Afghans mean by “God is kind” — it sounds a bit like the tendency on the part of some Christians to say, of pretty much anything that happens, “it was God’s will.”
In any event, elsewhere, she describes further the conception that the people she meets have of God — a stern taskmaster who demands obedience and punishes those who have failed, or for no particular reason at all. She relates that they believed that the fasting of a woman who is having her period doesn’t “count,” so she meets older women who are fasting in a “make-up” fashion, but fear they’ll never have made up the right number of days, because they don’t know how many days they “owe,” and will be punished accordingly when they die.
Is the religion of these people “true Islam”? There’s no reason to doubt it. But there is no room for “God is love” in their world.
Does Islam, in its core beliefs, teach that “God is love”? So far as I understand, no. An individual Muslim may come to believe this, perhaps influenced by the culture at large if living in the West, but it isn’t a particularly Islamic belief. After all, one of basic things one learns about Islam is that the name itself means “submission,” and the core of the religion is submitting to God.
Could a “reform Islam,” in contrast, teach that “God is love”? That I don’t know.
UPDATE: a couple points of clarification:
When I speak of “Islam’s core beliefs” I don’t mean whether “God is love” or “God is loving” can be found in the Quran. (And, by the way, I think there’s a difference between “merciful” and “loving.”) I mean what the essence of Islam is. Christianity has John 3:16, and its core belief is that God, in the person of Jesus, came to earth and allowed himself to be put to death in atonement of our sins, out of love for us. What would a “typical Muslim” identify as the “core belief” of Islam?
And, more broadly, when I speak of what Islam teaches, I’m not interested in proof texts from the Quran, or various websites expounding on Islamic doctrine. What is more important to me is how ordinary, everyday Muslims experience and understand their religion. But don’t worry — I’ve got several books from the library that I’m working my way through.
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