The Love That Is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith

by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Rowan Williams (Foreword)

 “God is love is  the  radical claim of Christianity,” writes Frederick Bauerschmidt at the beginning of this little meditation on the essentials of Christian faith. In a rich yet accessible style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, Bauerschmidt breathes life back into that claim, drawing from Scripture, great Christian and non-Christian writers of the past, and his own lived experience to show just how countercultural and subversive Christianity is actually meant to be. Eschewing the abstract and dogmatic in favor of the relational and inviting, he offers something for everyone, from lifelong churchgoers and students of religion to the growing population of “nones” among younger generations who are increasingly seeking spiritual fulfillment outside of institutional Christianity.  With further reading suggestions (both scriptural and nonscriptural) at the end of each chapter,  The Love That Is God  is the perfect starting point of a spiritual journey into deeper relationship with God.

Genres: Theology, Spirituality, Christian, Faith, Nonfiction, Religion, Christianity

147 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2020

Reviews

[Matt Moser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps one of the best introductions to Christianity that I’ve ever read. One of the endorsements for the book says “It made me want to become a Christian all over again.” We might think this sentiment is mere marketing, an over indulgent praise to sell more copies. But it isn’t. I had the same reaction as I read. This is a masterpiece and a future classic.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really good apologetic for what we believe as Christians. Though written from a Catholic perspective, it generally presents Christianity in such a way that Protestant and Orthodox traditions would agree with.

I would highly recommend it as an apologetics book for those who appreciate an academic, but relatable, style.

[Travis Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s much to appreciate about this book. The language is beautiful and often times Bauerschmidt’s insights are fresh and moving. It is certainly the sort of book that someone who has been a Christian for a long time will find rewarding. He seamlessly weaves together scripture and the writings of the saints giving the reader of the traditions deep reflection on the theme of God’s love.

With all of that being said. I found his treatment of God’s crucified love to be lackluster, and probably the weakest portion of the book. Bauerschmidt seems to be attempting to reject a guilt inducing reading of substitutionary atonement. That’s fair enough, there are plenty of bad articulations of PSA, and they deserve to be critiqued. More than that, there is much to be commended in other theories of atonement such as Christus Victor. But in his critique of PSA the author also misses the way in which the self substitution of God actually enhances our vision of God’s love. Ultimately, I don’t think this chapter really offers any illumination into how Christ was crucified for us rather than simply crucified by us.

With that being said, “The Love That Is God” is a helpful little meditation on divine love. But likely not one I would give to a new believer or someone exploring the faith. It seems more helpful as a resource to bring fresh insight for those who have walked with Jesus at length, and grown numb to the radical claim that God is love.

[Nevaeh Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was surprisingly good

[Shawn Enright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of outstanding simplicity (in the best sense of the word) and clarity. Neither cheap or shallow, nor frustratingly erudite or pretentious. I’d entrust it to both my Mom and my pastor. A throughly Christian book, in other words.

[Roy Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not uncommon for someone to ask a pastor for a book that will describe the Christian faith in a compelling manner. The answer for such a request varies and many pastors stumble for the right one. The Love That is God grew out of such a request. The author offered a sermon that laid out the Christian faith in five beautifully written movements focused on John’s assertion that God is love. In response, a parishioner asked to share that sermon with one considering Christianity. (It’s included as the epilogue.) Bauerschmidt acknowledges that being a Christian is difficult - always - because the heart of the faith proclaims what is astonishing: God is Love and this Love is crucified so that all humanity may experience the fullness of life. It’s a shocking proclamation, yet no one in recent times has written a more compelling case for its truth than the author. “This book,” he says, “attempts to make the case that the difficulties are worth it. ... Because the fundamental affirmations of Christianity can be a source of love and joy and meaning, even amid the difficulty.” Bauerschmidt has an eloquence that will remind some of C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” or Rowan Williams’ “Being Christian.”

He is a good listener, refraining from judgment on those who question the audacious claims of Christianity. He admits the failures and flaws of its practitioners and of the church. Nevertheless, what shines forth brightly is his vision of the Love that is God. At the conclusion of the book, I was so encouraged that I wanted it to continue. I realized that the sum of the Christian faith from creation to mission to eschatology, including the communion of the Saints had been beautifully laid before me. Stanley Hauerwas said this book is bound to be a classic. I agree. When someone asks me for an introduction to the Christian faith, without hesitation I will give them this book.

[Evan Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not quite the approachable introduction to the faith that it is billed to be, but the central argument is a beautiful one. I especially appreciated the chapter on church: "The church, rather than being an association of like-minded people, is more likely to be a group of people you would never choose to be friends with if they were not also friends of Jesus." Dead-on. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, this is what has brought me back into the church and kept me there.

[Noah Reimer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mere Christianity by Lewis or Delighting in the Trinity by Reeves would make for a much better intro. 2/5

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is surprisingly dense for how short it is—it has theology and philosophy and lots of references to old church fathers and mothers—but it’s worth the time to read through slowly. I’d like to read it again sometime in a physical copy rather than an ebook. It’s full of great insights. Simple, but not really, and worth remembering or seeing afresh.

“God is love.
The love that is God is crucified love.
We are called to friendship with the risen Jesus.
We cannot love God if we do not love each other.
We live our love out from the community created by the Spirit.
That is it. That is what Christianity is all about.”

[Adam Lomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book about Christianity as a list of rules, nor is it about orthodoxy for sake of orthodoxy. Instead, Bauerschmidt shows that the Christian faith is ultimately about a living relationship with God who is love - God who calls us into friendship. It’s clear, thoughtful, and accessible. It would be fun to read with high school students!

I’m grateful to a colleague and friend who recommended and let me borrow it.

[Don Verte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful short book that is expansive and not narrow and helped me remember what’s great about following God

[Zak Boston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thesis:
God is Love
The love that is God is crucified love
We are called to friendship with the risen Jesus
We cannot love God if we do not love each other
We live our love out from the community created by the Spirit

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. This book addresses important issues and has great potential but falls flat because the author loves himself more than he fears the Lord.

To spend a moment framing the book, more time may have been spent on graphic design for the book cover than on its contents. The introduction is absurdly pretentious and absurdly praising, *indeed* it slobbers with praise. The inclusion of a “homiletic epilogue” is pretty self-congratulatory for just another ok sermon. Should every pastor turn their weekly notes into a short book?? Speaking of, he describes himself as with a “rich yet accessible style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton”. The boldness!! After reading the book, I must conclude Bauerschmidt could only write this line out of deluded self-love or as shameless grifter. Not a good start.

“Love” is central to God and needs to be examined, explained, and clarified in its Christian meaning. Clarity is particularly needed in light of how the phrase “God is love” has been liberally abused in recent decades. Bauerschmidt is anything but clear. For a serious effort on Love, read CS Lewis’s “The Four Loves”, or “The trinity and the kingdom” by Jurgen Moltmann, among surely many others. Bauerschmidt is unclear and unserious. As a positive, he identifies that kindness is not simply niceness, how love must be unselfish, and that the trinity is a perfect symbol of God’s love. But he also compares his love for his wife to his love of pizza, gives an elementary analysis of Love via the Knight’s Tale, fails to properly differentiate various loves and how love is an action, not a feeling, and fails to deliver on HOW the trinity is a perfect symbol of God’s love. From the knight’s tale to Augustine to 1 Corinthians to personal opinions, Bauerschmidt throws everything and the kitchen sink at love in ch 1 in no particular order and the result naturally follows… through the rest of the book, more important and good discussion appears alongside muddled thinking.

In chapter 2, the author argues it is not proper for us to feel guilty about our sins, that Jesus is not simply a scapegoat we have condemned in our fallenness. Jesus was killed because of his goodness and because of the gospel he brought about the kingdom of heaven. These are great canonical points. But the author goes too far in absolution, saying that God is not angry about our sin, and questions the justice of God’s consequences for sin.

In chapter 3, his discussion of friendship is profound and useful. He gives great insights from Aristotle on arete, Theresa of Lisieux on prayer, the New Testament on the eucharist, and Augustine on our dependence on grace.

In chapter 4, Bauerschmidt’s explanation of how God redeems the world from a Hobbesian war of all against all is a good reminder, but hardly special. Similarly, he does well distinguishing sin and sinner, hating the first, loving the second. However, the author starts the first sentence in full liberal ideology on love, citing scriptures about loving each other, where love for God has been assumed, and with no regard to who “each other” is. Liberals eschew hierarchy and order and will overlook the truth of these as a matter of course. The FIRST commandment is to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. The SECOND is like it, to love our neighbors as ourselves. A classic fallacy is to put the second command first. This fallacy is common and understandable because loving our neighbors is viscerally convicting, it is clear and practical. Loving an unpleasant person is still much easier than loving God. Loving God is abstract and subjective and easily overlooked. And Bauerschmidt overlooks it. Worse he recommends a passive life, loving indiscriminately, and without reverence for what God has blessed. “To take up the cross is to renounce self-protection.” He argues we cannot protect our friends, or anything else in our lives with anything but the cross, faith, hope, and love. Maybe he never read the book of Joshua, but he clearly doesn’t understand hierarchies.

Whatever Bauerschmidt’s reason for failure, he simply fails to love God properly and misplaces that love in his “enemies”. He doesn't see how this misplacement nourishes his enemies and diminishes God. He doesn't understand that this is precisely the vehicle that secularized the west. He doesn’t see how God’s love flows through each person by their relationship with Him, back to Himself, to their spouse, to their children, to the family, their friends, their community, their church, and finally to their neighbors. The author doesn’t seem to understand how sinful it is to love your neighbor more than your wife. He doesn’t seem to understand that loving your neighbor is more about the extent of your domain of love, than about the neighbor. He doesn’t understand that God cares deeply about what God has blessed and the author doesn’t understand the sin of abandoning God’s blessings for your neighbors’ whims. The author, like so many liberals, has made the neighbor into an idol, and thinks himself a genius for his idolatry.

In chapter 5, Bauerschmidt completes his descent when his poor writing style and disorganization of thought climax. In this chapter he makes another idol out of “progressivism” and is totally unreflective on his distorted thinking. He labors to make the point that Jesus came to fulfill the law, not the letter of the law, but to transcend the letter by the spirit of the law. Sadly, he never quite gets there. Instead, he contradicts himself with the firm belief that new is good and old is bad. He says, “Old patterns of thinking die hard”, “[they are] blind to the new thing the spirit is doing”, “Alongside the persistence of former patterns of thinking, there is also the usual supply of garden variety human selfishness”. New fads also die hard, and Bauerschmidt is heavily invested in the woke fad on race, gender, sexuality, etc. If only he could understand HOW Jesus is making all things new with the Spirit! Worse still, he spends two pages lionizing the “faith” of Dorothy Day, a feminist, anarchist, communist, pacifist, spinster, who murdered her own baby and “was Catholic”.

I will think twice before reading any contemporary works from a university professor again.

[Andrew Kaiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strong recommendation from my friend and former classmate Bill Haley of Coracle (https://inthecoracle.org). He is currently on sabbatical and was deeply moved by this book. It would make an incredible book club or study group read.

This brief reflection on our God Who is Love presents a host of challenging, profound, practical applications of this truth for Christians everywhere. The implications for the church are particularly important. This is no anodyne fluff piece, but rather a surprising read that will transform/restore your understanding of our identity—individually and especially corporately—as the people of God. I had to stop myself from highlighting the entire fifth chapter. I’m still reeling…

[Christina Bohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful introduction to the Christian faith tradition. Simple ideas in each chapter, yet written with such conviction and clarity. I was impressed with how well the author interwove theology with Church tradition (I see you, female theologians!) and Scripture. Lovely read worth revisiting and referencing.

[Katherine Pershey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite theology. Beautiful writing. So simple, so profound.

I’m as Protestant as they come, and yet there was really only one sentence in this book that felt explicitly/exclusively Roman Catholic; otherwise it was small-c catholic.

Heartily recommend. Worth it for the epilogue alone.

[Sam Blades · Rating 4 out of 5]

“That God is love is the radical claim of Christianity.”

[Ethan Jarrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this book hoping for a broader, more ecumenical invitation to faith — something accessible to those who are struggling, skeptical, or simply outside the bounds of traditional Christianity. While the title and description seemed to promise that, what I found was something far more rooted in Catholic theology than I expected, with frequent references to the Eucharist and other traditions I’m not especially familiar with.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing — I appreciate reading books from different religious traditions — but this one felt more geared toward devout believers than seekers or skeptics. The book’s summary suggests that it has “something for everyone,” including “nones” and spiritual wanderers. As someone who is currently on the fence about religion, I didn’t really find that to be the case.

That said, there were a few memorable quotes and insights I’ll take with me, and I don’t think it’s a bad book. It just wasn’t the right fit for where I’m at right now in my spiritual journey.

[Erin Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot of theology presented in this book that I really loved and enjoyed and found healing, such as his discussion on the crucifixion of Jesus and the nature of god as love. At the same time, some of the language in the second half of the book felt a little bit stale and redundant of religious lingo that has left Christian love feeling phony and based on an agenda rather authentic care for the people around us. While I don’t think this is the author’s intention, his descriptions of friendship and community fall into the trap of cliches that leave much open the interpretation, allowing space for the love he’s describing to be understood as one motivated by obligation and moralism rather than genuine care.
As a whole I think the intention behind this book is incredible and needed and much of the theology presented is a welcomed message to Christian’s today but I didn’t love the way he discussed certain topics.

[Kenny]

With elegance and clarity, Bauerschmidt provides a introduction and invitation to the Christian way of life, suitable and oriented to the times in which we live. Highly recommended!

Some of my favorite quotes:

“Love is a work of patience, and to practice patience is to suffer the flow of time, recognizing our incapacity to rush redemption. The trick is to work ceaselessly, putting love into action in the most concrete ways possible, while simultaneously leaving the outcome of our labor entirely in the hands of God.” (90)

“The world needs a people who are so closely bound together by the God who is love that they can afford to differ from and with each other and yet still meet at the table of the Eucharist, the feast of their friendship in Christ.” (105)

“The church, rather than being an association of like-minded people, is more likely to be a group of people you would never choose to be friends with if they were not also friends of Jesus.” (103)

[Brian Hohmeier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bauerschmidt's is a lovely apology of Christian faith of the sort we need more written. His framework is loose but sensible, if not systematic, and he bogs himself down about once each chapter in developing digressions on Chaucer, Aristotle and the like, the returns for which are I think diminished—all of which is to say I hesitate, then, to call this an "introduction," and that leaves me wondering whom it's "for," that is, whom I would recommend this quite lovely book to. Taking his own cues for this, I'll understand it to be a *re*-introduction and re-invitation to the Christian faith for those in one stage or another of either a personal or a cultural deconstruction—yet inasmuch as this might be so, while I have almost nothing detracting to say of this book, I'd probably just as soon offer such a person Benner's _Surrender to Love_ as a (re)starting point.

[Cassy Coyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

something notable bauerschmidt does is mention women in his dialogue to assert his christian beliefs and ideas. that’s something you don’t tend to see when reading a christian novel based around its teachings. most times, it is only men that are mentioned. that said, I’m appreciative of his inclusion of women figures in his works.

numerous of the points were valid, some more extreme and hard to agree with. I also felt that a lot of times the author was losing track of the main idea of what was being conveyed in a chapter. nonetheless, there were valuable takeaways I noticed, even though I am not a devout christian follower when the author’s intended audience was evidently directed towards christians.

[Scott Rushing · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a remarkable book. What do Christians affirm when we proclaim that God is Love? Bauerschmidt answers that question in 5 parts:

1. To say that God is Love was a revolutionary idea in antiquity, as the Greek and Roman gods were not particularly loving towards humans.
2. God’s love is a crucified love.
3. We are called to friendship with the risen Jesus.
4. We cannot love God if we do not love each other.
5. We live out this live in community, specifically in the Church.

This is a short essay - my copy is around 125 pages. I think the Church would benefit from living out these words.

[Tom Albinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simple, honest, and profound reflection on the love of God

If you are a seeker of God (disillusioned or not); If you are a seeker of love (disillusioned or not); If you are a seeker of hope (disillusioned or not); this book was written for you. It humbly and honestly considers the revelation of God to us in Jesus. It is not an apologetic or argument for the faith. It is not an abstract, intellectual, and soul numbing dissertation. It is a heartfelt reflection on the crucified love of God. It did my soul good. I’ll surely read it again.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eloquent and literary reflection on key elements of the Christian faith, primarily focused on love. Here is an example, "To love our enemies is to renounce the idea that we have it in our power to make history turn out right, to end all suffering, to banish all evil. To love our enemies is, in the end, to disarm ourselves of any weapons except the cross and the Spirit's gifts of faith, hope, and love."

[Carina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I found it a compelling and readable introduction to Christianity through the lens of love. Excellent for the modern reader who has lost any sense for why faith is reasonable. I disagreed with some of the ways he frames certain terms, such as “tradition,” and felt that it was a little watered down and hippy-dippy. Nevertheless, his strong focus on “God is love” serves as a unifying thesis and foundational bedrock for exploring the Christian faith.

[Vic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grateful for the emphasis on our God who is Love. Grateful for Jesus who is God who runs out for me, his wayward son. Grateful for insight into friendships as a primary moral choice, and by extension who I date and marry. Grateful for a depiction of the messy church of wildfire spiritual movement and formation in a boiling pot of diversity. Grateful for the Gospel that is the heart of reality.

[Perry Siddons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to Christianity for somebody who may have been in the church and understands the lingo. Or maybe good for somebody who is in need of a reorientation on Christianity, on what it’s really all about. Good stuff on friendship with God, and the people who become our unexpected brothers and sisters through our friendship with God.

[Joel Wentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely my favorite "introduction" to Christian belief and doctrine. It's beautiful, simple, written to directly engage with our cultural moment in a thoughtful way, rooted deeply in both scripture and ancient Christian thought, and so compelling. I love it, and will probably be reading it again and again.

[Mike Schraml · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back to Basics: God is Love

This is a book that is beneficial to regular church goers as well as people looking for the true meaning and essence of Christianity. The book flows well and is written with clarity. The most important takeaway is that we cannot love God without loving our neighbor.

[Adam Tichenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book 5 stars, but Bauersmidt’s chapter on crucified love fell short; it lacked a clear theology of atonement (I think he was going for Christus Victor or perhaps Moral Influence? while shunning Penal Substitution), focusing almost entirely on what led to our Lord’s death (an aspect of the incarnation worthy of exposition to be sure!).