The term has bothered me for a long time: “unconditional love.” To me, the term says that someone, usually God, is not able to not love. That means that God’s love is not free. But the most beautiful thing about God’s love is that it IS free. God does not have to love us, but God still does love us, freely.
Theologians a few centuries ago got into an argument about
the issue. They said that God is all-knowing. That means that God knows in
advance what we human beings will do. But the theologians also said that human
beings are free. That means that no one can know what a human being will do in
the next moment, not even God. In other words, either God is not all-knowing,
or we are not really free.
The theologians argued about this for a century and then
gave up.
Some psychologists say that nothing we do is really free,
that we are under so many different kinds of pressure that the experience of
doing something freely is an illusion.
Two things go against that view. First, the experience of
doing some things freely. And second, many human plans have crashed and burned
because the planners assumed that the people they wanted to control could be
controlled by rewards and punishments.
A psychologist named B.F. Skinner was popular in the 1960’s.
He argued that all behavior is stimulus-response. He said that we can program
society so that people will always do the right thing. Criminologists in
Illinois tried to build a juvenile corrections institution (called “Valley View”)
on that theory. The young offenders would be rewarded for correct behavior, and
punished for bad behavior, and would become model citizens. We never hear about
Valley View today. Surely if the model had been effective, corrections institutions
all over the country would have adopted it. Controlling prisoners with treats
must have made them feel like dogs.
But we still punish people in prisons, because we think that
will make prisoners do what we want them to do. The strategy does not go well.
Influence is the ability to talk people into doing what you
want them to do, without threatening them with punishment if they don’t do it. Political
power is the ability to punish people who do not do what you want them to do. Political
power loses its power when people accept the punishment rather than obey the
orders. That is the basis for choosing nonviolent resistance instead of violent revolution.
God is not a politician. God loves us freely, and created us
so that we can love God freely in return. That is the basis of our dignity as
human beings. The smallest child can do that.
We can say that God will freely never stop loving us, but we
should not say that God’s love is unconditional.
