Editorial September 12, 1953 Issue

DEFINING GOD AS LOVE

Helen Wood Bauman

John defined God as Love (I John 4:8), and Christian Science teaches that we cannot look higher than Love to find the Principle of being. Finding the one God, the creative Principle, to be Love, we acknowledge the perfection of its idea, or expression—man and the universe; for Love can create nothing less than perfection. The nature of Love makes man guileless, healthy, free; combines its individual ideas in harmonious relationship; endows them with purity and wisdom; motivates all with good; governs all through merciful, changeless law.

Divine Love acts spontaneously because it has no reservations or partialities to restrict it, no inhibitions or restraints to frustrate it, no material estimates to limit it. And man, reflecting Love, reflects the spontaneity of Love's nature. This is the logic of true theology, or Christian Science, and it may be worked out in the lives of those willing to acknowledge it. Mary Baker Eddy says in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (pp. 1,2), "As Christian Scientists you seek to define God to your own consciousness by feeling and applying the nature and practical possibilities of divine Love: to gain the absolute and supreme certainty that Christianity is now what Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated—health, holiness, immortality."

To define God truly is to express Love in healing power. We measure our love for our friends by our ability to reflect God's love for them. And we embody divine power in the degree that we prove the existence of that love and its availability to all. Christ Jesus was constantly proving God's love for His children. He taught men to trust God's love, to have faith in it, to expect its tender provisions. On the night before his crucifixion, as he prayed for the revelation of the oneness, or unity, of the Father and His sons, the Master lingered tenderly on the theme that he had brought mankind the understanding of the glorious name, or nature, of God. "I have declared unto them thy name," he prayed, "and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:26). The Master knew that God's love, which he had displayed in the repleteness of his own experience, was universal, that all could share in it, and that mankind's only need was to define God by living Love.

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