---
title: Risky Love
tags: [Quote]
summary: Vladimir Lossky describes the risk involved in God's love.
---


> If the God of the philosophers and the learned is only a First
> Necessity who ordains the chain of cause and effect and
> corrects automatically every chance deviation which introduces
> itself, taking no more notice of human freedom than of a
> grinding noise in the machinery, the God of the Bible reveals
> Himself by His very wrath as He who undertook the risk of
> creating a universe whose perfection is continually jeopardized
> by the freedom of those in whom that perfection ought to reach
> its highest level. This divine risk, inherent in the decision
> to create beings in the image and likeness of God, is the
> summit of almighty power, or rather a surpassing of that summit
> in voluntarily undertaken powerlessness. For "the weakness of
> God is stronger than men" (I Cor. 1:25): it surpasses to an
> infinite degree all the attributes of majesty and dominion
> which the theologians enumerate in their treatises *De deo
> uno*. This category of divine risk, which is proper to a
> personal God freely creating personal beings endowed with
> freedom, is foreign to all abstract conceptions of the divine
> dominion---to the rationalist theology which thinks it exalts
> the omnipotence of the living God in attributing to him the
> perfections of a lifeless God who is *incapable* of being
> subject to risk. But he who takes no risks does not love: the
> God of the theology manuals can love only himself, and it is
> his own perfection which he loves even in his creatures. He
> does not love any *person*: for personal love is love for
> another than oneself. Now the jealous God of the Bible is not
> "the cruel God of the Jews," greedy of His own glory, but a God
> whose love for His elect is "strong as death," whose jealousy
> against everything which separates His creatures from Him is
> "cruel as the grave." God's dominion must be thought of in
> these terms of God's personal love which exacts from the
> freedom of His creatures a total conversion towards Him, a
> freely accomplished union. But a claim as absolute as this,
> addressed to the liberty of the person loved, would not be the
> claim of perfect love it it were not a desire for the
> realization in the beloved of absolute fulfillment, wished for
> by the beloved and accomplished with the cooperation of his own
> will."

---Vladimir Lossky, *The Image and Likeness of God*