God isn't just loving. God IS LOVE itself.

The scandal of divine love is reflected in a mirror we would rather not look into.

Most of us spend our lives walking a quiet, exhausting tightrope of transactional affection, searching for a love that finally feels like enough to fill the hollow ache we carry in secret. We have been trained in the pop-culture obsession with epic romances, romantic comedies, or even romance novels, to confuse love with a sophisticated form of self-service—a frantic hunt for the person who will finally meet our felt needs and plug the hole in our own souls.

Love can do that. But when the point of seeking love is directed at our own needs, our own feelings, our own fears and insecurities, we invariably "bend" love inward toward self and away from the one for whom love is intended: for the other, for the beloved.

When we encounter the radical love of God, it doesn't just surprise us; it offends us. It scandalizes our sensibilities because it suggests that the love we were made for is not a mechanism for bolstering self-esteem, for stoking an intoxicating dopamine surge in infatuation, but a terrifying and beautiful call to live for the other. To live sacrificially, to love the other selflessly, even when there is nothing left to take.

We see this reflected in the cultural "hooks" of our age—the romantic comedies where the protagonist finally "finds themselves" by finding a partner who makes them feel seen, or the romance novels where the hero exists primarily to heal the heroine’s specific insecurities. We call it "finding our other half," but the language reveals the deficit: we are looking for a missing piece to plug a hole in our own souls. So far as we diagnose something lacking within ourselves, we are not wrong. We are incomplete. However, the irony of our incompleteness is that we cannot "heal" that part of ourselves so long as we're focused on the hole itself.

If you have an empty cup, it won't do you much good to dwell on the emptiness of the glass. There are many things you can pour into an empty cup. But what is the cup intended for, what is it meant to hold? When we're fixated on the hole, on the empty cup, we often desperately fill it with whatever merely takes up the empty space within. It's like having a cup and, obsessed with its emptiness, we fill it with bleach instead of water. At first, it might appear full, it might feel like the cup now fulfills it's purpose. After all, a cup is made to be full, isn't it? But appearances can be deceiving. Because the cup's true telos, it's true purpose, isn't merely to be filled, but to satisfy our thirst. We do not keep cups in our cupboards just so we can fill them up, and leave them sitting on the counter. We keep cups because the cup's true purpose is that we might drink the life-giving water that's necessary for life.

Let's move beyond the metaphor and look at his this measures up to the way we often think about love.

We often treat our hearts like a cup that we're eager to fill without considering the true meaning of the cup, the true purpose of our hearts. As a result, due to our short-sighted fixation on the emptiness within, the other person we "fall in love with" is often not a person to be loved, but a commodity to be consumed. We "fall in love" with how another person’s attention soothes our anxiety or how their status elevates our own. It is a love rooted in scarcity—a desperate reaching out to fill an internal vacuum.

When that person stops satisfying those felt needs, we say we have "fallen out of love," as if we have simply unplugged a device that no longer charges our battery. This is why we hear the tragic stories of a husband leaving his wife after she grows older or suffers a debilitating condition that requires more from him than she can "repay." If we think of "love" as consumers, as if the purpose is merely about filling our emptiness, we end up with no love at all, but a heart filled only with the love of self. For the consumer, the contract is broken because the product is "damaged."

But we have also seen the alternative—the kind of love that shocks the world with its endurance. We see it in the spouse who remains at the bedside of a partner with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, or the one who provides years of grueling care after a catastrophic injury. This is a mature love that grows in selflessness precisely when the "benefits" of the relationship seem to vanish. When we experience love like that, we are closer to the heart of God that we realize. We are participating in something divine.

This kind of commitment reflects what St. John Paul II called the "spousal meaning of the body"—the body's capacity to express that love in which the human person becomes a complete gift to the other:

"...this [spousal] meaning points to a particular power to express the love in which man becomes a gift; what corresponds to this meaning, on the other hand, is a power and deep availability for the 'affirmation of the person,' that is, literally, the power to live the fact that the other--the woman for the man and the man for the woman--is through the body someone willed by the Creator 'for his own sake'... that is, someone unique and unrepeatable, someone chosen by eternal Love" (Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, 15:4).

This love participates in the Divine Image because it is a love that does not seek to be filled; it seeks to overflow. It is a riotous, self-diffusing abundance that existed before the world began. To understand this "Offensive Grace," we must look into the heart of the Trinity, where love is never a means to an end, but the very Beginning itself.

 

The Circle of Love: How The Trinity Shapes Our Hearts

Have you ever noticed how a conversation changes when a third person joins? Two friends catching up over coffee have a certain rhythm—back and forth, give and take, like a tennis match. But when a third arrives, something shifts. The conversation opens up, becomes richer, more dynamic. Provided, of course, the third person is welcomed into the conversation (and not treated like the colloquial "third wheel"). Suddenly there are multiple perspectives bouncing off each other, creating something neither of the original two could have produced alone. The dialogue becomes less predictable, more creative, somehow more alive.

This simple observation from everyday life hints at something profound about the very nature of God and what it means to be human. When Scripture declares "God is love" (1 John 4:8), it's not merely saying God has loving feelings or performs loving actions. It's revealing something about who God fundamentally is—love itself, love as pure being, love as the essential reality from which all other loves flow.

 

The Grammar of Divine Love

To say "God is love" is to make an identity statement as radical as it is mysterious. We're not dealing with an attribute here, as if love were something God possesses alongside wisdom, power, and holiness. Rather, love constitutes God's very essence. In philosophical terms, God is love qua love—love as love, love in its purest and most absolute form.

But here's where it gets interesting: love, by its very nature, requires relationship. Love cannot exist in isolation. It reaches out, gives itself, receives, and communes. A solitary being might have the capacity for love, but love only becomes real in the act of loving another. This is why the doctrine of the Trinity isn't some abstract theological puzzle but the very heartbeat of Christian faith. The one God exists eternally as three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in an eternal dance of perfect love.

Consider how Jesus speaks of this relationship in John's Gospel. In one of his final prayers before the crucifixion, he reveals the stunning truth: "Father... you loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). Before anything was created, before time began, there was love—not as potential but as eternal actuality within the Godhead itself. The Father loving the Son, the Son loving the Father, the Spirit as the very love between them, all in perfect unity.

 

Beyond the Binary

Here's where the Trinity revolutionizes our understanding of love itself. Human relationships often default to binary patterns—me and you, us and them, insider and outsider. Even in the most beautiful marriages or friendships, there's a natural tendency toward exclusivity. Two people face each other, and the world fades away. This has its place, certainly, but it's not the highest form of love.

Trinitarian love operates differently. It's inherently open, generous, and creative. Think about it: in the Trinity, every relationship between two persons includes a third. When the Father loves the Son, this love includes the Spirit. When the Spirit glorifies the Son, this glorification delights the Father. There's no competition, no jealousy, no scarcity of affection. Each person of the Trinity finds joy not only in loving but in witnessing and participating in the love between the others.

Augustine captured this beautifully when he wrote about the Trinity through the relation of love: "Behold, then, there are three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and love." (Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII.10.14). But even this imagery, helpful as it is, only begins to capture the dynamic reality. For in God, each person is simultaneously lover, beloved, and the very medium of love.

This trinitarian structure of love explains why God creates at all. Divine love, being perfectly generous and non-possessive, naturally overflows. Creation isn't born from any need in God—what could perfect love lack?—but from love's inherent desire to share itself, to include others in its joy.

This is rooted in the ancient principle bonum diffusivum sui—goodness is diffusive of itself. While its roots reach back to the Neoplatonists, it was St. Thomas Aquinas who formalized this as a cornerstone of Christian thought. Aquinas argued that "it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others" (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. q. 19. a. 2). For Aquinas, the "good" is not a static possession but an active power that moves toward others. Since God is not merely good but Goodness itself, His love must overflow. Creation becomes the arena where divine love extends its embrace beyond the inner life of the Trinity, inviting us into the divine dance.

 

The Image Bearers

Now we arrive at the crucial question: What does all this mean for us as human beings made in God's image? If God's very essence is trinitarian love, then being made in the divine image means we're designed for this same kind of love—not as solitary individuals but as persons-in-relationship.

Genesis gives us the first hint when God declares, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). Notice the plural—"us" and "our." The God who is communion creates humans for communion. Then comes the striking observation: "It is not good that the man should be alone" (Genesis 2:18). In a creation repeatedly declared "good," isolation is the first thing labeled "not good." Why? Because a solitary human cannot fully image the God who is relationship, who is love itself.

But here's the revolutionary insight: being made for relationship doesn't mean we're simply designed for one-on-one connections, as beautiful as these may be. We're made for trinitarian patterns of love—love that includes, expands, and creates community. This is why the arrival of a child transforms a marriage, why friendship groups have a different dynamic than paired friendships, why the Church is described as a body with many members rather than a collection of individual believers.

Tragically, it also reveals why couples who fail to embrace the trinitarian dimension of love, but remain consumed with how the other merely satisfies the longings of the self, often find that the arrival of a child strains the relationship, It's why jealousy sometimes takes hold when one partner or the other finds a "friend" with whom one shares more intimacy than with one's spouse. While men need friends of their own, and women too, these friendships cannot replace the intimacy of spousal love. It is also why infidelity in a marriage is so devastating. Even though many misappropriate the gift of spousal love and objectify their spouse (whether objectifying their bodies for sexual pleasure, or objectifying the emotional salve the relationship offers to satisfy an internal insecurity) infidelity still stings. We recognize, intuitively, on account of the way God designed us in His image, that love is meant to be more than what satisfies carnal desire or compensates for our insecurities.

Much could be said, of course, about other perversions of the spousal relationship, such as the perversion of it through polyamory or "open" relationships. Such a digression would be beyond the scope of this chapter or book, but suffice it to say that these trends are not really "trends" at all, but can be found throughout history. The inclusion of a third person (or multiple others) within the spousal union does not ultimately deepen love, but reflects the poverty of self-seeking love. When we view love as a "solution" to our own felt needs, lusts, or insecurities, we recognize something is missing and seek to supplement it. But bringing another person into the dynamic, who likewise seeks the same kind of self-referenced love, leads to strain, to competition, in the commoditization of others.

But marriage still requires a third. This is experienced, commonly, through childbearing. However, what of those marriages where childbearing is impossible on account of infertility? In such instances, the third can be sought as the marriage welcomes Divine Love Himself into the relationship, where they permit the love of God to flow through and define the marriage in a way that elevates their love--more than ecstatically, but substantially--in the love of our Triune Creator.

But what of headship? Questions of authority are wrought in a culture that tends toward anti-authoritarianism, that prizes "egalitarianism" in a way that falsely presupposes that to be "equal" is to be "identical." It is true, of course, that domineering authority is just as foreign to Trinitarian Love as is anti-authoritarianism. It is the tendency reflected in the example of broken authority structures in human society that often leads some to reject any idea of "authority" or headship at all.

Once again, these problems dissolve in the light of the Divine Image. It is only in understanding the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (this is what Jesus means when he says the Father is "greater than I" in John 14:28). The distinction is not one of substantial superiority, but one subsumed in a kind of headship that is always consumed by love for the other.

This communal structure is not exclusive of authority or a kind of egalitarianism that erases distinctions. In our relationship with God, in our participation in Divine Love, Jesus is still the authority—the King, the Lord, and the Head—but he is an authority who loves and who serves. This is how he directs Peter to embody his key-holding authority as the royal steward of the new kingdom. Notice how he begins his final exhortations to Peter after the resurrection. He asks him three times—a cadence of Trinitarian love—"Do you love me?" (John 21:15–17). And what follows each declaration? Acts of service: to feed the sheep and love the lambs. This is where discussions and debates about "authority" in Christianity can miss their mark; they must be expressions of divine authority, Trinitarian authority, love qua love. It is the authority of the one who kneels to wash feet, as Jesus did in the upper room (John 13). The love Jesus commands isn't generic benevolence. It's specifically the love he has shown—trinitarian love that serves, includes, and creates unity while respecting distinction.

 

The Transformation of Human Love

Understanding ourselves as made in the image of trinitarian love transforms every relationship we have. In marriage, it means the couple's love shouldn't curve in on itself but should be creative and generous. The medieval theologians spoke of marriage as an exemplum Trinitatis—an icon of the Trinity—where the love between spouses generates new life.

Richard of St. Victor, a 12th-century theologian, provided the foundational example of this by arguing that for love to be truly perfect, it must be shared with a third. He wrote: "Shared love is properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons in harmony and in community, and when the affection of the two persons is fused into one by the flame of love for a third" (Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, III.19).

In this light, the child is not an interruption to the couple's love, but the very manifestation of its Trinitarian character—the "third" who allows their love to move beyond a closed binary and become a communion. For those who cannot have children, whether on account of infertility, or some other medical condition, or even if a couple is advanced in age beyond childbearing years--Richard also has other advice, to incorporate some other shared love into the marriage. This can be a common cause, for instance, a love of the poor or the homeless, for whom one directs all the love that one would offer a child to others.

For those called to celibacy, either by choice, vow, or necessity, we might learn much from the example of St. Paul. Paul’s life was not a lonely binary between himself and God; it was a Trinitarian explosion of spiritual fatherhood. He wrote to the Corinthians, "For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (1 Corinthians 4:15). His love for God was fused with his love for the "third"—the community—creating a spiritual family that mirrored the divine life. Celibacy, in this light, is not the absence of relationship, but the expansion of it.

In friendship, trinitarian love means delighting when our friends form other friendships, celebrating rather than feeling threatened when the circle expands. C.S. Lewis captured this beautifully in his reflections on how a group of friends is enriched by each member:

"In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets" (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Chapter 4).

This isn't a deficiency in binary friendship but a reflection of love's trinitarian structure. Our private relationships are actually enriched when they are open to the light that others bring.

In church life, this understanding revolutionizes how we think about community. The Church is a communion of persons participating in the very life of the Trinity. This is why Paul can speak of the Church as the Body of Christ. Through baptism, we're incorporated into Christ and thus drawn into the eternal circulation of love between Father, Son, and Spirit.

 

The Wounds That Heal

But here's where the gospel becomes especially profound. We live in a world where love is distorted, where the image of God in us is cracked and clouded. We've all experienced love that excludes rather than includes, that grasps rather than gives.

The healing of these wounds doesn't come through trying harder to love correctly. It comes through being drawn into the love that God is. This is what salvation means at its deepest level—incorporation into the divine life itself. As Peter boldly declares, we become "participants of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).

The Eastern Christians speak of this as theosis or deification—sharing in God's life and love. Gregory of Nazianzus captured the loving impetus of the Incarnation when he wrote: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved" (Gregory of Nazianzus, To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius).

 

Living the Trinity

How do we move from understanding to transformation? First, examine your relationships through a trinitarian lens. Where has your love become possessive rather than generous? In your closest friendships, how can you open your circle to bless others? This doesn't mean having no boundaries, but rather ensuring that your closest relationships energize your capacity to love others.

Second, practice "third-person consciousness." Remember that your interaction with one person can bless others beyond the two of you. A conversation with a colleague ripples out to affect the whole workplace atmosphere. Recognizing that love naturally overflows its immediate boundaries is a step toward living trinitarianly.

Third, actively resist the culture of scarcity. Love isn't a limited resource; it is more like a spring that flows fuller the more it's drawn upon. When you see others receiving love or blessing, practice celebrating rather than comparing.

Fourth, seek out genuinely communal experiences. Share meals where conversation flows in multiple directions. Participate in efforts where success requires everyone's contribution. These experiences train us in trinitarian patterns of being.

Finally, immerse yourself in the life of prayer. Not prayer as a transaction with a distant deity, but prayer as participation in the conversation always happening within the Trinity. The Spirit within us cries "Abba, Father" (Romans 8:15), drawing us into the Son's own relationship with the Father.

Irenaeus spoke of the Son and Spirit as the "two hands" of the Father, reaching out to embrace creation (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV.20.1). This image captures something essential: the God who is love doesn't remain closed in self-contemplation but reaches out, includes, and transforms.

We are caught up in this divine movement. Made in the image of trinitarian love, we're designed not for isolation but for the kind of love that creates community, that delights in the other, and that finds its perfection in generous self-gift. The God who is love has made us in love's image. Not for a love that calculates and measures, but for the love that God is—generous, creative, and communal. In discovering this truth about God, we discover the deepest truth about ourselves. And in living this truth, we find not only our purpose but our joy.

Yet, be forewarned. In a world of competitive consumerism--where love itself has become a commodity--this kind of Divine love is often scandalous. To love others in this way has a way of exposing the shallowness and self-centeredness of the kind of love others seek. The refusal to define oneself by one's passions, one desires, one's need or "right" to be satisfied in one way or another, may put you at odds with many movements in culture that are rooted in concepts of "identity" that are based on one's desire to be loved however one wishes, to seek whatever experience or expression of love "feels right" and fits their carnal urges, their personal ideas of "attraction," and the like. To love so radically as God demands may, in this world, cause offense. But so be it. For we do not truly love when we co-sign someone's carnal or inwardly-focused definitions of love any more than we satisfy someone who is thirsty by giving them a glass of bleach. Yet, our posture in love cannot become warped in hatred, or write people off who are seeking love in all the wrong places. We must persist in the kind of sacrificial love that motivated God, who so loved the world, that He gave his only son (John 3:16). After all, as Jesus continues to speak in John's Gospel after that most famous verse, "God did not send his son in order to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him" (v. 17).

And loving that way might even cause offense to those in the Church who've divorced the pursuit of truth from love. However, we must never forget, Jesus also declares he is the way, he is the truth, and he is the life. When Jesus says this, he concludes, "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). This is not a statement meant to divide, nor is it one meant solely to condemn those who seek God in other religions--but to reveal the true expression of God's love for us that comes through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus insisted was "necessary" to send as he Ascended body and soul into heaven (see John 14:15-31).

So, how can your love today be more trinitarian—more open, more generous, more creative of community? For in learning to love as God loves, we participate in the very life of God, joining the eternal dance of love that holds all things in being and draws all things toward their perfection in Christ, "so that God may be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

 

P.S. The ABOVE is a chapter from my forthcoming book, OFFENSIVE GRACE: THE SCANDAL OF DIVINE LOVE