‘Agape’ as God’s ONLY action

One morning recently when I was praying about God’s agape, I realized that agape is God's action. At first that may not seem like much of a realization, but the more I prayed about the implications, the more I started thinking about all of the claims throughout the last 5,000 years about what else could be divine action.

Some of those claims actually resulted in formulating religions. I remembered reading about the huge variety of ideas about divine activity in ancient cultures throughout the planet. One of the most common ideas about God’s action and the impact on human individuals and groups is inspiration. None of the major claims to divine inspiration were written down by those originally inspired. So the results of the inspiration were passed along verbally, the oldest became cultural foundations for generations. That means: TRANSLATED into human cultural foundations. That’s how they were all passed down to people in the 21st Century -- through generations of translations.

But then I thought about all the trouble that has been caused by people wanting to be the only ones for whom God gave actions in special ways. Also I thought about all the people who suffered terrible disasters and then were made to suffer more by being told those disasters were the result of God’s actions. It has always seemed to me that something was wrong, cruel, and theologically misleading about such ideas about divine action. But then this thought came to me: what if …

... Agape is God’s ONLY action.

What could that mean? I was stunned by the thought. What would the implications then be for all those other theories about God’s action?

During the last two years of formulating this blog, my faith perspective has slowly but radically been transformed through my experiencing of agape. I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking back 2,000 years to try figuring out what St. Paul was working so hard to explain. At last I’m beginning to think that he was laying the groundwork for people hundreds of years later to begin understanding how agape could be God’s only action.

Paul did a lot of explaining that God’s agape not only opened us to divine Presence, but also the spiritual power of agape opened us up to awareness of profound relationship, and agape empowered and motivated humans to actions of respect and caring with those around us, and also to intense intimacy and affection. What an insight to show agape’s double power (both from divine to human and from divine to human to humans)!

Paul wrote about God giving agape to humans, first to help us find the spiritual reality of intimate, intense affection; and then to motivate us to give full acceptance and mutual respect to everyone around us. And Paul also explained how the power of God’s agape can transform a human life to perform such profound actions of respect and caring.

Paul’s efforts first started showing a little glimmer of results when, years after he wrote his letters, someone finally formulated the following words about God’s action (in 1 John 4:6-8) -- “This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Dear friends, let’s agapao each other, because agape is from God, and everyone who agapan is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t agapao does not know God, because God is agape.”    GOD IS AGAPE!

And people have been struggling ever since then to come to terms with what that means for the survival of the human race. I think it means everything! The very survival of the human race depends on coming to terms with agape as God’s only action.