Two Way Love?

My book One Way Love was recently reviewed critically by David Robertson. I’ve never met David but he seems like a great guy. I deeply appreciated his warm and gracious tone even where he disagreed with (misunderstood?) me and I look forward to meeting him someday. We are brothers in Christ who clearly both love the gospel.

Liberate winsomely responded to David’s review. You can read a portion of their response below:

The standard question/critique of the phrase One Way Love goes like this: The phrase “one way love” implies that God’s love is unrequited, but that’s not right, is it? God’s love for us engenders a reciprocal love from us: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). This means that while it’s right to stress the priority of God’s love, we should avoid the implication about the exclusivity of God’s love. Rather than talking about “one way love” we should talk about “two way love”—that is, God’s prior love for us that produces our subsequent love for him.

This concern was raised in a recent review of One Way Love by David Robertson. There are a couple of things about this review that suggest a “talking past one another,” but the most notable is this: “‘Grace doesn’t make demands. It just gives.’ [That's a quote from One Way Love.] … This does not really make sense to me. Is not ‘take up your cross and follow me’ a demand? Go sell all that you have and give to the poor, is that not a demand?”

Well, yes. Of course those are demands. But why is Robertson so sure they are grace? God’s word, said the reformers, is law and gospel. Jesus, as the Word made flesh, speaks and embodies both. It is therefore right to say Jesus makes demands, but this is not the same thing as saying grace makes demands. To say that grace makes demands is to confuse the categories of law and gospel. Both God’s law and God’s gospel come from God, and both are good. But they have unique job descriptions. As Herman Bavinck said, “The gospel is sheer good tidings, not demand but promise, not duty but gift.” The failure to distinguish the law and the gospel always means the abandonment of the gospel because the law gets softened into “helpful tips for practical living” instead of God’s unwavering demand for absolute perfection, while the gospel gets hardened into a set of moral and social demands we “must live out” instead of God’s unconditional declaration that “God justifies the ungodly.”

You can read the rest of Liberate’s important response here.