Our Lord also taught the universality of the love of God
Our Lord also taught the universality of the love of God(TOC)
But the question may further be put, whether, besides in this national and qualitative sense, our Lord also taught the universality of the love of God in the numerical sense of appropriating it to every individual man. The answer to this requires careful discrimination. It must be admitted that what the Old Testament used to call the goodness of Jehovah, in the sphere of natural life, is drawn by our Lord within the circle of God's love. In commanding the disciples to love their enemies He lays at the basis of this duty the example of the heavenly Father, who makes His sun to rise upon the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Although this benevolent attitude toward mankind universally is not explicitly called love, the reasoning implies that it may be correctly so designated. The more abstract form of New Testament truth opened the way for employing the terms in a wider sense than had been possible with the Old Testament conception, from which the thought of marriage or fatherhood was practically inseparable. Undoubtedly, by thus emphasizing the universality of common grace and making it flow from the love of God, our Lord sought a point of contact for the approaching universalism of the gospel. That God loves the world in its natural existence, even outside the sphere of the covenant, contains a pledge of the bestowal upon the same world of an infinitely higher redemptive love.
For it should be observed, in the second place, that the work of redemption itself bears in our Lord's representation a broad cosmical character. This is true already of the Synoptical teaching. Especially the doctrine of the kingdom in its eschatological aspect clearly reveals that the divine love sets for its goal not the saving of isolated individuals out of the world, but the salvation of the world as an organic whole. The coming of the kingdom in glory will bring a palingenesia of the universe. But it is especially in the Johannine discourses, with their characteristic method of unfolding truth in its large fundamental aspects, that the principle in question is brought out with great distinctness. It is here that the statements occur, "God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son," and "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." Christ is called the light of the world, and the Savior of the world. He gives His flesh and His blood for the life of the world. From the nature of the case, however, this cosmical love, though in certain of its effects pertaining to every man, does not permit in its absolute sense of being individualized. It involves a purpose to save the world organically, not a purpose to save every person in the world individually. I am well aware that such a qualification of the sense of these passages has come to be regarded in many quarters as a subterfuge inspired by dogmatic prejudice.[4] In one point of fact, however, the reasons which compel this interpretation are purely biblico-theological, and consist of a number of Johannine utterances giving the saving love of God a special reference to the elect. This will appear presently. How little ground there is for the charge of dogmatic bias against those who adopt the proposed exegesis may be seen, meanwhile, from the fact that men like Holtzmann and Pfleiderer are among its advocates—obviously not from any dogmatic motive, but because they see no other way of making the Johannine teaching consistent with itself.[5] .