So I had a few threads of thoughts come together around the topic of how we (in the west) think about God and Love.

The first thread came from a Roommates podcast interview with Esther Perel. She had said:

“People still want, in love, what the institution of marriage brought them: companionship, economic support, social status, and family life.  
But now they want love in marriage. Marriage was not about love. If it happened it was a nice thing but it often happened on the outside.
We brought love to marriage, we brought sex to love, we brought marital happiness as connected to sexual satisfaction… we’ve made all kinds of new connections. I still want that, but I also want you to be my best friend. I want you to be my confidante- the person I can tell everything to. And I want you to be my great lover, and I want you to be my intellectual equal, and I want you to be my co-parent, and as we get to millennials and further (generations) I want you to be the person who helps me become the best version of myself. You’re no longer just my partner, you’re my soulmate. That’s the pinnacle of expectations- what we bring to modern love. We want ecstasy, transcendence, wholeness, and meaning from our partners. This is stuff we used to look for in the realm of the divine.
The ‘romantic’ today carries all these expectations and everything is packed into these two people. ”

The second thread is from me just having finished Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and essentially confirmed in much literature written a few centuries ago. Marriages were often arranged, or at least the father had a veto power over any proposals. There was great stress placed on the position the marriage would put you in. There was great consideration placed on what kind of economic security the arrangement would give. Of course we also see the idealism of wanting that economic security, and having it come with romantic sparks as well. But this desire for romantic love is often seen as youthful idealism, not practical reality. 

The third thread is my just having read through Ephesians 5 in the course of my daily reading, where Paul writes about marriage, and then says in verse 32: 

“This is a profound mystery – but I’m talking about Christ and the church.”

 He tells us that marriage is essentially a model of Christ and the church. This understanding of the relation between God’s love for us, and our marriages perhaps informs the last thread.

The fourth and final part of this was a friend reminding me of a song I used to do at church called My Romance by Rick Pino of Christ for the Nations. The lyrics of the first verse are:

Look at the way the flowers bloom for you
They want to show you their beauty, Lord
Running waters dance
You and I romance

Now the lyrics for this song make some people uncomfortable, and I’ve been told they aren’t theologically correct.
One of the things I’ve heard from several men, trained and degreed in theology, I’ve known is that too many artists are writing worship songs that are theologically weak.

Let me offer up, as an artist, why I think that may be, and then come back to tie these various threads together.
Artists almost always engage in their art through the use of impressions. There are of course those that attempt to recreate an exact replica of the subject, in a realistic painting for example. But most will take liberties with the portrayal and seek to capture an essence through some level of abstraction. We do this because it allows us to showcase some creativity, but it also focuses on some particular aspect that we may see ourselves. We want to bring attention to a facet that captures our attention and highlight that.  

This of course has the consequence of inaccurately portraying most details. The impressionists painted quickly with loose brushstrokes in order to capture a play of light. But if you zoom in on the picture, the detail is lost because it doesn’t retain the accuracy.

Theologians are concerned with exactly the opposite. They are attempting to find the unifying theory of everything that explains the totality of scripture, and the details are important.

The artist, in attempting to emphasize specific aspects, necessarily plays fast and loose with the details he’s not concerned with at the moment. Hopefully he doesn’t say something heretical in the process, but this is at the heart of the matter.

So, considering these 4 threads together the other day, it struck me that perhaps our modern western conception of love has led us to imagine that God’s love for us is like our ideas of romance, minus of course the sexual. Whereas my guess is that the marriage spoken of in Ephesians 5 is more like the contractual obligation than coochy-koo lovebird self-fulfillment.

I’m not trying to say that God doesn’t love us the way we love our spouses, but I think this, perhaps, is at the heart of how we might end up with a line sung to God like- “You and I romance”, that may tend to evoke pictures that aren’t theologically correct.

I think there is probably a way to understand it that doesn’t evoke wrong images, but it probably would have been better to find a different wording that avoided it.