Love is the key to understanding our relationship to God and one another. This book is a deep look at love through the lens of eros and agape.
As Augustine taught, our loves must be rightly ordered. This order is not heirarchical or quantitative but qualitative. We love people differently. However, through love we identify with other people and desire their good.
We cannot possibly love all people individually, but we can appreciate and value their individuality. God loves persons in particularly, not in general. No one is repeatable. "God's love is not an equalizing love. It does not treat us as though we were all equal in his sight and therefore able to replace each other in his affection. The whole point about persons is precisely that they are not equal. One is not as good as another. No human being is worth less than another in God's as another. No human being is worth less than another in God's but because each one is irreplaceable. In this way God's love for us is not impartial but partial in the sense in which partiality is a matter of looking to see what the special individuality of the other person really is and attending positively to it. God can have this kind of special love for each of his creatures" (211-212).
This is our model: "The way in which God loves us is the perfect example on which we should try to pattern our love for each other. ... God's love of human beings can be understood as a supreme appreciation of the individuality of each person. Similarly, when we love our neighbours, we will imitate, in a necessarily incomplete fashion, God's appreciation of the individuality of each neighbour as a person (212). "What Christianity is really about is agape, that totally selfless love for which Christians had to find a name to distinguish it from all our human egoistic loves ... That is how God loves and so that is the sort of love we are to learn" (239).
The book also offers profound insights on romantic love and self-love: "It is impossible to eliminate love of self... because God loves us, and we should cease to be like him if we ceased to love ourselves" (243). Though this is not an easy read, the reward is worth it.
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