There’s a quiet moment many of us come to—not all at once, not dramatically, but through a slow, almost gentle noticing. Something about the story we were given—about God, about judgment, about how things are made right—no longer feels like it fits the shape of love we’ve come to know.
Sometimes that shift comes through grief, or through loving someone whose life doesn’t fit the categories we were handed. Sometimes it comes simply from paying closer attention—to the world, to our own lives, to the way love actually moves among us. Over time, the questions begin to surface, not as rebellion but as honesty: Can this really be what love looks like?
This isn’t a rejection of faith so much as a longing for something more true, more whole—more like love. And perhaps that longing isn’t something to push aside or resolve too quickly. Perhaps it is the beginning of seeing more clearly, the place where a deeper story starts to take shape.
What follows is a brief excerpt from Made by Love, For Love, where I begin to explore what it might mean to take seriously the possibility that even judgment—especially judgment—must be understood through the lens of love.
When Love Judges (an excerpt)
Our inherited story of judgment tends to follow a familiar moral script: failure, penalty, payment, and eternal consequence. Humanity misses the mark. Justice demands punishment. Hell becomes the last word. Within this framework, the story of eternal conscious torment can feel like the logical conclusion of divine holiness offended and satisfaction unmet.
But if we take seriously what has been unfolding throughout this book, the claim that God is the God-who-is-love, then this script cannot remain unchallenged.
Thomas Jay Oord’s vision of essential kenosis begins not with divine control but with divine character. God’s nature is self-giving, uncontrolling love. God does not occasionally act lovingly; God must love, because love is God’s eternal essence. Whatever we say about judgment must therefore cohere with that nature. Divine justice cannot contradict divine love without unraveling both.
If love does not need to be persuaded to forgive, then the cross cannot function as a transaction that makes God forgiving. The cross reveals what has always been true: the God-who-is-love is radically forgiving, co-suffering, and relentlessly present. Jesus does not change God’s posture toward humanity; he embodies it.
That reframing reshapes how we understand sin.
It is said that to sin is to miss the mark—but what if we have been aiming at the wrong target? The mark is not moral perfection, though morality is part of the picture. The mark is wholeness: an integrated life in right relationship with God, neighbor, self, and creation. Love makes whole. And as wholeness deepens, morality tends to follow—we get the lesser with the greater. Sin is whatever sabotages that wholeness.
If sin is resistance to love, then judgment cannot be reduced to divine retribution. Judgment must have to do with truth unveiled, reality faced, and restoration begun.
Pain may accompany that unveiling. But suffering, by itself, heals nothing. It may expose. It may awaken. But it does not restore what has been broken. Justice, from a love perspective, is served when truth is told and relationship repaired—when those who have resisted love come to see clearly and begin to change.
Metanoia is not mere remorse; it is reorientation toward love.
We glimpse this in Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus. No threat. No imposed penalty. Jesus simply enters his home. In the presence of self-giving love, Zacchaeus awakens. He sees. He restores. He turns. The transformation is not coerced; it is chosen. Love does not crush him—it wakes him.
This is what judgment looks like when love judges: not retaliation, but revelation; not vengeance but awakening; not the satisfaction of suffering, but the beginning of restoration toward wholeness.
And awakening is not painless.
To stand in the unveiled presence of love is to feel the weight of what we have done—and what we have left undone. It may burn. But the fire is not cruelty. It is reality, finally faced, and love refusing to let us hide.
Crucially, the God-who-is-love does not stop loving at death. Nor does divine love become coercive beyond the grave. Essential kenosis means love remains self-giving and uncontrolling—unwavering in invitation, unwavering in faithfulness.
Romans 8 insists that neither death nor life, neither present nor future, nor any power in all creation can separate us from the love of God. This is not sentiment. It is theology. Death does not interrupt divine commitment. Resistance does not exhaust it. Creatures may continue to resist. Love does not retreat. Relentless love exhausts evil[1]—not by overpowering it, but by outlasting it.
If something in this resonates, if it feels like a truer way of seeing, even if only in part, you may find yourself at home in the larger story this book is trying to tell. Made by Love, For Love is an attempt to follow that thread a little further, to explore what becomes possible when we take seriously the claim that love is not just what God does, but who God is, and what that might mean for how we understand faith, suffering, and the shape of our lives.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
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[1]. Christina, Nun., Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain; The Philokalia Volumes 1 – 5 The FULL Text (p. 271). (Line 93). Kindle Edition For Maximus, evil isn’t a “thing” with its own staying power; it’s a parasitic deficiency—a misdirected will—that feeds on our consent to resist love and settle for passion and sensual gratification. (p.196 (Line: 29)) As that consent is withdrawn through patient endurance and a steady turning toward love, evil’s grip weakens until it exhausts itself.