Loves Endeavour, Loves Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God by W.H. Vanstone

Loves Endeavour, Loves Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God Reviews

• 
  Matt Allhands

  There are a lot of really great and helpful things in this book - enough that I would still recommend it for reading. BUT, I wish Vanstone would have couched his argument on "The Kenosis of God" and "The Offering of the Church" more strongly in Scripture. To put it simply, the love of God transcends our ability to understand it, or communicate it comprehensively. Because that is the case, it is probably better to allow God to speak for himself by examining how God either states, illustrates, or describes his love in the Bible. The same goes for the Offering of the Church. These (both the kenosis of God, and the offering of the Church) where we often feel that love is, to use Vanstone's language, "coming wrong" but God, seeing according to His purposes from a different vantage point sees it coming right.
• 
  Robert Tessmer

  Very good book.
  
  Although this book is short, it is theologically and philosophically dense. It consolidates a life-time of reflection on the Love of God by a much-celebrated British writer and theologian who eschewed the life of academia for that of an urban (Anglican) parish priest.
  
  Vanstone's reflection is that true love gives everything it has, to the point of being spent, while simultaneously allowing the object of it's love to be and become in complete freedom. And God, needless to say, is True Love.
• 
  Peter

  
  Asking yourself what something 'IS' can be a troublesome question at the best of times, so..
  What is Church?
  What's it for?
  Who's it for?
  Does it have a point to it even if nobody attends?
  Is it then still necessary?
  
  We all know yearn for love or to love, but what is it? Real Love?
  Maybe we can only know perfect love by "what it is not".
  Is it then unattainable, a collective delusion or a wild goose chase?
  Have you ever experienced true love, authentic love?
  Have you truly loved or been loved?
  Even in part?
  
  Is you're experience informed by your theology or visa versa?
  Did you even know that you had a theology?!
  Is your God/Church/faith to be found in the "concrete reality of Creation"?
  
  If true love is limitless, precarious (read risky) and vulnerable, and really knowable by real people
  and God is true love...
  Then what would that God look like?
  A suffering servant, maybe?
  
  The central theme of this book is that redemption isn't a separate action on God's behalf but the continuation of the creative process described in Genesis 1, as is in keeping with a contingent loving act of creation