The Divinization of Human Love

Is it possible that if we love someone enough they will never die?  

A character in the trailer for Winter’s Tale asks this question.  For a Christian, the answer is simple, of course!  God’s love ensures that we will never die.  

Now it is not that there is anything magical about love in and of itself.  After all how can love, at worst a feeling and at best a committed disposition rooted in our will and character, keep someone alive?  It can’t.  God’s love alone, as great as it was, did not save us.  It was love informing His choices that saved us.  Think of John 3:16.  It does not say that ‘For God so loved the world everyone that believes in Him will receive eternal life.’  No.  It says that because God so loved the world He sent His son and made a way for us to receive eternal life.  

True love is not passive.  True love impacts everything—most of all our choices.  True love sacrifices itself in order to bring about good in the life of the beloved.  That is what God did.  He loved us, so He made a way, at a great cost to Himself, for us to have life everlasting.  

Love is not a powerful thing in and of itself.  It is not some mystic force that has existence or being independent of lover and beloved.  Love is powerful in what it compels us to do, in what it compelled God to do.  

But if we divinize human love, as I think this movie does, and if we think romantic feelings alone have the power to change us and give us life, we will blind ourselves to the true nature of love and the True Life that God's Love has brought us.