Sometimes he humbles them until they come unto him. Sometimes he permits other wicked children to punish them with cruel acts until they come unto him. Sometimes, he cuts them off from blessings entirely and gives those blessings unto others — but always his arms are outstretched for them to come unto him.

He loves his wayward children. But “love them until they return” might have a different meaning if you forget that he also declared:

Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

So, we are to have Christ-like love in our heart and actions, and repent of our sins. Those who refuse will be devoured. We should be clear how all encompassing that love is (blessing and punishment).

As others have pointed out, the concepts are relatively straightforward. God’s love (in the normal understanding of what that word means) is unconditional. His blessings, of course, are not. This is easy. No problem, right?

The problem is the insistence by Nelson and others to substitute the word “love” for the word “blessings”. And so … ok sure. If we want to redefine the word “love” to mean “blessings”, then I guess we can all agree that “love” is conditional. But why make the move in the first place? Again, as others have pointed out, there’s little to gain by doing this (other than to play a seemingly pointless semantic game), but there IS the potential risk that some will interpret the talks as reinforcing the idea that God loves sinners less. Which seems to go against the very essence of what the Savior’s ministry was all about, and may produce uncharitable behavior. (So again, why risk it, on behalf of a cute word game?)

Having said all that, one of the most interesting comments on this post is from “R” (#36) who suggests something provocative: maybe God’s “love” as it were, isn’t that relevant, ultimately, and that it’s all about the presence/absence of blessings anyway. (As R says, if God’s love simply refers to the feeling God has for us, that’s “irrelevant” or meaningless.) I happen to disagree with this perspective, but it’s an interesting one. Maybe President Nelson has the same perspective as R, which is what creates this whole disconnect in the first place.

For my part, unlike R I happen to think that the simple knowledge of God’s “feeling” for me – – and all that knowledge implies – – is TERRIBLY important. As in the parable of the prodigal son, the knowledge that son had of his father’s love for him (and therefore, his father’s pending forgiveness) was the thing that ultimately helped the straying son choose to return in the first place. The love (or specifically, the son’s belief in his father’s love) is the thing that motivated the change/repentance, which in turn is the thing that triggered the blessings. Viola! But i’m not sure how the son works his way to the decision to return, without the knowledge of his father’s “feelings” of love toward him, and that the father’s feelings were, essentially, unconditional.

Anyhow, here I am engaging in the very thing on the blog comments that I think is ultimately unproductive from the pulpit, in my view. (In other words, what’s good for the blogs isn’t always good for General Conference…) This seems like a pseudo-intellectual exercise that has very little potential upside and at least some risk of misunderstanding/downside among the saints’ lived experiences, in the context of redefining the use of a word like “love” in a GC talk.

Again though even that article gets at the equivocation between showing love i.e. behavior and feeling love i.e. internal to the parent. The whole notion was popularized by the psychologist Carl Rogers with his notion of unconditional positive regard. I should note that people still defend it and it’s actually a very popular position for Christian therapists. But it really is very new.

My sense, perhaps wrong, is that this is very much a popular psychology theory determining theology and theological rhetoric. It’s simply not a scriptural phrase. The popular Evangelical theology of “cheap grace” (still open to a different term) becomes popular around the same time culturally. Although theologically the notion goes back quite a ways – the term was coined by Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.

Because LDS culture uses parent-child metaphors to describe our relationship with God, it makes sense that we would naturally apply our understanding of parental unconditional love to God. It’s a simple and beautiful way of understanding God’s love.

But then Elder Nelson came along and started riffing on works-oriented LDS theology, and somehow, the benign phrase “unconditional love” got thrown under the bus. It was probably a mistake. Elder Nelson probably didn’t stop to consider just what a bulwark this phrase is in our understanding of love in the English language. Then some natural confusion and consternation ensued.

Along comes Elder Christofferson, who probably just wants to help clean up the semantic mess. But what can you do when a more senior apostle makes such a categorical statement like “God’s love is conditional?” All you can do is end up repeating Elder Nelson, but trying to soften and nuance the edges a bit. So you end up sounding like another works-oriented hard-liner, which probably isn’t the case.

In the end, I think Elder Chrisofferson maybe felt like he needed to kill off the phrase “unconditional love” since it had been irredeemably sullied, and try and replace it with something “God’s love is infinite and eternal” which should mean the same thing, but unfortunately looses the cultural associations “unconditional love” has with parental love. I wonder if he is regretting it. Perhaps it would have been better just to let a few decades pass and we could covertly reintroduce “unconditional love” back into LDS parlance.

Someone pointed out that God is a lot less like a vending machine and a lot more like a slot machine. There seems to be a total disconnect in mortality between obedience and blessings. There are a lot of poor, suffering righteous people and a lot of healthy, wealthy people like Donald Trump. Maybe this will all be rectified in the hereafter, but in the here and now, life simply isn’t fair, and God’s love, on a practical level, seems random at best.

After hearing that God’s love for us is conditional on our obedience, they will naturally bring that down to the next level: their love for their children must be conditional on their children’s obedience to them.

What? I find that really sad that you believe that. For that to be true, it would require parents to only be loving their children because they’re following Heavenly Fathers example, and I am not aware of anyone who loves their child because of that. My experience has been that non-modern western cultures have to teach parents very hard to not love their children if they’re children betray certain laws, and it’s very unnatural to them. So I just don’t see anyone saying “I’m going to stop loving my child because the scriptures never say that God has unconditional love for us.”

As I said the way we discuss this loosely is in terms of contemporary senses of love which is problematic for various reasons. I’d add that unconditional love just isn’t a scriptural term. Even ignoring the theological problems with it that have been debated a lot the past few decades in Evangelical thought there is a serious question about it psychologically.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/200911/parenting-unconditional-love-is-bad

There’s something to be said for the idea that the idea of unconditional love doesn’t even arise until the 1960s and is a relatively recent bit of pop psychology. And from there into pop theology.

That’s how all of us who are familiar with the standard works and with the principle of God’s unconditional love interpreted Elder Christofferson’s talk — because we are not comfortable ditching the concept of unconditional love for the new doctrine of conditional love. But that’s not exactly what Elder Christofferson said, and it *certainly* is not what Elder Nelson said in 2003.

Dave and other commenters have already pointed out the dangers implicit in a doctrine of conditional love, not only for our understanding of how God relates to us but also in how that can affect the relationships that some very literal-minded Mormons have with their children. After hearing that God’s love for us is conditional on our obedience, they will naturally bring that down to the next level: their love for their children must be conditional on their children’s obedience to them.