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Can Luther's Doctrine of God as the Giver and God as the Highest Good be Reconciled? A Critique of Tuomo Mannermaa's Two Kinds of Love

As commonly known, in Luther’s theology there exists a fundamental distinction between self-giving divine love and self-seeking human love. According to this distinction, for human love it is characteristic to always seek an object which is good and lovable. Divine love, on the other hand, is characterized by that it creates its own object out of that which is empty and nothing, bestowing on it existence and goodness. The emeritus professor of Ecumenics and one of the grand old men of Finnish Luther research, Tuomo Mannermaa, makes in his book Two Kinds of Love, published in English in 2010, the claim that the basis for this distinction for Luther is in God’s nature itself: It is God’s essence, or being, to always create something out of nothing.1 This distinction is then utilized by Mannermaa as the key to understand Luther’s theology. In the second and third chapters of his book Mannermaa describes a state of confrontation existing between two types of theology based on two different kinds of love. The basis of the criticism—on which Mannermaa seems to agree with Luther—is the accusation that in Thomistic theology based on Aristotelian philosophy the typos of human love—love seeking a good and lovable object—is applied to theology and taken as the model of the relationship between human being and God.2 In the third