Understanding the Relationship of Humanity to God and to Creation Through God's Love: Tuomo Mannermaa's New Interpretation of Martin Luther's View of the Two Kinds of Love

Based on Luther's twenty‐eighth thesis in the Heidelberg Disputation , which contrasts God's love and human love, Tuomo Mannermaa offers a detailed analysis of the theme of love in Luther's theology, highlighting its paradoxical character. According to Mannermaa's interpretation, Luther insists that God's love and human love move in opposite directions: the essence of God's love is creative and self‐giving, directed toward nothingness and deficiency; whereas human love is acquisitive and self‐seeking, oriented toward what is already good and beautiful. Luther thus grounds the God‐human relationship on the basis of God's love, not human love. Additionally, material creation, including neighbors, the natural world, and the self, is understood as a “good gift,” each worthy of God's loving embrace. This marks a decisive breakthrough from Anders Nygren's dichotomy of agape and eros . Nygren reduces Luther's conception of God's love to a gift of God imparted through faith, subsequently exercised by Christians in obedience to the command to love their neighbors. In contrast to Nygren, Mannermaa's interpretation demonstrates, at an ontological level, the absolute value of God's love in relation both to human love for God and creation. It thereby confirms the Christian love for God as a central and indispensable theme within Luther's theological system.