This post will serve both as clarification on my last post and food for thought.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian theologian from Germany who was martyred by the Nazis only days before the liberation. Here's what he had to say about our response ("We love because God first loved us") to God.

"And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur (as if God were absent). And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matthew 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering."

Any thoughts?