A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
by Fred G. Zaspel
This little booklet is part of Crossway’s Church Questions series. I’ve enjoyed and appreciated the few booklets in this series that I have seen so far, and this addition is helpful also. McCullough takes on the thorny question of God’s universal love. He guides carefully through needed distinctions in terminology, especially the all-important observation that “love” has a range of meanings—in the Bible just as it does in any language or culture. This is the strength of his argument, that God loves everyone but not in the same way. That, in my opinion, is the right answer. What is missing in the book, however, is any consideration of the biblical statements of God’s “hatred” of sinners, as in the Psalms (e.g., 5:5; 11:5)—the elephant in the room that McCullough leaves unaddressed. Without this, the topic seems to me to have been left a bit lopsided.