Goodness - including truth and all values - are not given-by God, but arise from love-of-God

What follows is an attempt to explain that we are profoundly mistaken when we try to picture God's creation as an objective and unavoidable reality - because that is excluding the foundational role of love. Our picture of ultimate reality, needs to have love as the basis. This has many implications, including an inescapable role for each individual person. 

Matthew 22: 36. Master, which is the great commandment in the law? 37. Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38. This is the first and great commandment. 39. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 40. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

I find this a very striking story (it also appears in the Gospel of Luke); because it seems to contain something profound - on the basis that it is not immediately apparent why all the "law and prophets" could depend on love of God and neighbour. 

How can law depend on love? They seem so unlike. 

And yet here it is stated, and the statement carries for me an innate authority, that love must come first - which I interpret to mean that without love there can be no "law". 

If therefore love must come first and as foundation; this has profound metaphysical implications. And some of these implications run counter to a great deal of Christian doctrine and practice. 

What I believe this means is that Goodness - including truth and all values - are not given by God, but arise from love-of-God.* 

Love is the basis for goodness, truth and all values. 

There can be no goodness/ truth/ values without love-of-God. 

If there is not first love-of-God, then divine creation and its purposes and methods are not evident. 

There is then no basis for persuading people that we inhabit a divine creation. 

Without the basis of love-of-God; other pictures of reality - such as the mainstream materialist-scientistic-atheist picture of reality as mostly-unalive, purposeless, meaningless, accidental - cannot be refuted. 

Gods creation - goodness, truth, values... These are coherent only for those who first love God and neighbour; and who themselves choose to affiliate with God: to join themselves with God in the work of creating. 

This is not enough to define Christianity - which also requires the essential intervention of Jesus Christ; but does form an essential basis.  

*I think that love of neighbour is intended to indicate that this love is not a matter of just our-selves and God only; but implies our endorsement that divine creation intentionally includes many other Beings, as well as our-selves. 

Note added: One consequence of the above is that arguments for the reality of God that take the general form of the Book of Job are futile! I mean, people cannot be persuaded of the reality of God by pointing at entities of power, magnificence, terror - nor at qualities such as beauty, goodness, moral-values - as if these were objectively present in the world. They are not. For beauty or morality to be real entails that we already acknowledge the reality of God - otherwise these are just arbitrary classifications. 

Of course; this analysis kicks-the-can on to how can, do, or should, people come to love God? Perhaps this is partly a matter of innate character or disposition (e.g. some people are more loving than others); but it is also a matter of what we choose to want-to-want; of where we place our priorities and ultimate hopes.  

And it is also a matter of how we conceptualize - or experience - God. IMO the God of the Old Testament (and of monotheism generally) is not loveable - but is instead fear-inducing; or else just too abstractly-defined (in terms of "attributes" like omnipotence and omniscience) to be genuinely personal - and only the personal is genuinely love-able. 

Then again, the loveable God must also be believable! But believability is largely a matter of fundamental assumptions. When these metaphysical foundations entail an unloveable God (e.g. because un-understandable, or "jealous" and tyrannical) - then naturally a Good and Personal God will seem too good to be true. 

For instance my God - Heavenly Parents who think of humans their divine children; children whom they hope will choose to develop their own natures in the direction of becoming more conscious, more divine, more actively-creative - may seem no more than a consoling delusion unless the metaphysical basis of reality is regarded as (roughly) animistic pluralism.