Is “unconditional love” a moral contradiction?

Many people and many pastors and Christians are using this term these days to attempt to describe God’s love for us. It seems God’s love must operate within a moral framework. God cannot love evil. So then how could His love ever be unconditional? What would compel us to repent if His love for us was unconditional? His love is the greatest of all things, it is unfailing, but unconditional?

You raise some good points concerning a perhaps too casual use of the term “unconditional.” Typically a term like this is well-defined initially within a specific context, but ...