Keller: "I believe in a God of love"

Here is an excerpt from The Reason for God, by Tim Keller:

"During my college years and my early twenties I, like so many others, questions the Christian faith i was raised in. There were subjective reasons for my doubts. Christianity just didn't seem real to me experientially. I had not yet developed a prayer life and had never experienced God personally. There were also intellectual problems I was having with Christianity, all of which I am addressing elsewhere in this book. There was one, however, I will talk about here.
I was troubled by those Christians who stressed hellfire and damnation. Like so many of my generation i believed that, if there was a core to all religions, it was a loving god. I wanted to believe in a God of Love who accepted people regardless of their beliefs and practices. I began to take course in the other religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Judaism. I have profited to this day form those studies. However, my explorations in other faiths proved my wrong on this particular point about the centrality of a loving God.
I found no other religions text outside the Bible that said God created the world out of love and delight. Most ancient pagan religions believed the world was created through struggles and violent battles between opposing gods and supernatural forces. I turned to look more closely at Buddhism, the religion I liked best at the time. However, despite its great emphasis on selflessness and detached service to others, Buddhism did not believe in a personal God at all, and love is the action of a person.
Later on, after I became a minister, I was a speaker and panelist for several years in a monthly discussion program in Philadelphia between a Christian church and a mosque. Each month a speaker from the church and a speaker from the mosque would give a Biblical and Qu'ranic perspective on a topic. When we covered the topic of God's love, it was striking how different our conceptions were. I was told repeatedly by Muslim speakers that God was indeed loving in the sense of being merciful and kind to us. But when Christians spoke of the Lord as our spouse, of knowing God intimately and personally, and of having powerful effusions of his love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit our Muslim friends balked. They told us that it was disrespectful, in their view, to speak of anyone knowing God personally.
Today many of the skeptics I talk to say, as I once did, they can't believe in the God of the Bible, who punishes and judges people, because the "believe in a God of Love." I now ask, what makes them think God is Love? Can they look at the life in the world today and say, "this proves that the God of the world is a God of Love?" Can they look at history and say, "this all shows that the God of history is a God of Love"? Can they look at the religious texts of the world and conclude that God is a God of Love? By no means is that the dominant, ruling attribute of God as understood in any of the major faiths. I must concludes that the source of the idea that God is love is the bible itself. And the Bible tells us that the God of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world to rights in the end.
The belief in a God of pure love - who accepts everyone and judges no one - is a powerful act of faith. Not only is there no evidence for it in the natural order, but there is almost no historical, religious textual support for it outside of Christianity. The more one looks at it, the less justified it appears."