We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Love That Keeps On Giving
In English, we have one word for love. In ancient Greek, there were four different words that we can translate as “love.” And each has a different meaning. Let’s consider each briefly.
Storge—referred to a person’s affection for something. When we say we love our car or a person’s smile or another’s ability to sing, we are using love in this sense.
Eros—usually used in reference to romantic or sexual love. This is what people mean today when they speak about “falling in love” or “making love.”
Phileo—most commonly used in reference to friendship. When we tell a best friend we love him or her, we don’t mean it romantically (eros), nor do we mean only that we have affection for something about that person (storge).
Each of these senses of love involves an emotional feeling we have toward another person or thing. For this reason these first three kinds of love are neither universal nor unconditional. We cannot have affection for everyone and everything (storge); we cannot have romantic feelings toward everyone (eros); and we cannot experience personal friendship with everyone (phileo).
Agape—this fourth kind of love is universal and unconditional. This love is not a feeling one has, although certain feelings often follow from it. It is rather a commitment one makes, a stance one takes toward another, and an activity one does. It should be present in each of the first three senses of love but also when those forms of love are absent. Agape is a kind of love you can have when there’s nothing about the other you like, when you have no romantic interest in the other, and even when the other is your enemy rather than your friend.
Agape is the most fundamentally the kind of love God had for us while we were yet sinners and the kind of love we are commanded to have toward all others.
The Bible does not give us an abstract definition of agape love. It rather points us to its perfect expression in the person of Jesus Christ, dying for us on the cross. “We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 Jn 3:16). In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we read “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). This is what agape love looks like. As Bonhoeffer put it, “love … is the revelation of God. And the revelation of God is Jesus Christ.”
Love, as defined by the one who is love, lays down its life for another, however undeserving. Agape love ascribes worth to another at cost to oneself. On the cross, God expressed this love in its most perfect form.
The kind of love that defines God, that characterizes the life of Christ, and that is commanded of believers has nothing to do with getting something. The agape love that flows from the Spirit of God is rather about giving something. It is constituted by a unilateral movement toward another. God does not love because he needs something from us. He is not trying to get his own needs met by relating to us. Rather, God loves out of the abundance of his life and in the interests of the beloved.
What is it that agape love gives? In a word, it is worth. God does not love because of the worth that he finds in another, as is typical of most expressions of love. If that were true, God could not love us with a perfect love, for we are unworthy sinners. Rather, God loves in order to ascribe worth to another.
—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 24-25 and Seeing Is Believing, pages 145-146
Image by Dayne Tomkin via Unsplash
Category: General
Tags: Love, Self-Sacrificial Love, Unsurpassable Worth
Related Reading
Repent! … From the Sin of Religion
People often think that being Christian is about “being religious,” but loving others in the way that Christ instructs us is about as far removed from religion as anything could be. Religion, as I use the term, is a system of beliefs and behaviors one embraces as a means of getting life—whether this be feeling…
God’s Love and Your Freedom
The most distinctive aspect of the revelation of God in Christ is Jesus’ demonstration that God relies on love to defeat his enemies and to accomplish his purposes. More than anything else, it was the perfect love of God revealed in the incarnation, ministry, and self-sacrificial death of Jesus that in principle defeated evil and…
Reversing Babel
Several generations after the flood, we read in Gen 11 how humans were still living in one locale and had one common language and culture. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea that they should construct an enormous tower that would reach “to the heavens” in order to make a name for themselves and…
Hearing and Responding to God: Part 5
We hope you’ve enjoyed this series on hearing and responding to God. In this last video on the topic, Greg discusses the significance of the fact that God IS love, and how our communion with him is the product of God’s eternal loving nature. You can watch the earlier installments here, here, here, and here. ***Bonus: Greg experiences a…
Sermon Clip: The Cross and the Tree
In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how Christians should react to the world with love. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were tempted to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did this because they didn’t understand that God was protecting them. In this sermon, Greg…