I love fishing. I love my wife. I love donuts. I love science fiction. I love Jesus. In those brief declarations I have barely scratched the surface of the multiple and various ways we use the English word “love.” When we look at the Christian idea of love, it is sometimes supposed that the several different words for love in the biblical languages help resolve some of the ambiguity of the term in English. We are sometimes encouraged to aspire to the form of love denoted by the Greek word used several times in I Corinthians 13, our text for this Sunday, the word agape as opposed to eros or philia.
It is true that the Greek Judaeo-Christian scriptures, the New Testament plus the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, seem to have created an emphasis on the use of the term agape (the verb form of the word in the Septuagint) which stands apart from its relatively seldom usage in other ancient Greek writings. And in the modern era, Anders Nygren famously pitted a Christian conception of agape as unconditional, self-giving, self-sacrificial love against eros as a self-focused, need-based, acquisitive form of love.
However, we use the word “love” in English for both the eros and agape ideas, as well as for other forms of relationship, for instance, for the love between friends denoted by philia in Greek. C. S. Lewis’s famous The Four Loves explores a few of the main ways in which we use the word.
One of the muddles of our single English word for love is in the use to which our text is often put in Christian worship. It’s one of the texts frequently read at weddings. As I typically, curmudgeonly point out to the couples I marry, Paul did not really have married or romantic love (perhaps more eros than agape) in mind at all when he included this hymn to love in his letter. He was writing to a church community, and to one which was split up in fighting factions to boot. I try to make that instructive for couples in considering just in what circumstances the love described in I Corinthians 13 is to hold sway.
However, we as Christians would do very well to recognize that, in talking about a wholly other-regarding form of love (verse 4-7 especially), Paul wants to describe the sort of interaction which ought to characterize us as believing communities, not just in limited marital, family or even friendship relations.
As I briefly touched on last week and in detail on Trinity Sunday several weeks ago, it is good to recall that the love Paul describes here is first and foremost the character of God, not just in His self-giving relationship with us, but in God’s own internal relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be made in the image of God, then, is for us to live in community in a way which reflects that same self-giving love.
Yet Lewis in the first part of The Four Loves has an interesting reflection on how the needy, receiving love thought to be more eros than agape is also necessary for human relationship to God. It’s only as we come to Him desiring and in need that we can get close enough to God for Him to fully impart His own brand of self-giving love. Which is, once again, why love is a theological virtue, one given and infused rather than one we generate in ourselves by practice.
I look forward to exploring all the richness of this last and “greatest of these” theological virtues for the next four weeks.