What Is Love?
Love in English is flexible. As a noun it can refer to a tennis score, several positive sexual meanings, a beloved, and a positive emotion towards some object. The verb form is much the same. There is also a host of synonyms and near synonyms for love that share the general meaning or have a degree of overlap: charity, delight, affection, loyalty, fondness, devotion, attraction, and so forth. It’s much the same in the Greek text of the Bible; both the Septuagint and the New Testament use a variety of words with a range of meaning limited by the context to express the idea of love. The basic issue is that love is a positive emotion towards something.
Sometimes among Christians, we conceptualize love with the Greek terms of agape (self-giving love), philia (friend love), and eros (sexual love). These may be somewhat helpful distinctions in conversations with other Christians, but it breaks down very quickly in doctrine, practice, and meaning. From a merely lexical perspective, John uses the Greek agape love and philia love to describe God the Father’s love for Jesus (John 3:35; John 5:20): the intended meaning of both agape and philia is identical. Paul requires that self-giving among married couples include erotic love (1 Cor. 7:2-3), but eros does not appear in the Septuagint or the New Testament. Further, we find agape love for both Christian and non-Christian love for instance in Luke 6:32, “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” Love is then varied and diverse. Stand alone Greek words representing Christian or non-Christian love are no help to us, because love must be enframed.
Having cleared away the issue of Christian talk about love, we must now deal with the issue of the human experience of love. We can love something for use—a good steak which is destroyed by love; we can love something for enjoyment without diminishing it, but with benefits to us—Bach’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, a sunset, God. And then there is a love of enjoyment and use combined together—drawing out the beauty of wood grain on a board for a table top and the physical changes and threats attendant to carrying, delivering, and nurturing a child. The wood and our spouse, and ourselves are transformed—increased and decreased—by love.
The issue of using and diminishing our beloveds sounds terrible doesn’t it? But the problem is implicitly commented on in Scripture (Prov. 5:18; Isa. 54:6). At the same time Scripture teaches the increase within married love that is a benefit of for both spouses. We will consider this more closely in a latter article. But the point to be grasped is that human love functions within an order that includes physical and spiritual decay and death and physical and spiritual improvement within interdependent relationships.
One of the great tensions of love between men and God’s love is this issue of enjoyment and use. God as the all-sufficient being and the source of all that is good can love a creature without benefit to himself. God loves creatures out of magnanimity and charity. As a human being we cannot love without expecting and hoping for a benefit because we are absolutely dependent on God for our existence and in a secondary sense dependent on the larger creation and web of relationships within the world. To love God is to recognize God as God. Human absolute dependence means that all human love includes dependence—godward always and toward neighbor to a greater or lesser degree. We cannot love that which we believe is not good for us in some sense. God’s freedom to love his creation is not a dependent love. God’s love is free indeed.
This theory of love, or perhaps I should say fact of love, requires that the human default be what is called eudaemonism. We love and we act on what makes us happy. Before you draw up in arms against me on this, as creatures dependant on God the thing that ought to make us happy is pleasing God. In other words, Christian love, agape love if you wish, is the desire to please God and to order our lesser loves around pleasing God. Christian eudaemonism is the recognition that what ought to make us happy is to please God. True felicity comes from pleasing God. Non-Christian eudaemonism is to make your belly your god, but Christianity is to recognize God as the source of all that is truly good. The perverse disorder of our current life is that it is possible to love in a way which displeases God. We may love in a way that rebels against, rejects, despises, tramples on our actual dependence on God. To love as if we are not contingent on God or to love as if we ought not love God is sin. Most importantly sin is the hatred of God.
We’ve worked out a definition of love: Godly love is the desire to please God as God and to order all our other loves around pleasing God. The logic of this definition is our absolute dependence on God and our secondary dependence on others. So let us turn to God’s word and attempt to prove it.
I’ve already shown above that love as love is a positive affection towards something and that the Bible allows for good love and wicked love. At the same time how love is to be ordered is explicitly commanded in the law (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), confirmed by our Lord Jesus Christ and then repeated by the Apostles in the epistles in the two great commandments—love God with all your being and to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no limit on our godward love—heart, soul, and mind; but there is a limit to our love of neighbor—love of self. We are only required to love our neighbor as ourself, and we are certainly forbidden to love our neighbor as God. The Bible then places two limits on love: all love must flow through our love of God. Our love of God then orders our love of self, and our ordered love of self creates the contours of our love of neighbor. The two great commandments, the summary of God’s moral, not only agrees with our definition, it requires this definition.
In our next articles we will explore, the love of God, love of self, and the love neighbor more carefully with an especial focus on Son of God Jesus Christ and his love.