by Ian Paul, Psephizo (Image: Unsplash)
The term ‘love’ is clearly important in the New Testament in a range of contexts. But modern use of ‘love’ shifts its meaning into all sorts of different areas. One solution to this has been to distinguish the different Greek terms for ‘love’ in Scripture.
But this approach does not stand scrutiny, so cannot solve the problem. But there is another, better, solution which can help.
The problem
I was rather struck by one part of the discussion last week about the contribution of the late Richard Hays to New Testament ethics, and his decision not to use ‘love’ as a category, because it very quickly becomes a wax nose—it can be pushed into whatever shape the commentator wishes. So what is the problem with the term ‘love’?
On the one hand, it is one of the most familiar words in the Christian vocabulary. God is love. Love your neighbour. Love one another as I have loved you. The greatest of these is love. For some reason, the term ‘love’ has emerged as the controlling term shaping what the Bible means, and what determines Christian action. A typical example is the cartoon from ‘The Naked Pastor’ where he contrasts ‘loving’ (ie liberal) Jesus with nasty narrow fundamentalists:
The difference between us is that you use Scripture to tell you what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.
And yet I am increasingly convinced that when most English speakers hear the word ‘love’ today, what they understand has surprisingly little overlap with what the New Testament writers meant when they reached for agapē and its cognate verb agapaō. This is just one of the many problems with the Naked Pastor’s comment. (I don’t think he realises that he is setting his own modern worldview as the authority over Scripture.)
This is not a merely academic concern. If ‘love’ in contemporary English means something different from ‘love’ in the Bible, then every time we read, preach or debate on the basis of ‘love’, we risk importing a meaning the text never carried. That matters for discipleship, for pastoral practice, and for the arguments the Church of England is currently having about what it means to be a ‘loving’ church.
But the problem is easy to state badly. It is a staple of popular preaching that Greek had ‘four words for love’ and that agapē was the special, selfless, divine one. That claim does not survive close attention to how the words were actually used.
So the question needs a little more care and exploration. Where do English ‘love’ and Greek agapē genuinely overlap? Where do they part company? And what would it take to recover the biblical sense in a language whose default meaning has drifted elsewhere?