It occurs to me that, having placed love at the center of the Christian life, I owe you some sense of how I define the term.  A technical discussion, yes.  But one I hope will be helpful.  (If you are truly allergic to technical discussions, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.)

In seeking to understand the biblical vision of love, we are both aided and hindered by the fact that the Bible is not written in English.  It is always difficult to conceptualize ideas conveyed in another language, and thus there is always a sense that whatever we are thinking when we say “love” in English, we are not quite grasping what the original writers were thinking when they penned their words in Hebrew and Greek (and a little bit of Aramaic).  Yet, the mere fact that the scriptures were authored in three languages (and translated back and forth between them) allows us to have several glances at in idea that – in any language – is beyond complete articulation.

As you may know, there are four words in ancient Greek that we properly translate into English as “love” – eros, philia, storge, and agape – and much ink has been spilled in recent decades trying to nail down the distinctions.  The general trend, which I think has proven unhelpful, has been to define each of these terms in contrast to the others, placing each one into a distinct sphere of meaning.

To get a sense of how many discussions go, imagine a blackboard on which we write “eros”  and draw a tidy circle around it.  We then say that eros means  “romantic love” or “erotic love” – love as chemical attraction, passion, desire…  Next to it, we draw another circle, and place within it “philia” and define it as the love of deep friendship, abiding devotion…  Likewise with storge – typically understood as love in the sense that we might “love” a good movie or a Diet Mountain Dew (just sayin’…).  And, of course, these definitions and distinctions are necessary to understanding nuance. But this manner of parsing out meaning can give the impression that the circles don’t overlap, that the language in which the New Testament was written had clear and distinct categories of love.  And therefore, that the NT writers used none of these words, but rather an obscure noun – agape – suggests that “biblical love” is yet another, distinct species of love. Agape, it is often argued, can only be understood as a love that is expressly not eros, philia, or storge.

All this, in turn, has led to what I consider a great over-spiritualizing of “biblical love.”  The love of God, we have been told, is not base like eros – passionate and possessive, seeking pleasure and fulfillment.  It is not rooted in mutual benefit like philia – a bond based on common purpose or temperament or family connection.  No, God is above all such entanglements and complications and self-interest.  God’s love is dispassionate, rooted in willful choice, an act of reason and character, not desire.  God’s love is not contaminated by these more primal aspects of human life.  And we are to seek to love in this same, rarified manner.

The trouble, of course, is that love without passion, desire and the like is not love!  It is uncontaminated, perhaps.  It is not messy.  But it is also useless and impossible.  And, it happens to fly in the face of the biblical story!  Who can read of the pleading of God, the jealousy of God, the anger of God, the tenderness of God…and see God as dispassionate?!?  Who can look at the cross and see only rational devotion to a cause or contract?  If scripture reveals anything, it is that God is very much messy.  God is in the thick of things.  God hurts, God longs, God desires, God has tremendous self-interest (and appeals to ours!).  When God loves, God is all in.

And we should note that agape did not occur to the NT authors out of nowhere.  It existed in classical Greek as a somewhat generic term for love, not separate from the other categories,but overlapping them all in one way or another (in particular, agape had the connotation of preference – to love one thing with special devotion or favor).  But even more important to a NT understanding of love is the realization that agape is the word most frequently used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, and the version that would have been known best to the NT authors) to translate the Hebrew word for love (ahav) – which we have already seen is anything but distant and clinical.  (A simple, but powerful, example is the translation of Gen. 22:2.  When the translators of the OT have to describe the love of Abraham for Isaac, the word they use is agape…)

All this is simply to say that when I say that love is the name of the game, I mean love.  Love in all its passion and complication; love with emotion and longing and suffering and rapture…  The love of God is a love of deep affection, of raw connection and enduring attachment.  The love of God is the real deal.  And I think we must grasp this in order to know how completely we have been embraced.  And also to know the depth of the work to which we are called.  For if we are called to love our enemies – not merely do not-hate them, to make moral choices where they are concerned, to act with regard.., but truly to love as God has loved us – then we can do with nothing less than our own transformation of heart.   And suddenly we see with new clarity the work of spiritual maturity that lies before us.