Love is a popular topic these days. Whether romantic, friendly, or familial, love is at the center of many of the hot-button topics in our society. Society defines love as affirming and supporting whatever idea someone wants to pursue. To the secular world, that’s how you show that you care for someone. Of course, the reason for this definition of love lies in a broader idea, that we are our own gods, free to create our own truth and pursue every desire.
Implicit in this view of desire–that we should get everything we want–is the belief that the goal of life is our own happiness. Following this idea further, because happiness is the purpose of life, and we’re all free to define our own truth, the result is that every desire should be affirmed. But, we need to give some deeper thought to love. Is love an emotion or a behavior, is love a choice, does love require affirmation or does it sometimes require us to oppose ideas? What does Biblical love look like and what are the four loves?
We’ve discussed society’s view of love. Let’s now look at biblical love.
The Greeks recognized four types of love[1]:
Philia: friendship or brotherly love.
Agape: perfect love.
Eros: romantic or sensual love
Storge: familial love, the natural bond between parent and child, or between siblings.
While only two (agape and philia) are specifically mentioned in the Bible, all four are embedded throughout. Understanding the various biblical loves clarifies love itself. It should also be noted that none of the four loves involve ignoring God’s laws, in fact they all require honoring God.
Thomas Aquinas defined love as “willing the good of the other.” Aquinas’ definition lacks a romantic ring, but it does provide a robust view of what it means to be loving.[2]
Like most you, I have read 1 John many times. In chapter 4, John tells us that God is love. That sounds great, we believe in a loving God. However, I recently was reading a book, The Way of the Modern World by Craig Gay, which led me to better understand our culture’s mindset. The section I was reading pointed out that the world is incapable of appreciating love. Christians can because Christ first loved us.[3] As Gay points out, love is revealed to us through the Holy Spirit. And then the question occurred to me:
Is it possible to know love without knowing God?
I’ve thought that there existed a disagreement on what love is. It seemed to me that society thought that love necessitated love. Biblical love; however, required truth, and that sometimes means not supporting harmful ideas. This is how I’ve typically responded to arguments claiming that Christians are unloving.
Revisiting 1 John may be helpful. Love isn’t a characteristic God possess. John doesn’t tell us that God is loving. The Apostle says that God is love. In fact, love could be another name for God.
Understanding the difference between being loving and being love itself is crucial to understanding our society. God is the source of love. Because God–holy, righteous, and perfect– is love, love itself must be righteous and holy. Any other foundation for love is going to be flawed.
As I’ve previously written, our society openly rejects God, and is becoming ever more hostile to Christianity (Entering the Narrow Gate.) Society’s idea of love is human-centered not God-centered. Human-centered love cares nothing for God’s ways and doesn’t consider why they are better for us. Rather, human-centered love is shallow, self-serving, and harmful. Biblical love is rich, selfless, and profitable.
In 1 Corinthians 12:4-7, Paul tells us that
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Paul makes a couple of points which are particularly relevant to our present culture:
1) Love doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness
2) Love rejoices in truth
3) Love endures all things
Paul’s teaching on love is antithetical to secular society’s definition of love. Society expects us to rejoice in unrighteousness, in fact demands that we do so. Our society doesn’t rejoice in truth, but absolutely rejects truth. Secular love doesn’t endure all things. Quite the opposite, society describes any failure to affirm, any disagreement, as toxic and tells us to end the relationship. This is true of both friendships and romantic relationships. The world knows nothing of sacrificial love.
It's why we see so many friendships that are merely echo chambers. Many parents don’t love sacrificially anymore. It’s why we see homosexual couples demanding a ‘right to children’ despise choosing a relationship that can’t produce children. It’s why we see parents raising children as young as toddlers as transgender. It’s why we so many divorces siting ‘irreconcilable differences.’ Children are not a right, regardless of one’s sexual orientation; they’re a blessing (Psalm 127:3.) We know that children need both a father and a mother, not two fathers or two mothers. No toddler decides they are transgender, it’s not something they can even conceptualize. Any toddler that is transgender is so because they have parents who want to be the kind of parents who have a transgender child. We know that divorce has serious detrimental effects on children, yet parents walk away because of their own interests. Differences are only irreconcilable when one or both parties refuse to reconcile.
A society that rejects God is incapable of understanding love. The Holy Spirit helps us grow in our sanctification, leading us to become more like Christ. A culture that rejects God doesn’t have the Holy Spirit to teach, to convict, to prompt, to guide them towards God. Because they don’t seek God, they’ll never understand Biblical love. Indeed, without God, love doesn’t exist. I do believe it’s possible for nonbelievers to demonstrate biblical love, because the Holy Spirit can work through nonbelievers. But, that doesn’t mean the person through whom the Holy Spirit has worked understands real love; it merely means that the Holy Spirit worked through them. Yes, Christians are often guided by the Holy Spirit as well. However, Christians (at least, are supposed to) actively seek God, and in the process learn what real love is.
Herein lies the heart of the problem. Revisiting Lewis’ The Four Loves, Lewis reframes M. Denis de Rougemont’s claim regarding love by saying “love begins to be a demon when he [man] becomes a god….if we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.”[4] For much of the secular world, love has become a demon wielded by people who have made themselves god. Godly love requires virtues. This is why merely affirmation, why mere sexual desire, or mere affection isn’t love. Fruits of the Holy Spirit are necessary components of love. Secular love sets its desire on things of this world, and as Lewis says, “when the natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just around the corner.”[5] Loving the world and supporting another’s love of the world is the path to destruction.
Biblcial love requires sacrifice because that is what God the Son did for us when He died on the cross. Loving the unlovable is so difficult for us sinful people, but it is the truest embodiment of Godly love. Just as the man who built his house on the sand learned that soft footing is an insufficient foundation, society is learning that love without God is impossible.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, First edition (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017).
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
[3] Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World, or, Why It’s Tempting to Live as If God Doesn’t Exist (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Carlisle, Cumbria: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Paternoster Press, 1998).
[4] Lewis, The Four Loves, 8.
[5] Ibid, 131.
Comments