All You Need is Love, But What is Love?

February 15, 2023February 13, 2023Todd R 1 Comment

A recent survey said that only 9% of American adults have a “biblical worldview.” I’m generally skeptical of polls unless I know how they were done. After looking into this one, I wonder if I fall in to the 91% of American adults who don’t have a “biblical worldview.” Why? In their definition of “biblical worldview” the word “love” was nowhere to be found. Maybe they thought “love” was too hard to define to base a survey on. If so, I can understand because love is a complicated thing.

In this survey, “love” was not in the definition, but “absolute moral truth” is, which bothered me not because truth is a bad thing, but because moral law is what condemns us. Moral law would still exist if Christ had not died for us. The Gospel, or Good News, of Christianity is that we can be saved despite failing to follow the law. Truth without love is like describing Easter and leaving out the Resurrection. If we have not love, we have nothing but condemnation. Love is essential.

But what is love? Love means many things to different people and is a word people like to leave undefined or use to mean whatever sounds good. Often people agree that “we should all love each other” without knowing what exactly they’re agreeing on.

^{Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash}

Confusion about what love is has been around for a long, long time. The Bible itself talks about several different kinds of love, making a “biblical worldview” definition harder. In English translations of the New Testament, the word “love” shows up over and over again, but the Bible wasn’t written in English. I’m no Greek scholar, but what follows is how I personally understand “love,” and I hope it clarifies rather than confuses.

In Greek, there are at least 4 words for love, including these three:

Eros – sexual or passionate love
Phileo – this is a root of “Philadelphia”, literally the city of brotherly love. Loosely, phileo means an affection for people who are “brothers,” who we like because we admire something about them, or because they are like us.
Stergo – This is a love toward kindred or family, typically between parents and children. This love is like a loyalty to those we are related to by blood.

These words and ideas were part of the culture in which Jesus lived, died and rose again over 2,000 years ago. However, the writers of the New Testament Bible couldn’t line the meaning of these words up with what they wanted to say about Jesus. Therefore, they took a little-used word – agape – and poured new meaning into it.

A Better Love
Agape is epitomized by the act of Jesus dying on the cross, but also by His selfless love for others repeatedly demonstrated in the gospel records of His life. Agape is putting the interests of others above the interests of yourself, even if there is no benefit to yourself, or even if there is a significant cost to yourself. Even if those others don’t love you. Agape motivates acts of benevolence or charity.

Why is love so important to a Christian worldview? Not only because if God didn’t love the world, He wouldn’t have sent His only son, but also because if individual Christians leave love out of their worldview, they use “absolute truth” as a reason to judge. Love that requires sacrifice may be less popular than love that doesn’t, but without it there is no cross.

As I see a Christian worldview, this kind of love is absolutely essential. From it comes a framework of the entire history of God’s relations with man in three phases: love rejected, love redeemed, and love restored.

Love Rejected
While vague “love” is popular, true agape love is not. When I took a college class on Interpersonal Psychology, one of the topics was the multiple meanings of love. The professor explained the multiple Greek words used for “love”, but when he got to “agape” he asked if anyone in the class could explain because he didn’t “understand” it (or so he said). I raised my hand, answered by describing the self-sacrificial love of Jesus, and was snickered at by much of the class. The professor smiled at me and moved on to the next topic. He probably set up the same situation every semester. So, yes, not only does the world often not know what “love” means in a Christian sense, but they actively ridicule it when it’s explained to them.

From Adam and Eve right to the modern day, agape love is the bonds that mankind seeks to break and find their own way. In an earlier post, I wrote that the “bonds” and “cords” that the world tries to break free from in Psalm 2 are the laws of love for God and for our fellow man. Jesus summarized all the commandments of the Bible as: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”, and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[1]

I recently wrote that “the problem with every person individually is that they are unable, no matter how much external pressure is put on them, to treat other individuals the way they should be treated.” People like to ask or demand that others practice agape love, but usually for the benefit of themselves. It is not in our nature to demand it of ourselves first whether or not anyone else reciprocates.

Love Redeemed
People also usually like the idea that every person gets what they deserve – but we are less likely to talk about that for ourselves than for others. The justice of God demands that anyone who refuses – at any time – to love Him and to love their neighbor should get what they deserve. He does not miss anything but is perfect in His justice. Jesus had to live the perfect life of agape love, under the loving guidance of Our Father, not so we won’t have to, but because we can’t. Without Christianity and without love, the world would never be able to overcome the “Love Rejected” stage.

Christianity is not judgement, but the only way of escape from it: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). If man had not rejected love, Christianity wouldn’t be necessary; but also, if Christianity does not restore mankind to agape love, it’s pointless. Jesus, by willingly giving the ultimate sacrifice of Himself, satisfied God’s perfect justice and perfect love simultaneously.

By rising from the grave, He is able to share with us the power of agape love, which governs and redeems the other loves:

Eros – So many of the personal and societal problems in the world are driven by unconstrained eros. In agape, God provides boundaries within which eros benefits, rather than harms, humanity. See an earlier post on Godly Offspring for how God prevails over unconstrained eros even when we fail.
Phileo – Unconstrained phileo, which can become what we call tribalism, is behind a lot of the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other group conflicts in the world. This also is nothing new – God through His Son will redeem us. I wrote about agape overcoming tribalism in an old post about Jesus reaching out to Zacchaeus the tax collector.
Stergo – Families might be expected to be the easiest places to love each other, but they are often where passions run hottest. James 4:1 says “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” Only agape provides what is needed to bridge the divide, a love to govern stergo.

A Christian in our world has a restored relationship with God but is only able to practice agape love imperfectly while awaiting a new body in a new heaven and a new earth.

Love Restored
The Bible does not contain a lot of specifics about the eternal life that Christians inherit and it is often misunderstood. For example, those who think of Christianity as a set of rules that make us “perfect” think they are right to ignore the hope of heaven. C.S. Lewis says sometimes “our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.”[2]

But thinking of heaven as love restored helps understand it better. Elsewhere Lewis reframes heaven as: “When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.”[3] By obedience he means obedience to loving God and man, and in heaven every person’s ability to love will be as the laws of nature, as reliable and predictable as the rising of the sun every morning or the return of leaves to the trees in the spring.

Also, we will not become something entirely other than what we are now, like an angel, but will be transformed and perfected, while retaining our individuality. Pastor Tim Keller explains that “Our future, glorified selves will be continuous with who we are now, but the growth into wisdom, goodness, and power will be infinitely greater.”[4]

This is a future worth having.

How to Have This Love
For those who agree that the agape love we lost is the love we need back, Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life. He offers a world where every individual person uses their individual talents, gifts and creativity in the best interests of others. All you have to do is agree to do the same, redeemed by His sacrifice and empowered by His Spirit to do the will of the Father.

How do we accept this offer?
“…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” – Romans 10:9-10

If you haven’t already, ask Him to be your Lord and Savior.

Nobody is more or less Christian than Jesus makes them. No doctrine or experience can replace a loving, personal relationship with our Maker and Lord, who guides and empowers us to love as He does. If we have not love, we have nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). Fortunately, in Christianity we have His agape love if we will accept it above all other, lesser loves. Christianity is not Christianity, and we are not fully ourselves, without it.

[1] From Matthew 22:37 and 39
[2] Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory (1941). P. 107
[3] Ibid. P. 43
[4] Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God (2016). P. 170

Driving Toward Morning’s 2022 in Books

December 31, 2022April 27, 2023Todd R 3 Comments

Dear fellow travelers,

As 2022 ends, many are posting reflections on the year, including book lists. Figured I’d jump in, even though I am a slow reader, prone to distraction, and have a job that requires multiple hours per day of reading. So, when I see others listing 70+ books read in 2022, I tell myself that 22 books is enough, since the year was 2022.

So, what 22 books did I read this year?

A range of history books:
Clouds of Witnesses by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom
The Residence by Kate Andersen Brower
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey
The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People by Paul Johnson

The first two of these made appearances in the blog, referenced in the Bibliography. Clouds of Witnesses, which could be included in other categories, is an excellent collection of stories about Christians in Asia and Africa, giving a great perspective away from my local, American one. More history posts will be coming from that book. The Residence is a collection of stories from workers in the White House, from cooks and valets, and many other roles. It ranged multiple decades of presidents and their families, with interesting takes on these very real people.

The Devil in the White City is my favorite book by one of my favorite authors, and likely will be covered as the blog’s first book review soon. Erik Larson writes history that reads like a novel and picks amazing stories as topics.

With a family trip to England and Wales on the 2022 calendar, both history and fiction books on this list revolved around the U.K.

A range of fiction books:
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarré
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

It’s only now that I realize all of these books involve England. “Tinker” is one of my dad’s favorite books and I’d put off reading it for a long time but am glad I finally got to it. It’s a fascinating and complicated story about a mole in the British spy network, and I picked up great quotes like “All power corrupts, but some must govern,” and “Learn the facts…then try on the stories like clothes.” “Hound” is one I read as a teenager and picked back up for something quick and light to read, and the other 3 were new to me. This blog began with a Douglas Adams reference, and there will likely be more to come!

Only one non-fiction book:
King’s X: The Oral History by Greg Prato

This ended up featured in two blog posts and tells the story of one of my favorite bands that never quite “made it big,” but gets a ton of respect from other musicians. Part of the problem was that they couldn’t be pigeon-holed as either a “Christian” band, or not.

Plus some Christian commentary and devotionals:
In addition to regular Bible and study Bible reading, in 2022 I read:

4 books by Warren Wiersbe: Be Alive (John 1-12), Be Transformed (John 13-21), Be Wise (1 Corinthians), and Be Encouraged (2 Corinthians).
4 books by C.S. Lewis: That Hideous Strength, The Weight of Glory, The Abolition of Man, and The Great Divorce.
Encouragement: The Key to Caring by Larry Crabb and Dan Allender
Everyday Prayer with the Reformers by Donald McKim
Tapestry: The Book of Revelation by Glenn Parkinson

A fan of C.S. Lewis from childhood, in 2022 I aimed to read several of his books I hadn’t before, which include the last 3 above. I love finding familiar Lewis quotes in their original context, which brings out even more meaning. A few of these ended up in the blog. In 2023, maybe I’ll get to Surprised by Joy, The Four Loves and all of God in the Dock.

I picked up Wiersbe’s entire “Be” series in 2021 as part of a digital subscription and am working through it over time. A long time. I like his overall approach and the books are a great source of thoughtful stories and quotes.

Encouragement and Everyday Prayer both ended up in the blog. The first I had read many years ago and rediscovered ideas in it that I had forgotten the source of. Everyday Prayer was a gift and is a short devotional covering segments of prayers from the Protestant Reformation, with related stories and Bible verses.

Lastly, I just finished Tapestry earlier today. Glenn Parkinson is the retired former pastor of my church, and the book provides a very helpful overview of the book of Revelation, making a great case that John “did not intend to give us a puzzle no one can solve,” but intended to reveal (as in a revelation) a tapestry of images designed to encourage Christian faithfulness and perseverance in the time between Jesus’ first and second comings.

Will I read 23 books in 2023? Who knows…in the meantime, have you read any of these 22? What books did you enjoy in 2022?

The Birth of Narnia and Why Tolkien Hated It – Sunday Share from Harry Lee Poe

October 23, 2022October 26, 2022Todd R Leave a comment

Many of us have loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the rest of the Narnia series of fantasy books by C.S. Lewis for so long we just assume they have always existed and were inevitable. Behind the books, however, is a story of the fight to get them written. The partnership between Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is widely known, but less known is that one of the reasons Lewis had trouble writing Narnia was discouraging objections from his friends. One said that “the children wearing fur coats since it seemed an endorsement of the fur trade and the murder of all the innocent animals needed to make such a coat,” while Tolkien himself criticized the story for not fitting the conventions of the genre.

In the article linked here and below, Harry Lee Poe, a professor at Union University, shares these stories and more about how Lewis persisted in writing and “experienced a renewal of his imaginative power.” Each of us is a marvelous work of a powerful Creator, designed to represent Him in this world. As you read the article, “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). Is there a world of Narnia trying to come out of each of us?

(Estimated reading time 7 minutes)

I discovered this article through fellow blogger Barbara Harper, who posts a weekly list of good reads on Saturday.

https://www.crossway.org/articles/the-birth-of-narnia-and-why-tolkien-hated-it/

What Was the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ Really About? – History for July 21

July 23, 2022January 7, 2023Todd R Leave a comment

Some events in history bring a faint glimmer of memory to many people, but what they remember may not be the most relevant point. One such event was the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” decided on July 21 in 1925. What actually was this trial? Wikipedia’s summary[1] is that “a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held.” The trial descended into theatrics and was covered by national news organizations. Time magazine called the trial a “fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war.” Each side had a famous lawyer seeking publicity: the Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan, who ran for president three times, was the prosecuting attorney, and the agnostic Clarence Darrow defended Scopes.

The immediate result of the trial was that Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay a small fine, but years later, that’s not what people remember. For some, the lesson of the Scopes trial is simple: “science good; religious fundamentalism bad.” Another group of people might think the lesson was: “religious fundamentalism good; science bad.” But did the case conclude either of these things? It didn’t, so what’s the real issue?

The Culture Behind the Scopes Trial
In the background issues were simmering which still linger today – whether religion should have a voice in how science is used and taught. Tim Keller notes that “Few people remember…that the textbook Scopes used, Civic Biology by George Hunter, taught not only evolution but also argued that science dictated we should sterilize or even kill those classes of people who weakened the human gene pool by spreading ‘disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country.’ This was typical of scientific textbooks of the time.”[2] Wikipedia notes that “Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.” So, the trial did not hinge on Scopes’ teaching, this textbook, or even eugenics, but the subject of eugenics sheds some light on how over-simplified the take-away of “science good; religious fundamentalism bad” really is.

Geneticist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, popularized the term “eugenics” from the Greek, meaning “good birth,” to describe ways humans could use evolutionary science to improve their condition. He usually left unspoken that he meant not specific humans, but some abstract sense of humans in aggregate, and also that he meant to improve the condition of those humans in charge, or those humans with a voice among the humans in charge. These beliefs were not rare, but quite mainstream. Joseph Loconte, writing of the culture J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis lived in[3], notes: “In Britain, the Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 to take up the cause. By 1913, the American Genetic Association was established in the United States to promote the doctrines of racial purity.” The United States was actually the first country where compulsory sterilization was legalized, and some practices implemented by Nazi Germany were lifted right out of laws used by U.S. States. U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “Three generations of imbeciles is enough” in defense of Virginia’s sterilization law.

The church was not entirely immune from the eugenics movement either. According to Loconte, “Ministers in the Church of England held a Church Congress in 1910 in Cambridge, inviting several members of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded to participate.” Also, “By the 1920s, hundreds of American churches participated in a national eugenics sermon contest. As the Rev. Kenneth McArthur, a winner from Sterling, Massachusetts, put it in his sermon: ‘If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.’”

This background to the Scopes Trial, often simplified to a “science” vs “fundamentalism” debate, makes us ask: which science and which fundamentalism? Was eugenics, for a moment, part of “religious fundamentalism” for some of the church? And is perfecting society on earth truly a fundamental Christian belief? With a rule of thumb of “science good; religious fundamentalism bad,” or the opposite, what do you do if a scientific idea becomes also central to religious belief?

Also, if you take away science and religion from the equation altogether, which is better: “all humans have dignity and are worthy of care and love” or “some people deserve to be neutered like an ordinary animal”? If science is the only source of our “fundamentalism,” where do we turn when it insists on destruction for the less favored? Tim Keller argues that “Secular, scientific reason is a great good, but if taken as the sole basis for human life, it will be discovered that there are too many things we need that it is missing.” What is missing is a meaningful reason to love your neighbor, regardless of their scientific knowledge, religious belief, disability, economic impact, level of intelligence, or any other characteristic.

It’s Not (Entirely) a Fantasy
Loconte says that although Tolkien and Lewis wrote of fantasy worlds populated not only by men, but also by elves, dwarves, orcs, and many other races, the topics of eugenics and other Progressive Era ideas served as background. In Tolkien’s epic The Lord of The Rings, the solution to conflict between the races was not for one race to rule the others, or (even worse) to eliminate them. Instead, the answer is to utterly destroy the Ring of Power, representing the desire of any tribe to use power to rule others “for their own good,” as some say. While Tolkien insists his story is not a direct allegory, he may have been thinking of the centuries of tribal conflict between the English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh. Or the conflict between any group of conquerors and the conquered. By using fictional races, Tolkien was arguing that this lesson applies to everyone, in all places and at all times.

Therefore, when scientific fundamentalism says it’s OK not to love some people, Christians need to respond without exception that every person is a creation of God with innate dignity and should be loved as Christ loved us. However, as shown on the cross, power is not the answer. As Jesus told his disciples in Mark 10:42-45 – “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

God does not expect us to understand every issue of history, or even in our daily news feed, which is increasingly a “fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war,” but when we all meet our Lord in heaven, He will say “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” – Matthew 25:40

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
[2] Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God (2016). This post draws from pages 12-13.
[3] Loconte, Joseph. A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918 (2015). This post draws on pages 15-19.

Will Green Be Greener in Paradise?

July 18, 2022August 5, 2022Todd R 3 Comments

Psalm 98:7 declares: “Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it!” In Romans 8:19 Paul adds that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”

Pastor James Montgomery Boice connects these ideas and says, “The world will one day be renewed.” Nature already shows God’s glory, but it also, like mankind, is not yet as it shall be. Boice adds: “I think of the way C.S. Lewis developed this idea in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the first section of that book, when Narnia was under the power of the wicked Witch of the North, the land was in a state of perpetual winter. Spring never came. But when Aslan rose from the dead, the ice began to melt, flowers bloomed, and the trees turned green.”[1] Creation shares the hope of mankind – regeneration in a future paradise at the coming of its Lord!

Even now, we get an occasional glimpse of nature that’s somehow better than what we’re used to, and perhaps it is a glimpse of the paradise beyond the renewal of all things. We were recently in Wales, on Mount Snowdon and a nearby trail in Llanberis, and below are some pictures from that day. Some of these show the many brilliant shades of green, which seemed more glorious than the greens near our home in the U.S. We don’t often see rocks interact with the greenery like this here.

So, will paradise be even greener than this? Will it seem like a perpetual winter has finally lifted? I’m eagerly waiting to find out someday. In the meantime, enjoy these: