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.
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 the Morning Sun 