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?
Two semantic ranges
Now, dear reader, you might think that, to make my case, I will immediately reach for the ‘semantic range’ of the two words (their ranges of meaning), in English and Greek, and show how different they are. This expectation was set up nearly 100 years ago by Anders Nygren’s influential Agape and Eros.
Nygren was part of the so-called Lundensian School of Theology, which included Ragnar Bring and Gustaf Aulén—the author of the hugely important Christus Victor, which explored the true nature of New Testament ideas of atonement. Nygren’s study (first published in the 1930s) set up agapē as a distinctively Christian, self-giving love, contrasted with acquisitive erōs. (More people will be familiar with C S Lewis’ The Four Loves, though Lewis argues on different grounds, and does not appear to draw on Nygren.)
James Barr (of The Semantics of Biblical Language fame) offered a specific critique of the ‘word-concept fallacy’ which challenged this. (In Semantics, Barr appeared to be bringing critical thinking to bear against naive, usually evangelical, pious readings of Scripture—but the reality is that all evangelicals, including me, now make use of his approach.) A single word does not carry a theology on its own back, and the NT usage does not support Nygren’s lexical claims. It is in fact rather surprising just how ordinary agapaō is.
Consider some examples. Demas deserts Paul because he ‘loved this present age’ (agapaō 2 Tim 4:10). The Pharisees ‘love’ the best seats in the synagogue (agapaō Luke 11:43). People ‘loved the darkness rather than the light’ (agapaō John 3:19). None of these is selfless or divine. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the OT, the verb is used for romantic and even sexual attachment. Isaac loves Rebekah (Heb ’ahav Gr agapaō Gen 24:67), Jacob loves Rachel (Gen 29:18, 30), and Amnon ‘loves’ Tamar before he rapes her (Heb ’ahav Gr agapaō 2 Sam 13:1, 15). And in John’s Gospel agapaō and phileō appear to alternate with little difference of meaning: the Father ‘loves’ the Son with agapaō in John 3:35 and with phileō in 5:20.
So the Greek verb could cover preference, attachment, desire and enjoyment, just as English ‘love’ does. English speakers love their dogs, love chocolate and love watching television. Greek speakers likewise ‘loved’ (philousin) to pray on street corners (Matt 6:5). At the level of raw dictionary range, the two words, in English and Greek, look surprisingly similar.
What they share at the core is real. Both denote a positive orientation of one person toward another person or thing, one that values it and seeks it. Both can describe an inner disposition and the actions that flow from it. Both apply to divine and human relationships, to family, friends and community.
If the dictionary entries are so similar, why does the gap feel so wide? Because meaning is not just a list of possible senses. Every word has a centre of gravity, a prototypical sense that comes to mind first when the word is used without qualification. The decisive differences lie there, and in the theological frame the biblical writers placed around the word.
Where they part company
The centre of gravity. In everyday English, the lighter senses of ‘love’ are so frequent that they shape contemporary default readings. When we hear ‘love’ in a theological sentence, the most familiar meaning arrives first, and it is a pleasant feeling of attachment. Between adults, unqualified ‘love’ leans toward the romantic, and the expression ‘make love’ gives it an explicitly sexual dimension (much more so than in the past, when it had a sense of ‘courting’).
Classical Greek kept erōs for that, and the NT avoids the word group altogether. So when we read ‘love one another’, we hear something warmer and softer, and more private and more sexual, than a first-century reader would have heard.
Feeling or allegiance. Modern ‘love’ is first of all an emotion, and largely an involuntary one. We ‘fall’ into it; it can fade; it is authenticated by how it feels. Biblical love, shaped by Hebrew ʾahăbâ, is weighted toward loyalty and commitment. William Moran showed long ago that ‘love’ in Deuteronomy belongs with the language of ancient Near Eastern treaties. ‘Love the LORD your God’ (Deut 6:5) sits alongside fearing him, serving him and keeping his commandments.
That is why love can be commanded at all, including love of enemies. No one can command a feeling, but you can command allegiance and conduct.
Love as choice. ‘I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated’ (Mal 1:2–3; Rom 9:13) sounds harsh to modern ears. But in Deuteronomy 7:7–8, love is the explanation for God’s choosing of Israel.
It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
To love is to elect. Luke 14:26’s demand to ‘hate’ father and mother is matched in Matt 10:37 by loving them ‘more’ than Jesus, which shows the same comparative idiom. English has almost entirely lost this sense of love as preferential choice, and it goes along with our cultural incomprehension of arranged marriage.
Love and obedience. ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’ (John 14:15; see also 1 John 5:3). If love is fundamentally a feeling, this is a non sequitur. If love is loyalty, it is self-evident. Yet in contemporary culture love is often set against rules and obligation, as if commands were the enemy of love rather than its expression.
Love and indulgence. This is the sharpest divergence of all. Modern English ‘love’ increasingly means giving the other what they want: affirming their choices, removing friction, making no demands. Think of the doting, over-indulgent parent, or the plea ‘if you really loved me, you’d let me…’ This is why, in all sorts of areas of morality and ethics, to place limits on actions or claims to identity is perceived as being ‘unloving’.
Biblical love seeks the other’s good, which may run directly against what they want. It was Thomas Aquinas who said that love is velle bonum alicui—to will or desire the good of another person (Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae, Question 26, Article 4, drawing on Aristotle).
So ‘the Lord disciplines the one he loves’ (Heb 12:6), and the risen Jesus says ‘those whom I love I reprove and discipline’ (Rev 3:19). Love ‘does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth’ (1 Cor 13:6). In current English, love and judgement are treated as opposites—‘how unloving to be judgemental!’ In the biblical frame, love is what makes judgement necessary—hence John 3.16 (‘God so loved…’) is quickly followed by John 3:19 (‘people loved darkness instead of light…’) both using the verb agapaō!
Private or communal. Finally, in English ‘love’ is largely interior and individual, and often oriented towards the lover’s own fulfilment. In Paul, love is the practice that builds the community (1 Cor 8:1). Its description in 1 Cor 13 consists almost entirely of verbs—it is patient, kind, does not insist on its own way, bears all things. In Jude 12 agapē even names the shared meal of the church.
For all these reasons, the phrase ‘Love is love’ because not merely a meaningless tautology (in which case it would be useless but harmless), but a seriously misleading claim about both clarity of meaning and its transfer from one culture and context to another.
Love defined by a basin and a towel
If the lexicon alone cannot give us the meaning of biblical love, where does it come from? The New Testament’s answer is clear: from what Jesus did.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son (1 John 4:10).
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers (1 John 3:16).
The content of the word is supplied not by a dictionary but by a narrative.
Nowhere is this clearer than in John 13. The footwashing is not an illustration added to a pre-existing concept of love. It is the definition. The scene opens with ‘having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them eis telos‘ (13:1). That means both ‘to the uttermost’ and ‘to the end’, and it points forward to the cross. Jesus then takes the slave’s place, kneels, and washes his disciples’ feet. Shortly afterwards comes the new commandment: ‘Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another’ (John 13:34). The standard is not a feeling to be matched but an action to be copied.
Three things follow. First, this love involves status reversal. Footwashing was a menial task, which is precisely why Peter objects. Love takes the lowest place for the other’s benefit: ‘the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve’ (Mark 10:45; compare Phil 2:5–8).
Secondly, this love is not indulgence. Jesus overrides Peter’s protest: ‘If I do not wash you, you have no share with me’ (13:8). Serving love does not simply give people what they ask for.
Third, love takes the form of service. Paul makes the connection explicit: ‘through love serve one another’ (Gal 5:13), where the verb douleuete means to act as a slave. Christian freedom is not abolished but redirected, into enslavement to the neighbour’s good.
Is there a better English word? Each candidate recovers one dimension and loses another. ‘Charity’, the KJV’s choice in 1 Cor 13 (via the Vulgate’s caritas), has shrunk to almsgiving and condescension. ‘Loyalty’ or ‘faithfulness’ captures the covenantal sense but sounds cool and contractual. ‘Devotion’ holds commitment and warmth together but faces inward or upward. ‘Goodwill’ and ‘benevolence’ seek the other’s good but can cost nothing. ‘Care’ is perhaps closest in everyday speech, but has been professionalised. Coverdale’s coinage ‘loving-kindness’ for Hebrew ḥesed is a reminder that translators have sometimes needed to invent words because none existed.
Perhaps the best solution is not to abolish the word ‘love’ (which was my first instinct, as with the word ‘church’ which we should never use in the New Testament!), but to qualify it (‘self-giving love’, ‘costly love’) and to define it by example, as John does. (There is a parallel here with calling God ‘a good father’ to prevent misunderstanding by those whose experience of fatherhood has been negative).
And if we need a partner word to keep ‘love’ from drifting back into sentiment, the best candidate is ‘service’. I therefore nowadays find myself asking not ‘How can I love this person, these people?’ which immediately sounds sentimental, but ‘How can I serve them?’
Conclusion
The gap between English ‘love’ and biblical agapē is not mainly a matter of dictionary range. On paper, the two words cover much the same ground. The difference lies in where each word’s centre of gravity sits. Contemporary English has drifted toward feeling, pleasure, romance and indulgence, and has almost entirely lost love as covenant loyalty, as choice, and as obedience to teaching. The New Testament anchors love in the action of Christ—a love that commits, chooses, corrects, and kneels to serve.
That has consequences. When the Church appeals to ‘love’ as the decisive argument, it is worth asking which love is meant. Is it the love that affirms whatever the other desires? Or is it the love that takes up a towel, washes feet, and will not let the beloved go without being made clean? Only the second is the love Jesus commands us to imitate. Recovering it will mean doing what John does: not defining love in the abstract, but pointing to the one who ‘loved his own to the end’.
PS If you want to know about the 1,000-year history of the term ‘wax nose’ there is a great account here. If, on the other hand, you do an internet search for ‘wax nose’ you will find something else altogether!
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