One of the first religious books I remember reading was CS Lewis' The Four Loves. Lewis describes four kinds of love based on four Greek words for love--Sturge, Eros, Phileos, and Agape.
Here they are in grossly oversimplified terms.
Sturge is a passing enjoyment, such as "I love baseball" or "I love chocolate."
Eros, is a sensual, consuming passion, obsession, or addiction.
Phleos is friendship love, the love in commonly shared relationship or experiences.
Then there is agape love. This divine love is only possible fully through Divine intervention. It is a sacrificial love, as Christ loved on the cross. It is not a love because of liking anything about a person, but liking in spite of everything unlikeable about a person. This love is the blessed, chaste love of a true saint.
When I read that book, I wanted to be a true saint. (I still do, though I have never achieved it.) This was the love I longed to have--a love that does not depend about liking anything about people, but only depends on the love God has for poor lost sinners such as ourselves.
Agape love is not so much an act of he heart as of the will. It is, as Finney put it, a "decision to seek the highest good of another." I can decide to love my enemy, and seek his highest good without having to like him. Agape love is sacrificial, giving ourselves to others.
That was my understanding in my days of youthful idealism.
Since I have grown older, though, I have come to realize that agape love, though it may be the highest, is not the only kind of love God wants us to have for others. Agape allows us to love people we do not like. But it does not settle the issue of whether or how we should also like them.
We need to be careful about "sloppy agape." That is a general and ideal love, but not personal and specific. It is not enough tolerate the lost, but to welcome them. We may claim we love a person in Jesus, while detesting everything about them. This kind of love is not love at all, but paternalism and condescension--a misuse of the doctrine of Christian charity.
A purely ideal concept of love lacks both passion and staying power. We may be able to love those we do not like, but we cannot keep it up for long. Sooner or later, no matter how pious we may act, our love needs to grow into real, honest affection or it will not last.
Think about broccoli for a moment. Many people hate broccoli. (Not me, I actually like it.) Those who hate broccoli may be determined to eat healthy, and they know broccoli is good for them, so they force it down their throats. But how long can they keep doing this without either developing a taste for it, or dropping it from their menus?
Or take marriage. A person may marry another as a result of prearranged marriage or out of a sense of duty. But unless that person develops a geniune liking for their spouse, that marriage will be unsatisfying for both. This is not to suggest that people should divorce if they do not feel love, but rather that we find something likeable about our spouses if we do not already have it. If ideal love does not turn into honest affection, then that marriage is doomed.
We can suppress our feelings, but it will wear us out in the end. No one can work at something they do not like to do forever without respite. We will not stay with people we honestly do not care for, without making them and us miserable. At some time, our feelings will conquer us.
This idea of liking as well as loving is absolutely essential for the spreading of the Gospel. For hundreds of years we have been preaching evangelism. Also for hundreds of years, the majority of Christians have simply ignored the call. They love the world, in a spiritual sense, and do not want to see others go to hell. But they do not like the world. Many Christians find the current age so abhorent that they want nothing to do with it. They move into fortresses of their own making, isolating themselves from "sinners" so they will not be contaminated by the things of the world, whether or not that world has anything to do with the gospel itself. We make excuses for hating the world around us, condemning aspects of music, dress and language that do not fit our cultural, non-spiritual norms. We do this to further emphasize our differences with the culture around us. We do this for the same reason teenagers of my generation wore their hair long or dressed in miniskirts--because we wanted to be different from our parents' generation. It's not that we didn't love our parents and grandparents. We just didn't like them, or anything about them. As we grew up, we learned better, when our children did the same to us.
John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world." God does not just love the world, he honestly likes it. God may not like what the world does or what it believes, but God, like the parent of a rebellious teenager, sees something of Himself in them. He experiences genuine affection for us, as well as loving us in an esoteric sense.
Many Christians cannot grasp this. That is because many of us have an "all or nothing" mentality regarding our likes and dislikes. If we do not like a man's politics or religious opinions, we drop him in a bin in our mind that is labeled "Don't like." If we agree with a person, we drop him in the "like" bin. I don't believe God thinks this way. He recognizes the fact that there is very little difference between those we like and don't like. We have the same DNA. We were created in God's image. We are affected by the same sinful nature. There are actions, ideas, and attitudes which we should not like, that's true. But it up to God to decide who is or is not condemned in their sin. Even in the worst of us, there is something to like and admire.
Phileos love, that is friendship love, is built on commonalities. Our common interest, passions, and failures make us far more like each other than different.
We share similar interests. Among men, it may be more effective evangelism goes on at the lake or on the golf course than in the church. Christians who golf with non-Christians forge a friendship which provides a bridge for the Gospel to get to their hearts. Those places where we share neutral activities with others--the gym, the mall, or the marketplace, become those places where we come to like unbelievers, which leads to loving them. Some Christians are more afraid of unbelievers affecting them than they are excited about affecting unbelievers themselves. We share the same passions. Not long ago, I was asked to hold a funeral for a relative of someone in my church who had been a lesbian. The grief of her "significant other" was no less real than our grief for a spouse. Pain is pain no matter who has it. A sensitive, caring believer will recognize the pain in others, whether or not that pain is theologically justified. Jesus wept over Lazarus, even though He was about to raise him for the dead. He did not chide Mary and Martha for their lack of faith. Our own pains enable us to understand the pains of others.
We also share the same sins. We once lived in the same apartment building with an unmarried couple who were addicted to drugs. We got to know them and talked to them about their problem, even though we never used drugs. But I found that my own struggles with food were not that different in form from their struggles with drugs. It differed only in consequence and intensity.
We believers are comfortable with the fact that we are sinners. We just don't like to admit we have sinned, or have anything in common with those we consider to be really bad sinners. Our sins are small, but their sins are big. We regard ourselves as sinners in a general, esoteric sense, but do not like to admit to any particular sin. Yet it is our admission of our fallenness and failures which helps the unbeliever believe that God means it when he says "I forgive." It is our failure, not our successes that give us the ability to befriend the lost. We were lost, and now are found. We still sin, but we still find grace.
God doesn't just love the world. He likes it. He enjoys the enjoyable things about it, even though he hates the things that are broken. If we follow in His footsteps, then we ought to do the same.
Here they are in grossly oversimplified terms.
Sturge is a passing enjoyment, such as "I love baseball" or "I love chocolate."
Eros, is a sensual, consuming passion, obsession, or addiction.
Phleos is friendship love, the love in commonly shared relationship or experiences.
Then there is agape love. This divine love is only possible fully through Divine intervention. It is a sacrificial love, as Christ loved on the cross. It is not a love because of liking anything about a person, but liking in spite of everything unlikeable about a person. This love is the blessed, chaste love of a true saint.
When I read that book, I wanted to be a true saint. (I still do, though I have never achieved it.) This was the love I longed to have--a love that does not depend about liking anything about people, but only depends on the love God has for poor lost sinners such as ourselves.
Agape love is not so much an act of he heart as of the will. It is, as Finney put it, a "decision to seek the highest good of another." I can decide to love my enemy, and seek his highest good without having to like him. Agape love is sacrificial, giving ourselves to others.
That was my understanding in my days of youthful idealism.
Since I have grown older, though, I have come to realize that agape love, though it may be the highest, is not the only kind of love God wants us to have for others. Agape allows us to love people we do not like. But it does not settle the issue of whether or how we should also like them.
We need to be careful about "sloppy agape." That is a general and ideal love, but not personal and specific. It is not enough tolerate the lost, but to welcome them. We may claim we love a person in Jesus, while detesting everything about them. This kind of love is not love at all, but paternalism and condescension--a misuse of the doctrine of Christian charity.
A purely ideal concept of love lacks both passion and staying power. We may be able to love those we do not like, but we cannot keep it up for long. Sooner or later, no matter how pious we may act, our love needs to grow into real, honest affection or it will not last.
Think about broccoli for a moment. Many people hate broccoli. (Not me, I actually like it.) Those who hate broccoli may be determined to eat healthy, and they know broccoli is good for them, so they force it down their throats. But how long can they keep doing this without either developing a taste for it, or dropping it from their menus?
Or take marriage. A person may marry another as a result of prearranged marriage or out of a sense of duty. But unless that person develops a geniune liking for their spouse, that marriage will be unsatisfying for both. This is not to suggest that people should divorce if they do not feel love, but rather that we find something likeable about our spouses if we do not already have it. If ideal love does not turn into honest affection, then that marriage is doomed.
We can suppress our feelings, but it will wear us out in the end. No one can work at something they do not like to do forever without respite. We will not stay with people we honestly do not care for, without making them and us miserable. At some time, our feelings will conquer us.
This idea of liking as well as loving is absolutely essential for the spreading of the Gospel. For hundreds of years we have been preaching evangelism. Also for hundreds of years, the majority of Christians have simply ignored the call. They love the world, in a spiritual sense, and do not want to see others go to hell. But they do not like the world. Many Christians find the current age so abhorent that they want nothing to do with it. They move into fortresses of their own making, isolating themselves from "sinners" so they will not be contaminated by the things of the world, whether or not that world has anything to do with the gospel itself. We make excuses for hating the world around us, condemning aspects of music, dress and language that do not fit our cultural, non-spiritual norms. We do this to further emphasize our differences with the culture around us. We do this for the same reason teenagers of my generation wore their hair long or dressed in miniskirts--because we wanted to be different from our parents' generation. It's not that we didn't love our parents and grandparents. We just didn't like them, or anything about them. As we grew up, we learned better, when our children did the same to us.
John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world." God does not just love the world, he honestly likes it. God may not like what the world does or what it believes, but God, like the parent of a rebellious teenager, sees something of Himself in them. He experiences genuine affection for us, as well as loving us in an esoteric sense.
Many Christians cannot grasp this. That is because many of us have an "all or nothing" mentality regarding our likes and dislikes. If we do not like a man's politics or religious opinions, we drop him in a bin in our mind that is labeled "Don't like." If we agree with a person, we drop him in the "like" bin. I don't believe God thinks this way. He recognizes the fact that there is very little difference between those we like and don't like. We have the same DNA. We were created in God's image. We are affected by the same sinful nature. There are actions, ideas, and attitudes which we should not like, that's true. But it up to God to decide who is or is not condemned in their sin. Even in the worst of us, there is something to like and admire.
Phileos love, that is friendship love, is built on commonalities. Our common interest, passions, and failures make us far more like each other than different.
We share similar interests. Among men, it may be more effective evangelism goes on at the lake or on the golf course than in the church. Christians who golf with non-Christians forge a friendship which provides a bridge for the Gospel to get to their hearts. Those places where we share neutral activities with others--the gym, the mall, or the marketplace, become those places where we come to like unbelievers, which leads to loving them. Some Christians are more afraid of unbelievers affecting them than they are excited about affecting unbelievers themselves. We share the same passions. Not long ago, I was asked to hold a funeral for a relative of someone in my church who had been a lesbian. The grief of her "significant other" was no less real than our grief for a spouse. Pain is pain no matter who has it. A sensitive, caring believer will recognize the pain in others, whether or not that pain is theologically justified. Jesus wept over Lazarus, even though He was about to raise him for the dead. He did not chide Mary and Martha for their lack of faith. Our own pains enable us to understand the pains of others.
We also share the same sins. We once lived in the same apartment building with an unmarried couple who were addicted to drugs. We got to know them and talked to them about their problem, even though we never used drugs. But I found that my own struggles with food were not that different in form from their struggles with drugs. It differed only in consequence and intensity.
We believers are comfortable with the fact that we are sinners. We just don't like to admit we have sinned, or have anything in common with those we consider to be really bad sinners. Our sins are small, but their sins are big. We regard ourselves as sinners in a general, esoteric sense, but do not like to admit to any particular sin. Yet it is our admission of our fallenness and failures which helps the unbeliever believe that God means it when he says "I forgive." It is our failure, not our successes that give us the ability to befriend the lost. We were lost, and now are found. We still sin, but we still find grace.
God doesn't just love the world. He likes it. He enjoys the enjoyable things about it, even though he hates the things that are broken. If we follow in His footsteps, then we ought to do the same.
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