Behind the Post: Biblical Love
Okay, so I do hereby swear and promise (and I’ve got my right hand on a Bible, honest) that I will not repost everything I’ve posted somewhere else here. (Maybe once in a while but, I swear, not always.)
At the same time, I’ve had folks ask – by email and in person – for more info on particular posts. Sometimes the request really is just for more information, but often the questioner is more interested in where the idea came from or where you can learn more about the subject. So from time to time I’ll offer a “Behind the Post” look at what was going on behind a particular piece that’s recently been published.
First up, then, is a post that just went up yesterday on the Huffington Post titled “What Does the Bible Really Say About Love?” True confessions – this wasn’t my idea. This came as a request from the editor of the HuffPo Religion section, Paul Raushenbush, looking for a way to tie Valentine’s Day to religion and the Bible. The funny thing is, while Paul began his email by saying, “I know this is pretty basic for you, but….”, I actually found it a very challenging assignment. Because, as it turns out, both Hebrew and Greek have a number of different words that are regularly (but not always – see, it’s tricky) translated as “love.” And while I’d grown up hearing about the 3-fold categorization of eros, phileo, and agape, it turns out this distinction is no longer in vogue. And for good reason, it just doesn’t do the biblical notion (make that plural – notions!) of love justice. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t treat the dozen or so words in Hebrew and three or four more in Greek. So what are you supposed to do? The classic three-fold designations may not be perfect, but they at least give a way to think about the diversity of the biblical witness on love.
And that was the interesting thing I learned from this assignment. Sometimes in writing – and in any creative process – inadequate is better than nothing. Maybe it’s a letter you want to write to an estranged family member of friend and you want it to be perfect. Except it won’t, so write it anyway – inadequate is sometimes better than nothing. Or maybe it’s the opening of your sermon and you can’t find just the right way to get started. Start anyway, as inadequate is better than nothing.
So I went with three kinds of love. Not perfect, but hopefully a reasonable place to start to at least get a sense of the wide-ranging dimensions of “love” in the biblical witness. And by the time I was done writing, I came to appreciate that if the biblical treatment of love was complicated and defied categorization, maybe that made perfect sense given just how mysterious, vital, and complicated this mix of human emotions was in our own lives and experience.
If you want to read more, the two classic works on the subject are C.S. Lewis’ Four Kinds of Love and Anders Nygren’s Eros and Agape.
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