I another post, I offered to provide some helpful words on Agape from William Barclay. I thought it best to provide his words as a separate post, since they are so helpful and I did not want them to get lost somewhere in the middle of another post. The following are from William Barclay:
AGAPE AND AGAPAN: THE GREATEST OF THE VIRTUES
In English we have only one word to express all kinds of love; Greek has no fewer than four. …
1. The noun eros and the verb eran are mainly used for love between the sexes. They can be used for such things as the passion of ambition and the intensity of patriotism; but characteristically they are the words for physical love. Gregory Nazianzen defined eros as 'the hot and unendurable desire'. …
2. The noun storge and the verb stergein have specially to do with family affection. They can be used for the love of a people for their ruler, or for the love of a nation or household for their tutelary god; but their regular use is to describe the love of parents for children and children for parents. …
3. The commonest words for love in Greek are the noun philia and the verb philein. There is a lovely warmth about these words. They mean to look on someone with affectionate regard. They can be used for the love of friendship and for the love of husband and of wife. Philein is best translated to cherish: it includes physical love, but it includes much else beside. It can sometimes even mean to kiss. These words have in them all the warmth of real affection and real love. …
4. By far the commonest NT words for love are the noun agape and the verb agapan. …
We must ask why Christian language abandoned the other Greek words for love and concentrated on agape and philein. It is true to say that all the other words had acquired certain flavours which made them unsuitable.
Eros had quite definite associations with the lower side of love; it had much more to do with passion than with love. Storge was very definitely tied up with family affection; it never had in it the width that the conception of Christian love demands.
Philia was a lovely word, but it was definitely a word of warmth and closeness and affection; it could only properly be used of the near and the dear, and Christianity needed a much more inclusive word than that. Christian thought fastened on this word agape because it was the only word capable of being filled with the content which was required.
The great reason why Christian thought fastened on agape is that agape demands the exercise of the whole man. Christian love must not only extend to our nearest and our dearest, our kith and kin, our friends and those who love us; Christian love must extend to the Christian fellowship, to the neighbour, to the enemy, to all the world. …
We speak about falling in love. That kind of love is not an achievement; it is something which happens to us and which we cannot help. There is no particular virtue in falling in love. It is something with which we have little or nothing consciously to do; it simply happens. But agape is far more than that.
Agape has to do with the mind: it is not simply an emotion which rises unbidden in our hearts; it is a principle by which we deliberately live. Agape has supremely to do with the will. It is a conquest, a victory, and achievement. No one ever naturally loved his enemies. To love one's enemies is a conquest of all our natural inclinations and emotions.
This agape, this Christian love, is not merely an emotional experience which comes to us unbidden and unsought; it is a deliberate principle of the mind, and a deliberate conquest and achievement of the will. It is in fact the power to love the unlovable, to love people whom we do not like. Christianity does not ask us to love our enemies and to love men at large in the same way as we love our nearest and our dearest and those who are closest to us; that would be at one and the same time impossible and wrong. But it does demand that we should have at all times a certain attitude of the mind and a certain direction of the will towards all men, no matter who they are.
What then is the meaning of this agape? The supreme passage for the interpretation of the meaning of agape is Matt. 5.43-48. We are there bidden to love our enemies. Why? In order that we should be like God. And what is the typical action of God that is cited? God sends his rain on the just and the unjust and on the evil and the good. That is to say - no matter what a man is like, God seeks nothing but his highest good.
Let a man be a saint or let a man be a sinner, God's only desire is for that man's highest good. Now, that is what agape is. Agape is the spirit which says: ‘No matter what any man does to me, I will never seek to do harm to him; I will never set out for revenge; I will always seek nothing but his highest good.' That is to say, Christian love, agape, is unconquerable benevolence, invincible good will. It is not simply a wave of emotion; it is a deliberate conviction of the mind issuing in a deliberate policy of the life; it is a deliberate achievement and conquest and victory of the will. It takes all of a man to achieve Christian love; it takes not only his heart: it takes his mind and his will as well.
If that is so, two things are to be noted.
(i) Human agape, our love towards our fellow men, is bound to be a product of the Spirit. The NT is quite clear about that (Gal. 5.22; Rom. 15.30; Col. 1.8). Christian agape is unnatural in the sense that it is not possible for the natural man. …
Christian agape is impossible for anyone except a Christian man. No man can perform the Christian ethic until he becomes a Christian. He may see quite clearly the desirability of the Christian ethic; he may see that it is the solution to the world's problems; mentally he may accept it; practically he cannot live it, until Christ lives in him.
(ii) When we understand what agape means, it amply meets the objection that a society based in this love would be a paradise for criminals, and that it means simply letting the evil-doer have his own way. If we seek nothing but a man's highest good, we may well have to resist a man; we may well have to punish him; we may well have to do the hardest things to him - for the good of his soul.
But the fact remains that whatever we do to that man will never be purely vindictive; it will never even be merely retributory; it will always be done in that forgiving love which seeks, not the man’s punishment, and still less the man’s annihilation, but always his highest good.
(“New Testament Words” by William Barclay, pages 17 - 23. SCM Press Ltd, 1964)
Agape
by Doug Mason 4 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
Doug Mason
-
onacruse
So is agape an intrinsic aspect of "normal" humans?
Barclay suggests otherwise, as if agape cannot be developed outside the framework of Christianity.
If he is correct, then what does the Biblical phrase "made in the image of God" mean?
-
Sad emo
Christian agape is impossible for anyone except a Christian man. No man can perform the Christian ethic until he becomes a Christian. He may see quite clearly the desirability of the Christian ethic; he may see that it is the solution to the world's problems; mentally he may accept it; practically he cannot live it, until Christ lives in him.
I kind of agree and disagree with this statement!
Yes, Christian agape is unique to Christians in that there are specific 'demands' upon the Christian life.
If however he is saying that the practice of agape is exclusive to Christians, then I disagree strongly. There are plenty of people of other faiths and none who over the centuries have shown this complete sacrificial love (even Jesus was a Jew not a Christian!!!)
-
Doug Mason
I am not here to defend the way in which Barclay applied his Christianity. Remember that he was a product of his time, in which Christians were very insular. I hope that today we have a much broader view of God. This does not diminish the worth of his contributions, such as in word studies and in Biblical commentaries.
God is the great Judge and is quite capable of offering salvation to Jews (my ancestry), Christians (my upbringing), Arabs, Muslims, and so on.
It is my understanding (as per Brash Bonsall) that when man is said to be "in the image of God" it means God and Man are both persons, thus having Thought, Feeling, Will and Conscience. (It is on those criteria that Trinitarians determine the "holy spirit" is a Person.)
It seems to me that if Agape were a natural attribute of human nature, there would have been no need for Jesus' greatest teachings about love to God and love to man.
I am glad there is still much room to think, ponder and grow.
Doug -
Narkissos
As one of my exegesis professors used to repeat, theology is in the texts, not in the dictionary.
In the Septuagint agapè/agapaô is just the default equivalent for the Hebrew root 'hb, which is about as unspecific as the English verb "to love". In 2 Samuel 13, for instance, it describes the "love" of Amnon for his half-sister Tamar, which led to incestuous rape.
What makes the NT references to agapè particular is not the choice of the word but the sentences, such as "love your enemies" or "love one another" (which are almost opposite btw). It has long been noticed that agapaô and philein are used interchangeably in John, for instance (11:3,5; compare the farfetched nuances which many, including the WT, read into 21:15ff).