Issue 9 - Baby Don't Hurt Me
Biblical Understanding
Twentieth century German philosopher Nestor Alexander Haddaway famously posed the question “What is love?”
This is actually a valid linguistic question given that we use the same word to describe our enjoyment of pizza as we do to describe our affection for our family or God’s devotion to us. Mama Bear Apologetics recently had a podcast episode about four different words for love in the Greek of the New Testament era. They note that these are important distinctions, especially for young children, given that it is easy to confuse the types - particularly in our society which tries to sexualize everything. Specifically, they caution that young girls with strong feelings for female friends may come to believe they are actually lesbians, and young boys may flee from healthy male friendship, because they believe strong feelings for another guy is gay.
The episode lays out four different types of love:
Agape - Unconditional, self-sacrificial love. It is the love of God that we see through the cross of Jesus. This wasn’t mentioned in the episode, but this is also the word for love used in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13 - agape is patient, agape is kind, and agape will remain with faith and hope when God brings everything to completion.
Storge - Familial love. Why won’t you let classmates pick on your brother even as you pick on him? Why do you tolerate things from your siblings you’d never tolerate from other acquaintances? Because of storge. This word is never used in the Bible, but the lack of this type of love is mentioned in Romans and 2 Timothy where it is translated as “heartless.”
Phileo - The love we have for friends, especially close friends. Used in the New Testament to describe Jesus’ love for Lazarus and between the disciples and Jesus.
Eros - Physical love or sexual desire. This is the type of love we celebrate on Valentine’s Day and associate with “falling in love” with somebody. Apparently, this word was never actually used in the New Testament, but was used in the Greek translation of The Song of Solomon.
The Mama Bears encourage parents, particularly those of young children, to continually distinguish and affirm the different types of love to better help their children recognize and appreciate the various forms.
On this topic, I stumbled across an excerpt from this Encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI. (According to Encyclopedia Britannica, an Encyclical is a “pastoral letter from the Pope to the church on matters of doctrine, morals, or discipline…and is not considered to be infallible”. While as a Protestant I do not believe in Papal authority nor infallibility, I am coming to appreciate Catholicism’s highly developed theologies of sex and the body). Much of the first half of the encyclical is devoted to a defense of the Christian conception of eros and its relation to agape. He notes that beginning with the enlightenment, Christianity was accused of ruining eros through its seemingly strict regulations. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that Christianity had “degenerated [eros] into vice,” and Christianity’s perception as a killjoy continues to this day.
But Pope Benedict notes that eros ultimately points to agape. Specifically, he draws from Genesis 2 in describing how eros love is rooted in man’s very nature. Woman is made from man, and for this reason a man leaves his mother and father to be united to his wife, and become one flesh (an expression of eros love). However, this one-flesh union (that is, marriage) serves as the symbol of God’s relationship with his people - his agape love. Pope Benedict describes how Christianity paints a picture of eros not as vice or a lesser form of love, but as one dimension of a singular concept of love, that ultimately leads to God’s designated symbol of agape love. Although closely related to the discussion of marriage I summarized in a prior newsletter, I thought this was a beautiful point worth reiterating.
In his writings on parenting, Christian author Paul Tripp notes that we can never build high enough walls to keep our kids away from harmful/sinful things. Rather, we have to convince them to prefer the alternative by accurately conveying the beauty and wonder of God’s design. The idea that eros love is ultimately meant to lead us to a symbol of God’s agape love - a symbol not just for ourselves but for those around us- is, I think, one compelling reason to take seriously God’s plan for sex and romance.