ἀγάπη

There is a popular framework in modern Christian teaching that distinguishes four Greek words for love, each said to name a different kind of love:

Agapē — the unconditional, sacrificial, divine love of God. Philia — friendship love, brotherly affection. Erōs — romantic, desiring love. Storgē — familial love, natural affection.

The framework was made famous in part by C. S. Lewis’s 1960 book The Four Loves, though its roots go back further into earlier biblical scholarship. It is theologically suggestive and pastorally useful in a basic way. It is also, in important respects, lexically inaccurate as a description of how these Greek words actually function in the New Testament.

The framework’s central problem is that it overdraws the distinction between agapē and philia. The two Greek words do have somewhat different ranges of usage. But they overlap in significant ways. The Septuagint uses agapē for everything from God’s love for Israel to Amnon’s destructive desire for Tamar (which turned to hatred — see 2 Samuel 13:15). The New Testament uses phileō for the Father’s love for the Son (John 5:20) and for Jesus’s love for Lazarus (John 11:3, 36). In John 21, Christ asks Peter “do you agapaō me?” twice, then “do you phileō me?” once, and Peter answers all three with phileō; some commentaries have built entire interpretive structures on the variation that the Greek does not actually sustain. The two words overlap. The popular framework asserts a tidy distinction the lexical evidence does not support.

This is the chapter on agapē, and the chapter’s most important task is to recover what agapē actually means in the New Testament — without either overdrawing the distinction from other Greek love-words or collapsing it into them. Agapē in the New Testament is not a unique vocabulary God reserved for Himself. Agapē is the ordinary Greek word for love that Christ has filled with specifically Christian content through His own life, His own teaching, and especially His own death. Love that looks like the cross. That is what makes Christian agapē what it is.

The Word

ἀγάπη (agapē), pronounced ah-GAH-pay. A feminine noun. The family includes the verb agapaō (ἀγαπάω, “to love”) and the adjective agapētos (ἀγαπητός, “beloved”). The verbal form occurs more than 140 times in the New Testament; the noun more than 110 times; the adjective about sixty times. The word group is one of the most theologically loaded vocabulary clusters in the New Testament.

The lexical background is worth knowing because it complicates the popular framework. In pre-Christian Greek, agapē and agapaō were ordinary words for love, with a semantic range that overlapped with phileō and other love-vocabulary. The verb agapaō appears in classical Greek for many kinds of affection and devotion — sometimes for divine love, sometimes for ordinary human love, sometimes for love of food or wine or favorite pursuits. The noun agapē was less common in pre-Christian Greek than the verb but was used in similar contexts.

The Septuagint translates the Hebrew verb ahav (אָהַב, “to love”) predominantly with agapaō. Ahav in the Old Testament has the same kind of broad range — God’s love for His people, the husband’s love for his wife, the parent’s love for the child, the neighbor’s love for the neighbor, and sometimes even illicit or destructive forms of love. Amnon “loved” (ahav / agapaō in the LXX) his half-sister Tamar (2 Sam 13:1), and the love that began as desire ended in rape and then in hatred more bitter than the love had been (2 Sam 13:15). The same Greek verb that the New Testament uses for God’s love of the world is the verb the Septuagint uses for one of the Old Testament’s ugliest stories of human desire. The word does not contain the morality; the context fills it.

What gives agapē its specifically Christian content is not the word itself but Christ’s use of it — and the way the New Testament writers fill the word with the content of Christ’s own life and death. When John writes “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), he uses agapē; the content of that statement is what God has done in Christ. When Paul writes the great love chapter (1 Corinthians 13), he is describing the kind of love that Christ exhibited in His life and death. When the love commands appear (love God, love neighbor, love enemies, love one another), the love being commanded is the love Christ has shown — the kind that does specifically what Christ did.

This shift is important. The Christian distinctive of agapē is not lexical (the word itself does not mean love-of-a-superior-kind in pre-Christian Greek). The Christian distinctive is Christological — Christ has filled the word with specific content by His own demonstration. To know what Christian agapē is, look at Christ. The cross is the dictionary entry. The empty hand of faith receiving Christ’s love is the response.

Range of Meaning

In its New Testament usage, agapē covers:

• Love, in the broad sense. The ordinary Greek meaning.
• God’s love for His creation, particularly for His people, particularly for sinners. The dominant New Testament theological use.
• Christ’s love demonstrated in His life and death. The central content the New Testament gives the word.
• The love Christians are commanded to have — toward God, toward neighbor, toward enemy, toward one another in the church.
• The fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22), produced in the believer through the means of grace.
• The agapē meal — the early Christian fellowship meal closely associated with the Lord’s Supper, mentioned in Jude 12 as a “love feast” (agapais).
• The principle and substance of the Christian moral life. Faith working through love (Gal 5:6).

The center of gravity in the New Testament is the second and third senses — God’s love demonstrated in Christ — and the fourth sense, the love Christians are commanded to show in response. The other senses cluster around these.

Where You’ll Meet It

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16, ESV)

The most quoted verse in the New Testament. The verb is ēgapēsen — the aorist of agapaō. God loved. The love is past tense and accomplished. The means of the love is the giving of the Son. The verse establishes the New Testament’s pattern: God’s love is named by what He has done, not by what He feels in some abstract divine emotion. The love has a specific shape — the giving of the Son for the world.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34–35, ESV)

The new commandment. Notice the standard: as I have loved you. The pattern of Christian love is given specifically — it is the love Christ has shown, applied between believers. The basis is not generic moral principle (“love is good”); the basis is the example and authority of Christ Himself. The recognition of discipleship will be by this love. The world will know the church is Christ’s by the way Christ’s people love one another in the pattern He set.

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8, ESV)

Paul’s compressed statement of the gospel’s love-content. God shows — synistēsin, “demonstrates, exhibits, establishes” — His love. The demonstration is Christ’s death. The recipients are “while we were still sinners.” The love is not earned; the love is shown to those who do not deserve it. This is the verse Lutheran preaching has cited as the foundational statement of what kind of love God’s agapē actually is — the love that addresses the undeserving with the costly gift of the Son.

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8a, ESV)

The famous love chapter. Agapē is described not by definition but by behavior. Each clause is a specific characteristic — patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, not record-keeping of wrongs, not rejoicing in evil, rejoicing in truth, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. The list reads as a description of Christ Himself. Lutheran preaching has frequently noted: substitute “Christ” for “love” in each clause, and the chapter becomes a Christological hymn. Christ is patient. Christ is kind. Christ does not boast. Christ bears all things. The love commanded is the love Christ embodies.

“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” (Galatians 5:6, ESV)

Paul’s most concentrated statement of the relationship between faith and love. Faith is what justifies; love is how faith works itself out in life. The faith that does not produce love is not the faith Paul means. The love that exists apart from faith is not the love Paul means either. The two are joined in the believer who has been gripped by the gospel of Christ’s love and lives accordingly.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22–23, ESV)

The fruit-of-the-Spirit catalogue. Agapē is named first. The fruit is produced by the Spirit, not manufactured by the believer’s effort. Where the Spirit is at work in the believer through the means of grace, the love grows; the joy follows; the peace deepens; the other fruit comes in time. The Lutheran tradition has read this as the gift-character of Christian moral life. The believer does not produce love by gritted teeth and concentrated will. The believer remains in the means by which the Spirit works, and the love grows as fruit.

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” (Ephesians 5:25, ESV)

The marital application. The pattern of the husband’s love for his wife is Christ’s love for the church. The standard is high. The standard is also given — not invented by human reflection, not derived from cultural norm, but defined by Christ’s own example. Marriage is one of the places where Christian agapē is required to be most concrete, most costly, most cross-shaped.

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7–8, ESV)

John’s most concentrated statement of the love-theology of his epistle. The structure is: love is from God; the one who loves has been born of God; the one who does not love does not know God; God is love. The last clause is the famous one — ho theos agapē estin. God is love. This does not mean love is God (a sentimental reversal that some readers make) — it means God’s character is love, and the love we know is the love God has demonstrated in Christ.