Agape Love
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What is the supreme concept of love in the New Testament?
The supreme concept of love that we find in the New Testament is this word agape, which has its ground and foundation in the character of God Himself. And it is this kind of love that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.
I've mentioned this week that there is confusion when we speak of love. The world's definition and the Bible's definition are often at odds with each other. And one of the reasons that confusion exists is because in English, we only have one word for love. But that's not true in the Greek of the New Testament. This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Well, today we conclude this study on the love of God. And as this is the final message you'll hear from the series, it's also the final time to request the complete 11-part series when you donate at RenewingYourMind.org. Simply give your gift before midnight tonight. The Greek language has several words for love and different kinds of love.
Well, here's R.C. Sproul to explain some of their New Testament uses and nuances.
There are three ways in which we speak about God's love, His love of benevolence, His love of beneficence, and thirdly, His love of complacency. Now we ought not to confuse those three types of love with what every Christian has heard at some time or another from the pulpit of the three words for love that are found in the Greek language. I mean that's a common theme that you hear that when the Bible speaks of love we have to be careful to distinguish among the different kinds of love that are articulated in ancient Greek. And today we're going to look at those three words for love and the significance of them. The first one is the noun eros. The second is a noun that comes from the verb phalline or phalline.
And the third is the noun that most have heard of, agape. So these are the three words for love that one can find in the ancient Greek language. Now the best tool for word studies that we have in biblical Greek, is the massive undertaking under the editorship of Gerhard Kittel called Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, where New Testament scholars from around the world were given assignments to do comprehensive research on the use of particular Greek words in any extant literature from antiquity.
How does the Greek language differentiate types of love?
So if you find a word in the New Testament, like the New Testament word for faith, they would explore how that functioned in Homeric Greek, and then among the later Greek poets, among the Greek philosophers, how it functioned in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. Then they study how it is used in the Gospels, then in the Epistles, then in the early church, and so on. so that by the time you're done with that investigation, you have a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of the Word. As I have said many times to my students, that even though this tool has been created by higher critics, people who are critical of the Scriptures themselves, nevertheless, from an academic perspective,
It's the greatest tool of research that exists in the Christian scholarship for coming to an in-depth knowledge of the word meanings that are found in the text of Scripture. And if you would look up the word agape in Kittel, you will see that that particular entrance was penned by the New Testament scholar Ethelbert Stauffer. He is noted for his work in New Testament theology as well as for his work in the Greek. And what he does in his study is, first of all, spends time examining the meaning of the Greek word eros. And the word eros does not occur in the New Testament. but because it is a prominent word in the Greek language that can be interpreted or defined as love. And since the Greeks distinguished among different types of love, it's important that we have a basic understanding of it.
In the English language, we get the English word erotic. from this Greek word because eros refers to a sensuous love, a love that is heavily laden with sexual overtones. But not only that, in classical Greek the word for love, eros, also carried with it the baggage of the demonic.
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