Love

Love, a word much overused and underdefined today, is employed promiscuously of everything from cars to diapers to dog food and is largely equated with feelings. Love, the most crucial and central concept in Christian theology and ethics, is also one of the most theologically, ethically, psychologically and culturally ambiguous concepts, with diverse interpretations and contradictory definitions. Love, to have a clear referent, requires not only a theological base and a philosophical framework but also a psychological dynamic and ethical content and context. This will be the outline for our exploration of the forms and types of love.

Theological Base of Love

Love is considered one of the three primary theological virtues along with faith and hope. Throughout the centuries of theological writing, the analysis of love has centered on love as self-giving agapē. The nature of agapē has moved through a progression of emphases. As (1) benevolence, that is to love the unlovely and the unlovable, agapē is the generous, altruistic, compassionate love that values the neighbor self-forgetfully, in a self-disinterested concern for his or her welfare. It is in no way dependent on the recipient’s merit or worth, but only on the lover’s generosity. As (2) obedience that acts to love the other because of role, command or moral imperative, agapē is the faithful, willing obedience to the moral imperative to act for the good of the neighbor in fulfillment of the command of Christ. As (3) self-sacrifice that seeks to love the other at the lover’s expense—the other’s need comes first—agapē is self-sacrificial service to the neighbor, which puts the other’s needs above one’s own, even at great cost to the self. As (4) equal regard that perceives the other as equally worthful, even as one knows the self to be precious and of irreducible worth agapē is thus both an act of the will—to exercise compassion toward the other without reservation—and an act of the heart—to value self and other unconditionally. Such love regards the neighbor as loved even when enmity exists, that is, when the other is the enemy.

The first view, benevolence, has been the dominant interpretation of love in Christian history. Most modern and postmodern theologians critique it for its paternalistic element. The fourth view, equal regard, is now more frequently pursued since it is capable of embracing the other three, that is, benevolence, obedience and self-sacrifice, in a way that takes wholeness, justice and well-being seriously for all humankind, including enemies.

Agapē has frequently been defined as “disinterested love,” which allows, even supports, an atomistic individualism, a curious insularity. When it is seen as a total, unselfish form of love that utterly disregards any response, this unilateral love becomes entirely a matter of what I unilaterally offer to do for someone out there or down there in benevolent generosity. But agapē cannot be individualized in such a manner; it is at heart a sharing of experience, a recognition of our underlying kinship in the kindom of God. It is an equal regard grounded in our common existence as creatures from the hand of the Creator, who loves all equally.

We have often been trapped or limited by etymological analyses of words, such as the terms for love in the Scripture. Our understanding of Christian love ought not to hinge on the root meanings of classical Greek verbs, nor on particular usages, but on the decisive test of the central understanding of love in the overall meaning of the New Testament witness to love, of the incarnation’s demonstration of love, of the full impact of the life, teaching, death, resurrection and presence of the loving Christ. The past, present and future reality of the people of God—the church—as the community of love is the body of Christ.

In the biblical world there were at least five words used to designate forms of love, although only three of these appear in the New Testament: (1) eros, the search for an object in aesthetic, passionate or spiritual love; (2) philia, the preferential bond of affection, friendship and social solidarity; (3) storgē, the caregiving love of compassion; (4) agapē, the nonpreferential, self-giving love of equal respect; and (5) koinōnia, which is love in the mutuality of community, in the sharing of the common life in covenant and commitment (see Fellowship). The fifth love is more than a search for an object (eros) or altruistic self-giving (agapē); it is an expression of mutuality in which giving and receiving are united (koinōnia). This is the authentic word for Christian love, the end of the trajectory of the multiple words (eros, philia, storgē, agapē, koinōnia). The word koinōnia, from koinos “in common,” expresses the fellowship-creating drive toward mutuality, the fellowship-fulfilling goal of equality, the fellowship-celebrating joy of community, the fellowship discipline of impartiality: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13:14, emphasis added).

A Philosophical Framework

Each type of love has received philosophical analysis, but eros, philia and agapē have been the primary foci. Here we shall selectively draw only on the notion of agapē. Agapē is a profound concern for the welfare of another, to be understanding and to understand the other without any desire to control the other, to be thanked by the other or to enjoy the process. Agapē is a decisive distributing of benefit to self and others. We may view it as a continuum from other-forgetfulness to self-forgetfulness with intermediary steps of preferring self, equal parity and preferring other. Forgetting the other allows the person to choose a course of action with no concern for the other’s welfare. Preferring self may take into account the other’s good but gives more value to one’s own need or advantage. Equal parity offers equal weight to both self and other in a mathematics of truly equal division of good and bad. Preferring the other demands that a person, while taking self-needs seriously, should always give preference to the other. Self-forgetting suggests that the person prizes the other so highly that thoughts of the self occur only in relation to the other’s needs of fulfillment.

When agapē is tempered with justice, equal parity becomes a criterion for evaluating what is creative for the other, for the relations and also for the self. The balance point between a just concern for both parties and their needs may vary with the context, the circumstances, the special situations of either. Yet agapē, accepting the human need as a necessary point of preferring the other, works toward the parity of equality.

Gene Outka has sought to isolate a basic normative content to Christian love, a virtue that it possesses irrespective of the circumstances. Does love have a normative status comparable to utilitarianism or the Kantian categorical imperative? The three fundamental features of agapē he sees as being most systematic and recurrent are these: (1) an “equal regard for the neighbor that in crucial respects is independent and unalterable” (p. 9); (2) self-sacrifice, “the inevitable historical manifestation of agapē insofar as agapē was not accommodated to self-interest” (p. 24); (3) mutuality, characteristic of those actions “which establish or enhance some sort of exchange between the parties, developing a sense of community and perhaps friendship” (p. 36). These three definitions—equal regard, self-sacrifice and mutuality—all suggest that the love defined is being or has been mediated by justice and balances an unstable equilibrium.

The Psychological Dynamic

In his analysis of love as unifying power, Paul Tillich wrote, “Love is the tension between union and separation” (p. 25). Love is the moving power of life that seeks the unity of the separated. The individual needs to find unity with other selves but without sacrificing its own or violating the other’s identity. This retains the centeredness of each person without absorption or abandonment by the other. These polarities—absorption or abandonment, engulfment or ignoring, union or separation—express the basic fears as well as the essential needs for balanced personhood. According to Fritz Perls, the Gestalt theorist, “To love another is to move as close as possible without either violating the other or losing oneself,” as Erik Erickson affirms (Perls et al., p. 419). More than a balance point, love is an active process of mutuality. Mature love seeks the mutuality that expresses the reciprocity of give and take in a relationship. But the practice of a love that seeks mutuality can be pursued by one person whether the other reciprocates or not. Unconditional positive regard can be given whether the other responds or returns such valuing, as Carl Rogers has taught.

Many psychological theorists assume the principle of psychological hedonism, which holds that all human beings are driven to seek pleasure for themselves and to avoid pain. An outstanding exponent of this view is Sigmund Freud, who formulated the pleasure principle as the basic expression of human motivation. The contrasting view is that of psychological altruism, which supports the human capacity of self-love as distinct from pleasure for the self, which is selfishness. Love of self and love of other are complementary. A true concern for one’s own welfare cannot be divided from concern for the welfare of significant others, and true self-love motivates one to see others with equal respect. Eric Fromm has articulated this perspective and points toward the possibilities of humans’ coming to value self and other as a means of reducing the alienation of human society and of increasing the possibilities of persons’ valuing giving above getting, valuing being above having or doing. This vision of an innate harmony between egoism and altruism has become a basic assumption for human potential, existential and the many varieties of popular psychology, in contrast to the analytic and object relations theorists, who see the two in eternal tension.

Ethical Content

If the concept is to have any meaning, love requires an ethical community. Ethical practice does not occur in human isolation or in individual decision. It arises within community and directly by the commitments of the person. It is in a particular community that the practice of love takes form, receives content, finds direction, achieves fulfillment. The ethic that has emerged from the tradition of Immanuel Kant places central emphasis on reason to the belittlement of feeling. He grounds ethics on a foundation of laws that are universal (in that all rational beings would need to subscribe to them). Thus, he held that the universal principle of respect for all rational beings as ends in themselves and never as mere means constitutes the measure of genuine love. The Aristotelian perspective, in contrast, views love not as a universal law but as a virtue that is central to the formulation and sustaining of human community.

Christian theology is grounded in the passionate, eternal, self-giving, unconditional love of God. The presence of God in the birth, life, teaching and death of Christ presents divine love in human experience and community. The incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection are not as much the infusion of supernatural love as the transformation of the natural human experience, the restoration of created human possibilities, the gift of grace that restores the courage to love, the commitment to care even for the enemy, the participation in the power of the Spirit, which enables us to go beyond the common human capacity to love to an uncommon experience of agapē in relationships and community.

» See also: Emotions

» See also: Fellowship

» See also: Gift-Giving

References and Resources

E. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: Norton, 1964); E. Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956); C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960); G. Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); F. Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy (New York: Dell, 1951); C. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961); P. Tillich, Love, Power and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

—David Augsburger