Exploring the Blogosphere for Agape Talk

Weird things happen when people try to make agape mean some kind of love. When I was putting together ideas to start this blog, I did some searching of blogs to see what others were saying about agape. At first I was a little surprised to find so much variety in listings of hits. By varying just a little what I typed into search engines, I got very different results.

Even when I narrowed the wording for search engines (like blogsearch.google.com) by typing “agape power” instead of just “agape,” I got everything from martial arts, to a financial advisor, to churches and ministries that used “agape” in their name. There was even a blog about learning agape through the therapy provided by pets. A few blogs claimed to focus more on spirituality than on religion, those blogs usually claimed to be non-Christian even though they professed to follow Jesus.

One blog that shares my questioning about translating “agape” as “love” is www.freelygive-n.com by Robin Calamaio. He pointed out clearly the problems people run into by trying to have “agape” mean “divine love” everywhere the word appeared in the Bible. He discovered that obviously there was a great deal of difference in what the various writers meant by “agape” in the differing places in the Bible. Although I disagree with Robin Calamaio on all subjects of religion, I’ve enjoyed our email correspondence.

Some blogs were listed by the search engine even though they never mentioned the word, but the authors had so completely identified “agape” with “unconditional love” that they were listed because the search engine also operated under that same assumption that somehow agape was connected with love. When I searched by using “divine love,” I found some very strange blogs that fit into the category that large book stores call “New Age.”
 
So far I’ve found no one else who considers agape to be spiritual power. Of course, everyone who linked “agape” with “love” had trouble trying to figure out what kind of love applied to agape. There is complete agreement that agape cannot mean what English speakers usually mean by love, so all kinds of adjectives get tacked onto “love” when trying to use it to mean “agape” -- as some sort of way to make it work. But all of those don’t get the point that it just doesn’t work. Originally, “agape” did not mean what people normally mean by the word “love.” In fact, St. Paul was trying to take it in a completely different direction.

I’m hoping that thru this blog I can reach out to find others who are taking an alternative approach to using agape in the modern world, just as it was used in the ancient world.