There are two major problems with translating spiritual ‘agape’ with the ordinary English word ‘love.’ So far in this blog I’ve only focused on the first -- that is, because Paul purposely chose not to use the ordinary Greek word for love, his meaning is corrupted if we translate what he wrote with our ordinary word for love.
Of course, a few centuries ago, translators tried using words like ‘charity’ and ‘loving-kindness.’ But neither of those words carries the spiritual meaning that Paul gave to agape when he referred to 'God's agape.' We can never begin to see what Paul was meaning without the sense of spiritual.
The second major problem is much, much worse. It happens when ‘love’ gets wrongly used to imagine God in our image. That happens when we think that God loves just like humans love.
And that is the problem with applying our ordinary word for love to divine action. All kinds of wrongful thinking comes from doing that. For example, in popularized religious groups, God is expected to love us in the ordinary way that humans love each other. That pushes them to fall into the mistake of pseudo-religious thinking that God is somehow a "super-powerful Man-in-the-clouds" who has to always protect us when we strictly follow a bunch of rules and regulations.
Such a mistaken image of God pictures this Being-up-in-the-clouds showering down love into us like rain. That’s why popularized pseudo-religion has set up a false system of rewards and punishments. Of course, that has led to the unfortunate state of affairs causing untold numbers of people to ‘lose their faith’ -- because life just doesn't work that way.
But of course, that is not at all what Jesus meant. In the Greek translation we see that clearly when a spiritual form of agape is used instead of ever using the Greek word for love (eros, philia, storge) applied to God.
Of course, where that truth stands out so starkly is when we finally get to 1 John 4:8. No First-Century Christian would have ever said, “God is eros;” or “God is philia.” That would have been turning God into human love. Something very different was meant when that verse proclaimed that "God is agape." But in the modern world that tragic error can be made when ‘agape’ is translated as ‘love.’
But we can gain better insight by quoting 1 John 4:7-12 -- leaving in agape, agapeo, and agapan where they were meant to be -- “Dear friends, let’s agapeo each other, because agape is from God, and everyone who agapeo is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t agapeo does not know God, because God is agape. This is how the agape of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is agape: it is not that we agapeo God but that God agapan us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God agapan us this way, we also ought to agapeo each other. No one has ever seen God. If we have agape for each other, God remains in us and God’s agape is made perfect in us.” (Common English Bible)
So we can see, that during the developing process of spiritual understanding in the Early Church in the first century, Christians had transformed agape into a deeply spiritual term. Of course, we today lose all that important spiritual transformation when we make the mistake of reversing that critical religious process by translating ‘agape’ as ‘love.’ Those verses in 1 John 4:7-12 have so much deeper meaning when the forms of ‘agape’ are left in -- where they were meant to be originally.
No comments:
Post a Comment