Two years ago I started this blog about agape. I started by struggling with what St. Paul was working so hard to explain about 'agape.' I wondered why everyone seemed to think Paul would need to work that hard to explain love, and yet he never used any of the commonly used Greek words for 'love.' Obviously something was wrong with the usual interpretation.
When Paul found himself being asked by non-Jewish Greeks to explain the teachings of Jesus Christ, he seemed to have realized that some of the words used by Greek-speaking Jews were not familiar to the average Greek. The main one of these words was ‘agape.’ So he spent a lot of time explaining what ‘agape’ meant.
When we read those passages from his letters, it helps our understanding if we start with the basic assumption that he was talking about a spiritual power (and definitely he was not talking about what the average Greek thought of as love).
I came to that conclusion many years ago, when I first started finding out that English translations of the Bible did not bring out the full meaning of the original text. Eventually I found out that the English word ‘love’ did not capture the spiritual meaning that Paul was expressing with the word ‘agape.’ Of course, everything that the average American means by our word ‘love’ was expressed by the words that the average Greek used (such as, 'eros,' 'philia,' and 'storge'). And none of those Greek words for love were what Paul was trying to convey with the word ‘agape.’ That's why he didn't use those words. So I concluded that the reason Paul did not use any of the usual Greek words for love was because he was not talking about love.
During these 2 years of writing, I’ve come back several times to that section of the New Testament that we call 1 John. The more I continue studying those parts of 1 John that deal with agape, the more I see why we lose most of the meaning when we translate ‘agape’ with our common English word ‘love.’ 1 John used ‘agape’ in a way to convey God's action as it is manifested to people. I finally realize that the author's deep awareness of God's action through agape is what led to the great acclamation: “God is agape.”
It is through that understanding that these 2 years of writing culminated on Dec. 19 with the thought coming to me: Agape is God’s ONLY action. During the weeks since then, I’ve been struggling to understand what such a conclusion of spiritual awareness could mean. What would the implications then be for all those other thousands of years of theories about God’s action?
I think such a thought conveys the full meaning that God’s supreme act to any human being comes through not only agape opening a person to divine Presence, but also agape motivating and empowering humans to actions of respect and caring with those around us. That’s how human sensibility becomes aware of agape’s double power!
And so I concluded that by the time Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, he could express this profound insight: through giving agape to humans, God makes it possible for us to be able to find the spiritual reality of intimate, intense affection such that we can give full acceptance and mutual respect to everyone around us. And Paul also explained that it is the power of God’s Presence that can transform a human life to perform such profound actions.
And so I was finally able to say on Dec. 27: the very survival of the human race depends on coming to terms with agape as God’s only action.
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