Because I’m so new to this world of writing blogs, I get very frustrated with the order in which postings are automatically listed. I’m so used to the old world of reading books, articles, research papers, sermons, and newspapers that I have a hard time imagining a reader starting at the end and reading to the introduction. I know I can't do anything at all about it, but that seems so backward.
When I started writing this blog, there was a certain flow to the development of my ideas. But that flow gets reversed by the way postings are listed. So when someone happens to find this blog, but wants to see how my ideas developed, the reader has to go to the bottom of the list to find the Introduction. (That’s a hint -- I would like for you to stop reading, arrow down to the bottom of the list of postings, and now read the Introduction.)
Thank you. Now I’ll stop griping. And I promise that if you email me with comments, I won’t ever mention my frustration with blog post listings.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Agape is Patient and Kind
The mystery of agape power is not found in the English word “love.” That is one of the conclusions I’ve reached during my years of looking into what agape meant for Greek-speaking Christians of the First Century. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings below this one, when St. Paul and some of his Greek helpers started their work, they needed to find Greek words to explain what they were bringing from the Jewish culture. I think they had an especially difficult time trying to find a word to express a spiritual gift that was helping them open up to the power of God.
But over the centuries since then, that all was lost. Only in the early 20th Century did a slight recovery process start for the word "agape." But I think a mistake was made by claiming that “agape” was a common word for “love.” Over the last few decades, when "agape" got confused with "love," we have lost most of the meaning behind what St. Paul was doing.
While I’ve investigated the meaning behind the strange thing St. Paul was doing in 1 Cor. 13, I ran across a couple of scholars who challenged the traditional understanding of the way words were used in those verses. Those old interpretations made it seem like St. Paul was taking a verb and making it a noun. Even though we today have gotten so used to people turning verbs into nouns, that was rarely done in the ancient world. So the strangeness of that chapter extended even to the use of the noun ‘agape’ instead of the usual verb ‘agapao.’
In the Hebrew scriptures or in any other Greek or Hebrew literature, there are actually very few instances of people not using verbs as verbs but instead turning them into nouns. What I’m getting at is the difference between “love” and “loving” (or “to love”). Most of the time in the ancient world people talked about “loving” or called on people “to love” someone. That’s the usual use of love as a verb. But it would have been unusual for a writing to use “love” as a something -- for example, to say that “love is patient and is kind.” Or as it is in the King James version: “Charity suffereth long and is kind.” (vs. 4) You would almost never find such a strange expression; instead, you might see “when you are loving someone, you should be patient with them.” Or an alternative might be, “When you are loving one another, you learn how to be patient.” Such examples correctly use the verb. But who would turn “loving” into a noun and say, “Love is patient”?
It is because of such instances that I began to question how St. Paul would have wanted those sentences in 1 Cor. 13 to be read. I began to see that St. Paul was not turning a verb into a noun. I began to wonder: What if he weren’t talking about love at all; but instead, he was illustrating what the strange noun “agape” meant? I started searching for what agape meant to him. I’m using this blog to report on the results of my searching.
For example, what did he mean by saying, “Agape is patient”?
What we would like it to mean is: through the gift of agape, God was giving us the way to help us live patiently. But … what a strange way to say that. By just using three words it sounds like he’s saying, “Whatever agape is, it is patient.” Actually, that sounds like he means that there is something about agape that is patient. What did that mean?
Why didn’t he say, “Agape gives us patience” -- or “through agape we become patient”? Was he actually meaning, “Agape [itself] is patient” -- or “Agape is [patience itself]”? Did his next phrase mean “Agape is [kindness itself]”? So what would it mean if he went on to imply, “Agape [itself] is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude”? Was he implying the conclusion that with agape active within us, we are patient and kind and not envious nor boastful nor arrogant nor rude? So was he also implying that if we aren’t patient and kind; therefore, we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives -- or if we are envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, then also we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives?
That would be a hard proof, because we all know how difficult it is in this modern world, with all the pressures and frustrations, to be patient and kind with all people. That seems to be why St. Paul then starts Chapter 14 by calling his readers to aspire to agape. He said that like he knew how extremely difficult it is to let the ‘agape of God’ pour into the center of our being in such a strong, conclusive way that we are transformed until we are patient and kind. I think he was saying that we have to really work at it, spiritually, to aspire to what agape can bring to us.
To be truly, profoundly patient calls for a sense of deep, inner peace and sense of wellbeing. That seems to be what he meant when he wrote the following to the Philippians:
None of the usual words seemed to work to express what was almost inexpressible, so either they had to find a new word, or they had to change the meaning of an old word from the past. It seems like they began using the word “agape” because that word was not in common usage anymore in the Greek cities where they were starting churches. (Even though the verb "agapao" did appear a mere 18 times in the entire Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, it was not in common usage in the few synagogs where that translation was available). So they took the uncommon noun, "agape," and gave it a special role in the spiritual life of their new communities, thus transforming it's meaning.
While I’ve investigated the meaning behind the strange thing St. Paul was doing in 1 Cor. 13, I ran across a couple of scholars who challenged the traditional understanding of the way words were used in those verses. Those old interpretations made it seem like St. Paul was taking a verb and making it a noun. Even though we today have gotten so used to people turning verbs into nouns, that was rarely done in the ancient world. So the strangeness of that chapter extended even to the use of the noun ‘agape’ instead of the usual verb ‘agapao.’
In the Hebrew scriptures or in any other Greek or Hebrew literature, there are actually very few instances of people not using verbs as verbs but instead turning them into nouns. What I’m getting at is the difference between “love” and “loving” (or “to love”). Most of the time in the ancient world people talked about “loving” or called on people “to love” someone. That’s the usual use of love as a verb. But it would have been unusual for a writing to use “love” as a something -- for example, to say that “love is patient and is kind.” Or as it is in the King James version: “Charity suffereth long and is kind.” (vs. 4) You would almost never find such a strange expression; instead, you might see “when you are loving someone, you should be patient with them.” Or an alternative might be, “When you are loving one another, you learn how to be patient.” Such examples correctly use the verb. But who would turn “loving” into a noun and say, “Love is patient”?
It is because of such instances that I began to question how St. Paul would have wanted those sentences in 1 Cor. 13 to be read. I began to see that St. Paul was not turning a verb into a noun. I began to wonder: What if he weren’t talking about love at all; but instead, he was illustrating what the strange noun “agape” meant? I started searching for what agape meant to him. I’m using this blog to report on the results of my searching.
For example, what did he mean by saying, “Agape is patient”?
What we would like it to mean is: through the gift of agape, God was giving us the way to help us live patiently. But … what a strange way to say that. By just using three words it sounds like he’s saying, “Whatever agape is, it is patient.” Actually, that sounds like he means that there is something about agape that is patient. What did that mean?
Why didn’t he say, “Agape gives us patience” -- or “through agape we become patient”? Was he actually meaning, “Agape [itself] is patient” -- or “Agape is [patience itself]”? Did his next phrase mean “Agape is [kindness itself]”? So what would it mean if he went on to imply, “Agape [itself] is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude”? Was he implying the conclusion that with agape active within us, we are patient and kind and not envious nor boastful nor arrogant nor rude? So was he also implying that if we aren’t patient and kind; therefore, we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives -- or if we are envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, then also we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives?
That would be a hard proof, because we all know how difficult it is in this modern world, with all the pressures and frustrations, to be patient and kind with all people. That seems to be why St. Paul then starts Chapter 14 by calling his readers to aspire to agape. He said that like he knew how extremely difficult it is to let the ‘agape of God’ pour into the center of our being in such a strong, conclusive way that we are transformed until we are patient and kind. I think he was saying that we have to really work at it, spiritually, to aspire to what agape can bring to us.
To be truly, profoundly patient calls for a sense of deep, inner peace and sense of wellbeing. That seems to be what he meant when he wrote the following to the Philippians:
"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:4-7 NRSV)That’s why near the end of Corinthians he concludes that we can let develop within us just such an attitude of peacefulness when we learn to “Let all your things be done with agape.” (1 Cor. 16:14 King James Version) It is that spiritual power of agape that brings to the center of our being the peace that brings patience, the strength that brings kindness, the wisdom that rejoices in the truth, the compassion that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Differences Between Agape, Love, and Loving
As I mentioned in my 3rd posting below, I’m taking my cue for understanding “agape” from what St. Paul wrote to the Romans. There he used a phrase I think had become very important in his spiritual life: “the agape of God.” He seemed to consider it the greatest gift that God gives through the Holy Spirit to the followers of Christ. To repeat, he wrote:
“the agape of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given us.” (Romans 5:5)And there “heart” didn’t mean to the ancients what it means today; instead, they used the word “heart” to mean more like “the center of a person’s being.”
So that’s why St. Paul told the Corinthians that compared with all the other spiritual gifts, agape is the greatest. That showed one of the many innovations that St. Paul brought to the early development of Christianity. The more I look into the amazing insight he displayed in the 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, the more unusual I see that whole chapter is, but also how those words are the very key to understanding his unique spiritual experiences. Because the Corinthians would have considered those words unusual when they first read them, it’s so important not to change “agape” into our common word “love.” If we make it sound like common, everyday talk (like reading it in weddings, for example), then we lose all the shocking impact that it would have had on the Corinthians.
The more we find out about the people who lived in Corinth, the more modern they seem, and so the more we should try to identify with them. It helps when reading that chapter to feel like St. Paul is challenging us as profoundly as he was challenging them.
So over the years of research, I have started disagreeing with the traditional interpretation. Most interpreters have him saying something like, “As wonderful as are the spiritual experiences most of you have been having, when it comes to holding together a church community, if you don’t love each other, you have nothing.” Now, of course, that is an important corrective statement to make to any church. But one problem churches have with that is the reality that no one can make people love each other.
Even though you can constantly call people’s attention to the importance of loving -- by writing about it, preaching about it, counseling about it -- but there is no way to make people put into action all that’s involved with having compassion for one another. So as much as I would like to imagine him talking about the importance of compassion, I just no longer think that St. Paul was doing that in the verses we call chapter 13. Instead, I now think he was talking about a special spiritual gift that can transform us when we let it pour into the center of our being.
Friday, January 22, 2010
1 Corinthians 13
When St. Paul finally launched into showing the power of agape, his first readers would have been surprised. They would have found very strange his detailed illustration of the supreme importance of agape. He was warning them about how unusual it was going to be, when he said, “Now I shall show you a still more excellent way.” (1 Corinthians 12:31 The Anchor Yale Bible, p. 474, 2008 Vol. 32) So what was this innovation that he brought to the early development of Christianity?
He began the 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, by continuing his list of spiritual gifts that he started talking about in chapter 12. He did that to show that he considered “agape” to be the greatest of all spiritual gifts. For example, without agape, “speaking in tongues” was just like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Then he said that we are nothing without agape even though we “have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and … have all faith, so as to remove mountains.” (vs. 2 The New Revised Standard Version)
Then he got into what we today mean by charity, when he said that if we give away all our possessions and even are willing to sacrifice our own bodies for the cause -- but don’t do it through the power of agape -- we gain nothing. At that point he had his readers’ attention in a shocking way! They would not have liked that list of comparisons between agape and all the other spiritual gifts that most people would find wonderful to have. So he was ready to lay out the details showing what agape power could do.
So then he pointed out that agape is what we need to be patient and kind. Agape power helps us not be envious or boastful or arrogant or rude or insist on our own way, and not be irritable or resentful. Then he hit the self-righteous religious people right between the eyes when he said that agape will help them not rejoice in the wrongdoing of those they like to judge as less religiously worthy. So of course, agape helps us “rejoice in the truth.” Agape power even gives us the internal strength to “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.” (vss. 4-7) Because everyone knows how difficult it is to live that way, we are able to see how extremely important such an inner transformation is.
Then he concluded that the effectiveness all the other spiritual gifts will eventually end, but agape will never end. So we need agape in order to become fully mature in our spiritual development -- otherwise, we remain childish in our understanding of the spiritual dimension of Life. And finally, even though we know that faith, hope, and agape abide to sustain us spiritually -- “the greatest of these is agape.” (vs. 13)
Those statements would have shaken up Christians of the First Century. Those words show a new way for Christians to develop spiritually. We lose that shocking, new, powerful quality if we just translate “agape” with our English word “love.” But by leaving the word as St. Paul wanted it, we are better able to see what he was showing us.
When we hear agape used in that chapter, then we know we are dealing with the basis for a new spiritual discipline that motivates us to look for a spiritual training that will help us live fully through the power of God.
He began the 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, by continuing his list of spiritual gifts that he started talking about in chapter 12. He did that to show that he considered “agape” to be the greatest of all spiritual gifts. For example, without agape, “speaking in tongues” was just like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Then he said that we are nothing without agape even though we “have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and … have all faith, so as to remove mountains.” (vs. 2 The New Revised Standard Version)
Then he got into what we today mean by charity, when he said that if we give away all our possessions and even are willing to sacrifice our own bodies for the cause -- but don’t do it through the power of agape -- we gain nothing. At that point he had his readers’ attention in a shocking way! They would not have liked that list of comparisons between agape and all the other spiritual gifts that most people would find wonderful to have. So he was ready to lay out the details showing what agape power could do.
So then he pointed out that agape is what we need to be patient and kind. Agape power helps us not be envious or boastful or arrogant or rude or insist on our own way, and not be irritable or resentful. Then he hit the self-righteous religious people right between the eyes when he said that agape will help them not rejoice in the wrongdoing of those they like to judge as less religiously worthy. So of course, agape helps us “rejoice in the truth.” Agape power even gives us the internal strength to “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.” (vss. 4-7) Because everyone knows how difficult it is to live that way, we are able to see how extremely important such an inner transformation is.
Then he concluded that the effectiveness all the other spiritual gifts will eventually end, but agape will never end. So we need agape in order to become fully mature in our spiritual development -- otherwise, we remain childish in our understanding of the spiritual dimension of Life. And finally, even though we know that faith, hope, and agape abide to sustain us spiritually -- “the greatest of these is agape.” (vs. 13)
Those statements would have shaken up Christians of the First Century. Those words show a new way for Christians to develop spiritually. We lose that shocking, new, powerful quality if we just translate “agape” with our English word “love.” But by leaving the word as St. Paul wanted it, we are better able to see what he was showing us.
When we hear agape used in that chapter, then we know we are dealing with the basis for a new spiritual discipline that motivates us to look for a spiritual training that will help us live fully through the power of God.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Thomas Merton and agape/caritas
In my last posting I mentioned a book of essays on comparative mysticism by Thomas Merton. I commented on a quote from his chapter on “Love and Tao.” In that chapter he went through some mental twistings in his attempt to compare Christianity with the Chinese philosophy Taoism (the T is pronounced so much like a D that some people spell it Daoism). Here is the quote in which he used the Latin translation of First John 4:8 -- Deus caritas est. -- "God is love (agape)."
Only by experiencing the changes first hand can anyone even begin to come to terms with the effectiveness of agape power, that St. Paul listed in 1 Cor. 13, to create patience and kindness, and the capacity to endure whatever comes. Only then can a person truly understand the power to never be jealous, never be conceited, never be rude or selfish, never to be resentful nor to take offense, nor to take any pleasure in other’s sins. Only then can a person comprehend what it means to "delight in the truth," and to always be ready to "excuse, to trust, to hope." (Jerusalem Bible)
In my next posting I’ll go into a more detailed investigation into how extremely unusual were the rest of St. Paul’s proclamations in 1 Cor. 13.
The power of the sage is then the very power which has been revealed in the Gospels as Pure Love, Deus caritas est is the full manifestation of the truth hidden in the nameless Tao, and yet it still leaves Tao nameless. For love is not a name, any more than Tao is. One must go beyond the word and enter into communion with the reality before he can know anything about it: and then, more likely than not, he will know ‘in the cloud of unknowing.’ (Mystics and Zen Masters, p. 76)Something about that assertion of the spiritual need to “go beyond the word and enter into communion with the reality” made me think of 1 Cor. 13. Even though St. Paul didn’t use those words, I think his illustration of the power of agape pointed to a similar need to enter into communion with the reality of agape power in order to come to the truest understanding of the way such power works both in personal lives and in congregational life.
Only by experiencing the changes first hand can anyone even begin to come to terms with the effectiveness of agape power, that St. Paul listed in 1 Cor. 13, to create patience and kindness, and the capacity to endure whatever comes. Only then can a person truly understand the power to never be jealous, never be conceited, never be rude or selfish, never to be resentful nor to take offense, nor to take any pleasure in other’s sins. Only then can a person comprehend what it means to "delight in the truth," and to always be ready to "excuse, to trust, to hope." (Jerusalem Bible)
In my next posting I’ll go into a more detailed investigation into how extremely unusual were the rest of St. Paul’s proclamations in 1 Cor. 13.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Should "agape" be translated as "love"?
Many years ago I was comparing various translations of the Bible. I became especially curious about a major difference in the way the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians was handled. In the King James Version the word “charity” was used -- but in every translation in the 19th and 20th centuries, "charity" was changed to “love.” I started wondering about why that change happened. The more I looked into ideas about why “charity” was dumped, the more I started thinking that something very important had been dropped from our religious understanding about what had happened to the first Christians.
As I looked into this change, the main reason I kept running across was corruption in the English language. It seems that in Great Britain and America the word “charity” had become so ruined from its original meaning that the word could no longer be used for translating the Bible. That struck me as very strange.
That language corruption played right into what I was seeing happen among various Christian groups about the word “love.” I wondered about the arguing among Christian groups about various religious meanings of love. Some groups want to downplay emphasis on forgiveness and love, because that takes away from emphasis on sin and divine judgement. Other groups want to claim that love is the central concern of Christianity. The “sin and judgement” groups seem to claim that there is something weak about loving -- that somehow love weakens ‘true, born-again’ Christians. But on the other hand I noticed that the groups, who emphasized the central importance of love to Christian identity, seemed to have all kinds of different interpretations of what love meant to Christians in the First Century and today.
As I continued looking into the change in meaning when translating 1 Cor. 13, I found that ever since the 1920s an increasing number of people claimed that the problem started because of the differences between the Greek, Latin, and English languages. The translators of the King James version only used the Latin Bible. The claim was that if they would have gone back to the original Greek New Testament, they would have found that in the Greek language there were several different words for love, and that one of those words was “agape.” But was that really the case?
I found out that at the same time those claims were made about the Greek language, there was always a side comment made that originally “agape” was an obscure, arcane word that was not used by the common people. Almost no one used “agape” before the Greek-speaking Jews then the Christians started using it!
Just about the only times it ever appeared outside of Christian writings was in a religious context, and there it seemed to mean something like “devotion.” So it was not a common word for love, and what Christians (especially St. Paul) did was transform that word by giving it a meaning unique to certain Christian groups.
That means we have a problem in understanding what the first Greek-speaking Christians were doing. If they would have wanted to talk about love, they would have used one of the common Greek words for love, like “philia” or “eros.” And "agape" was not a common word for love. Actually, they did use “philia” in many places. On the other hand, if they purposely did not want to mean the word “love” when they used their word “agape,” then what happens when we translate “agape” with our common word “love?” Do we radically change the meaning from what the first Christians wanted to say? The meaning is still changed even if we stick qualifiers onto it like "self-sacrificial," "Pure," "divine," "unconditional" or any of a number I've seen used.
So maybe the King James Version of the Bible was correct in not using “love” at all in the whole chapter of 1 Cor. 13. The team of scholars who put together that historically important 16th Century translation from Latin into English were following the lead of translators in France who used the word from Old French: “charite.” So the Latin “caritas” became the English “charity.”
That means the Latin translation didn’t use the Latin word for love, and the French translation didn’t use the French word for love, and so the first major English translation followed that important tradition and didn’t use the English word “love.” Why? Were they implying that St. Paul didn’t want the word “love” used there? So what happens when we stick in the word love? We completely change what St. Paul was trying to do there!
----------------------
The idea for this blog came when I was re-reading a book by the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. It was his book of essays about other forms of mysticism, Mystics and Zen Masters. In his chapter on “Love and Tao” he used the Latin translation of First John 4:8 -- “Deus caritas est.” He felt the need to explain that “caritas” referred to “Pure Love.” As I re-read that chapter after almost 4 years from the time I first read it, I began to get the sense that he was not talking about what we normally call love. Of course, “Pure Love” was not a good translation either of “caritas/agape.”
That reminded me of the sense that I got the last time I re-read 1 Corinthians 13. I wondered, What if Paul was not trying to explain love to the Corinthian Christians? (Why would he need to explain love?) What if, instead, he was trying to explain why he was trying to get them to use a word that almost no one ever used anymore, and he was making it the most important word for all Christians. That word, of course, was “agape.”
So what was Paul trying to illustrate in 1 Cor. 13? Why did he end chapter 12 by claiming that he was about to show his reader “a more excellent way” than all of the spiritual gifts he had been discussing? Was he actually laying the groundwork for the spiritual breakthrough he later wrote to the Romans when he said, “the agape of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us?” (Romans 5:5 --The Jerusalem Bible)
On purpose I did not try to translate “agape” because I’ve come to believe that Paul would not want it translated. As a word, “agape” was just as unusual to the people he addressed as it is to us today. And that is just as it should be. What if Paul was purposely using it in a completely new way because he wanted it to be considered to be a new word for a new spiritual way of living?
To try seeing what that would be like, I’ve started re-reading Paul’s letters, and in every place where he used the noun “agape” (instead of the verb "agapao"), I leave it as “agape” instead of using that unfortunately misused and misunderstood English word “love.”
So after you’ve read this, give it a try yourself. Start putting “agape” back where it was meant to be, and then follow along with this blog in the weeks ahead.
As I looked into this change, the main reason I kept running across was corruption in the English language. It seems that in Great Britain and America the word “charity” had become so ruined from its original meaning that the word could no longer be used for translating the Bible. That struck me as very strange.
That language corruption played right into what I was seeing happen among various Christian groups about the word “love.” I wondered about the arguing among Christian groups about various religious meanings of love. Some groups want to downplay emphasis on forgiveness and love, because that takes away from emphasis on sin and divine judgement. Other groups want to claim that love is the central concern of Christianity. The “sin and judgement” groups seem to claim that there is something weak about loving -- that somehow love weakens ‘true, born-again’ Christians. But on the other hand I noticed that the groups, who emphasized the central importance of love to Christian identity, seemed to have all kinds of different interpretations of what love meant to Christians in the First Century and today.
As I continued looking into the change in meaning when translating 1 Cor. 13, I found that ever since the 1920s an increasing number of people claimed that the problem started because of the differences between the Greek, Latin, and English languages. The translators of the King James version only used the Latin Bible. The claim was that if they would have gone back to the original Greek New Testament, they would have found that in the Greek language there were several different words for love, and that one of those words was “agape.” But was that really the case?
I found out that at the same time those claims were made about the Greek language, there was always a side comment made that originally “agape” was an obscure, arcane word that was not used by the common people. Almost no one used “agape” before the Greek-speaking Jews then the Christians started using it!
Just about the only times it ever appeared outside of Christian writings was in a religious context, and there it seemed to mean something like “devotion.” So it was not a common word for love, and what Christians (especially St. Paul) did was transform that word by giving it a meaning unique to certain Christian groups.
That means we have a problem in understanding what the first Greek-speaking Christians were doing. If they would have wanted to talk about love, they would have used one of the common Greek words for love, like “philia” or “eros.” And "agape" was not a common word for love. Actually, they did use “philia” in many places. On the other hand, if they purposely did not want to mean the word “love” when they used their word “agape,” then what happens when we translate “agape” with our common word “love?” Do we radically change the meaning from what the first Christians wanted to say? The meaning is still changed even if we stick qualifiers onto it like "self-sacrificial," "Pure," "divine," "unconditional" or any of a number I've seen used.
So maybe the King James Version of the Bible was correct in not using “love” at all in the whole chapter of 1 Cor. 13. The team of scholars who put together that historically important 16th Century translation from Latin into English were following the lead of translators in France who used the word from Old French: “charite.” So the Latin “caritas” became the English “charity.”
That means the Latin translation didn’t use the Latin word for love, and the French translation didn’t use the French word for love, and so the first major English translation followed that important tradition and didn’t use the English word “love.” Why? Were they implying that St. Paul didn’t want the word “love” used there? So what happens when we stick in the word love? We completely change what St. Paul was trying to do there!
----------------------
The idea for this blog came when I was re-reading a book by the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. It was his book of essays about other forms of mysticism, Mystics and Zen Masters. In his chapter on “Love and Tao” he used the Latin translation of First John 4:8 -- “Deus caritas est.” He felt the need to explain that “caritas” referred to “Pure Love.” As I re-read that chapter after almost 4 years from the time I first read it, I began to get the sense that he was not talking about what we normally call love. Of course, “Pure Love” was not a good translation either of “caritas/agape.”
That reminded me of the sense that I got the last time I re-read 1 Corinthians 13. I wondered, What if Paul was not trying to explain love to the Corinthian Christians? (Why would he need to explain love?) What if, instead, he was trying to explain why he was trying to get them to use a word that almost no one ever used anymore, and he was making it the most important word for all Christians. That word, of course, was “agape.”
So what was Paul trying to illustrate in 1 Cor. 13? Why did he end chapter 12 by claiming that he was about to show his reader “a more excellent way” than all of the spiritual gifts he had been discussing? Was he actually laying the groundwork for the spiritual breakthrough he later wrote to the Romans when he said, “the agape of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us?” (Romans 5:5 --The Jerusalem Bible)
On purpose I did not try to translate “agape” because I’ve come to believe that Paul would not want it translated. As a word, “agape” was just as unusual to the people he addressed as it is to us today. And that is just as it should be. What if Paul was purposely using it in a completely new way because he wanted it to be considered to be a new word for a new spiritual way of living?
To try seeing what that would be like, I’ve started re-reading Paul’s letters, and in every place where he used the noun “agape” (instead of the verb "agapao"), I leave it as “agape” instead of using that unfortunately misused and misunderstood English word “love.”
So after you’ve read this, give it a try yourself. Start putting “agape” back where it was meant to be, and then follow along with this blog in the weeks ahead.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Martin Luther King and Agape
IN HONOR OF MARTIN LUTHER KING’S BIRTHDAY
For many years I’ve taken time on the week of Martin Luther King’s birthday to re-read a portion of his writings. So it’s appropriate to start this blog by reflecting on his book of sermons, Strength to Love.
Dr. King truly understood the power of agape. He let it draw him into action. He knew what agape power could do when it worked in a person’s life and in a group, a nation, and the world. Rev. King saw first hand how agape power poured through the Holy Spirit into people to give them courage and strength to endure all things and to stand up against terrible oppression against them. In the chapter of Strength to Love entitled “Loving Your Enemies,” he said, “When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros nor philia; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all.” (pg. 44)
He went on to say that only by following this way of agape are we able to be children of God. He deeply believed and put into action, as he mobilized masses of suffering people, that “returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” By following the prodding of the Spirit, Rev. King led growing numbers of people to gain the justice they were being denied under a corrupt system of laws; and he did it with the power of non-violence, because as he said, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” He witnessed that “Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence … in a descending spiral of destruction.”
By seeing agape power in action and feeling it surge through an enormously long line of marching people across a bridge near Selma to face down snarling dogs and club-wielding police, Rev. King witnessed what agape power could do. He was able to ask, “Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies -- or else?” He proclaimed, “The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
That is exactly why it is so important to recover the meaning of agape for our period of post-modern history. As Dr. King wrote:
Dorothee Soelle wrote in her pages on Dr. King, in her book about the history of the connection between mysticism and social resistance entitled The Silent Cry, that he followed Gandhi in talking about ‘soul force.’ Dr. King made the profound connection between agape and soul force. She quoted him as saying,
And so we continue to honor Martin Luther King’s memory every year, and those of us who believed so deeply in what he was doing, continue to pray that his teachings will influence more and more people -- before it is too late.
For many years I’ve taken time on the week of Martin Luther King’s birthday to re-read a portion of his writings. So it’s appropriate to start this blog by reflecting on his book of sermons, Strength to Love.
Dr. King truly understood the power of agape. He let it draw him into action. He knew what agape power could do when it worked in a person’s life and in a group, a nation, and the world. Rev. King saw first hand how agape power poured through the Holy Spirit into people to give them courage and strength to endure all things and to stand up against terrible oppression against them. In the chapter of Strength to Love entitled “Loving Your Enemies,” he said, “When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros nor philia; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all.” (pg. 44)
He went on to say that only by following this way of agape are we able to be children of God. He deeply believed and put into action, as he mobilized masses of suffering people, that “returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” By following the prodding of the Spirit, Rev. King led growing numbers of people to gain the justice they were being denied under a corrupt system of laws; and he did it with the power of non-violence, because as he said, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” He witnessed that “Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence … in a descending spiral of destruction.”
By seeing agape power in action and feeling it surge through an enormously long line of marching people across a bridge near Selma to face down snarling dogs and club-wielding police, Rev. King witnessed what agape power could do. He was able to ask, “Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies -- or else?” He proclaimed, “The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
That is exactly why it is so important to recover the meaning of agape for our period of post-modern history. As Dr. King wrote:
“An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love men not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type of divine spark; we love every man because God loves him.”In other chapter, “Love in Action,” that is mainly about the strength of forgiveness, he wrote,
“Jesus also admonished his followers to love their enemies and to pray for them that despitefully used them. This teaching fell upon the ears of many of his hearers like a strange music from a foreign land. Their ears were not attuned to the tonal qualities of such amazing love. … Yet Jesus taught them that only through a creative love for their enemies could they be children of their Father in heaven and also that love and forgiveness were absolute necessities for spiritual maturity.” (p. 32)Of course, Dr. King was reflecting on his own experience. When his house was bombed, thus threatening his wife and children, he stood on the rubble of his front porch, surrounded by a huge mob of supporters who were ready to destroy the whole town at his command. In that instant of monumental decision, he preached the need for love and forgiveness that he had learned from those teachings of Jesus, and at first his words fell on deaf ears because the mob was not attuned to the tonal qualities of such amazing love. But he went on from there to use non-violence to start overthrowing the whole system of Segregation that had oppressed people for generations.
Dorothee Soelle wrote in her pages on Dr. King, in her book about the history of the connection between mysticism and social resistance entitled The Silent Cry, that he followed Gandhi in talking about ‘soul force.’ Dr. King made the profound connection between agape and soul force. She quoted him as saying,
“We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. … Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us up, and we will still love you." (A Testament of Hope, pp. 256-257)Of course, he wasn’t talking about what we normally mean by the English word “love.” Instead, he was working with a meaning more in line with what St. Paul meant with his new, unusual use of the Greek noun “agape.” Rev. King proved to the modern world what St. Paul was prophesying could be accomplished through working with the agape power of God.
And so we continue to honor Martin Luther King’s memory every year, and those of us who believed so deeply in what he was doing, continue to pray that his teachings will influence more and more people -- before it is too late.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
INTRODUCTION
What did the first Greek-speaking followers of the Way of Jesus/Yeshua refer to when they used the noun agapé and the verb agapao?
I’m starting this blog to reach out to other explorers of spiritual ideas. Are you asking similar questions about the spiritual development of First-Century Christian writings? Do you wonder what they meant by Agapé? Do you really think they meant what we mean by “love,” or do you wonder if they meant something else?
The more I look into the use of “agape” in the 1st Century, the farther I seem to get from answers to questions, such as:
(1) Was “agape” originally one of the normal Greek words for “love?”
(2) Why did the translators of the King James Version of the Bible use the word “charity” in 1 Corinthians 13 instead of using “love?” Did they do that because they suspected that “love” was not the right word?
(3) If it did not mean “love,” then what did agape refer to?
The theologian Paul Tillich tried to express the greater significance by observing that
I’ve been trying to find out HOW the first Greek-speaking Christians started making ‘agape’ the main identifying word used in their faith communities? What was the development involved in taking that unusual, obscure, arcane word and transforming it into an important expression of spiritual power that helped both the community and the individual?
How did it come about that a word that was hardly ever used became the term for something that not only served as the centralizing, cohesive power holding their fellowship together but also served as each person’s access to the Presence of God. HOW did the use of this word develop to the point where St. Paul could write that of “faith, hope, and agape; the greatest of these is agape?” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
But even more than that, what does agape mean to spiritual development for us in the 21st Century? I welcome comments from anyone who can help with this search.
I’m starting this blog to reach out to other explorers of spiritual ideas. Are you asking similar questions about the spiritual development of First-Century Christian writings? Do you wonder what they meant by Agapé? Do you really think they meant what we mean by “love,” or do you wonder if they meant something else?
The more I look into the use of “agape” in the 1st Century, the farther I seem to get from answers to questions, such as:
(1) Was “agape” originally one of the normal Greek words for “love?”
(2) Why did the translators of the King James Version of the Bible use the word “charity” in 1 Corinthians 13 instead of using “love?” Did they do that because they suspected that “love” was not the right word?
(3) If it did not mean “love,” then what did agape refer to?
The theologian Paul Tillich tried to express the greater significance by observing that
"in agape ultimate reality manifests itself and transforms life and love."(Love, Justice, and Power; pg. 33)
I’ve been trying to find out HOW the first Greek-speaking Christians started making ‘agape’ the main identifying word used in their faith communities? What was the development involved in taking that unusual, obscure, arcane word and transforming it into an important expression of spiritual power that helped both the community and the individual?
How did it come about that a word that was hardly ever used became the term for something that not only served as the centralizing, cohesive power holding their fellowship together but also served as each person’s access to the Presence of God. HOW did the use of this word develop to the point where St. Paul could write that of “faith, hope, and agape; the greatest of these is agape?” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
But even more than that, what does agape mean to spiritual development for us in the 21st Century? I welcome comments from anyone who can help with this search.
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