How Agape can be Thought to be Similar to Love

I’ve been asked, "Why does ‘agape’ and ‘agapao’ get translated as ‘love’ and ‘loving’?” The question comes from my claim that originally ‘agape’ was not a common Greek word for love. “So why did the Greek-speaking Christians and Jews start using ‘agape’ and ‘agapao’ in a way that had a meaning similar to love and loving?” Obviously the English translators thought that there was a similarity or they wouldn’t have used the English word ‘love’ to translate ‘agape.’

So after spending the first 2 months of writing this blog by focusing on the differences, I decided today to try looking at the similarities that led people to translate ‘agape’ as ‘love.’

This concern has a special problem, of course, in America today. The modern world has produced so much confusion about love that there is no common agreement about what the word means. It’s used for everything from ‘liking [something] a lot’ to ‘sexual intercourse’ to ‘the force that holds the Universe together’ -- and an amazing variety of relational meanings in between. I’m even old enough to remember when General Motors tried to use the word to name a truck, but at least they knew enough to change the spelling to “Luv.” Recently the car manufacturers have picked up that weirdness in some of their advertising, by showing people "in love" with their cars or SUVs or trucks.

Actually, the confusion extends back thousands of years, but it has just gotten worse in the last 100 years. Even in the Bible there are a few examples of people loving the wrong way, and misusing the power of agape, and also using the word 'agape' to refer to “liking a lot” and liking in a way that leads to problems.

And then there is such a widespread problem in the modern world with dysfunctional families that the model of family relationships is not totally helpful for understanding love. Maybe the ancient Greeks had a similar problem so they used two different words for love between parents and children: 'storge' and 'philia.' (Before the Bible was written in Greek, no where in Greek literature was ‘agape’ used to refer to family relationships -- nor for that matter for any intimate or casual relationships.)

When I started searching through blogs, I saw hundreds of examples of the confusion over what kind of love. Everyone who tried connecting ‘agape’ with ‘love’ had trouble trying to figure out what kind of love applied to agape. Most people find it necessary to add all kinds of qualifiers onto ‘love’ when trying to use it to mean ‘agape’ -- as some sort of way to force the translation to work. Even though everyone recognizes there is something different about agape, there is no agreement about what causes the difference.

So when we start looking for similarities, we know we have to look at the BEST kinds of love (not just “liking a lot” -- after all, loving is about relationship). Of course, there are many good things to say about the best kinds of love, because loving relationships are such an important part of being human. Even the large number of people who want to translate ‘agape’ as ‘love,’ admit that ‘agape’ would have to be the very best kind of love that is possible. So we need to start with the best qualities of love. What comes to mind first are the qualities of caring and concern. Also, there is acceptance.

In that sense, giving us the spiritual power of agape is understood by us as God caring for us. So we feel God’s concern that we are able to have access to God’s manifested Presence with us. We experience this as being drawn to God in a powerful, close, joyful, caring (in other words, loving) way. And then we are enabled to open up to God's Presence in our times of prayer, sensing this deeply over a long period of time in a disciplined way gives us the feeling of relationship that can only be expressed as "falling in love" with God.

When we also are able to sense God's agape as coming to us through others, then we grow spiritually to know God's agape flowing out to others as caring. And then when we are thus drawn into close relationships with those around us, we are empowered through agape to reach out in caring and concerning actions to accept others, and to help them, and to share in mutual respect. 

And of course, we have the strong examples in the Gospels of Jesus showing caring and concern. So when the Disciples looked back over the years at their relationship with Jesus and at his teachings, they remembered his loving care for and acceptance of everyone. They also remembered his teachings about his followers needing to treat others with care and acceptance and mutual respect. So when it finally came time to write the Gospels in the Greek language for the new non-Jewish Greek-speaking people, they used 'agape' every time Jesus used 'love' in the Aramaic language he originally used to speak to his Jewish audiences.

All of that, of course, comes under a similarity between love and agape. So even though it makes a little sense for translators to use the English words ‘love’ and ‘loving’ to translate ‘agape’ and ‘agapao’ in some places, we can lose something important in translation if we too quickly try to understand agape by our 21st Century confusion about love. Our word ‘love’ puts unfortunate limitations on what the New Testament originally meant by ‘agape.’ So we come back to the reality that 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 in 1 Cor. 13 and Romans 5:5 & 12:9-10 (even though at other times he seemed to use it to mean something more similar to love).

What I’m discovering in my research is that agape was far, far more than what we mean by love.