Know you are not alone and if you have the interest take a moment to study the definition and meaning
of Agape love.
However, the highest type
of agape love is not human at all, but divine.
The toil of Eros is essential to congregational story because, as Niebuhr perceived, Eros signifies far more than the contradiction
of agape love: Eros is an image of culture itself, the expressive stuff without which the proclamation or incarnation of the Christian story is inconceivable.
To return to the positive notes in the message of Paul, it is of prime significance that in both Jesus and Paul it is the love of God that calls forth the human response of faith, of hope for this life and the life to come, and the requirement and possibility
of agape love for one's neighbor in need.
Not exact matches
The gospel
of God's grace in Jesus Christ frees the Christian from both these erroneous tendencies but only if Christians respectfully strive to follow God's commandments and practice
agape love.
Agape is the kind
of love we're supposed to learn.
Family is secondary when people understand the grace
of God and his bestowed mercies then they will have the power to forgive and the power to perfect «
agape love.
And to not see God's
love (
agape) in all
of this, is not going to protect God from who He actually is, it is merely to insulated us from having to deal with a true Sovereign.
But now, I had seen a glimpse
of my own heart, and knew that as long as I was in this flesh, I could never
love him with
agape love.
Recently, in his first Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict has beautifully set the goodness and delight
of the
love of man and women — and indeed wider
loves — in the context
of the sacrificial
love of agape and the ecclesial service
of caritas.
The story
of Abraham's intercession thus points to the central theme
of biblical faith: the steadfast
love of God — hesed,
agape — that refuses to be frustrated even in the context
of a most immoral society.
What happened to Jesus» teaching
of agape — brotherly
love?
The doctrine that
agape fulfils the human
loves has a critical test in interpreting the sexual life, not because
of the earthiness
of sexual
love, but because
of its power to drive the spirit in seeming disregard
of God or neighbour.
Today's definition
of tolerance is NOT the same thing as true,
agape love; which is not afraid to speak the truth with grace.
The
loves which are linked with sexuality seem to be the extreme case
of the ambiguity in human
loves when they are judged in the light
of agape.
The Christians who preach violence in the name
of love of the poor are disciples
of Eros and no longer know the
Agape of Christ.
Agape bids us seek justice here, not the stale justice
of combat and compromise, but the justice
of a search for a new economic, political, and ecclesiastical order in which sexuality can be fulfilling for each in a life which is a support and not a barrier to the
love which binds all together.
61 Keller invites the displacing
of our
love of power with what she has represented as the power
of love, combining eros and
agape: the divine Eros attracts, calls, invites; the divine Agape responds, receives, feels our feelings compassionate
agape: the divine Eros attracts, calls, invites; the divine
Agape responds, receives, feels our feelings compassionate
Agape responds, receives, feels our feelings compassionately.62
Nothing «turns into»
agape, but
love experienced in depth within the context
of faith in God's
agape becomes an occasion for gratitude, humility and the celebration which expresses the life
of God's people in his world.
That it can be so is a proof that this human
love belongs with the creative action
of agape.
There is however no sharp difference in the usage
of this word for
love of the brother, as against the
love spoken
of as
agape.
To be sure, the parables are understood more profoundly in the light
of the full disclosure
of agape in Christ; but that revelation illumines what is already pressing for recognition in human experiences
of love.
Does it not follow from this statement that biblical
love (
agape) refers to the presence and power
of God himself.
It is not simply that Augustine has mixed up the Christian
agape -
love with the self - seeking eros
of Greek religion.
The entire passage reads, «In spite
of the many kinds
of love, which in Greek are designated as philia (friendship), eros (aspiration toward value), and epithymia (desire), in addition to
agape, which is the creation
of the Spirit, there is one point
of identity in all these qualities
of love, which justifies the translation
of them all by «
love»; and that identity is the «urge toward the reunion
of the separated,» which is the inner dynamics
of life.
... While the Principle
of Redemptive Withdrawal is focused on the abandonment Jesus experienced as he experienced the Father's judgment on the sin
of the world, it is nevertheless grounded in the truth that the cross is the definitive expression
of the self - giving, mutual indwelling
agape -
love that defines the triune God throughout eternity (p. 778).
Or as Tillich has it, «The appetitus
of every being to fulfil itself through union with other beings is universal...» (32)
Agape, the
love that gives with no thought
of return; eros, the
love that finds the beloved valuable, and philia, the
love that shares and works for the vision
of the good - none
of these can be reduced to sexual desire, but all
of them in different ways attest to the oneness
of love, so evident in sexual union, as «that which drives everything that is towards everything else that is.»
And as Christians,
of course we're to
agape love folks!
Wyschogrod notes that it is common to distinguish between two kinds
of love,
agape and eros.
Jesus gave so clear a picture
of what a life centered in the
love of God and expressing itself in
love for others would be that, when the New Testament was written in Greek, the meaning
of agape was transformed.
The distinction corresponds to some degree to that between soul and body
Agape is disinterested and impartial, without regard to persons, while eros is interested
love, concerned with this person rather than that and desirous
of the body
of the other.
A personalistic philosophy
of life does not offer us absolute knowledge;... we discover divine purpose in so far as our human purposes are ruled by the New Testament principles
of logos and
agape - reason and
love.
It is not possible simply to collate hesed and
agape into a single understanding, even though they are closely interrelated — and even though the New Testament language
of agape clearly owes more to the meanings
of love in the Old Testament than to the ordinary meanings
of the word in the Hellenistic environment.
The togetherness
of Agape and Eucharist rests upon the unity
of faith and
love in Paul and upon the unity
of faith and works in James.
xii - xiv), which results in giving a relatively low place to abnormal phenomena, and exalting moral and intellectual endowments, and, above all,
agape,
love or charity, to the highest places, is a genuinely scientific estimate
of the situation as it was from the beginning.
Lovers
of Jesus with $ in pocket are a powerful force
of unconditional
agape Love... better $ in the pocket
of Love than in the pockets
of greed and self serving...
vii; M. C. D'Arcy, The Mind and Heart
of Love, Lion and Unicorn, A Study in Eros and
Agape [New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947], p. 204, cf. pp. 114 - 123, 218, 318 - 321.)
Such humility does not exclude the ecstatic joy
of receiving the Spirit
of God, or the peace
of agape with God and the neighbour, but it is joy and peace made possible within
love's work
of forgiveness.
And he uses here a form
of the word
agape, for the highest kind
of love.
I became aware that the
love of God — hesed,
agape — is more
of a zigzag than a straight line.
Unquestionably, the pietism which both Luther and Calvin resisted, tended to reinforce an individualistic view
of salvation in spite
of the fact that pietistic mysticism usually stressed experience
of the Holy Spirit in the
agape -
love which binds the community
of the faithful together.
The personhood
of the Creator is manifested in his radically free relationship to the created world, the radical freedom
of agape, the
love that gives being.
Agape is not the power to overcome dependence; it is the power to overflow in interdependence toward an other which is not something to be identified with but which may be dependent and in need
of the
love that overflows.
In the context
of finite creative acts, the creator's
love can not have the same structure that
agape has in the context
of the cosmos.
Peirce's argument against determinism in «The Doctrine
of Necessity Examined,» published a year earlier than his paper on evolutionary
love, clearly lays the basis for the affirmation
of radical creativity and the need for the principle
of agape (6.36 - 65).
In his analysis, he found in Whitehead a concept
of divine
love which lies in contrast to New Testament
agape and medieval amicitia and which identifies with Platonic eros.
As was pointed out a moment ago, because the
agape in question is a principle
of finite creative agents, the agapastic
love of these agents must be infected by eros.
The defect in eros and the need for
agape is also evident in the relation
of creative
love to disorder and disharmony.
«9 Or again, the ability to enter sympathetically into the experience
of another turns out to be another form
of love that is close to
agape.
The Christian motif is that
of salvation through
love, but this is the
love which is named
agape in the New Testament.