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Love Is Love?

              Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. (I John 2:10)


            Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:10) 

            Love is love.

 

            The last of the quotes above is popular today. The idea seems to be that if you love someone, it doesn’t matter who you love; it’s still love. The problem with this is that the definition of “love” is assumed. In one sense, one doesn’t love pizza, kittens, certain songs, one’s children, one’s job, one’s neighbor, and one’s spouse, all in the exact same way.

            In Os Guinness’s The Call, he discusses “two contrasting views of love that have shaped Western searching for the past three thousand years.”[1] The first is eros. This is the love that seeks to be made happy through the possession of a loved object. This is the love of the person who says, “I love ______ because _______ makes me happy, fulfilled, laugh, etc.”

            The second view of love is agape which, as Dallas Willard describes it, seeks the good of the beloved. Happiness is found in doing what is in the best interest of the beloved.

            Rarely, the two are not at least intertwined. We can act in the best interest of the bellowed because it is in the best interest of the beloved while simultaneously checking to see if anyone is noticing what a good person we are or even to prove to ourselves we are good people. I must admit that I spend a lot of time in this continuum, and I’m rather afraid of where I am between the extremes of complete eros and complete agape. I suspect the times when I am closest to agape is when I do something to help without thinking about it.

            Another aspect of this is that we’re learning – or we’re supposed to be learning – the agape end of the continuum. When you learn to do something,  you tend to think about it a lot.  You might watch yourself in a mirror, or ask someone to critique your work. This means that as we learn, we may focus more on the act of love than we do on the person we are supposed to be loving. The same is true when we teach others to love. This is to be expected and excused because learning is a process that requires attention. But the goal is to reach the point where we seek the best interest of others because that’s what we do – even if it means foregoing our own pleasure.


[1] Guinness, Os, The Call (Nashville, TN, W. Publishing Group, 1998), p. 12

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