Journal: Journal of Transformative Learning and Leadership
Volume: JTLL 02:1 (Fall 2024)
Article: Let Love Be Un-Hypocritical: The "Agape" Of God And Amnon
Author: A. W. Morris

Let Love Be Un-Hypocritical: The Agape Of God And Amnon

A.W. Morris

Introduction

More than fifty years ago, Billy Graham delivered a passionate evangelistic message called “True Love.” With characteristic zeal he proclaimed to his audience that the Greeks had not one but four words for love: storge (family affection), eros (romantic / sexual love), phileo (friendship), and, fourthly:

Agape love. This is another word that the Greeks used; they invented this word for the New Testament. This is God’s love. Agape love is a supernatural love, a love that we know nothing about apart from God. It’s so deep and so wide and so high and so great and has such dimensions to it that no words in any language can describe it.1

It is worth asking whether the Greeks actually invented the word ἀγάπη (agape) specifically for the New Testament. Also, does this word refer only to God’s supernatural love that is higher than the other three and beyond all human description?

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A Christian understanding of love is based not on Greek philosophy but on plainly interpreted Scripture. This article demonstrates that the Scriptures reveal not four but two categories of love; and any expression of love – physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, or any combination thereof – falls into one of these two categories.

Four Loves

The idea of four Greek categories of love did not originate with Billy Graham. The first modern treatment of this topic was a book by C.S. Lewis titled The Four Loves (1960). In the broadest sense he distinguished between what he called “need-love” and “gift-love,” and then he devoted a full chapter to each of the four loves:

1) Affection: “The Greeks called this love storge ... I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as ‘affection, especially of parents to offspring’; but also of offspring to parents.”2

2) Friendship: “We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few ‘friends.’ But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships’, show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book.”3

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3) Eros: “By Eros I mean of course that state which we c...