It has become a well-known claim that “agape love” is a special kind of divine love. It is commonly spoken of as an unconditional love, as something that is the supreme expression of love, or as sacrificial and self-giving. It is often placed against the verb phileo, which speaks of a brotherly love or fondness for someone; it is a good form of love, but not quite as high as agape. Due to this form of reasoning, we can infer that any time the word agape—or its verbal form, agapao—is used, it is reflecting a specialized meaning.
What I aim to do with this post is to show that overemphasizing the use of agape/agapao is ultimately misguided and use this as a case study to warn us against putting too much stock in individual words divorced from context. I would also like to show how, despite the lack of specialized meaning in Greek, agape has nevertheless become a technical theological term as we know it today in English.
Greek Usage of Agape/Agapao
While agape/agapao is often used to describe God’s love for his people, as well as the love his people should have for one another, it is the context of the word’s usage that is more important than the word itself. That is to say, we don’t learn of God’s great love just because agapao was used, but because we are told (among other things) the way in which God loved the world: he gave his only Son; Christ laid down his life for his friends; Christ died while we were still sinners.
That agape/agapao in and of itself is not indicative of a special form of divine love is demonstrated by other contexts in which the words are used both in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, abbreviated LXX) and in the New Testament. I will simply provide the passages and provide some brief commentary after the list:
When Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of the land, saw her, he took her and lay with her and humiliated her. And Shechem’s soul clung to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved (agapao) the young woman and spoke kindly to her.
Genesis 34:2–3 (LXX)
And it was after these things that Absalom, the son of David, had a very beautiful sister whose name was Tamar, and Amnon, the son of David, loved (agapao) her… But Amnon would not listen to her, and he overpowered her, humbled her, and lay with her. Then Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, such that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love (agape) with which he loved (agapao) her. And Amnon said to her, “Get up and go!”
2 Samuel 13:1, 14–15 (LXX)
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved (agapao) the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
John 3:19
Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved (agapao) the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
John 12:42–43
For Demas, having loved (agapao) this present age, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia and Titus to Dalmatia.
2 Timothy 4:10
Do not love (agapao) the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves (agapao) the world, the love (agape) of the Father is not in him.
1 John 2:15
I don’t think I need to make any more comment on whether the “love” that Shechem and Amnon held could be considered a “special divine love” because they agape’d Dinah and Tamar. These contexts show that, semantically, agapao/agape can encompass something that is “love” tainted by evil, much in the same way that we can infer the evil intent of corrupted “love” in English.
The passages in John, 2 Timothy, and 1 John illustrate agapao can be directed toward evil and worthless things. In this way, it also functions very similarly to how we can use “love” in English. I can “love” wicked things, not in the truest sense of “love,” but in a perverted way where my affections are set upon worthless things. It seems that, despite some protestations to the contrary, the English word “love” is a quite appropriate equivalent to agapao/agape in its potentially varied contexts.
We can also consider parallels where the supposedly lower form of love, phileo, appears to serve as a synonym for agapao:
for the Father himself loves (phileo) you, because you have loved (phileo) me and have believed that I came from God.
John 16:27
Those whom I love (phileo), I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.
Revelation 3:19
On account of the use of phileo, would we want to conclude that a lesser sort of God’s love is being spoken of in these passages? No, for the context shows it is speaking of God’s love for his people. What this tells us is that there was semantic overlap between agapao and phileo, such that they could be used somewhat interchangeably. This can be most clearly seen when comparing the two below passages:
The Father loves (agapao) the Son and has given all things into his hand.
John 3:35
For the Father loves (phileo) the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.
John 5:20
Compared to the verb agapo, the verb phileo is used for “love” relatively infrequently: phileo occurs 22 times, while agapao is used 134 times (according to the count in Logos). By the time of the writing of the New Testament, it seems that the verb agapao had become, in a sense, the generic and default word for “love.” One of the reasons for this, as D. A. Carson highlights, is that the verb phileo had gained the meaning “to kiss” as part of its semantic range (you can see this where Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss in Luke 22:47).1 As part of the natural process of language change, phileo was fading in favor of agapao, but still could be used somewhat interchangeably and for apparently stylistic reasons.
What this discussion should tell us is that words are not concepts. In English, we can discuss the concept of “love,” but that concept is not bound only to the word “love” itself, for clearly we can use the word “love” in contexts that are antithetical to the concept of “love.” In the same way, we should not confuse the concept of God’s unconditional love with Greek usage of agapao/agape. It is not the word itself which carries the exegetical weight, but the context it is used in and its overall message. We can make this a general principle: we should not focus merely on words, but on the contexts those words are used in. In the case of agapao/agape, we should not draw conclusions based only on when these words are used, but we should draw our conclusions based on when God’s love is demonstrated in Scripture, regardless of what word is used.
English Usages of Agape and Love
Now while we do not want to overstate usage of agape means when used in the New Testament, that does not mean that we therefore need to stop using agape to speak of as the highest form of love. Why is that? Because years of overinvesting the Greek term agape with too much meaning has, in effect, turned agape into a technical theological term (this probably goes for phileo as well). The Oxford English Dictionary in fact has an entry for agape: “Theology. Christian love, as distinct from erotic love or simple affection; charity.” It attests usage of agape in English going back at least to the 18th century.2 We should essentially consider agape to be a borrowed word rather than a foreign word, as opposed to ahava (the Hebrew word for “love”). If I speak of the need for Christians to show agape toward one another, you will understand that I am speaking of the need for Christians to show unconditional love, love that is selfless and demonstrated in action.
Since agape has been adopted into English with a specific meaning, we should differentiate between its meaning as we understand it when speaking in English as opposed to when referring back to Greek. In English, it is perfectly acceptable to use agape to specifically mean something along the lines of “unconditional, selfless love; the highest form of love.” When we use agape in English, we are only using it to refer to this form of love. We must, however, differentiate between its technical usage in English and its more general usage in Greek. In Greek, the semantic range for agapao/agape really does appear to be similar to the semantic range for our own English word “love.” When we speak of the technical English meaning of agape, we would do well to add the caveat that this applies only to the English language, not to Greek from which we derive the word.
I am not currently certain when agape came to be highlighted to such an extent in the English language. My suspicion is that C. S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves (1960) contributed to emphasizing agape above all other forms of love, but that is all I have for now: a suspicion. If you are more familiar with the history of the concept of agape in the English-speaking world, I would love to hear it.
Conclusion
So is agape the highest form of love? In one sense, no, and in another sense, yes. In terms of the Greek of the New Testament and the Septuagint, the word is not invested with special meaning. It can be used in similar contexts as our English word “love,” both positive and negative; the overall context determines the meaning. Agape can refer to the type of love God has for his people, yet it can also refer to the perverted attraction a rapist has for his victim or a love for the worthless things of the world. Yet in English, we have borrowed agape as a technical theological term which does in fact refer to the highest form of love; it is functionally the only way the word is used in English nowadays. In making a careful distinction between the Greek and English usages, we can avoid over-interpretation that can arise from word studies that may have a tendency to invest agapao/agape with too much meaning. And in so doing, we become more careful and responsible handlers of the text.
Notes
- D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 51–52. ↩︎
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “agape (n.), sense 2,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4425648460. ↩︎
