I started rambling about love, and the pain that keeps us from loving, in the post at http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-addictions.html, and added to it at http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-pain.html. I am going to continue with that theme and will probably end up with a series of posts that seem disconnected, but I do intend to tie them together for those patient enough to keep reading over the next several weeks.
At http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/love-that-never-dies.html
we discussed the love that is really liking something or someone. While I want
to be loved with that kind of love (in other words, I want to be liked), I really need the kind of
love which the Greeks describe with agape.
We read in I John 4:8 that "God is love". It's a
statement of equivalence and it is a definition. That same word agape
that is used 116 times in the Greek New Testament and is rendered in the old
King James Version as charity,
which back then really wasn't such a bad translation of it. Yet, agape
is more than what we typically mean by charity today.
Love is not an emotion; it is an attitude. It is thing of the head more than of the heart. It is a point of view. It is, as Eric Fromm relates in his The Art of Loving, an interpersonal creative capacity that is characterized by care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If I love you, I care about you, I take responsibility for your welfare, I respect you, and I get to know you and about you so that I CAN actually take that responsibility.
Essentially love is non-directional. If I love you I must also love the guy across the street. If love you, but not him, then the very reason that I don't love him shows that my love has conditions attached: it is a "love" that operates only if its Object fulfills certain requirements. That then renders my "love" as a business transaction. That isn't love. I either love everyone, or I love no one. Moreover, a corollary is that I love them no matter what they say, what they think or what they do. I may not love what they say, think or do, but I love them in any case. This, of course, requires separating the person from the behavior and realizing that a person is not his behavior.
Love is not an emotion; it is an attitude. It is thing of the head more than of the heart. It is a point of view. It is, as Eric Fromm relates in his The Art of Loving, an interpersonal creative capacity that is characterized by care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If I love you, I care about you, I take responsibility for your welfare, I respect you, and I get to know you and about you so that I CAN actually take that responsibility.
Essentially love is non-directional. If I love you I must also love the guy across the street. If love you, but not him, then the very reason that I don't love him shows that my love has conditions attached: it is a "love" that operates only if its Object fulfills certain requirements. That then renders my "love" as a business transaction. That isn't love. I either love everyone, or I love no one. Moreover, a corollary is that I love them no matter what they say, what they think or what they do. I may not love what they say, think or do, but I love them in any case. This, of course, requires separating the person from the behavior and realizing that a person is not his behavior.
The next time I write on this, I want to explore the concept
of God as the personification of love.
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