What Does Agape Love Really Mean?

Maybe you’ve already heard that agape (ἀγάπη) is the standard word for love in the Greek New Testament, and maybe you’ve heard that it points to a specific kind of love: a selfless, giving, non-emotional love—as opposed to the friendship love of philia (φιλία).
 
What does agape love really mean?
 
And now to love, because John 21 provides a perfect example of what Dr. Decker is talking about. I actually remember the day as a college freshman when I was given the (supposed) secret Greek key to unlocking Jesus’ famous conversation with Peter in that passage. Jesus asks three times, “Do you love me?” Peter replies each time: “Yes, I love you.” I was told that, hidden underneath the surface of the weak, imprecise English word “love” were two different Greek words: agapao (ἀγαπάω) and phileo (φιλέω). I was further told that these two Greek words pointed to two vastly different kinds of love, the one selfless and non-emotional and the other merely emotional and friend-ish. Peter, so the interpretation goes, twice couldn’t bring himself to say he loved Jesus selflessly and unconditionally, so Jesus asked him, in effect, “Do you even love me like a friend?”
 
…The fact is that the Bible never says anywhere that real love, ideal love, is non-emotional. In Jesus’ conversation with Peter, he appears to be varying agapao and phileo for purposes of style, not meaning.
 
One of the problems with using Greek without knowing it well is that you tend to fail to apply your principles rigorously. Are all synonyms in John 21 used to point up their differences rather than their similarities?
 
As D. A. Carson points out… Jesus doesn’t just vary his words for love in his conversation with Peter, he varies his word choice for the noun “sheep”:
 
“Feed my lambs,” he says.
Then, “Shepherd my sheep.”
Then, “Feed my sheep.”
 
Is it lambs or sheep? If Jesus intends to highlight a significant difference, he does not choose to make that clear. There do not seem to be obvious differences among the three imperative verbs, either: “feed,” “shepherd,” “feed.” The verb “shepherd,” in fact, also means “feed” sometimes, especially in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). 
 
And John 21 isn’t the only place where Jesus varies his use of agapao and phileo in the Gospel of John. In John 3:35, Jesus says, “The Father loves the son,” and in John 5:20 he says precisely the same thing—only in one verse he uses agapao and in the other phileo, with no discernible difference in meaning. Jesus isn’t invoking two radically different kinds of love in his conversation with Peter.
 
One of the most popular linguistic and exegetical fallacies in modern times is that the Greek word for love, agapao, carries in it the implication of a divine love that is unconditional and comes to us in spite of our sin.
 
That is not true. Context must decide if agapao refers to our proud, cliquish love for our cronies (as in Matthew 5:46) or if it refers to God’s merciful and sacrificial love for sinners (as in John 3:16), or if it refers to our love for leaders, not unconditionally but precisely because of their labor (1 Thessalonians 5:13)
 
To be clear, the New Testament does speak of a special kind of love, but we don’t know that by looking up Greek words in the dictionary. We know it by reading the New Testament. People who can read the Bible only in English can still know what love is.
 
Debunking beloved interpretations of Scripture is a favored pastime of young seminarians. But constructive help, not destructive criticism, is my goal here. It is my impression that the church in general—and perhaps the most studious of us in particular—put too much weight on looking up Bible words and not enough weight on reading Bible sentences in their contexts. There is nothing necessarily wrong with looking up words, and Logos can do it so incredibly well! I do it all the time—and if you’re curious as to what I think “love” really means, I actually believe the standard Greek dictionary defines it pretty well if you put senses one and two together: “to have a warm regard for and interest in another; to have high esteem for or satisfaction with something, cherish, have affection for, love, take pleasure in.”
 
But you’ll learn far more about “love” by reading the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, or by reading the story of the Good Samaritan—Scripture passages which don’t even use the word—than you will by looking up agape in a dictionary. By all means do both, but know in advance which one weighs more than the other.
 

Excerpt from: https://blog.logos.com/what-does-agape-love-mean/

Is Love Mere Chemistry?

 Indeed one of the central characteristics of human nature is the capacity for relationships of love and self-giving. Young children deprived of love do not thrive. Yet reductionists tell us that feelings of “love” are merely the effects of chemical reactions in the brain—or, as cognitive science puts it, an illusion caused by patterns of neural activity.

Evolutionary psychologists tell us that altruistic behavior is merely a calculated strategy of helping others so they will help us in return. Tit for tat. It is a strategy of “reciprocal altruism,” programmed into our genes by natural selection so that we will get along and survive better. It would be more candid, however, to call this “pseudo-altruism” (as Daniel Dennett does) because the assumption is that individuals practice cooperation and self-control only when it secures their larger interests. Every good deed is ultimately selfish.

The only worldview that supports the highest aspirations of the human heart is Christianity. It gives a basis for believing that love is real and genuine because we were created by a God whose very character is love. The Bible teaches that there has been love and communication between the members of the Trinity from all eternity. Love is not an illusion created by the genes to promote our evolutionary survival, but an aspect of human nature that reflects the fundamental fabric of ultimate reality. Moreover, by submitting to God’s plan of salvation and becoming His children, we have the astonishing possibility of participating in that eternal love.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

How to be Wise

If we are to become wise, our information diet must begin with the Bible. It must be our solid foundation, as well as the grid through which all other sources are tested. In a world of information overload, the Bible is graciously concise and yet comprehensive.
 
The Bible is our most important source of wisdom because it is literally the eternal God—the standard and source of all truth—revealing himself. What a miraculous thing!
 
When God speaks, we are obligated to obey. His speech, and only his, is supremely authoritative. And Scripture is his speech… But we humans hate authority. We don’t like subjecting ourselves to anyone other than ourselves. Adam’s original sin was a proud intellectual self-sufficiency, what J. I. Packer describes as the “ability to solve all life’s problems without reference to the word of God.” True faith, argues Packer, means giving up the notion of intellectual autonomy and recognizing that “true wisdom begins with a willingness to treat God’s Word as possessing final authority.” Man is not the measure of all things. God is.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

What Wisdom Is and Isn’t

Wisdom is not knowledge. Nor is it information.
 
Wisdom is not a matter of mere data processing; there’s no algorithm for it. Wisdom is also not necessarily the end result of education (though it certainly can be). Wisdom is knowing what to do with knowledge gained through various means of education: how to apply knowledge and information in everyday life; how to discern if something is true or not; how to live well in light of truth gained.
 
Wisdom is not merely knowing the right answers. It’s about living rightly. It’s about determining which right answer is best. It’s a moral orientation: a developed sense and intuition for discerning right and wrong, real and fake, truth and falsehood; the ability to weigh greater and lesser goods and make complex decisions involving multiple, sometimes competing truths. Wisdom is not something you can Google or download in one fell swoop. It is accumulated over time and through experience.
 
Wisdom and knowledge do have a symbiotic relationship. We can become more or less wise depending on the good or bad knowledge we take in. But the more wisdom we have, the better we become at filtering out bad knowledge and turning good knowledge into spiritual nutrition. Wisdom is sort of like a healthy kidney: it retains what is nutritious as it filters out the waste
 
As James puts it in the Bible, true wisdom is “from above,” not below (James 3:17). It is the God-created (Prov. 8:22–32), God-given (Prov. 2:6), God-fearing (Prov. 1:7), God-oriented (Prov. 3:5–8) ability to synthesize, filter, evaluate, and apply information in ways that lead to right judgments and overall flourishing. We cannot be wise apart from God. God is the standard, the definition, the source, and the keeper of wisdom. But he’s not greedy with it. He’s happy to give it to us if only we ask (James 1:5).
 
This, however, is the struggle. Asking requires humility, and we want to believe we can be wise without God. To bypass God in pursuit of wisdom, however, is a fast track to folly. Just ask Adam and Eve. Only when we acknowledge God and submit to his sovereign rule can we begin to be wise.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Our Changing Brains

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Internet “a technology of forgetfulness” and describes how, thanks to the plasticity of our neural pathways, our brains are literally being rewired by digital distraction:
 

The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.

 
Though we are reading a ton on our devices and screens—we actually read a novel’s worth of words every day—it is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. Maryanne Wolf argues: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests.”
 
Google offers quick answers to any query we might have. But wisdom is not about getting to answers as fast as possible. It’s more often about the journey, the bigger picture, the questions and complications along the way.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Involuntary Attention

Commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day “crisis of distraction” rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a “finite resource,” and finite it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson, we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment.
 
But to describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.
 
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap. When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible. In any case, it would be highly undesirable to be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention. If outside forces couldn’t commandeer at least some of it against your will, you’d be unable to step out of the path of oncoming buses, or hear that your baby was in distress. Nor are the benefits confined to emergencies; the same phenomenon is what allows your attention to be seized by a beautiful sunset, or your eye to be caught by a stranger’s across a room.
 
Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d struggle to stay alive without it. Yet the capacity to exert some influence over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.
 
All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

The Folly of Distractibility

In Proverbs, the opposite of wisdom is often personified in a character known as “the forbidden woman.” A woman of “smooth words” (Prov. 2:16–17) whose lips “drip honey” (5:3), she is “loud,” “seductive,” and “sits at the door of her house,” “calling to those who pass by” (9:13–15). A. W. Tozer describes her as “moral folly personified” who “works by the power of suggestion.” 

In today’s world, we see the “forbidden woman” at work through “watch this next!” algorithms that lure us into constant distraction by putting “suggestions” into our minds. Here’s Tozer:
 

Many are brainwashed from nine o’clock in the morning or earlier until the last eyelid flutters shut at night because of the power of suggestion. These people are uncommitted. They go through life uncommitted, not sure in which direction they are going.

The antidote to dangerous distractibility is purpose, focus, and intention. Proverbs 4:25 says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” This is wisdom in contrast to the unwise woman of folly, who “does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it” (Prov. 5:6).
 
When you go online, ask yourself what you are going online to do. Is there a specific goal? When you open YouTube, is it to watch a specific thing? When you reach for your phone as you wait in line or walk from one place to another, is it for a purpose or just out of habit? When we aren’t going somewhere, we’ll go anywhere—and the “anywheres” of the Internet are rarely good for us. 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021