AGAPE ä gä’ pā, ἀγάπη, G27, is one NT word for love. It appears in the Johannine definition (1 John 4:8), “God is love.” It is that love demanded of man by the law of God and for man’s neighbor, whom man must love “as himself.” Agapé is, therefore, the fulfillment of the law as it relates to both God and fellow man (Matt 22:40); and of the trio “faith, hope and love,” agapé is the greatest (1 Cor 13:13). Agapé is also the power that overcomes evil.

To this Biblical data must be added: the NT has a second word for love (ιλέω). While the NT does not use, and the OT has no direct counterpart for ερος, both Testaments do recognize erotic love. In view of all this Biblical data, it is neither surprising that the Bible has much to say about love nor that the mystery of love spills over the limits of the best definitions of love.

The Heb., as does the Eng. language, has only one word for love (אָהַב, H170), and this word, as does love in Eng. usage, has a rich variety of meanings. While the NT with its two words for love, makes finer distinctions of meaning, even in the NT the distinctions are blurred in actual usage so that the meanings of each overlap. It is in the imprecise usage that the true meanings of love, particularly of agapé and eros, appear in Biblical thought. Any rigid categorization or definition of agapé and eros, in which the one excludes the other, distorts the Biblical meaning of each as well as their peculiar relationship.

Anders Nygren’s brilliant book, Agapé and Eros, is a case that illustrates this point. Nygren defines eros as it appears in Gr. thought: eros is desire in search of satisfaction. Eros seeks its object in order to satisfy its own hunger. Eros seeks its object for the worth and value it has for its own self-fulfillment. Unlike agapé, eros seeks its own.

In sharp contrast to this, Nygren sees the peculiar and distinctive character of agapé in the NT teaching that God is agapé and reveals His agapé in His self-giving redemptive love for sinners. Agapé loves the unlovely and the unworthy; it is, therefore, neither elicited nor motivated by the loveliness or worth of its object. Agapé seeks not its own (1 Cor 13:5), but the good of its object, however unlovely. While eros is motivated by what its object can do for it, agapé is motivated by what it can do for its object. Eros seeks its object for the delight it proffers; agapé loves though it sees nothing of delight in its object.

This sharp distinction between agapé and eros does not comport with all the Biblical data. In Biblical teaching God the Father has “agapic” love for His eternal Son; men are summoned to have agapé for God and for each other—a summons that Nygren tries to temper by the claim that the NT demands faith rather than love. His insistence that agapé excludes a motivating delight in its object creates a difficulty for him in terms of the demand that one love one’s neighbor “as oneself,” and leads him to estimate the insistence of the Johannine epistles that one ought to love the “brethren” but not “the world” as a departure from the authentic NT meaning of agapé. In Biblical usage agapé, both regarding God and man, extends to the righteous as well as the sinners, to the lovely as well as the unlovely and to those who love only those who love them (Luke 6:32). It is an expression both for man’s love for God, and the Father’s love for the Son, and thus describes that delight which the one finds in the other because of what the other is.

Biblical thought does not endorse an agapé which excludes eros, but one which allows for an erotic love that sees value, and takes delight, in its object. Eros in Biblical thought is an expression for mutuality; the lover finds delight in this love. While the Heb. has no word for “sex,” the OT gives erotic love a positive and noble role. Eros celebrates life in general, and bodily life in particular. Sexual differentiation, and the erotic love of husband and wife, are an expression of the image of God in which man was created (Gen 1:27). The marital bond is an expression of both agapé and eros. In it there is both self-giving and self-fulfillment. The sexual relationship is an image of God’s covenant relationship to His people; Jehovah is the husband and Israel His wife; similarly Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride—and His Body. Consequently, Hosea in his peculiar marriage, uses erotic love as a representation of God’s experience with Israel. The Song of Solomon is plainly a celebration of erotic love; even the attempts to spiritualize the Song as a celebration of Christ’s love for the Church must acknowledge that the celebration is expressed in terms of eros. In Biblical thought eros is open to profound corruption, but it is also open to redemption and is recognized as an essential part of man’s being. Eros is never surrendered to the selfishly-centered connotation of eros in Gr. thought, where it is ultimately sacrificed for an unbodied spirituality.

The clue to the validity of eros, and of its relationship with agapé, is found in the freedom of God to express and share Himself as agapé in creation, election, covenant-making, and redemption. Eros is an expression of the freedom of God to desire to create a world and to take delight in that which He has created. God is free to impart existence and worth to an object and then to love it and take delight in it because of its worth. This divine giving to an object, and the divine love for and delight in this worth of the object, is an expression of divine eros. For God, too, eros is an expression of mutuality and self-giving, of the celebration of and delight in, bodily life and created reality, and this comes to expression in the Biblical doctrines of covenant-making, election, and redemption. Agapé alone does not explain the Biblical view of any of these divine actions. It is agapé plus eros which comes to expression in that freedom of the divine good-pleasure to create and redeem, and to find and take delight in what is created and redeemed.

Nygren’s mutually exclusive definition of eros and agapé, eros as selfish self-seeking love and agapé as God’s love for only the unlovely, excludes that love, delight and good pleasure which God has in creation as such, that neighbor love that demands a love for the neighbor as for one’s self, and that divine love expressed in God’s election in which God loves the sinner and delights in the Christian as a good and righteous man. God’s agapé embraces sinners but does not exclude that eros in which God loves the righteous (Ps 73:1), hates all the workers of iniquity (5:5), and takes delight in what is righteous and good and lovely for the very reason that they are such. Without eros, agapé renders creation and its redemption absolutely necessary, or projects them as realities bereft of real worth. It is only when agapé and eros are understood in their peculiar relatedness, that creation, election, redemption become meaningful and not arbitrary, and both agapé and eros become an essential part of man’s total life and being. See Love.