Love Defined
“When love has been inverted in on itself—the way our common vernacular implies—loving another shifts from sacrificially seeking their good to extracting my own good from them. ‘I love you’ is no longer a statement of covenantal faithfulness. ‘I love you’ now means ‘you please me.’”
What is Love? (Baby, don’t hurt me)
How we define “love” will inevitably define our lives.
Let’s be honest with each other…the English language is a bit of a mess. It is a conglomeration of influences from various root languages, mashed together to create general loci of meaning. Nowhere is the English language less precise than with the word: “love”.
Greeks get it, they have five to seven words to express various realities of love. Hindi has over 14. English? Just one.
Think of all the strange theological, personal, anthropological implications of the following list if read with a similar meaning…especially when held together:
I love Grandma.
I love freshly baked bread.
I love my newborn son.
I love my wife.
I love the music of U2.
I love warm cookies.
I love the beach.
I love God.
God loves me.
In the words of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Now, this makes things very difficult, especially for Jesus followers. Even more for those of us seeking to make disciples who make disciples. How do we call people into living out the love of God and love of neighbor, or loving our enemy, or living a perfect love that casts out all fear, when this word carries such confused—and sometimes downright corrupted— baggage?
Let’s begin by unraveling the knot that is this word “love.” Just like our understanding of “the gospel,” we can only offer this world something Jesus-centered and life-changing when we have crystal clarity in our own hearts and minds about what “love” actually is.
A Simple Definition
Read through the biblical narrative and you’ll quickly find different types of “loves”…romantic, motherly, friendly, etc. We call these “loves” simply because we use one English word to encapsulate all of them. Let it be known, though, these are different words with different meanings!
But two words are uplifted as reflecting (or being, in the case of 1 John 4:8) God’s very essence: the Hebrew hesed and the Greek agape. Covenantal lovingkindness and others-oriented love. Libraries have been written about these two words, so we will not parse them out in depth. Instead, let’s cut to the chase. Here’s my best summary of these divine loves as modeled in the Bible…caught in one sentence:
Love means seeking the true good of the other, even at expense to the self.
I know, I know, this is such a bold assertion to seek to define love in a sentence. But work with me here…this is squarely what Jesus modeled in his life and ultimately fulfilled in his death and resurrection.
(Disagree with this definition? No sweat, just work up your own sentence. But for now, let’s see how this plays out.)
Love and the Incurvatus in Se
So, why is this specific definition of love so important to hold to as Jesus followers? Why must we be clear in our thinking (and usage!) of this word?
In the West, something very disturbing has happened to our mutual understanding of love. Take a moment and think about the ways you use the word in your daily vernacular. Besides a goodbye between friends or spouses, we have downgraded this word into what I call the “like scale”. It goes like this…
If something disgusts me, I hate it.
If I am generally put off by it, I don’t like it.
If I am generally fond of it, I like it.
If I really like it, I love it.
“You like warm cookies and milk? Well, I LOVE them!”
Maybe you can begin to see the problem here. Love is meant to be the ultimate others-oriented force of God’s universe. It is meant to turn our eyes away from ourselves in acts of servanthood, sacrifice, and selflessness for neighbor or enemy. And yet, this outward-bending love has been tragically inverted. Instead of focusing on the other, this word now is used for the things I most desire, the things that bring ME the most pleasure. Biblically, the word love itself is beginning to mean its opposite.
This is likely the slow work of the incurvatus in se, a term coined originally by Augustine of Hippo, and then expanded upon by Martin Luther. Their argument is that humans were originally designed to be shoulders up, oriented outward towards others and God. But, our rejection of God in Eden, and our continual rejection thereafter, has begun a curvature inward. Our shoulders slump in, heads bow, and we focus all things towards ourselves.
As Luther wrote:
“Our nature [has] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself…, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake”1
This is not the happiest diagnosis of the human condition, but it is seemingly becoming an ever-truer one, particularly around God’s gift of love. We bend this most beautiful gift towards ourselves. No wonder “love” has become the battlecry for various cultural shifts that are rooted in self-liberated expressions of desire. No wonder a “lack of love” is commonly used as an excuse for many walking out on the 50% of American marriages that end in divorce, often leaving families in tatters. No wonder the refrains of “Jesus ‘loves you” to our congregations have resulted in a personal religion that shapes God into my own therapeutic deity that secures my eternal comfort at no cost to myself.
When love has been inverted in on itself—the way our common vernacular implies—loving another shifts from sacrificially seeking their good to extracting my own good from them. “I love you” is no longer a statement of covenantal faithfulness. “I love you” now means “you please me.”
Let that soak in for a moment. How far we have drifted.
Living as People of Love
So, what must we do? Let us be refreshed and reoriented by the words of Jesus:
A new commandment I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
John 13:34-35 (NIV)
How do we know what real love is? We do not define it ourselves, and we certainly do not relegate it to the expression of desires. No, we are called to look at how Jesus treated his disciples. This is what love is. Then, we are to imitate this love for one another. It is lived, practiced, incarnated, sacrificial, and good. It does good. It brings good. For the sake of others.
And notice the last sentence. Loving in this inverted, upside-down, rightside-up, Kingdom kind of way will be a curious act of subversive nonconformity that will confirm for all the fingerprint of Jesus on you. This is how they will know that we are Jesus' disciples…how we love.
BONUS CONTENT: Where to start? A suggestion…
Begin with your language around love. The words we use shape our perspective. We perpetuate this inverted and false love when we continue this self-oriented use of the word. Instead of saying, “I love that movie”, try saying “I really enjoyed that movie.” “I am refreshed by the beach” instead of “I love the beach”. Use “love” when you’re truly seeking someone else’s good. To “love” a batch of cookies would be—I suppose—to preserve them in a hermetically-sealed bag.
Then, live in such a way that the best words someone can say to you is not “I love you”, but “you have loved me so well.” This is when we will be walking the Jesus path of outward-oriented love.
[1] *Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, qtd. in Mark Johnston, Saving God (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 88.
