NTM

My cousin asked me to perform the wedding ceremony for her, can you believe that??  The wedding took place a few weeks ago.    I thought I would talk about the most appropriate topic – love.  I also thought it was going to be an easy subject to study and figure out – wrong.    I did end up enoying studying this topic a little more.  Here is what I learned along the way and this is an excerpt from the wedding. . . .

I have found that other languages do a better job with this word — love. Languages such as the greek language have distinct words for love. They have different words that all describe love but are very diverse.
I chose to dig a little deeper at the different words for love in greek because I believe it can really help us understand what type of love we have for someone else and what kind of love someone else might have for us.
I focused in on three of the words and want to present them, much like the order of the progression of a relationship.
First we have Philia  which means a love between friends. It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. It denotes a general type of love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity. We probably would include many people and things in this category.
This would include sports and other recreational activities. This would also include those people that we work with or neighbors down the street that we would consider friends even though we may not intentionally spend time with them outside our daily routines.

The second word for love in greek is eros. The people and activities that we enjoy in this group are much smaller than those in the first group we talked about. Eros is a passionate love. The Modern Greek word means “(romantic) love;” Eros can be interpreted as a love for someone whom you love more than a friend. It can also apply to dating relationships as well as marriage. Platos definition of eros is that after thinking about a person, there is an appreciation of the beauty within them, or there becomes an appreciation of beauty itself. Plato also said this type of love helps us recall knowledge of beauty and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth.

And now we come to the last word in Greek for love – Agape. I think this is the most important type of love and it is probably the least seen. This is the charitable, selfless, and unconditional love. It is a parental love. A love that does not seek out what can be done but simply is just given. A love that does not expect or want anything in return. It is the way God loves us.

The New Testament of the Bible was written in Greek and it uses these different words for love so there is no doubt of what kind of love is being talked about. For example, when we read the famous verse John 3:16 in English, we read it as For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son. When we read this verse in greek, we see this word agape being used, so there is no doubt the kind of love that God has for us — unconditional.

The last definition I came across for agape was that it can be described as the feeling of being content and secure when receiving this love and allowing the people you love to feel the same. This is the love that I believe we are challenged to have for eachother.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under News Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.