Let Me Count the Ways
Breaking down the types of love and our calling to the highest form
It is late Friday afternoon and you are excited. After a babysitter arrives to watch your kids, you, your precious wife, your best buddy since childhood and his wife are all going for dinner to your favorite steak and seafood restaurant. You cannot wait!
In that short itinerary, I just touched on three different types of love.
You and your buddy both love your wives. That actually covers two kinds of love in one stroke: the loving affection of familial companionship and the erotic love of the one with whom you have physical intimacy. Your beautiful children are you very heart itself; more familial love! Your best buddy since childhood you love like a brother. Well, one more: you love a good steak!
There is a particular shortcoming in the English language in that we use the same word—love—to describe several, very different versions of it.
The New Testament was written in Koine (common) Greek so that the message of the Gospel could be shared far and wide. Greek is more specific in differentiating types of love. When we study love in the Scriptures and how God calls us to the love He desires from us, there are different words for each type.
How do I love thee?
The New Testament uses three different Greek words for love:
Phillia is brotherly love as one would have for a close friend with whom you have a deep connection. It is rendered as phileo (pronounced fill-eh-o) in New Testament Greek. We get the name of Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love—from this root word.
Storge (pronounced store-gay) is familial love, the love one has for family members. The New Testament actually does not use this word in a positive sense except once in combination with phileo; but it also uses it in the negative sense by attaching the antonymic prefix “a” to the front of the word, rendering it astorgos to describe someone lacking in familial love toward those he or she should have storge love toward.
Agape (pronounced uh-gah-pei) is the highest form of love. This is unselfish, mature love. It loves unconditionally. It loves and gives even if there is no reciprocity. It is the love God has for us and what He calls us to have toward others.
There is a fourth descriptive word in Greek for love—eros—the love born of physical intimacy between a husband and wife. This word is not used in the New Testament, but is the meaning behind when a man and woman “know” each other in the sexual sense. It operates in combination with storge love toward one another as husband and wife. We love our spouses in both storge and eros love.
Examples of use
Phileo love is cited in a number of cases in the New Testament. One example is in John 11 when Jesus goes to raise Lazarus from the dead. The crowd says of Jesus, “See how he loved (phileo) him!”
A grimly ironic gesture of betraying Jesus in phileo, brotherly love, is the moment Judas delivers Jesus over to the Temple guards sent to arrest Him. When Judas kissed Jesus’s cheek, that normally would have been considered an act of greeting in phileo, brotherly love. Instead, Judas turned the notion on its head, using it as a sign of betrayal of Jesus to His enemies.
Storge love is not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, but is combined with phileo to form the compound love phileostorgos, in the Apostle Paul’s command in Romans 12 to “love one another with brotherly affection”.
Storge is used in the negative sense when Paul describes sinful hard heartedness in Romans 1:31. By attaching the prefix letter “a” to the word, it gives the opposite meaning. Astorge literally means “heartless”, a cold hard heartedness which the Apostle Paul cites as gross sin, which reveals its ugliness in acts of indifference, meanness and pettiness toward ones we should love. Storge is familial love, the love of family bonds. Its antonym, astorge, is the sin of allowing that familial love to grow cold, to become hard hearted. The research site Learn Religions describes it this way:
As with eros, the exact Greek term storge does not appear in the Bible. However, the opposite form is used twice in the New Testament. Astorgos means "without love, devoid of affection, without affection to kindred, hard-hearted, unfeeling." Astorgos is found in the book of Romans and 2 Timothy.
In Romans 1:31, unrighteous people are described as "foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” The Greek word translated "heartless" is astorgos.
In 2 Timothy 3:3, the disobedient generation living in the last days is marked as "heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good.” Again, "heartless" is translated astorgos. So, a lack of storge, the natural love among family members, is a sign of end times.
The love of God to which we are called
The supreme type of love is agape love. Love that is unselfish, devoted, that gives love and acts of generosity and kindness without selfish strings attached. It is the love that God has for us. It is also the love He calls us to for others.
Jesus uses this word, agape, when he describes God’s motivation to send Him into the world: “For God so loved (agape) the world that He sent His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”—John 3:16
Reflect on that for a moment: humankind is fallen, broken and denies God. Yet God in His boundless love takes on human flesh, suffers at the hands of the very created beings who despise Him and takes the punishment due to them upon Himself.
This is not a love based on feelings. It is not a love based on what someone can do for us. If anything, God would be justified in hating us. He certainly wasn’t getting any benefit from his rebellious creatures. Yet, in His unselfish, whole and mature agape love for us, He gave Himself to redeem us and restore us to Himself.
That is the very essence of agape love.
This is why I say agape love, mature love that God calls us to, is an act of the will, not the feelings. Feelings may come with it, a sublime and blissful state of blessing. But agape gives love even when it is rejected, when the object of that love is not appealing or does not return love. It wants the best for others, period.
Agape love also combines with the other types. Our brotherly love for close friends, our storge love for family members, should be fueled by an overarching agape love that raises those types of love to their highest achievement.
Jesus clearly calls us to agape love for one another.
This is my commandment, that you love (agape) one another.—John 15:12
By this the world will know that you are my disciples, that you love (agape) one another.—John 13:35
Greater love has no one than that he lay down his life for others.—John 15:13
Jesus did not use the term for brotherly love (phileo), even as sublime as it is. Nor did he use the word for familial love (storge) as natural as it should be. No, he called the disciples to the greatest love of all.
He called them to love like Him. He calls us as well.
He calls us to love unselfishly.
He called us to imitate Him.
He calls us to godly maturity in agape love.
Next time: How Jesus restored a broken man through His agape love. It is a passage of incredible beauty.