Ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους, ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν
The Greek New Testament text above was made by the author of 1 John and it can be translated literally as: Beloved, may we love (present tense, indicating continuous action) one another, because love out of God is. What the author meant to say was that we are capable of experiencing this “loving” of one another simply because that “love” comes to us from God. Now, this is not just any kind of “love”, nor any kind of audience he is speaking to. First, “beloved” was a term used to describe the community of Church-going people, today we may call them Christians. Church people were believers who gathered together, to worship God, and who believed in Jesus Christ as their Savior; the term could also mean: brothers. The term “brother” in the epistles is used to describe a fellow-church person bound in love toward other church people (a.k.a Christians), rather than a person who is not a fellow-man.[1] Many times there is a problem with translation of the word, as when translated into English as “brothers,” it can be argued that it involved only the male audience. In reality the term “brother” is not bound only to males, but also to females, as both, men and women can be and are a part of the church, so saying “brothers and sister,” would be most correct. Thus, people who found themselves among the midst of the believing in Christ, were the people that John was addressing.
The Greek New Testament text above was made by the author of 1 John and it can be translated literally as: Beloved, may we love (present tense, indicating continuous action) one another, because love out of God is. What the author meant to say was that we are capable of experiencing this “loving” of one another simply because that “love” comes to us from God. Now, this is not just any kind of “love”, nor any kind of audience he is speaking to. First, “beloved” was a term used to describe the community of Church-going people, today we may call them Christians. Church people were believers who gathered together, to worship God, and who believed in Jesus Christ as their Savior; the term could also mean: brothers. The term “brother” in the epistles is used to describe a fellow-church person bound in love toward other church people (a.k.a Christians), rather than a person who is not a fellow-man.[1] Many times there is a problem with translation of the word, as when translated into English as “brothers,” it can be argued that it involved only the male audience. In reality the term “brother” is not bound only to males, but also to females, as both, men and women can be and are a part of the church, so saying “brothers and sister,” would be most correct. Thus, people who found themselves among the midst of the believing in Christ, were the people that John was addressing.
The term used for “love” is typical for a biblical audience: agape. Agape was a new term for “love,” because this new community of a new faith at the time, had to create a new vocabulary, which for all purposes and intents would define them and their vision.[2] Why would they do that? As we will continue to study, we will see that they intentionally had a different idea about the essential meaning of “loving.”[3] The new movement of the united people consciously thought about, experienced and wanted to express their relations of men to God, God to men and fellow-man to fellow-man.[4] For the author of 1 John[5] to say that we “love” one another because agape out of God is, implies that the meaning of agape must therefore be divine, its purpose holy and its intention is to target our hearts and to transform them into the image of God, who is also agape [v.7]. Agape then is not only connected to God, but God is identified as its origin.[6] ‘God is agape’ becomes a condition of fellowship between the believing ones, because this Spirit of agape will not only result as an obligation for the followers, but will direct them into the proper actions toward one another and to those outside.[7] Further, the author of John will make many connections to show us that faith is a real faith for the ‘beloved’, only when that faith becomes reflected by the loving acts in one’s community.[8]
But, for a church-going person today, two-thousand years after the life of Christ on earth, what does it mean to really agape one another? We tend to say “love” in many different contexts, with many different degrees of intention or understanding of the words. We “love” our shoes that we bought on a great sale, we “love” our friends, we “love” our pets, we “love” the picture we took, we “love” the new car, we “love” our parents, we “love” the paper we wrote, we “love” the new professor, etc., but do we really mean “loving” them? As Church-going people, what do we understand behind that four letter word, which was marked by the blood of many believers in the One, whom shed his blood first, for you and me? The problem we need to face first, is not the fact that agape is intentionally a new word for “loving”, but that agape comes the from Greek language which has four different words to describe different kinds of “loving”, specifically as directed to the object of our “loving.” English has one word which summarizes our emotions, passions and acts of “loving” no matter the object, degree or intention of our “loving”, which creates a great problem for anyone raised within this limited view of greater mystery and beauty. This is also, why so many church going-people, especially young people like myself, are confused about what the agape of Christ is beyond the physical blood that was shed for each of us, and what this agape should require of us today, as we read the Word and are called to “loving of one another.” The ultimate goal of this study is to examine the intended meaning of agape and to redefine ancient terms for “love” for a person, who lives over two-thousand years after the establishment of Christian movement, in order that it can be practically applied to one’s individual and relational living. My proposed thesis is that agape is not a mere “love,” but an intentional term used to describe a way of living, which should be an expression of one’s eternal destiny and a constant-present attitude of servant-hood and giving-hood for the other, first in the church and then outside the church. Agape should not be seen as a love separated from all of the other loves we can know as humans, but it should be applied as the fundamental ingredient for each one of them.
Copyright © 2007 by Dorota Krzyzaniak
All rights reserved
[1] James Moffatt, Love in the New Testament (New York: Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1930), 282.
[2] Moffatt, 40.
[3] Leon Morris, Testaments of Love, A study of Love in the Bible (Grand Rapids: William B. Eardmans Publishing Company, 1981), 128.
[4] Moffatt, 11.
[5] No one is sure of the identity of this writer; some thing it might have been the same person who wrote the gospel of John, because of the collision of terms and ideology used, or that it could be someone different, as the author never identifies himself in the epistles of John.
[6] John Christopher Thomas, The Pentecostal Commentary on 1 John, 2 John, 3 John (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004), 215.
[7] Gordon H. Clark, First John, a Commentary (Jefferson: The Trinity Foundation, 1980), 131.
[8] Werner Georg Kummel, The Theology of the New Testament, According to its Major Witnesses: Jesus, Paul, John (Nashville: Abingon Press, 1973), 303.
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