Lexicon

G0026 - agape

Strong's: G0026 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: ag-ah'-pay Part of speech: feminine noun Root: from G0025 - agapao (ἀγαπάω, "to love") NT occurrences: ~116 (notably absent from Acts, Mark, James in the noun form)

Semantic range (Thayer / BDAG)

Affection, good will, love, benevolence, the broadest sense.
The love of Christians toward Christians (covenant love within the believing community).
God's love toward humanity, sacrificial, unconditional, initiatory.
Christ's sacrificial love for sinners (Romans 5:8; John 15:13).
(Plural) A love-feast, early-church communal meal (Jude 12).

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Theological force, the agapē / philia / eros contrast

A frequently-cited (and often overdrawn) distinction:

ἀγάπη (agapē), willed, committed, sacrificial, often unconditional love. The choice to seek another's good regardless of merit or reciprocity.
φιλία (philia), affectionate friendship-love, often mutual, based on shared regard or kinship.
ἔρως (erōs), passionate, desire-based love (rare in NT).
στοργή (storgē), natural family affection (rare in NT, frequent in classical Greek).

C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves (1960) is the popular treatment. Caveat: NT usage shows considerable overlap. Agapē is sometimes used of less-than-noble loves (Demas "loved this present world," 2 Timothy 4:10); phileō is used of God's love (John 5:20, "the Father loves the Son"; John 16:27). The vocabulary is not always rigidly partitioned. The deeper point: agapē in Christian usage acquires the distinctive sense of covenant love through theological appropriation of pre-existing Hellenistic vocabulary.

The decisive theological claim: God is agapē (1 John 4:8, 16). Not "God experiences love" but "God is love", love is constitutive of the divine nature, not merely a divine attribute. This grounds the eternal mutual love among the Trinitarian persons: the Father loves the Son (John 3:35; 17:24), the Son loves the Father (John 14:31), the Spirit is the love-bond (Augustine, De Trinitate 15), the divine being is love-in-action ad intra, before any creation existed.

Agapē has a stance toward evil

A point routinely lost in popular use, and load-bearing apologetically. The hymn of 1 Corinthians 13 is not a description of unconditional affirmation. Verse 6 reads ou chairei epi tē adikia, sygchairei de tē alētheia, love does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth. The verb pair is deliberate: chairō with the preposition epi for the withheld response, and the compounded sygchairō ("rejoice together with") for the given one. Agapē is therefore not neutral toward adikia; the word takes a side.

The patience of verse 4 points the same direction. Makrothymei is long-suffering under provocation from persons, distinct from hypomonē, endurance of circumstances. The same root describes God at Romans 2:4, where kindness, forbearance and makrothymia are said to lead to repentance, and at 2 Peter 3:9, where it explains the delay of final judgment. So the term the hymn uses for love's patience is the term the New Testament uses to explain why judgment has not yet fallen, which presupposes a judgment to be patient about rather than excluding one.

The consequence for the doctrine of God: agapē and divine judgment are not competing attributes to be balanced. Hebrews 12:6 and Revelation 3:19 treat a certain kind of discipline as evidence of love, and 1 John 4:9-10 locates the demonstration of divine agapē in a propitiation, which is an act addressed to judgment rather than an act that ignores it. Objections built on the premise that love excludes consequence are equivocating on the English word; see God Showed No Love in Eden Objection Defeater and Biblical Love.

Notable verses

God's agapē toward us

John 3.16, "for God so loved (ēgapēsen) the world that He gave His only begotten Son"
Romans 5:8, "God demonstrates His own love (agapēn) toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us"
Ephesians 2:4-5, "because of His great love (agapēn) with which He loved us"
1 John 3:1, "see what kind of love the Father has bestowed on us"
1 John 4:9-10, "in this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins"
1 John 4:19, "we love, because He first loved us"

Agapē as God's nature

1 John 4:8, "the one who does not love does not know God, for God is love (ho theos agapē estin)"
1 John 4:16, "God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God in him"

The love command

Matthew 22:37-40, the great commandment: love (agapēseis) the Lord your God; love your neighbor
John 13:34, "a new commandment I give you, that you love one another"
John 15:12-13, "greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends"
Romans 13:8-10, "love is the fulfillment of the law"

The hymn of love

1 Corinthians 13:1-13, the locus classicus on agapē; "love never fails"; "the greatest of these is love"

Christ's love

Galatians 2:20, "the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me"
Ephesians 5:2, 25, "Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us"; "husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church"
Revelation 1:5, "to Him who loves us and released us from our sins"

Love within the church

John 13:34-35, "by this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another"
1 John 3:14, 16, "we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren"

Patristic / scholarly note

Augustine (De Trinitate 8.10; 15.17-19) develops the doctrine that the Holy Spirit is the love between Father and Son, the personal bond of mutual agapē ad intra in the Trinity. This becomes the Western Trinitarian model (Augustine → Anselm → Aquinas → Reformed); the Eastern tradition emphasizes the Spirit's procession from the Father alone (filioque controversy). Either way, agapē is constitutive of God's eternal being, not a contingent property.

Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros (1932/1953) made the agapē/erōs contrast famous in 20th-century Protestant theology, arguing that agapē is uniquely Christian (descending, gracious, unmerited) over against pagan erōs (ascending, desire-based). Critics (e.g., Pope Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est, 2005) have argued Nygren overstated the contrast: God's love includes both gracious initiative (agapē) and desire-for-the-beloved (erōs in a purified sense).

C. S. Lewis (The Four Loves, 1960) gives the popular treatment that has shaped Anglophone Christian thinking on love.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here.