God's Love for the Unlovable: The Silencing of Eros

Did you know that the Greek word eros (where we get erotic) is not even in the New Testament? Only used twice in the Green Old Testament. And yet, we modern Christians, like the Ancient Romans are terrified of eros. The Romans even tried to legislate against it. It did not work very well. Our views of love have been widely informed by C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves (agape, eros, phileo and storge). Every Sunday School child knows that agape is “God’s love”, right? Well it turns out that ‘agape’ is actually one of the generic Greek words for love. It has a broad group of meanings. Jesus says that even the tax collectors do it. Just saying.

Instead of seeing love broken into four separate categories, the Biblical writers see love as more holistic (including all four aspects of Lewis’ loves) but on a spectrum from ‘selfish’ to 'selfless.’ God’s love is perfectly selfless agape, phileo, storge, and yes, eros. There is a godly eros. The selfish form of eros (Greek: porneia) is the love that terrified the Romans, that Paul wrote against often, and makes modern Christians uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we have tossed the ‘baby’ (i.e., godly eros) out with the ‘bathwater’ (porneia). We need to adjust our understanding, or drift more into irrelevance.

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