At the heart of so much of our cultural confusion is an impoverished understanding of what love truly is.<\/p>\n
Several years ago I earned the wrath of a group of teenage girls at a Christian school. No, I didn\u2019t question the divinity of Jesus or the historical reality of the resurrection. I did something worse: I made a sarcastic comment about the movie, \u201cThe Notebook.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t seen the 2004 film, it tells the story of Noah and Allie, who meet as teenagers in 1940s South Carolina. Noah is a poor country boy and Allie is an heiress. You can pretty much guess what happens next: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets her back again, and their love lasts through all kinds of trials and tribulations, including Allie\u2019s eventual dementia.<\/p>\n
The movie\u2019s \u201cmessage\u201d is that their love \u201ccan do anything,\u201d including arranging the time and manner of their mutual deaths.<\/p>\n
As I describe in my book with Sean McDowell entitled, \u201cSame-Sex Marriage: A Thoughtful Approach to God\u2019s Design for Marriage,\u201d the girls at the school were aghast that I criticized the film and asked me how I could not like a movie with such a great picture of love.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re hardly unique in their confusion. It\u2019s become increasingly apparent to me how impoverished our ideas about love truly are, and by \u201cour\u201d I include many Christians.<\/p>\n
My response to the girls was that, in the film, the love that was supposedly unconquerable and inescapable was really nothing more than just strong emotions, strong feelings. And of course our feelings are fickle and transitory. What\u2019s more, the feelings on display in the movie led the characters to break commitments, act selfishly, and otherwise behave badly, all in the name of, and somehow justified by, their \u201clove\u201d for one another.<\/p>\n
Recently on \u201cBreakPoint,\u201d Eric Metaxas took the idea of romantic \u201csoul mates\u201d to task and exposed it for the unbiblical and pernicious notion that it is. Eric\u2019s comments brought my experience discussing \u201cThe Notebook\u201d to mind.<\/p>\n
It also reminded me of the timeless importance of C. S. Lewis\u2019 classic book, \u201cThe Four Loves.\u201d Multiple generations raised on movies, television, and other popular culture are only acquainted with visions of love that are sentimental or erotic. For them, like the characters in \u201cThe Notebook,\u201d love is just a matter of feelings.<\/p>\n
But as Lewis told us, love is much more than that.<\/p>\n
The first of the four loves is storge , the natural bond of affection that is the product of familiarity. Storge is the love a parent has for a child and vice-versa. The second love is philia , the bond of friendship. For Lewis, friendship was about more than shared interests; it was a spiritual bond. Friendship was about seeing or at least caring about the \u201csame truth.\u201d For Lewis, \u201cLife \u2014 natural life \u2014 has no better gift to give\u201d than the bonds of friendship.<\/p>\n
The third love, eros , or romantic love. According to Lewis, eros is what \u201cmakes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.\u201d And finally, there\u2019s agape , or as Lewis called it, charity. It is \u201cwholly disinterested and desires what is simply best for the beloved.\u201d<\/p>\n
While storge , philia , and eros all have their place, they\u2019re prone to selfishness, pride, and possessiveness in and of themselves. It\u2019s only in submission to agape , the love of God, that their risks and dangers can be overcome.<\/p>\n
In agape , familial affection, friendship, and even romantic love find their highest expression. Agape enables us to love our family, our friends, and our spouses for their own sake and not for what they give us and do for us.<\/p>\n
There just may be no more abused word in the English language today than \u201clove.\u201d Or to paraphrase Inigo Montoya in \u201cThe Princess Bride,\u201d \u201cWe keep using that word. I do not think it means what we think it means.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Church, let\u2019s enrich our understanding of love.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the heart of so much of our cultural confusion is an impoverished understanding of what love truly is. Several years ago I earned the wrath of a group of teenage girls at a Christian school. No, I didn\u2019t question the divinity of Jesus or the historical reality of the resurrection. I did something worse: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3821,3823,3340,355,3822,12,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}