There, we hear about a self-sacrificial God.īecome a Member of Biblical Archaeology Society Now and Get More Than Half Off the Regular Price of the All-Access Pass! Explore the world’s most intriguing Biblical scholarshipĭig into more than 9,000 articles in the Biblical Archaeology Society’s vast library plus much more with an All-Access pass.Ĭlearly enough, the sort of love predicated of God is not any mere human love, certainly not any sort of narcissistic self-directed love, search for personal fulfillment, or expression of strong personal desires. The verbal form of the noun agape (agapao) is used to say God loves the world of humanity in perhaps the most famous verse in the New Testament, John 3:16: “God loved the world in the following manner-he gave his only and beloved Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life” (author’s translation). In 1 John 4, where God is called love not once but twice, God is called agape, a very different word for love than eros. English, unfortunately, doesn’t have the versality of Greek when it comes to having different words for different kinds of love. The problem, of course, for most people in English-speaking countries is that they associate the word “love” with particular kinds of human feelings, but in the Greek New Testament physical or tangible human love is referred to by the term eros, from which we quite appropriately get the word “erotic,” not by several of the other Greek words for love. Here, I will focus just on the last of these statements, noting from the outset that it is one thing to say God is loving it is another to say God is love. This is helpful up to a point, but not to the exclusion of studying the nouns used to characterize God-God is Spirit, God is One, and God is Love. Over decades of studying the Bible, I’ve noted how much emphasis many scholars place on the adjectives used to describe the biblical God-God is righteous, God is holy, God is merciful, and so on.

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