Love, and Greek

So I want to say that I don’t like any of my classes except my philosophy class. Which now totals me hating every class I’ve taken in the engineering college that is not in my major or the CS department. Also, it means that total the south of Green classes that I have hated is actually less then the total north of Green.

Well, anyway I’m sitting in my philosophy class today (after my other two ECE classes) and the guy is talking about religion and medicine and how they effect schools of thought, and he mentions a thought from Gandhi. He says that Gandhi’s “love your brother” philosophy was challenged by Gorge Orwell. And Orwell said that to while he respected Gandhi’s values and ideals, he had to disagree on some points of his logic. Primarily he said that no matter what you do you will always show some favoritism toward family, spouse, and a few other people that is not loving everyone the same. And to treat everyone the same would be ignoring those differences that is what defines love in a practical context. Now this seems to coincide with his theme in 1984, and when I read the essay in question he specifically says “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.” Gandhi did say that close relationships could not be had because of this position he took. And I happen to agree with Orwell, but this has caused me to think about how the Greeks had 5 words for love (I think 5 anyway?) and what that means to us as Christians.

I think that means that there is a difference between the kind of love we have for God, our Christian Brothers, and the people we are in love with. I know there are at least four different words for love that I need to focus on. One being agape, I have written on this before and I’ll touch on it again. The second is philia the brotherly love, thirdly storage which is a familial love, and lastly is eros the word for physical attraction or a romantic love

I think that in some ways you should eventually experience all four of these kinds of love for the person you marry. You should love God in three ways, just because I don’t’ think you can be physically or romantically in love with an intangible thing. You should love your friends with brotherly love, but you should love everyone in an agape sense according to the Bible as I understand it.

How does this all relate? How do I do these things and what is the difference? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I have been studying serving people in the Bible lately and this has all kinda played into my thinking today. First I think that we should love everyone as ourselves, just like the second half of the great commandment Jesus gave us. But her is the problem, Jesus said that we must follow his example and serve people who are less then we are, just as he did. This, and dying for our sins, is an example of agape love, unconditional love, serving love, the kind of love that we are supposed to represent and express to all Christians. Our immediate Christian family we have to extend agape and philia, the people we see day to day, there is a different kind of thing that extends beyond normal love for Christians.

This is the last part, so read this if nothing else
I believe that we start our Christian expression of love by treating others as we would treat ourselves. Then we move to serving others, treating others as well or better as we treat ourselves with no regard for our own desires. Finally, there are a select few people that we love so much beyond anything except God. Those are the people that we literally love more then ourselves, those are the people that we marry, or our children.

This is an odd dilemma where we say, who would we willingly lay down our lives for, and where do we draw that line. What is the practical application to all this….well, I don’t know, and sometimes I’m just to wrapped up in my mind, but I’m still working on that, and maybe I’ll find a suitable answer for myself in the near future so I can put this all into practice, but until then
Thank you, and Goodnight.