Love in English is flexible. As a noun it can refer to a tennis score, several positive sexual meanings, a beloved, and a positive emotion towards some object. The verb form is much the same. There is also a host of synonyms and near synonyms for love that share the general meaning or have a degree of overlap: charity, delight, affection, loyalty, fondness, devotion, attraction, and so forth. It’s much the same in the Greek text of the Bible; both the Septuagint and the New Testament use a variety of words with a range of meaning limited by the context to express the idea of love. The basic issue is that love is a positive emotion towards something.

Sometimes among Christians, we conceptualize love with the Greek terms of agape (self-giving love), philia (friend love), and eros (sexual love). These may be somewhat helpful distinctions in conversations with other Christians, but it breaks down very quickly in doctrine, practice, and meaning. From a merely lexical perspective, John uses the Greek agape love and philia love to describe God the Father’s love for Jesus (John 3:35; John 5:20): the intended meaning of both agape and philia is identical. Paul requires that self-giving among married couples include erotic love (1 Cor. 7:2-3), but eros does not appear in the Septuagint or the New Testament. Further, we find agape love for both Christian and non-Christian love for instance in Luke 6:32, “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” Love is then varied and diverse. Stand alone Greek words representing Christian or non-Christian love are no help to us, because love must be enframed.

Having cleared away the issue of Christian talk about love, we must now deal with the issue of the human experience of love.  We can love something for use—a good steak which is destroyed by love; we can love something for enjoyment without diminishing it, but with benefits to us—Bach’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, a sunset, God.  And then there is a love of enjoyment and use combined together—drawing out the beauty of wood grain on a board for a table top and the physical changes and threats attendant to carrying, delivering, and nurturing a child. The wood and our spouse, and ourselves are transformed—increased and decreased—by love.

John Lennon’s lyrics “All you need is love. Love is all you need,” are either the truest words ever penned or the most perverse. They are either criminally trivial or deeply profound. The significance of the lyrics is not found in the letters of the word love but by what is intended by love. And Lennon understood this to the degree that he rejected patriotism as love of a nation, tyranny as the love of detrimental power and embraced the love of non-violence and art. Even entertainers at least suspect that we are saved and we are damned by love.

Our salvation or reprobation and love are clearly linked in Scripture; “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).  He is not merely love and yet he is love. Further, man is created in the image of God and so in some sense man is love, though again not merely love. The great summary of the duty of man is to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as ourself. We cannot move away from God without a love, and we cannot turn to God without love. Thus both theology proper (the study of God) and anthropology (the study of man) are dependent on what love is or is not. A definitional misstep on the issue of love damages both our worship and our ethics; the greater the error the less true our worship and the more confused and detrimental our relationships. False love when “fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).

God is love, and because God is the greatest possible being (Heb. 6:13, 16-18), God must love perfectly: further God is “blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5, 2 Cor. 2:11), and so God has always loved and been fulfilled or blessed in that love “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). To love requires an object of love. The infinitely perfect object of God’s love is himself in the mutual admiration of the Trinity.  The Father loves and so begets the Son, the Son in turn loves the Father and both the Father and Son are conscious of this mutual love, leading to the spiration of the Holy Spirit.

For these several months we have discussed the problem of literalism, which is essentially that there are two almost opposite uses of the idea of literalism. For Augustine literalism meant attempting to understand the intent of the author and the historical reality expressed in the text. For Spinoza literalism meant attacking the very possibility of revelation. We also discussed that the “rationalizing” of religion around a philosophical or scientific consensus was an ancient project reinvigorated by Spinoza’s work. Having considered all of these pieces, let’s draw them all together to consider how the church should respond to the current state of affairs.

I have an obscure book called Spinoza Dictionary, published by a small press called the Philosophical Library. It’s not a terribly interesting book, but it has a short foreword by Albert Einstein. Here we learn that Einstein “read the Spinoza Dictionary with great care” and that he had obviously read Spinoza’s canon with greater care. He makes a gentle jibe reminding the astute reader to read Spinoza’s works, establishes himself as an interpreter of Spinoza, and mocks sin and the soul and closes. Perhaps, one of the greatest scientific minds in history flashes his philosophical membership card, hides it a way with a smile, and goes back to his physics.

The other day as I sat on the train returning from Washington, DC, the man behind me was loudly counseling his reluctant friend over a cell phone about the need to despoil his new girlfriend. The basic argument was that human beings are essentially animals, and as animals we have sexual needs; if these sexual needs are not fulfilled, we can break down in rage. If the girlfriend refused to submit to his needs, then she was unnatural or likely cheating on him. And thus, we find materialistic philosophy or Epicureanism disseminated throughout our culture at all levels.

Note: If you haven’t read the first four articles in this series, please do so. We are in the midst of a cumulative argument about literalism within biblical hermeneutics and the best way to understand and practice interpreting the Bible.

I have attempted to lay out the argument that Spinoza’s literalism is incompatible with Christianity, but this leads us to the difficulty that a large group of Christians promote a system of hermeneutics which has the appearance of being identical to the Epicurean belief policy.  Their definition of literalism, “interpretation that gives to every word the same meaning it would have in normal usage, whether employed in writing, speaking or thinking” [Charles Ryrie, Dispensationalism: Revised and Updated (Chicago: Moody Press, 2007), 91], sounds very much like Spinoza’s.

The above quote comes from Charles Ryrie, an august proponent of a doctrinal system called Dispensationalism. He holds two secular academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. He is a sophisticated and academic defender who has written a Dispensational systematic theology—Basic Theology. Obviously, godly Dispensationalists are not Epicureans, and it would be a gross injustice to call them such—especially, given their contribution in maintaining the gospel against encroaching modernity in the last century.  Let’s see if we can’t clarify the situation.

Dispensationalism as a system is a relative newcomer to theology, dating from about the 1840s with some of its unique components beginning to appear on the historical horizons in the mid-1700s. (By theology, I mean a systematic understanding of the biblical canon.) It is different from Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed theology in that its proponents are united around an understanding of the end times, but not around their understanding of salvation, and polity.

“But we should depart as little as possible from the literal sense. . . . If we do not find it signifying anything else in normal linguistic usage, that is how we must interpret the expression, however much it may conflict with reason. . . . For, as we have already shown, we are not permitted to adjust meaning of Scripture to the dictates of our reason or our preconceived opinions; all explanations of the Bible must be sought from the Bible alone.” Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.

I once started a sermon with the above quote. The regular church members nodded their heads in assent and approval until I informed them that the quote was written by one of the most vicious modern enemies of Christianity, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677). He used literal sense as a devastating weapon against even the possibility of revealed religion. And he did so as a theist.

We live in world enframed by Spinoza’s system of interpretation and his materialistic philosophy. Men such as Dawkins (a biologist) and Ehrman (a biblical text critic) use his interpretive method without thought or apology. Even within the church, this system of materialism influences our minds in such a way that we accept the vocabulary of this theory of interpretation without thought.

In our last article, we established that Augustine rejected the possibility of the Bible containing myth, any attempt to interpret nature independently of the Bible, and any attempt to interpret the Bible based solely on nature. He came to these conclusions because the Bible claims to be a revealed account of God and man. As the modern church is beset by both enemies and intended friends pressing natural and mythological accounts of God upon us, it is extremely important that we understand Augustine’s “historical literalism.” The importance of this is heightened by the modern problem of literalism and the rhetorical weight of the term literal among modern Christians.

Let us, return to Augustine’s understanding of literalism:

I have started here to discuss Sacred Scripture according to the plain meaning of the historical facts, not according to future events which they foreshadow. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 39, 1.17.34.

He believed that the Bible’s meaning was “the precise meaning [the author] intended to express (On Christian Doctrine, 1.36.40). The Bible then teaches historical facts when the author represents them as such. And he accepts the book of Genesis as providing such facts. To understand what the Bible teaches about reality is to have its literal meaning. He rejects the possibility of Genesis being mythical, but what he does not reject is that it takes effort to understand what the historical or literal significance of the text is.