I thought I was breaking new ground with my Pistis Faith post, but, sadly, someone else appears to have beaten me to it. Either that or I've started a movement.
Dissertation
Pistis Faith
This entire post is balderdash. Though the Scripture verses certainly stand, the scaffolding I’ve erected around them is made of store-brand Q-tips. But I’ve got a purpose in it all. This post should be like the definition of metaphor I once read: you take two things...
Biblical Love 2: Response to the Father of Friends of This Blog
Don Johnson, a Canadian pastor and father (and father-in-law, respectively) of my good friends Duncan and Meg Johnson, offered a response to my last post on love, a post in which I argued that love is not an action: I have defined agape love as an act of the will for...
Biblical Love
First Corinthians 13:4–7 is a list of fifteen specific actions that love performs on behalf of other believers. That should immediately dispel the notion that love is primarily a feeling or an emotion. Although true love will carry emotion with it sometimes, feeling...
Please Comment
Serious comments only, please. I want to ask you to think and think hard about what Jonathan Edwards is saying in the following excerpt. If my experience (and, I recently found out, that of Tim Keller) is any guide, you're going to have a hard time understanding him...
Faith, Hope, and Love, These Three
Ἀγάπη (agape) love is often said to be an action given independent of the worth of the person loved. But if you follow the exegetical data, it's more like "faith," which all recognize is worth only as much as its object. Hope is the same.
ἀγάπη
I've spent much of the last two weeks trying to process and organize the usage data for ἀγάπη/ἀγαπάω (and, to a lesser extent, φιλέω) in the Greek New Testament, the Septuagint, Josephus, and even the Apostolic Fathers. BibleWorks and Logos were essential tools for...
Love and Hate; ἀγαπάω and μισέω
If hate is the opposite of love, as many passages indicate, then why don't we have a book called The Four Hates? Why don't preachers fulminate against the scary hate of a mother for her crying infant (ἀστοργέω [a + storge]), the emotional hate of one's ex-best-friend...
ἀγάπη Rejoinders
I recently posted a few of the kinds of statements my dissertation is opposing. For example, a Bible textbook avers, "Love is not an emotion, but an act of the will. Feelings may ebb and flow, but love remains constant." Let me now offer a few rejoinders: "Love" as...
Why I Am Writing My Dissertation, no. 2
I've already shared one blatant denial of my dissertation's thrust, courtesy of a high school Bible textbook. Here are five somewhat less blatant ones from the same book: Love is centered in the will, not the emotions; one who loves gives without reservation, for he...
Joy, Part 3
An addendum to the previous post. Try out the common definition of joy as non-emotional action on your wife: "Honey, I rejoice in you by taking out the trash and mowing the lawn, despite what you are actually like! My joy in our marriage exists independent of any...
Joy, Part 2
I asked commenters recently to evaluate the following definition: Joy is the feeling that comes from something good happening to an object you love. And now for my view: I agree. I believe it's especially important that we view joy as a feeling, an emotion. Here is a...