There's a lot of debate over this topic, especially when contemplating intergender relational dynamics. I don't have much time, so this post will mostly be a collection of thoughts in a rather disorganized fashion. It's meant more to stimulate conversation on a relevant topic than it is to make a clear point.

Here are a few quick thoughts to get the conversation going.

ONEitis is not love. Love is not defined by an infatuated state of heightened emotions. To conflate the two can lead in horrible directions.

1 Cor. 13 lists attributes of love, but does not provide an exclusive or exhaustive definition. Principles we can draw from it, though, include: (1) love is the most important of all virtues; (2) behaviors that we associate with "love" can be done without love (ex. giving to the poor, being a martyr); (3) the identifications of what love "is" do not include emotion language, they include decisions; (4) the identifications of what love "is not" includes both decisions and emotions.

1 John 4:8 says that "God is love." This is the closest thing we have in the Bible to a comprehensive, exhaustive definition of love. Rather than looking to aspects or qualities that describe love, we look to God himself.

More interestingly is the implication that without God there is no love. That is, when secular RP says that a woman cannot love a man, from a secular perspective this is absolutely true: it is impossible for anyone to love apart from God. At best, I have heard it argued that those without God can emulate a shadow of biblical love because of the general grace that God gives over humanity, or because of the broken remnant of his reflection that we bear even after the fall.

Contrarily, if this verse is true in any meaningful sense, then any expression of love between two people inherently must include God in the exchange. That could be in directly sharing Christ with someone through evangelism, but it could also be through relaying the character of Christ to someone in a way that leads them closer to godliness. But if I fail to include God in the exchange, no matter how "good" my behavior toward someone might seem on an outward level, God views it as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6), and if it isn't produced from faith, it's still sin (Romans 14:23).

John 14:21 gives a prerequisite for loving Jesus: having his commands and obeying them. Jesus did not say, "Whoever has tingly, gooey feelings whenever he thinks of me is the one who loves me."

Matthew 7 lists people who do attempt to do good works, but with whom Jesus denies any actual relationship, making it clear that actions alone are not sufficient to define love.

Matthew 15:8 notes, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules." This implies again that outward behaviors and expressions of love do not constitute love. So, no matter how many times she professes her undying love for you, don't look at her words. Likewise, no matter how emotional you feel toward her and how many times you've expressed it, don't trust your own emotions either.

Greek words for love are unreliable as a basis for most of Scriptural interpretation. It may be relevant to a few of the epistles that were originally written in Greek, but Jesus was not preaching to a Greek audience, nor did he speak in Greek. We'd be better off looking to the Hebrew, whose language would have been familiar and whose culture was dominant among those Jesus ministered to, or to the Aramaic, which was the language Jesus most likely actually used when saying many of these words (although the Aramaic presents a different problem because we don't actually know which Aramaic words were spoken).


So What is Love?

The best conclusion I've reached is that, in a strict biblical sense, love is the orientation of our hearts to share what God has given us with someone else. Here are some more musings on how I reached that conclusion, biblically.

Love is always talked about in the Bible in terms of interconnectivity. God is the only individual person who is said to be love or even "have" love without anyone else - and that is because he is triune (see C. S. Lewis' thoughts on this toward the end of Mere Christianity). Even when a person is said to love himself, this is usually an interconnection between his will toward his flesh or his emotional state. In this sense, love always begins in a person's will.

If love originates in a person's will, then we can rightly understand love not as the feelings we experience in our hearts or as the behaviors we commit with our bodies, but as the motivations that cause us to feel or do those things. Perhaps our "intentions" would be a better way to put it, however poorly they may be executed at times. In that sense, love is neither an action nor a feeling, but a motivation or intention.

For example, if I am kind toward someone, if my intention is to be recognized for my kindness, this is not "love" because I have not incorporated a communication of God or godliness to that person with my intentions, only with my outward behaviors. Similarly, as with saving faith, an intention or motivation that never manifests into anything is merely daydreaming and not the genuine article (see James 2, by parallel), thus cannot be "love" if nothing ever comes of it - that is, we are mistaken as to our own intentions because a man follows through with his intentions and his behavior is defined by his true motivations.

If I intend to go to the gym, but end up watching a show instead, this means that my motivation and intention to enjoy the TV show in front of me is of greater weight and importance than my motivation and intention to go to the gym, and the lesser intention is only a farce we pretend exists. When a man says, "I planned on doing x, but y came up so I did that instead," this only communicates that a man never planned on doing x if y was an option. This view works well with the tension we see in the Bible between Jesus' statements about what the one who loves him does as compared to the fact that he says many people who do these things do not actually love him. That is, he is looking toward the orientation of their heart - the reason why they're doing those things in the first place. If the reason is an expression of God working through them, it is love; if it is self-motivated, it is not an expression of love.

If you have been around here for any time, I would hope that you have learned a thing or two about motivation. When a motivation is defined by an intended result, we call that a contract. When that result is an unspoken expectation, it's a covert contract. As such, if your alleged love for someone is conditional on an anticipated response from them, especially when you have not overtly communicated that anticipated response when you initiated your actions, you are, at best, expressing only a shadow of biblical love. One of the attributes we see in 1 Cor. 13 about love is that it never fails. But conditions fail. So, if our love is conditional, it is not biblical love.

But unconditional love is not stupid either. If God is love, then he must be acting in love when he lets people walk away from him to their own destruction (Romans 1:18 et seq, for example). Simply put, if God is love and they are rejecting God, then they don't have love and perhaps the most loving thing to do (i.e. the most God-like thing to do) is to let them walk away and reap the fruit of their rejection.

Too many people make false assumptions about who God is and what loving behavior looks like when they try to impute modern linguistic definitions for the term on what was actually meant by the word in an ancient text. Praise God that "ancient" does not mean irrelevant.


Conclusion

I may pretty up this post someday, but for now I just want to get people thinking. In the meantime, I do stand firm (however poorly articulated it is here) in my view that love is defined by our internal motivations toward someone, which can only qualify as "love" when those motivations intend to communicate God to someone in some fashion.

To those who differ and believe that your intense emotions define love, or who believe that your actions and behaviors can define love, let's talk.