The 3 gospels

[Robert]

Today three concepts of love exist: the concept of eros or self-love; the concept of God’s agape or self-giving love; and the concept of caritas, a mixture of self-love (eros and agape). Each of these three concepts have produced in human history their own kind of gospel. The pagans who are steeped in eros have produced in their various religions the gospel of works. As Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, declared: “Salvation is the movement of the creature towards God.” Plato taught a similar idea, and believed that God only saves the lovable. In other words, the eros gospel teaches that man must save himself by pleasing God through sacrifices and good works, to make himself lovable. We call this “legalism” or salvation by works, the basis of all non-Christian religions.

At the heart of Roman Catholic theology is the caritas gospel: man must first give evidence he wants to be saved through his good works, and when God sees this, He will meet him halfway to save him. This gospel teaches that we must do our best to meet God’s ideal and Christ will make up the difference. The Galatian Christians fell into this trap [Galatians 3:1-3] and so have a great number of Christians today the religion of faith plus works, or justification plus sanctification. This is a subtle legalism.

The Bible however subscribes to neither the eros or the caritas gospel. In complete contradiction to the above two gospels, the apostles taught that while we were “helpless,” “ungodly,” “sinners,” and even “enemies,” God demonstrated His agape love towards sinful men through the death of His Son, which fully reconciled us to Him [Romans 5:6-10]. This agape gospel is the clear teaching of the New Testament. [John 3:16, Ephesians 2:1-6, 1 Timothy 1:15, Titus 3:3-5 are but a few examples.] Both the eros gospel as well as the caritas gospel may be described as conditional good news; but the agape gospel which turned the world upside down in apostolic times [Acts 17:6] is unconditional good news.

It is this gospel that the world desperately needs to see restored and witnessed today, and which will lighten the earth with His glory [Revelation 18:1] before the end comes [Matthew 24:14; Revelation 14:6-15].

[jasd]

"Moreover, the gospel of John, which does not contain the Greek noun "faith," uses the Greek verb for faith more than 90 times."

Not being adversarial here, just interested in another's take on the matter - especially as "agape" has only been found (I think) three times in [Classical] Greek writings - leaving a rather sparse field to glean from as to actual meaning...

Of course, it's been said that the NT Bible has endued "agape" with its own meaning, which may lend more liscense than desired... just saying.