Love and Spirit – Two Words to Avoid

This will sound like heresy to Christian writers, but two words I believe we should drop from our normal vocabulary are love and spirit.

I suggest this drastic step because love and spirit have specific meanings in the Bible, but these are not the meanings contemporary culture assigns to these words. Simply to use them without putting them into the context of the biblical perspective is to distort them. Even if we quote a Bible passage that uses these words, we need to contextualize them so they won’t convey the wrong impression. Usually, it’s just better to avoid them entirely.

Take spirit, first of all, along with its derivative spiritual. Usually the word is a cover for something we can’t understand or explain. We can get out of dealing with the “nuts and bolts” of an issue if we can just flip it off into the realm of the “spirit,” where logic can’t touch it. Granted, our logic isn’t always reliable because it’s tied in with our cultural presuppositions. But that doesn’t excuse a lapse into the illogical, even the unobservable, and I fear that’s the effect of consigning a matter to the “spiritual” realm.

We tend to think of the spiritual as the invisible, but in Scripture the spiritual always has a visible manifestation. There has to be some perceptible evidence that spiritual factors are operative – in changed human behavior, for example, or (in the primal actions of Spirit, Genesis 1–2) the creation of a universe and of human life. Both the Hebrew and Greek words for spirit mean “breath, wind,” and it’s only the translator’s judgment which English meaning to use. Spirit isn’t a “religious” word in the Bible; it refers to the “breath” that motivates that which lives and moves in observable ways. So, to avoid misunderstanding, in our writing let’s deal with those concrete actions and their motivation instead of shoving them under the “spiritual” rug.

More could be said, but let’s tackle love. I don’t need to point out the contemporary misuses of that term, which should be reason enough for Christian writers to delete it from their working lexicon. Once again, the Bible gives love a concreteness that contemporary usage lacks. I’ll give a Scriptural reference here from Psalm 103:17-18, “But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.” The Hebrew word is hesed, which refers to God’s covenant loyalty — His commitment to those who are committed to Him, and who demonstrate their faithfulness by their obedience.

I suggest that the agape love of the New Testament is a direct development from this Hebraic concept. It has an inherent relationship to the covenant between the Lord and His people, and to be outside that covenant is to be outside the realm of God’s directed love, or faithfulness. Otherwise why would Paul speak, in Romans 1, of those whom God “gave up” because they “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” — i.e., acknowledge Him as their “senior Partner” in the covenant?

So, in sum, love in the Bible is a commitment, a decision we make to be faithful to another. It isn’t the “warm fuzzy feeling” we have for somebody. But, sadly, Christian writers often use it that way or fail to explain what they really mean. Better to keep our usage of the word love to a bare minimum.