Part Six: Word Study Damage

Word study damage is the most invisible category because it operates inside the translation itself. The reader never sees the distinction that was lost because the English Bible does not show what the translator had to choose between. The meme versions of these passages are not misreadings of the English — they are accurate readings of it. The problem is that the English is carrying less than the original. In each case in this section, recovering the distinction the translation collapsed opens a room the English reader never knew was there.

Chapter Nineteen: Three Words for Love at a Wedding

1 Corinthians 13 — What Was Actually Lost in Translation

"Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." — 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NET)

First Corinthians 13 is read at more weddings than almost any other passage, and it is a strange choice. Not because the passage is not beautiful — it is. Not because love is not the right subject for a wedding — it is. But because the passage was written to address a church in conflict over spiritual gifts, and the love it describes is the love that makes community possible under pressure, not the romantic love of two people beginning a marriage. The passage is applicable to marriage. It was not written for marriage.

The English word love used throughout 1 Corinthians 13 is the Greek agape. The New Testament uses at least three distinct words that English translates as love. Eros is passionate desire, romantic and sexual attraction. Phileo is the warm affection of friends, the love of familiarity and companionship. Agape is the self-giving love that acts for the good of the other regardless of how the other responds — the love that Paul says God demonstrates in Romans 5:8 by sending Christ while we were still sinners.

When all three collapse into the single English word love, the distinctions disappear. A couple hearing 1 Corinthians 13 at their wedding hears a description of their romantic attachment. Love is patient, love is kind, love does not brag. Yes, they think. That is what we feel. But agape is not what you feel. It is what you do. It is not produced by attraction. It is produced by choice and sustained by will, often in the absence of the feelings that accompanied it originally.

The couples who have trouble in marriage are not usually people who stopped feeling attracted to each other on a particular day. They are people who have encountered the gap between eros — which is real and good and designed by God — and agape, which is what sustains the relationship when eros is under pressure. If no one has told them that 1 Corinthians 13 is describing agape and not eros, they have been handed a passage about one thing and led to expect it to describe another.

The passage in its actual context is Paul's argument that spiritual gifts without agape are worthless. You can speak in tongues and prophesy and have faith to move mountains and give everything you own to the poor, and if you do not have agape, you are nothing and it profits you nothing. The love he is describing is not an emotion that makes these activities feel meaningful. It is the orientation toward the good of the other that makes the activities genuinely loving rather than performances of spiritual competence.

The Recovery

Read 1 Corinthians 12–14 as a single unit about spiritual gifts and the community that deploys them. Notice that chapter 13 is embedded in that argument — it is the character description of the love that should animate everything in chapters 12 and 14. The love described is agape: deliberate, sustained, oriented toward the other's good regardless of reciprocity. It is applicable to marriage because marriage requires exactly this. But you receive it properly when you know what you are being asked to sustain, and that what you are being asked to sustain is a choice, not a feeling.