What We Don't Talk About

The third love is eros—which is not hard to translate into English, since our word "erotic" comes from it. Eros is romantic love, married love, sexual love. Christians, generally, aren't all that comfortable talking about eros. I still have the scars on my soul from the feedback I got when I preached a sermon on eros! But the reality is this: God created eros. It is a good gift, given for the uniting of two souls. The problem in our culture is that we've made eros all about pleasure, exclusively about physical love, when in reality eros was created as a physical expression of a spiritual union.

Richard Foster famously said that the three biggest gods or drivers of passion in our world today are money, sex and power. Often, in our world, those three are so intertwined as to seem inseparable. Watch movies, television shows, or listen to popular music and you'll hear those themes, twisted together, over and over again. But here's the thing: they are all three good gifts we have taken, corrupted and used for our own purposes. What might the world look like if we got back to understanding why each of these things were created, and why God gave them to us as a good gift?

C. S. Lewis called eros the sense of "being in love." Not "falling in love." That is far too fleeting an emotion. Being in love is something that is willing to go the distance no matter what the cost. It is love that reaches beyond merely physical actions and binds two people together on a deep, deep level. Eros is the love that seeks one and only one person—and that alone can help us see where we have gone wrong in our culture today. When eros is misused, we find brokenness—broken hearts, broken lives, broken families, and a broken world.

God even uses this kind of love to call to his people, Israel, to be faithful only to him. The imagery the prophets use to describe unfaithful Israel is that of a prostitute. Through his prophets, God calls his people to focus on him and not on the gods of the world around them, which are not gods at all. Will you be faithful to me? God asks the people. Will you return to me? (The book of Hosea is the clearest and loudest example of this kind of preaching.) Israel lived in a disordered spiritual world that grew from a misunderstanding of what love is.

We cannot, individually, reorder our entire disordered world. But we can reorder the disorder in our own world. How, then, will we begin to allow the eros in our lives reflect the love God has for each one of us?