Tina Turner, C.S. Lewis, and What Love's Got to Do With It — The Spacious Place
I’m sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for inspiration. Sometimes coffee is inspiration enough, but not today. My mind is blank. I ask God to drop something into my brain. Then comes Tina Turner.
You probably know Turner’s 1984 song in which she asks the question, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” I’m all about music from 1984, so I’m singing along in my head when a single line hits me. “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?” Good question.
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know I’m all about heart questions. Obviously, Turner is singing about eros, or romantic love, but I’d like to expand the question into the four types of love we find in scripture: storge, phileo, eros, and agape.
If you’re new to these four Greek words found in the New Testament, here’s some brief definitions:
Storge: familial or affectionate love, like the natural love between a parent and child.
Phileo: the bond of friendship, founded on companionship and mutual appreciation.
Eros: romantic love, being “in love.”
Agape: spiritual or divine love, selfless and constant, the highest form of love.
C.S. Lewis wrote an entire book about it, simply called The Four Loves. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
Love inevitably leads to loss. If you live long enough, you will learn this hard lesson. We can lose jobs and circumstances we love. We can lose homes and surroundings we love. We can lose hobbies and daily habits we love. We can lose animals we love. And worst of all, we can lose people we love.
Sometimes we rage at God about the apparent unfairness of it, and it feels easy to blame him for our sadness. But we must not imagine God doesn’t know what we’re experiencing. Turn to Genesis 3. From the moment Adam and Eve were forced to leave the garden, loss existed in the world. Paradise lost, so to speak.
But Adam and Eve weren’t the only ones to experience the sting of separation, God also experienced loss—the loss of his own children, made in his image, who can no longer live in a place of intimacy with him.
If we believe that God removed Adam and Eve from the garden as punishment for their sin, we may miss the fact that God must have grieved this loss. You see, I don’t believe Adam and Eve’s expulsion was an act of judgment but rather mercy. (Read more about this in Let’s Talk About Sin) His heart held nothing but agape love for them, and so his only motivation was to protect them from entering a state of eternal corruption and degradation, which would result from eating of the tree of life in their fallen condition. So not only did Adam and Eve experience devastating loss, God did too. And that loss bled into humanity in every area.
By Genesis 4, we see Adam and Eve experiencing loss when one of their sons murders the other. This is loss in relation to storge, familial love. Scripture is full of descriptions of this kind of loss. Job grieving the loss of his children in a storm. David mourning over the loss of the first child he fathered with Bathsheba and later mourning over Absalom. Even the poignant image of the father running to meet his returning son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son can be understood in this light.
Scripture also depicts loss related to phileo love. David lamented the loss of Jonathan. Jesus wept when Lazarus died. And we must not forget Jesus’ exchange with Peter in John 21. Here we see Jesus using both “phileo” and “agape” as he gently restores Peter following his devastating betrayal of Jesus.
Even eros is not absent from scripture.The most notable description of eros is found in Song of Solomon. Here we find a collections of love poems between a woman and a man, and even here we find words depicting the anxiety that is felt when the possibility of loss arises.
“All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for him but did not find him. I will get up now and about the city, through its streets and squares; I will search for the one my heart loves” (Songs 3:1-2).
This is also an allegory of love between God and his chosen people, the Israelites. Later, Christians came to interpret it a description of the love of Christ for his Church or even between Christ and each human heart, a melding of eros and agape love.
Truly, the entire sweep of scripture can be understood as the grandest story of agape love—a love that never gives up, never fails, and never ends.
I like to think of love as the consummation of all things. When love ultimately triumphs, nothing else will remain. All will be one with God. This may sound like arcane mysticism or simply wishful thinking, but nothing could be more certain.
As Paul states in 1 Corinthians 13:8, “Love never fails.” It will outlast all things because it the most real of all things.
There is a reason why Jesus, before laying down his own life, tells his disciples, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Love requires both surrender and sacrifice, a truth which Jesus perfectly demonstrates with his own life. In short, there is a cost.
As long as we exist within a temporal state, love requires the possibility of loss. When we lose sight of that reality, love is easily distorted into manipulation and control. It is only possible to truly love with open hands and an open heart—open to the possibility of loss. This is how God loves us, without manipulation or control, granting us freedom even while knowing the cost.
Getting back to Tina Turner’s question, why do we need a heart if it will inevitably cause us pain? Because learning to love is what makes us more like Jesus, and more like his Father. To fail to love is to fail to be human—to fail to be who God created us to be. There is no higher calling than love. It is the fulfillment of the Law (Romans 8:10, Galatians 5:14), and it is only in this fulfillment that we find true freedom and peace that will last for all eternity.
