Agape: An Unearned Love

An essay recently writ­ten for a course… C.S. Lewis regarded agape love to be the great­est of the four loves. It is the kind of love Christ taught and lived. Author Richard L. Strauss notes that, “it is a love which keeps lov­ing when its object is unre­spon­sive, unkind, unlov­able, or com­pletely unwor­thy… it gives one hun­dred per­cent and expects noth­ing in return!“1 It is an impos­si­ble love if not a reflec­tion of God’s love for us. It is this kind of love, as Peter Kreeft notes, that “goes beyond worth, beyond jus­tice, beyond rea­son“2 . In the words of C.S. Lewis, it is a gift-love from God to us: God, who needs noth­ing, loves into…

Book Review: Socrates Meets Jesus

Pages: 182 Pub­lisher: Inter­var­sity Press Year:  2002 Author: Peter Kreeft Peter Kreeft has writ­ten a sim­ple, yet crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the claims of Jesus as expe­ri­enced through a pagan Greek philoso­pher — Socrates.  It is through Socrates that Kreeft cuts through a lot of the the­o­log­i­cal jar­gon, ask­ing what should be the fore­most and basic ques­tions when approach­ing the ques­tion “Who is Jesus?” The book is writ­ten in the same fash­ion as his other Socrates meets… books. Names are often satire, some times bit­ing and always rel­e­vant. The con­text is always mod­ern day (at least at the time of writ­ing) and the issues as rel­e­vant now as they were back then. Kreeft’s use of satire does…

Hail Mary, Full of Grace.. Was The Lord With Thee?

Let’s get straight to the point. If the vir­gin birth did not hap­pen, then, as Mark Driscoll rightly observes: If the vir­gin birth of Jesus is untrue, then the story of Jesus changes greatly; we would have a sex­u­ally promis­cu­ous young woman lying about God’s mirac­u­lous hand in the birth of her son, rais­ing that son to declare he was God, and then join­ing his reli­gion. But if Mary is noth­ing more than a sin­ful con artist then nei­ther she nor her son Jesus should be trusted. Because both the clear teach­ings of Scrip­ture about the begin­ning of Jesus’ earthly life and the char­ac­ter of his mother are at stake, we must con­tend for the…