No Ladder Between Agape and Phileo

Many Christians have been shown a ladder of love. On the bottom rung stands eros, desire. A little higher stands storge, the affection of a family. Higher still is phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o, the love of friends. And at the very top is agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay, the love of God. It is a tidy way to teach, and it has been taught in a great many classes.

Two of its rungs have already given way. Eros does not appear in the New Testament at all, and storge appears only inside two compound words. The top rung has proved unsteady as well, because agape is used for loving the darkness and the world. The rung that remains to be tested is phileo. The claim says that phileo is the lower love, warm but merely human. A simple question tests it. Does God the Father love the Son with a lesser, merely human love? No one would say so. If the ladder were true, there would be one Person who never loved anyone with phileo, and that is God the Father.

The Father Loves the Son With Phileo

John 5:20 For the Father phileo(loves) the Son and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel.

“For the Father phileo(loves) the Son.” The verb is not agapao ἀγαπάω ag-ap-ah'-o. It is phileo (φιλέω). The love between the Father and the Son, the deepest love there is, is described here with the very word the ladder places below agape. If phileo were a flawed and second-rate human feeling, why would the Father love the Son with it? The Father does not love the Son with a second-rate love.

The same Gospel describes the same love with the other word as well.

John 3:35 The Father agapao(loves) the Son and has given all things into His hand.

In John 3:35 the verb is agapao, and in John 5:20 it is phileo. It is one Father loving one Son with one love, and John moves between the two verbs without any sign that one of them is a step down from the other.

The Father’s Phileo for the Disciples

The Father’s phileo is not reserved for the Son.

John 16:27 for the Father Himself phileo(loves) you, because you have phileo(loved) Me and have believed that I came forth from God.

Phileo stands in both halves of the sentence. The Father’s love for the disciples is phileo, and the disciples’ love for Yeshua is phileo too. Yeshua says so with no hint that either love is second-best. If phileo were merely human affection, these sentences could not have been spoken.

One Person, Two Words

John uses both verbs in the same way for the people Yeshua loved. When Lazarus fell sick, his sisters sent word using one verb, and John, telling the story, used the other.

John 11:3 So the sisters sent word to Him, saying, "Lord, behold, he whom You phileo(love) is sick."

John 11:5 Now Yeshua agapao(loved) Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

The sisters chose phileo, and John chose agapao. It is one love, for one household, told with both words two verses apart. Later in the same chapter, when Yeshua wept at the tomb, the people standing by said, “See how He phileo(loved) him!” (John 11:36). They saw His tears and named His love with phileo. No one reading that scene would call the love that wept beside Lazarus’ grave a lower kind of love.

The disciple who reclined next to Yeshua at the last supper is described the same way. At the table he is the disciple whom Yeshua agapao(loved) (John 13:23). On the morning of the resurrection he is the other disciple whom Yeshua phileo(loved) (John 20:2). If the two verbs stood on different rungs, John would have had to decide whether Yeshua loved this disciple with the higher love or the lower one. He does not decide, because there is nothing to decide.

The Same Saying, Two Words

The same is true outside John’s Gospel. The woe Yeshua spoke over the Pharisees’ love of honor appears in two Gospels, and they use different verbs for the same love.

Luke 11:43 Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the front seats in the synagogues and the greetings in the marketplaces.

Matthew 23:6 They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues,

In Luke, the Pharisees “love the front seats,” and the verb is agapao. In Matthew, they “love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues,” and the Greek verb is phileo. It is the same wrong love, the love of the first seat, named once with each word. Agapao does not make it better, and phileo does not make it worse.

Phileo Toward God

The ladder also teaches that phileo is the love people have for one another, and agape the love they ought to have for God. Scripture again does not follow the ladder. Yeshua says to the ekklesia ἐκκλησία ek-klay-see'-ah in Laodicea:

Revelation 3:19 Those whom I phileo(love) I rebuke and discipline; so be zealous and metanoeson(repent, spiritual domain).

“Those whom I phileo(love) I rebuke and discipline.” His phileo is the love that corrects, and it calls for repentance.

Paul, closing his first letter to Corinth, writes:

1 Corinthians 16:22 If anyone does not love the Lord Yeshua Messiah, he is to be anathema ἀνάθεμα an-ath'-em-ah(accursed); Marana tha(Our Lord, come!).

The Greek verb behind “does not love the Lord” is phileo. Paul does not ask whether anyone has risen to agape toward the Lord. He says that the one who does not love Him with phileo is to be anathema, accursed. Phileo toward the Lord is not a lesser rung that a believer may stand on while hoping to climb higher. Its absence is a curse.

No Hierarchy in the Text

So the ladder falls. Phileo is not a lower rung, because the Father loves the Son and the disciples with phileo. The same love is spoken of with both verbs, of the Father and the Son, of Lazarus, of the beloved disciple, and even of the Pharisees’ love of honor. Phileo is the love the Lord shows when He rebukes, and the love the Lord requires on pain of a curse. Agape is not a guaranteed top rung, because Scripture uses the same word of people who love the darkness. Both are words of real love, and both can be given to God or to the world.

This matters for one passage above all others. The breakfast by the Sea of Galilee in John 21, where Yeshua asks Peter three times whether he loves Him, is where the ladder is preached most often, as if Yeshua had lowered His question from agapao to phileo to meet a weaker love. Without the ladder, we must read that conversation on its own terms, beside the sayings John records from the night before the cross.

For now the result is clear. There is no ladder between agape and phileo. There are two words standing side by side on the same ground, and the question for both is the same: what is loved, and are His commandments kept?

That first question, what is loved, is written into the very shape of a whole family of Greek words, the compounds built on phil-. Each of them is named by the thing it loves.