Love and Faith

December 4, 2025

Different types of love have been distinguished, and the Greek eros type of love has been contrasted with the Christian agape type of love. Eros is described as the desire for self-fulfillment by the other being, agape as the will to self-surrender for the sake of the other being.

But this alternative does not exist. The so-called “types of love” are actually “qualities of love,” lying within each other and driven into conflict only in their distorted forms. No love is real without the unity of eros and agape. Agape without eros is obedience to a moral law—without warmth, without longing, without reunion. Eros without agape is chaotic desire, denying the validity of the claim of the other to be acknowledged as an independent self, able to love and to be loved.

Love as the unity of eros and agape is an implication of faith. […] The immediate expression of love is action.

Theologians have discussed the question of how faith can result in action. The answer is: because it implies love, and because the expression of love is action. The mediating link between faith and works is love. When the Reformers, who believed salvation to be dependent on faith alone, criticized the Roman Catholic doctrine that works are necessary for salvation, they were right in denying that any human action can produce reunion with God. Only God can reunite the estranged with himself. But the Reformers did not realize—and the Catholics were still only dimly aware of it—that love is an element of faith if faith is understood as ultimate concern. Faith implies love, love lives in works; in this sense faith is actual in work.

Where there is ultimate concern there is the passionate desire to actualize the content of one’s concern. “Concern,” in its very definition, includes the desire for action. […]

In the first case, the eros quality of love drives to union with the beloved in that which is beyond the lover and the beloved. In the second case, the agape quality of love drives to acceptance of the beloved and his transformation into what he potentially is. Mystical love unites by negation of the self. Ethical love transforms by affirmation of the self.

The sphere of activities following from mystical love is predominantly ascetic. The sphere of activities following from ethical love is predominantly formative. In both cases, faith determines the kind of love and the kind of action.

~ Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, Chapter 6