The genitive love of God

Continuing our thinking about the love of God I was reading Romans 5.5 this week, which says that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." (NRSV)

'God's love' is the translation of ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ (he agape tou theou) which is in the genitive case - 'the love of God'. As it happened, in my beginner NT Greek class last week we were discussing how the genitive case has a wider range of meaning that simple possessive or ownership. (This was new to me, as a very beginner linguist.) My teacher pointed out the genitive can be understood in several ways:

  • the love God has for others
  • the love that another has for God (as in 'I have a great love of books')
  • 'of' can imply authorship, as in 'the gospel of Mark'
Translating the phrase above simply as 'God's love' seems to me to give it the first of these meanings.

However, perhaps the original text (also?) carries the second meaning, i.e. it refers to a believer's love for God. This is the emphasis that Tom Wright has in his Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1 where he says, referring to this verse, that “those grasped by the gospel are marked out as the people who offer this God the obedience of faith, loving him from the heart.”

Doubtless, the Holy Spirit does pour the love that God has for us into our hearts, but the emphasis of this verse is then that the Holy Spirit also fills our hearts with the love that we have for God - our 'love of God'.

God does not coerce or force us to love, but what a wonderful gift that the Spirit gives - the ability to love God in response to God's love for us.

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