In a world straining for eros we have lost the meaning of friendship and are thus in danger of losing the heart of Christianity. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis is a wonderful and insightful book. I commend it to you if you have not read it recently. In the book, he defines the nature of eros as two people facing one another. It is a kind of delight in the person of another. It makes much of the person with whom eros is shared. I delight in your delight. I savor and enjoy the person before me. Friendship, alternatively, is imagined by Lewis to be represented as two people facing something else and walking side by side. It is a shared delight in something outside of either person. It is an ambition aimed at something beyond or greater than either of them.

Our world is drenched with a kind of explicit and yet tepid sexuality. It is a distortion of eros that has taken over everything from entertainment to advertising for potato chips. Sex is everywhere, which is to say that one (potential) expression of eros has become the dominant motif of our culture. I say potential because sex is not equivalent to eros. Sex can still be bent further in on the self and thus lose its true eroticism - its real nature, love for another. In a culture like that one, we find that other forms of love - like Lewis' notion of friendship - atrophy and even die.

Love in our day has been largely redefined as giving someone good feelings, or avoiding making someone feel bad. It is, increasingly in our day, to make much of them, to make much of their feelings. In other words, where people are condemned for being unloving, it is increasingly more about how someone else felt rather than about their objective good (I realize here that it is possible to harm someone and for them to feel it emotionally - but it is also possible to seek someone’s real good and it feel really bad emotionally). In other words, we've come to define love in almost exclusively erotic terms. For me to love you, I must magnify you, magnify how you feel, and act accordingly.

Friendship isn't like that. It is surely patient and kind and slow to anger like all real expressions of love. But it is a kind of love that is aimed supremely at something else. It is concerned mostly with a third thing, a love shared by two people that delights in something outside of either of them. It is no wonder that in a culture pervaded by sexuality, that we've lost any conception of love that does not end in making much of the self. It is no wonder that preaching in our age has, in many places, distorted the message of the bible to make the gospel largely about how God makes much of me - and this is redefined as his love. It is no wonder that calls to behold the majesty of God, to consider the wisdom of God's law, to tremble before the terrible wrath of God and to reorder our lives in accordance with these things is seen as unloving or ineffective. When love can only be experienced as a distortion of eros - as a making much of me, then the call to behold and be chiefly concerned with someone gloriously big and sovereign who is not centered on your emotional well-being or fulfillment can seem like the furthest thing from love imaginable. And yet this is what Christian discipleship and Christian worship is supposed to do. When we accommodate the message of Christianity to a world like that one, we gut it of its true power: a power that can bring sanity and beauty and goodness. A power that lay in its ability to lift the gaze of self-obsessed people.

Cultural accommodation in a world consumed with the me and how I feel will mean recasting biblical Christianity in terms that make much of me or you and fails to confront us with the infinite superiority and worth of Jesus - and such a Christianity will never be truly good news.