What are the five love languages?
The "five love languages" is a modern framework for describing how people give and receive affection; you will not find that list in Scripture, and the commentators in this collection do not use it. What they do trace is something the framework assumes — that love must be expressed to be real — and they answer two questions: what language did God Himself use, and how is our love proved to be more than talk?
God Spoke First
Before love is anything we practise, it is something done to us. Commentators point to 1 John 4:10 as the place where the Bible defines love — and the definition is not a feeling but an act, and one that answers a wrong picture of God:
F. B. HoleFirst, that the teaching of the Bible is NOT that God is ill-disposed toward us, a frowning Deity to be continually pacified by sacrifices that change His feelings toward us. That is the corrupt heathen idea. The Bible presents the truth like this: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). Far from our having to change His heart toward us by a sacrifice, His heart toward man is the very source of all our blessing. Our sins had made propitiation necessary, but He Himself provided the necessary sacrifice.
Propitiation means the sacrifice that satisfies God's righteous claims against sin. The point here is who supplied it.
Deeds, Not Vocabulary
The nearest thing to a "love language" in the New Testament is a warning against language. One writer notes that the word translated "word" in 1 John 3:18 covers the thought as well as the speech:
The Bible TreasuryThe term "logos," here translated "word," has a much wider meaning than our "word." In English "let us not love in word or in tongue" certainly looks like repetition. But this word "logos" means, in Greek, not merely the word by which thought is expressed, but the thought itself. So the force of what the apostle says is that we are not to love in theory (or thought), nor in mere language ("in tongue"), but in deed and in truth.
That closes an easy escape route, as another writer observes — the person most fluent about love may be the one shortest of it:
William KellyNothing is easier than to call for love and complain that others lack it; but some who complain loudest are very short of it themselves. They want to be objects of love; but the right way is for us to love, if we would be loved. A heart going out in goodness without a selfish aim draws out other hearts, while the lip too readily learns to talk about love and stops there.
The Forms It Takes
If the counting stops at five, Scripture's range is wider — and it includes expressions that do not feel affectionate at the moment:
Greg QuailThere are hundreds of practical ways in which it may be expressed — in tenderness: a consoling word, a helping hand, a helping handout; or in firmness: a correcting word, a chastening hand, unflinching obedience to God's Word. The expression may be feeble, but love is love. Love desires the blessing and well-being of its object.
Two elements run through all of them, according to a writer commenting on 1 Corinthians 13:
The Bible TreasuryThe only true love is love that will bear and do for its object… Its two elements are action and suffering. The two sides of living love are to bear evil meekly and to do good energetically for every brother, according to his need and your opportunity. Christ's example is its rule — "love one another as I have loved you."
Where It Is Tested
The list in 1 Corinthians 13 is largely negative, and one writer treats that as deliberate:
The Christian's FriendThe description is not so much of what love does as of what it does not do, showing that the very essence of love is self-denial and self-effacement. How comparatively easy it is to take up active and even hard service rather than to suffer — and yet the very first thing mentioned is, "Love suffers long, and is kind." How little we like to suffer at the hands of others, and how quick we are to retaliate.
(The ESV reads "Love is patient and kind"; the older wording "suffers long" is what the writer is commenting on.)
The testing ground is usually domestic. One writer pictures a husband busy with meetings while his own household goes unfed:
Julius A. Von Poseck"My dear brother, is this the way Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her?"… And does that phrase "one another" mean anyone other than your own wife, your own body? Charity begins at home.
Summary
- Told. Love began outside us: God sent His Son as the propitiation for our sins, and provided Himself what our sins made necessary.
- Shown. Christ's love "was told not in words only, that might be treasured for a while and then forgotten, but in deeds" — the pattern for ours.
- Wide. Its expressions run past any short list: tenderness or firmness, a consoling word or a correcting one, action and suffering both.
- Costly. 1 Corinthians 13 measures love mostly by what it refuses to do; bearing wrong is harder than busy service, and rarer.
- Near. The test lands closest to home — the brother in need, the wife, the household. Charity begins there or it is theory.