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9 9 9 Love and Compassion as Given Doctrinal structures and systems are important conceptual constructions made by persons of faith. In the course of decades, even centuries, those constructions have contributed to maintaining recognizable patterns of discourse. They have changed, too, through the centuries. Running through these formulations is a significant insight about religious persons: Jōdo Shinshū, Theravāda, and Christian. We find in the moments when authentic love and genuine compassion are expressed that the act that arises in those moments seems somehow not the result of our deliberate creation but a spontaneous response that we have been enabled at those moments to make. In attempting to understand religious men and women we see the remarkable variety in the modes of expressing the quality of faith. Religious traditions differ, of course, but persons who participate in these traditions demonstrate discernibly similar patterns of faith and response. We know an awareness of refuge is one response. Another is a profound sense of love and compassion. Let us turn our attention to love and compassion in the experience of Christians and Buddhists—Theravāda and Jōdo Shinshū—to consider a remarkable dialectic in a profound awareness of one’s receiving and responding. Were I to attempt to consider some of the key notions that relate to a topic such as “agapē (αγάπη) and compassion, their relation to insight or faith,”1 and to discuss their ramifications within these three great traditions I would be faced with a restriction that would allow no more than a paragraph or so for each notion in the different contexts, leaving aside whether one might want to trace the notions through millennia. There is a fundamental experiential dimension which one can infer from the manifestation of love (agapē) and/or compassion (karuṇā) among Theravāda Buddhists, Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists, and perhaps more than a few Christians. This experiential dimension suggests that love (agapē) and compassion (karuṇā) 10 0 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s are, like salvific insight or faith, given; that when persons authentically manifest love (agapē) and compassion (karuṇā) they do so as an expression of salvific insight or faith; that the ideal paradigm for love (agapē) and compassion (karuṇā) is found in the actions of focal personages. AGAPĒ By the time that some correspondence and a few accounts written in koine Greek that had to do with what we now tend to call “the early Christian community” began to appear and to circulate, later to form a part of the New Testament, verb and noun forms of agapē already had served for well over two centuries as a vehicle for expressing a sense of the quality of love. Regularly, the translators engaged in translating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX) chose verb and noun forms of our word agapē (αγάπη) as translations for the Hebrew verb form āhav’ and āhe-v’ and ahavāh’. We find this use of agapē in contexts dealing with love for one’s neighbor (Lev. 19:18), love of oneself (Lev. 19:34), love of God “with all one’s heart” (Deut. 6:5), as well as with love toward one’s wife (Ecc. 9:9), man toward man (Ps. 109:4–5 [LXX 108:4–5]), between man and woman (II Sam. 1:26 [LXX Regnorum II 1:26]).2 Hence, one might want to modify slightly Anders Nygren’s observation, “The New Testament uses this new word [that is, agapē] because it must communicate a message of a new kind, namely, God’s love revealed through Jesus Christ, given through Jesus Christ.”3 When we turn to the contextualization of agapē in the New Testament, we find the overwhelming theme to be the salvific activity of God in Jesus the Christ reconciling the world, demonstrating the love of God for humankind, and the consequent potentialities that are brought within the realm of possible human actions because of God’s salvific activity, initiated from beyond the realm of possible human actions. The notion of agapē is set within this context in the Christian heritage: God’s love for humankind, our love for each other in light of this divine love. This self-giving act of love on the part of God provides the core notion of agapē. There is not sufficient space to go into a careful study of the New Testament evidence or to consider thoroughly the work of others. Much has...

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