At the heart of Christian ethics is the biblical commandment to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. But what is the meaning of love? Scholars have wrestled with this question since the recording of the Christian gospels, and in recent decades teachers and students of Christian ethics have engaged in vigorous debates about appropriate interpretations and implications of this critical norm.
In Love and Christian Ethics, nearly two dozen leading experts analyze and assess the meaning of love from a wide range of perspectives. Chapters are organized into three areas: influential sources and exponents of Western Christian thought about the ethical significance of love, perennial theoretical questions attending that consideration, and the implications of Christian love for important social realities. Contributors bring a richness of thought and experience to deliver unprecedentedly broad and rigorous analysis of this central tenet of Christian ethics and faith. William Werpehowski provides an afterword on future trajectories for this research. Love and Christian Ethics is sure to become a benchmark resource in the field.
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Yes, you can access Love and Christian Ethics by Brian C. Sorrells, Frederick V. Simmons in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Christian Theology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
BIBLICAL PORTRAYALS of the love commands are interwoven with presentations of more comprehensive bodies of commandments, laws, and ordinances that order human affairs in particular social settings. The love commands provide a substantive foundation for these more complex resources, undergirding their authority and informing efforts to observe them faithfully in ongoing life practices. This essay focuses on distinctive yet overlapping treatments of the love commands contained in the book of Deuteronomy and in Matthew’s presentation of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, with selective references to related materials in other biblical texts. Deuteronomy ventures a comprehensive yet realistic vision of a well-ordered society, one firmly grounded in repeated declarations of the Lord’s steadfast love for the people of Israel with a corresponding summons to the people to love the Lord in return. It directly addresses the challenges of adapting Israel’s covenant legacy to a social order structured by an aristocratic class and status system subject to the rule of kings, a form of social organization that typically routinizes the exploitation of vulnerable people. In this setting, implementations of the love commands included generous contributions by the privileged to support those in need. In contrast, Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are directed toward a socially inclusive company of followers, equipping them for faithful participation in an emerging grassroots social movement, one informed by a life-transforming vision of God’s redemptive purposes (Matt. 5–7; cf. Luke 6:17–49). These teachings are substantially illumined by Jesus’s climactic claim that the enduring authority of the law and the prophets derives from the commands to love God with heart, soul, and mind and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matt. 22:34–40). They direct attention to the underlying moral and spiritual substance of the law, including calls for justice and righteousness by Israel’s prophets. Both of these classic models are pertinent for contemporary reflections on the love commands, underscoring the point that love has different implications within different social contexts.
The Love Commands in the Book of Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy opens with the narrative of the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt, their wilderness wanderings, and their struggles to possess and defend the land that the Lord had promised them. This narrative is followed by the ten “words,” devarim—a term usually translated as “commandments”—that the Lord delivered to the people on Mount Horeb (Deut. 5:1–21). These words set forth the basic requisites for covenant fidelity in the lives of the people.1 Moses then declares the Lord’s steadfast love for his people (cf. Deut. 5:10), and he summons the people to love the Lord their God in return with all their hearts, with all their souls, and with all their might (Deut. 6:4–9). The Hebrew word for “heart,” levaveka, has cognitive and volitional connotations. Greek translations in New Testament texts capture this richness with two separate words: heart, or kardia, and mind, or dianoia (cf. Mark 12:30; Matt. 22:37; Luke 10:25–27). The Hebrew word for soul, naphsheka, suggests the depths of the self, and the word for might, me’odeka, calls for the full investment of one’s strength and energy. Accordingly, the Lord’s words are grounded in his love for his people, and they are delivered to the people for their well-being. The people are urged to “heed” the words of the Lord, to study them diligently, and to embrace them with their hearts and souls (Deut. 6:10–25, cf. 11:18–20), a message that pervades the book of Deuteronomy (cf. Deut. 5:10, 7:7–13, 10:15–22, 11:1–22, 13:3, 30:6).
Deuteronomy contains no explicit references to neighbor love or to love for self, though it does emphasize the Lord’s impartiality in executing justice for orphans and widows, and it declares his love for strangers, when he provides them with food and clothing. Accordingly, the people are instructed to love strangers with the reminder that they were themselves strangers in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:17–19). These references serve as tacit endorsements of self-love combined with equivalent love for neighbors and strangers, a message that is explicitly stated in Leviticus (19:18, 34). Deuteronomy’s basic message is that the people must love neighbors and strangers living among them in accordance with the Lord’s own steadfast love.
Along with declarations of the Lord’s love and a corresponding summons to love the Lord in return, the book of Deuteronomy directs attention to the persistent stubbornness, hard-heartedness, and disobedience of the people of Israel. The underlying message is that the people have not demonstrated a readiness to love themselves or their neighbors in appropriate ways. They constantly allow their fears and uncertainties to dominate their lives, and they invest themselves too narrowly in the pursuit of their own self-interests. This message is vividly displayed in the story of Moses coming down from Mount Horeb with tablets of stone that recorded the words the Lord had spoken directly to the people. Moses discovered to his dismay that the people were constructing an image of a calf as a sacral object, a blatant example of idolatry. Confronting the wickedness of the people, Moses concluded that they were in no way disposed to fulfill their covenant commitments, and he cast to the ground the tablets of stone, shattering them into pieces (Deut. 9:6–21). The prophet Jeremiah expressed similar anguish as he struggled to make sense of the pervasive faithlessness and disobedience of the people of Judah. He became convinced that the Lord’s words would never be effective if they were simply engraved on tablets of stone; they had to be engraved on human hearts (Jer. 31:33–34).2 In a parallel manner, the prophet Ezekiel proclaimed the Lord’s promise to give his people a new heart and a new spirit, replacing their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh more responsive to the Lord’s instructions (Ezek. 36:26–27). Having pleaded with the Lord not to destroy his people despite their idolatrous behavior, Moses seized the calf, burned it with fire, and crushed it, reducing it to dust. The Lord then summoned Moses to bring to the mountain two more tablets of stone on which he would once again engrave his words. Returning from the mountain, Moses addressed the people, urging them to fear the Lord, to walk in his ways, to love him and serve him with heart and soul, love that would honor God’s glory and enhance their own well-being (Deut. 10–11). Deuteronomy concludes with Moses’s final instructions for the people, in which he extensively elaborates these basic themes (Deut. 29–31).
The persistent disobedience of the people is manifest in the predominately negative form of the words that the Lord spoke directly to the people: no other gods; no graven images; no wrongful uses of the Lord’s name; no killing, adultery, or theft; no false witness against a neighbor; and no covetous dispositions of any kind, whether driven by greed, arrogance, or sexual lust (Deut. 5:6–21; cf. Exod. 20:1–17). The rigorous observance of these prohibitions would hardly amount to acts of love, whether for God, self, neighbors, or strangers. Instead, they underscore the urgency of constraining forms of human misconduct that render authentic expressions of love virtually impossible. Only two of the Lord’s words convey positive obligations: keep the Sabbath and honor your father and mother. The Sabbath takes on special importance because it is not simply a day for worship, sacrificial offerings, and instruction. It is above all a time of rest because it exemplifies the seventh day following the Lord’s completion of the original work of creation (Gen. 2:1–3). Indeed, the word “Sabbath” comes from the Hebrew word shabat, which means “to rest.” Therefore, God blessed the Sabbath as a time of rest for all creatures, including sons and daughters, slaves, resident aliens, and even livestock. The inclusion of slaves is reinforced by the reminder that the people of Israel had themselves been slaves in Egypt (Deut. 5:12–15; cf. Exod. 20:8–11, 31:12–17).3 Honor for parents undergirds family bonds that were central components of the distinctive identity of a covenant people.
The Ten Words are then elaborated in a more detailed set of statutes, laws, and ordinances that addressed virtually all aspects of life in the ancient kingdom of Judah (Deut. 12–26). With the exception of standards regulating dietary practices and purity codes (Deut. 14:3–22, 22:5, 9–12), most of these statutes are related, directly or indirectly, to one or more of the Ten Commandments. Taken as a whole, however, they should not be viewed as integral components of Israel’s covenant traditions. Instead, they represented practical attempts to reconstruct those traditions in ways that could accommodate an aristocratic class and status system subject to the rule of kings, a system marked by wide social disparities in wealth, status, and honor.
Deuteronomy directly addresses the challenges of rendering monarchy compatible with Israel’s covenant legacy. The central message is that monarchy will be viable for a covenant people only if kings are themselves committed to ruling in ways that are congruent with the law of the Lord. Kings must not seize power by force, accumulate great wealth, have multiple wives, or build large standing armies, and they must not afflict or oppress their people (Deut. 17:14–20). The books of Samuel and Kings indicate that Deuteronomy’s vision of righteous kings was actually unrealistic. Apart from David’s penitent responses to prophetic critics and Solomon’s alleged wisdom, only two of Judah’s kings are portrayed as righteous: Josiah and Hezekiah. Even Solomon violated some of the basic standards, accumulating great wealth, having multiple wives, and using forced labor for ambitious construction projects (1 Kings 5–11). Kings ruling in the northern kingdom of Israel are uniformly condemned as cruel, unjust, and disobedient. Deuteronomy bestows substantial responsibility on the Levites for instructing the people, especially their rulers...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Conjunctive Approach to Christian Love
