Abstract
In introducing this volume, Frederick Simmons cautions against the oft-repeated sentiment that, though love is the ‘source, substance, standard, and goal of Christian ethics’, it is nonetheless a neglected topic in the field (p. 1). Instead, Simmons encourages readers to view ethical approaches that not only consider multiple forms or meanings of love but also directly address ‘other values, virtues, authorities, and traditions’ (p. 3). Indeed, Simmons frames Love and Christian Ethics as a ‘conjunctive approach to Christian love’ (p. 1). Simmons and Sorrells convened nearly two dozen prominent scholars to write on the topic, and the outcome is a volume that does indeed offer fresh insights and forge new directions in Christian love ethics.
The volume is a Festschrift in honor of Gene Outka, whose Agape: An Ethical Analysis (Yale University Press, 1972) remains a touchstone for Christian analyses of love. Outka described agape as an equal regard for each fellow human being qua human. For Outka, agape is disinterested love, and the prospect of an unfitting self-regard should prompt a standing wariness. The contributors in the volume develop aspects of Outka’s thought, addressing the character of Christian love, its operation in orders of creation and in special relations (preferential and particular loves), its relation to justice, and its import for moral action. Individually and together the essays examine love in ways that surface questions about the methods, structure, and purposes of Christian ethics more generally.
Simmons and Sorrells organize contributions in three sections. The first includes essays that treat, respectively, scriptural texts, Greek concepts of love, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas, Kant, and Kierkegaard. Each of the contributions in this section softens distinctions between key sources, concepts, or thinkers on Christian love. The essays by Jean Porter, John Hare, and M. Jamie Ferreira together provide an intriguing study of love in relation to the thought of Aquinas, Kant, and Kierkegaard. They offer nuanced explorations of the motivational springs and moral intentionality that may operate in human regard for others. Aquinas, who argues that agents always aim at their own happiness, represents the sort of eudaimonistic position that vexes many Christian thinkers who celebrate agape as disinterested love for God and neighbor. Porter, however, builds on recent work on practical reason and human motivation to argue that an agent with a virtuous will may desire her own happiness ‘while genuinely desiring the good of the other for her own sake’ (p. 61). She also positions her essay in relation to a growing body of literature that is rethinking overly sharp contrasts between Aquinas and Kant. Hare’s subsequent essay responds explicitly to Porter’s. He does grant that Aquinas and Kant have more in common than scholars have previously acknowledged, while also charting differences in how Aquinas and Kant understand divine intentions, the natural order, and human inclinations. Ferreira extends and deepens the study of human inclination by comparing Kant and Kierkegaard on the obligation to love our neighbors. Ferreira shows that, in their distinctive ways, both thinkers acknowledge that a preferential love for one’s neighbor—in the bond of friendship, say—may encompass a disinterested, non-preferential love for them, and that the latter helps to safeguard the former from becoming exploitative.
The middle, theoretical section of the book features familiar voices on ‘perennial theoretical questions’ (p. 3). Timothy Jackson, for example, writes on evolution and the image of God, Stephen Pope examines friendship, Edward Vacek treats love for God, and Edmund Santurri argues for agape as essentially a self-sacrificing love. The essays in this section grapple with the relationship between a non-instrumental love for God and neighbor (chiefly, neighbor), the lover’s own flourishing or good, the import of preferential bonds for universal neighbor love, and particular manifestations of love. The chapters by Simmons, Santurri, and Pope make for a lively conversation about self-sacrifice.
Also noteworthy in this section are a rebuke and a methodological outlier. The rebuke comes in Vacek’s sharp contention that ‘most Christian ethicists, dealing as they do with this-worldly problems, write as if Jesus’ first great commandment itself is irrelevant to their work’ (p. 111). Vacek invites ethicists to direct sustained attention to the commandment to love God, and to consider how addressing this-worldly problems may instantiate or deflect that love. The methodological outlier comes in Margaret Farley’s essay on forgiveness. Rather than jump into conceptual disagreements, as most of the other essays do, Farley begins by looking at social realities that urgently demand inquiry into forgiveness. Farley thereby demonstrates that social realities of conflict and violence not only occasion new reflection on forgiveness but inform it, by surfacing worries about premature forms of reconciliation, highlighting disparities in the ways offenders are treated, and underscoring what Simmons might call ‘conjunctive’ moral commitments such as human rights. Vacek’s observation that love for God is neglected in Christian ethics has merit. Yet, Farley shows that attention to this-worldly problems can be a way of reckoning with God’s love for humanity and our response to that love.
Part III of the volume includes essays on the law, global health, sex, violence, and the environment. Simmons positions these essays in terms of the implications of Christian love for particular social realities. Each of the individual essays in Part III makes a valuable contribution to Christian ethics, but the chapters by Mark Jordan, Emilie Townes, and Holmes Rolston are especially significant for stimulating new directions in Christian love ethics. Jordan asks ‘Where is love in the vocation of Christian speech about sex when so many coercions constrain it, outside churches and inside them’ (p. 290)? Jordan concludes that Christian ethics should provide ‘moral teaching that is animated by an irreducible variety of preoccupations, that is pursued as loving knowledge, and that refuses to codify sex out of respect for the example of its Teacher, who has not yet finished teaching—or acting’ (p. 301). He thereby challenges readers to re-consider the very enterprise of Christian ethics, as well as the categories and concepts in which it traffics.
Townes also reverses the pattern of applying Christian love to some social reality. She rightly notes that ‘if love is to have any enduring meaning, it requires an ethical community’ (p. 303). Townes therefore begins with the community presented in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which is inspired by a real murder case involving a black slave woman who killed her children to keep them from slave catchers (Toni Morrison, Beloved, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). As Townes notes, the kind of love revealed in the moral community at the heart of Beloved is one that addresses systemic violence. Indeed, reckoning with systemic violence teaches us what love must be and do, that it must threaten the status quo, manifest itself in concrete strategies, and live in our brokenness. Just as Jordan calls Christian ethics to a vocation that lovingly questions our moral codes, Townes observes that ‘genuine intellectual engagement begins with the concreteness of our humanity rather than in esoteric concepts abstracted from life’ (p. 311).
Rolston similarly challenges readers to reflect in new ways on the work of Christian ethics. Rather than ask what Christian love means for environmental ethics, he ponders what the wildness of nonhuman creation, which is ‘outside the hand of man, outside culture’, but ‘not outside … divine and biological order’, means for Christian ethics (p. 319). Rolston goes on to argue that, if humans are to love the wild in its creaturely integrity we must acknowledge that ‘the meaning of the words “good” and “divine” is not the same in nature and in culture. Nor is the character of the appropriate “love”’ (p. 319).
This section also includes essays on love in Jewish and Muslim ethics. Ronald Green offers a comparative study of love in Jewish and Christian biblical texts. John Kelsay compares the obligation to love one’s neighbor in Muslim and Christian traditions. The essays move Christian ethical work on love beyond intramural considerations. The global rise of nationalism, increasing rates of religious disaffiliation, and tribalism within religious communities, make interfaith engagement even more urgent. Eric Gregory’s contribution helpfully emphasizes that ‘recognition of diversity has sponsored and determined much of the intellectual agenda of the discipline known as “Christian ethics”’ (p. 332). And yet, Christian ethics, as a discipline or field, does not deal extensively with religious pluralism (p. 333). Gregory appeals to ‘the priority of divine transcendence of the One who sends and vindicates Jesus’ to invite ethical reflection on resemblances between intra-Christian pluralism and religious pluralism more generally (p. 334). Christian ethicists should build on the work that Green, Kelsay, and Gregory undertake here.
The quality of edited volumes depends on the merit of individual essays, but also the intervention the volume as a whole makes to its topic of study. This overarching contribution depends in turn on elements such as the topical scope and structure of the volume, the editorial positioning of the collection in relation to existing literature, and, importantly, the sourcing of contributions. Simmons and Sorrells invited prominent thinkers who on the whole have written thoughtful essays that invite readers to rethink some fairly settled positions in Christian love ethics. (Contributors on whose essays I have not focused in this review are Thomas Ogletree, Terence Irwin, Oliver O’Donovan, John Reeder, Cathleen Kaveny and Lisa Sowle Cahill.) The volume is certainly a useful stimulant to thinking about Christian love and deserves attention. Nevertheless, it is important to note that fewer than one third of the contributors are women. Moreover, there is only one black scholar among the contributors, and one who works on queer theology; perhaps it is telling that these two essays appear in the third section, which charts the import of Christian love for society. The implication is that the influential aspects of ‘tradition’ engaged in the first section, and the ‘perennial theoretical questions’ that occupy the second section can be addressed adequately while giving relatively little considered attention to dynamics of power or engagement with under-represented perspectives. The implication is that Christian love has import for social realities but that social realities do not have implications for rightly understanding Christian love. Granting that one aim of the volume is to honor Gene Outka’s contributions to Christian ethics, it might have brought even more critical rigor and innovative thinking to its examination of love with a more diverse slate of contributors.