key moral principles

• Christian moral principles

  • Eros – sexual love
  • Phila – brotherly love
  • Storge – love of stuff
  • Agape – mirroring god's love to everyone
• Agapeic love


  Love that should be the normative principle for all Christian ethics
• Joseph fletcher: '"There must be rules and conventions, but they must always be tested against the primary commandment of love"'
• Love your neighbour is not one of the 10 commandments
• Love your neighbour is rooted deep in the Hebrew bible
• Leviticus 18:8: '"You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the lord"'
• Leviticus 19:34: '"The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the lord your god"'
• All four gospel writers and St. Paul refer to the importance of agape
• Christians should show their love and commitment to God by imitating his love for humans – through agape
• Christian ethic of agapeic love

  Goes beyond an ethic of reciprocity (i.e. just return love when it is given to you), it is a love that goes well beyond duty
• Jesus: '"You have heard that it was said, "you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy" but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"'
• Luke's gospel: '"You shall love the lord God with all your heart, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself"'
• The lawyer wants more detail and presses Jesus about who his neighbour is
• Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan, and the lawyer gets more than he had bargained for – the neighbour is anyone who behaves with agapeic love, even if that was one of the hated Samaritans
• John 3:16: '"For god so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life"'
• John 15: '"As the father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you loved one and other as I have loved you. no one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends"'
• E.P Sanders argued that agape is at the centre of Paul's ethics
• Galatians 5:14: '"for the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "you shall love your neighbour as yourself""'
• 1 Corinthians 13: '"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I mayboast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror,dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love"'
• 1 John 4: '"Let us love one another, because love is from God"<|>"Whoever does not love does not know god"'