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Richard Hays and John Wesley

I have long thought love the heart of a biblically oriented ethics. But an influential book by New Testament scholar, Richard Hays, argues otherwise.

I suppose the main reason I think love is the heart of Christian ethics comes from my own reading of the Bible. I find the call of love appearing often in Scripture, and biblical writers place supreme importance on love. 

Jesus' two great ethical commands are oriented around love: Love God and love others as oneself. The apostle Paul says all the commandments are fulfilled in love. And while faith, hope, and love remain, says Paul, the greatest is love.  Immediately after claiming love is supreme, he adds that we should pursue love.

John Wesley also considered love primary in the Bible. “No scripture can mean that God is not love,” argues Wesley, “or that his mercy is not over all his works.”  Wesley says, “Love is the end of all the commandments of God. Love is the end, the sole end, of every dispensation of God, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things."

Defining Love

Admittedly, what one means by “love” makes a world of difference. One's definition should at least play a role in deciding whether love is the center of biblical ethics. I define love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.  Love is primarily about doing good in relational response to God and others.

My definition fits very well with the vast majority of instances the word “love” appears in the Bible. “Love your enemies,” says Jesus, by “doing good” to them (Lk. 6:35). Do good even to those who hate you, says Jesus (Mt. 5:44). God loves all others by doing good to them – e.g., sending rain (Mt. 5:45). God was good to us by sending Jesus so we might benefit (Jn. 3:16; 1 Jn. 4:9). Jesus’ Good Samaritan story points to the core meaning of love as doing good.  

In my new book, The Nature of Love, I document many more instances in which biblical writers identify love with doing good. In sum, to love is to respond well to God’s empowering call to do good. That may mean being a blessing, being generous, showing compassion, acting self-sacrificial, helping the least of these, etc.

Richard Hay’s Vision of New Testament Ethics

Eminent New Testament scholar, Richard Hays, thinks differently than I do on this issue.  In his influential book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, Hays does not choose love as the central theme for biblically oriented ethics.

Instead, Hays chooses three other focal images. He believes these “encapsulate the crucial elements of the [New Testament] narrative and serve to focus our attention on the common ground shared by the various witnesses.”

The three images Hays picks are community, cross, and new creation.  Of the first, he says, “the church is a countercultural community of discipleship, and this community is the primary addressee of God’s imperatives.” Of the second, “Jesus’ death on a cross is the paradigm for faithfulness to God in this world.”  And of the third, Hays says, “the church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-yet-redeemed world.”

Where’s Love?

I personally think all three themes Hays chooses are important.  And Hays offers some profound insights in his book. But where’s love?

Hays anticipates my question. “Some readers will be surprised to find that I have not proposed love as a unifying theme for New Testament ethics,” says Hays. He admits that “the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John, and the Johannine Epistle explicitly highlight love as a (or the) distinctive element of Christian life: it is the ‘more excellent way’ (1 Cor. 12:31- 13:13), the fulfillment of the Law (Rom. 13:8), the new commandment of Jesus ( John 13:34-35), and the revelation of the character of God that is to be reflected in the relationships within the community of believers (1 John 4:7-8).”

Despite these important passages suggesting love ought to be a, if not the, unifying theme for Christian ethics, Hays chooses not to include it among his focal images.  He offers three reasons for its absence.

Hays says love is not a central thematic emphasis for some major New Testament writers.

Not all New Testament books emphasize love. For instance, “Jesus’ promulgation of the double love commandment [in Mark 12:28-34] stands as an isolated element [in Mark’s gospel],” says Hays.

In Hebrews and Revelation, says Hays, “we encounter only scattered incidental references to love, mostly with regard to God’s love of human beings.” Furthermore, says Hays, “in [Hebrews and Revelation] where love is mentioned, it is closely identified with good works…”

Hays rightly notes that “nowhere in [the Acts of the Apostles] does the word ‘Love’ appear, either as a noun or a verb.” 

Instead of love, argues Hays, “the images of community, cross, and new creation more adequately bring these texts into focus along with the rest of the canonical witnesses.”

My Response

I find this argument interesting on a number of levels. Hays uses a word count approach to deciding which themes should be considered central to New Testament ethics.  His argument is that the word "love" does not appear in a few New Testament books, and it appears only occasionally in a few other books.

I think a word count approach to formulating central themes for biblically based ethic is of limited use.  But even if one were to use it as a dominant tool for deciding focal themes, Hays's reasons for neglecting love and embracing the other themes do not withstand scrutiny. After all, the word “love” appears more often as a word in the New Testament than "cross," "community," or "resurrection." And the word "love" appears in more New Testament books overall than these other words.  If a strict word count were the criterion for choosing focal themes, love should be chosen over the three Hays offers.

Secondly, love is clearly the focus of Jesus’ own ethical commands in all four gospels. Hays admits this. But it is also the Apostle Paul’s focus for several of his main arguments. By contrast, the foci Hays chooses are not clearly the foci of many books in the New Testament.

Hays commits an error frequently committed by theologians and biblical scholars: he fails to define what he means by love. If Hays had defined love and based his definition on the most frequent meanings of love in the Bible, he may realized that love is central to the biblical witness.

If Hays had defined love based on the dominant meaning of love in the Bible, he may have realized love’s meaning appears even in the few books of the New Testament that don’t include the actual word.  My New Testament scholar colleague, Richard Thompson, observes that there are numerous examples of loving others in the book of Acts, even if the word “love” isn’t used to describe them.

Hays says love is not an image. It’s an interpretation of an image.

The second reason Richard Hays gives for not making the love the central focus of his understanding of New Testament ethics pertains to his own method.

“What the New Testament means by ‘love’ is embodied concretely in the cross,” says Hays. “As 1 John 3:16 declares with powerful simplicity, ‘We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’”

I agree with Hays that the cross reveals love in a profound way.  But Hays says more…

“The content of the word ‘love’ is given fully and exclusively in the death of Jesus in the cross; apart from this specific narrative image, the term has no meaning. Thus to add love as a fourth focal image would not only be superfluous, but it would also move in the direction of conceptual abstraction, away from the specific image of the cross.”

My Response

My first criticism of Hays has to do with the method he has chosen.  If love is the heart of the New Testament gospel message, why take one’s focal image methodology as so important as to relegate love to an inferior position?  In fact, a quick look at the index of Hays’s book suggests that he rarely refers to “love” in his presentation of New Testament ethics. In my opinion, he should have chosen another conceptual scheme to account for the centrality of love.

Secondly, while the death of Jesus Christ is of great importance, it is not true that the cross gives love’s meaning “fully and exclusively.” The New Testament talks about love in other, non-self-sacrificial ways (e.g., friendship, mutual giving and receiving, desire, passion). These ways are not abstract; they emerge in genuine relationships within community and toward those outside the community.

We can preach the cross of Jesus Christ without either thinking the cross is the only expression of love or placing love and the cross in conflict.

Hays says “love” has been debased in popular discourse.

The third reason Hays gives for not considering love central for his presentation of New Testament ethics has to do with the use of love in common parlance. “The term … has lost its power of discrimination, having become a cover for all manner of vapid self-indulgence,” says Hays.

“One often hears voices in the church urging that the radical demands of Christian discipleship should not be pressed upon church members because the ‘loving’ thing to do is to include everyone without imposing harsh demands,” says Hays. Instead, “the biblical story teaches us that God’s love cannot be reduces to ‘inclusiveness’: authentic love calls us to repentance, discipline, sacrifice, and transformation (see, e.g., Luke 14:25-35; Heb. 12:5-13).”

Hays concludes that “in combination with the [first two] considerations, [the popular discourse on love] suggests that love as a focal image might produce more distortion than clarity in our construal of the New Testament’s ethical witness.”

My Response

Hays is certainly correct that the word “love” has been misunderstood and abused in popular discourse.  Mildred Bangs Wynkoop calls love a "weasel-word" because of this phenomenon.  I think we all realize love is a multi-meaningful word.

Yet, the word "love" remains the central word New Testament writers use to talk about ethics. We can't ignore this. And we shouldn't allow popular uses of the word to push "love" from the biblical limelight.

A New Testament scholar should be concerned about the language he or she uses to convey biblical ideas to contemporary people. But such a scholar should deal with that concern in some other way than neglecting a word Jesus, Paul, and other New Testament writers use most often to describe their ideas about ethics.

Secondly, there are no perfect words to use when talking about Christian ethics. Hays’s own choice of words -- “cross,” “community,” and even “new creation” -- are also misunderstood and abused.  Remembering that pop singer Madonna often wears a cross should help us realize that Hays’s preferred images can also be problematic. And the word "community" can mean so many different things.

I think a biblical scholar should provide definitions and meanings for the words he or she chooses. And I think these definitions and meanings should be consonant with the New Testament witness.

Hays correctly notes that New Testament writers sometimes use “love” to talk about discipline, transformation, and sacrifice.  I wished he had worked with these words and others to construct a definition of love consonant with the Bible and suitable for his work. Had he done so, the many other insights in his influential book could have been based in an ethic of love framework.

In sum, I remain in agreement with Wesley’s account of biblical ethics. In my view, the greatest of these is love…

Posted in 2010 under John Wesley, Holiness, and the Church of the Nazarene

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