On Christian Doctrine, By St. Augustine

Any Christian ethic must be one deeply rooted in the Bible and exemplified by the person and life of Jesus. The Bible’s various authors, largely narrative structure and seemingly contradictory ideas has always prevented people from agreeing on a particular interpretation, let alone a set of moral principles. This makes the difficult task of arriving at a definitive Christian ethic a largely hermeneutical one. St. Augustine provides rules for how to interpret the Bible in the text, On Christian Doctrine; in which he concludes that the fulfillment and purpose of the scriptures is to love God and to love the that can love God with us, and any interpretation that does not lead to the love God and neighbor is incorrect (1.35.39, 1.36.40). Augustine’s

Only the radical, self-giving, and unconditional love taught in scriptures and demonstrated in the life Jesus can support such an ethic. The command to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself appears several times the teachings of Jesus. The New Testament gives several different examples and descriptions of love, but love is always self-giving. Jesus exemplified sacrificial love when Christ died for the sins of humanity while still sinners. He said that the greatest act of love the laying down of one’s life for their friends. Christians are called to follow Christ’s example of love rather than reproduce it (Gregory). In following the model of Jesus, Christians are commanded to “Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This command requires the love of three things, a love for God, neighbor and self. According to Augustine, who separates the self from the body, the Christian life is about the proper ordering of these things; one ought to love God, oneself, their neighbor then their body (1.23.22). God is the only thing loved for his own sake, everything else in the world is to be used and love for the sake of God, which means turning all of one’s thoughts and actions toward God

I plan to explain and defend against Richard Hays’s objections for why love is insufficient to serve as a focal image in his attempt to synthesize the moral teachings of the New Testament, a feminist critique against an ethic of self-sacrificing love, and Niebuhr’s argument that love can not stand as a social ethic.

In the book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Hays seeks to address the issue of the New Testament text ought to shape the ethical norms of the Christian community (p.9). In the text Hays attempts to synthesize the various messages presented in the New Testament by extracting three root metaphors to serve as the focal images through which the scriptures are interpreted; he selected the images of community, cross, and new creation. Hays provides three reasons why the love is insufficient to function as a focal image, and therefore as a Christian