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Agape Love is More than Human Flourishing

Gorgeous magnolias burst forth in B.C. Lower Mainland

Historically speaking, God has composed a major contribution to Western moral identity. Theology has a long-standing history with ethics. It is also interesting to note that Christianity mad a significant contribution to the concept of personhood, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar. The separation of morality from theism is a more recent phenomenon (18^th century). What have we lost in culture as a result?

Charles Taylor claims that many of the goods that are commonly aspired to in the West have their roots in the constitutive good of Christian theism (R. Abbey, 2000, pp. 50-51, 98-99; and Taylor, 1999, Part IV; Morgan, 1994, p. 49). They are rooted in the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth (Hebrews). This is also hinted at in Taylor’s book Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989), but it became even more overt in A Catholic Modernity? (C. Taylor, 1999), and A Secular Age (2007). Thus, he believes that there would be real fruitfulness in reconnecting many contemporary goods to their historical roots—in Christian theism. It would make sense of them and empower them once again in significant ways.

Taylor recovers something profound that was lost in Western moral consciousness with his language of moral sources. From his perspective, moral sources are not about highest principles. Rather they are all about the qualities of the will, a concept which has been largely absent in moral philosophy for over a century. These are qualities that set us free to human creativity within community–promoting dignity and personhood. For example, the primary question for Taylor’s moral ontology is: What or whom do I love? (motivation), not What am I obliged to do? (right action). He wants to broaden and enrich the domain of morality, to fill it with joy. The latter, to him, is the last question to ask, even though it is often the main concern of contemporary ethical debates. The second question is “What do I want to be?” (character), a question that is in recovery to some degree in the late twentieth century through Virtue Ethics, heralded by intellectuals such as A. MacIntyre (1984) and journalists such as New York Times’ bestselling author David Brooks (The Road to Character; The Second Mountain).

The first question addresses the issue of sources of moral inspiration and motivation, that is the moral power behind decision and action. Just as the first flowers of Spring (magnolias) inspire us, stories of high moral character and courage add light to our lives and stimulate our imagination for the good. Taylor muses sadly about the current problem of weakened moral sources. How can we maintain a commitment to high ideals of benevolence, rights, and justice under the condition of weak moral motivation (constitutive good), due to a weakening of our moral vision? Moral Vision is a pressing problem in culture. He rightly points out that this first question was part of the normal philosophical discourse for ancients such as Plato, Augustine, and Aristotle. They would understand the concept of the greater good, the summum bonum, or the higher loves or loyalties. Indeed there is an urgent need to sort out our loves today in the West. For Augustine, Scripture is fundamentally about the love of God poured out in Christ.

Taylor points out something significant. The secular humanist perspective (immanent frame on ethics) is radically endemic to this time-space-energy-matter matrix. Its vision sees the good largely in terms of mere human flourishing, without any demand to give allegiance, love or worship to anything higher, anything transcendent of the self or the human sphere. It encourages us to be pragmatic and cut our losses in ethical decisions. Taylor rejects this implosion into the immanent frame, and suggests a route back to transcendence and to transcendent, trinitarian goodness. He sees this articulated in the biblical concept agape love. (C. Taylor, 1999, 28) This is a very weighty concept connected to transcendence and the summum bonum. It is not limited by the immanent frame of thinking or perception of reality. It expands the imagination rather than imploding it into selfishness.

Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer says the concept of person can be defined as: “A bio-social, spiritual sounding board, answerable and accountable to God, a grammatical subject whose mission is to glorify the ‘Thou’ who called it into existence” (a TEDS conference talk on Personhood).

Following on from a discussion that began in the previous section, transcendent agape love transforms the self, according to Taylor, a love from above, transcendent of the human community. It brings a whole new dimension of reality to bear on ethics, a higher source of the good, a larger, thicker discourse. In contrast to the secular age, the memory that human beings were created in the image of God and are automatically an object of divine compassion is well worth reviving. This love can be broached even in our ‘secular age’ as Taylor does in his famous book of that title (A Secular Age), where he covers the history of the knowledge of God in the West.

The original Christian notion of agape love is of a love that God has for humans which is connected  with their goodness as creatures (though we don’t have to decide whether they are loved because good or good because loved). Human beings participate through grace in this love. There is a divine affirmation of the creature, which is captured in the repeated phrase in Genesis 1 about each stage of the creation, “and God saw that it was good.” Agape is inseparable from such “seeing-good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 516).

The individual self is elevated by this love, affirmed in its destiny, taken as a person with potential. Agape informs significantly the quality of the will and the character of freedom, the dimensions of personhood. Trinitarian goodness empowers, clarifies, and animates the human self. It acknowledges the value that each person gains from the recognition, mercy, and affirmation of God. Within this paradigm, the self does not struggle to define itself by itself alone (one dominant narrative today within the ideology of the aesthetic), but engages this transforming love from the divine compassionate other. It makes a big difference who loves us; it shapes our whole identity and the potential of our lives. Divine resources are phenomenal!

Divine trinitarian love creates the larger environment and potential for robust human loving, a love that issues from the power to love in spite of rejection, a sacrificial love. The source of such love/such good and goodness is infinite. This higher goodness is a relational attribute in God. It exists and exhibits itself in the form of a communion of love within the Trinity. It works at a high level. The relational, interpersonal, mutually supportive, loving relationship among the persons of the Trinity articulate such a love and honour. C. Schwöbel (1992, 73) explains how human goodness is rooted in this divine transcendent love: “In a conception where goodness is understood as a divine attribute, rooted in God’s trinitarian agency, goodness has to be understood as an essentially relational attribute.” From this perspective, humans do not invent the good, but discover it derivatively from God and within community, in relation to the neighbour. As a gift from God, it is full of surprises. It overcomes the distance between divine and human goodness and empowers human ethics, truth, rights, and justice once again. The agape incarnational community filled with endemic agape love provides a safe space of refuge amidst the conflicts, tragedies, and transitions of life.

Moreover, Jesus’s wisdom, life, and teaching directly addresses the large debates of our time—inequity, xenophobia, autocracy, poverty, and multitudes of displaced refugees. His love invokes justice for the oppressed, healing for the broken. His life work is the highest representation of agape love. See my larger elaboration of the power of such love in my recent book, Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture (G. Carkner, 2024, 91-95). One final quote from Christopher Watkin captures the trajectory of agape.

Love is the epicenter of the distinctively Christian way of being in the world—not power, respect, or tolerance, not equality, justice, freedom, enlightenment, or submission. Love is the overall shape of Christian ethics, the form of human participation in the created order. . . . Love sets the rules for how that world is structured and functions in its entirety. . . . Love is a way of being in and experiencing the world, approaching friends and enemies alike as people to be loved. . . . It is the warp and woof of Christian relationships. . . . Love is the signature disposition of Christ’s disciples. (C Watkin, 2022, 390)

~Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgrad Students.

Abbey, R. (2000). Charles Taylor. Teddington, UK: Acumen. 

Brooks, D. (2015). The Road to Character. Random House.

Carkner, G. E. (2024). Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing.

Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Schwöbel, C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos. 

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Taylor, C. (1999). In J.L. Heft (S.M.). (Ed.). A Catholic Modernity? Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.

Watkin, C. (2022). Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic.

Read more about Agape: David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 146-65; Larry Siedentop, The Invention of the Individual; Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity

Suggested Biblical Reflection: Psalms of Ascent 120-134.