Evans on Kierkegaard

Does God command us to do good works because they are good? Or does he command them because he decrees them to be good? If the former is true, then the good would seem to be antecedent to and independent of God, who thus becomes less than God. If the latter is true, he would seem to be arbitrary. This is the dilemma which Baylor University's C. Stephen Evans brought before a faculty and student audience late friday afternoon and into the evening. Evans has recently written a book, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations, published last year by Oxford. Drawing on this book, Evans lucidly explicated the thought of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, as found primarily in his Works of Love.

Kierkegaard follows a divine command ethic which sees God's command to love our neighbours standing at the origin of our activities as human beings created in his image. This is in contrast to the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, who sees love and justice standing in dialectical relationship to each other. It is also in contrast to John Rawls, who anchors ethics in the flimsy foundation of mutual contract.

But can love be commanded? Contemporary opinion says no, as love is considered not genuine if forced. Isn't love spontaneous? This is perhaps true of the preferential love which spawns friendship and erotic attraction. But neighbour love is something different and stands at the origin of all good works. Jesus himself invokes the great commandment calling for love of God and neighbour. Our modern world, whether it comes in the guise of a prechristian paganism, a postchristian secularism or a complacent Christendom, has great difficulty with this notion.

Somewhat surprisingly, Evans identifies this neighbour love as an emotion. Can a mere emotion be an adequate foundation for ethics? Evans says yes. I disagree. One need hardly follow the Greeks in vilifying the emotions to recognize that neighbour love is much more than this. Love partakes of all the aspects of reality, not only the emotional. In short, love includes the emotions but is not to be identified with them.

Now I am interested in reading Kierkegaard, whose divine command ethic has obvious relevance for my own work on authority.