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This chapter is concerned with the relationship between Christian hope and public reason, especially as articulated in John Rawls's essay ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’. With reference to Matthew 25, it argues that Christian hope goes beyond history, but that Christian love is expressed within history and that this tension can be the source of a specifically Christian service to democratic societies. Hope is crucial to the ethical life of democratic societies in three particular ways: it inspires a discernment of human capacities which evokes moral virtue; maintains a conviction of the openness of the future to human striving; and teaches a certain detachment from the fruits of that striving. The chapter considers how Christian hope can serve this public political hope while at the same time maintaining a distinctively Christian identity, focussing on the use of the religious language of hope by Christians in the public political forum.

This chapter puts the qualifications of Christendom's minor premise — works of love, witnessing, and suffering for the truth into a larger view so that a true understanding and expression of the Christian life can emerge in the modern age. The first section reflects on the paradox of faith, the double movement of faith, dialectical problems relating to faith, the role of the Will in Faith, the faith of Abraham, and becoming a self. The second section looks into the workings of hope in a Christian sense. The third section examines the origin and nature of Christian love, Christian love as self-denial, the equality of love, the emancipation of women, God as the middle term in human love relations, the danger of Christian love, and martyrdom.

I suggest that erotic love is (or can be) a virtue. I contest both the cynicism and the vacuousness in much of the love literature. I argue that love is a historical emotion, involving a great deal of historical and cultural variation. And I give an analysis of what love is as shared identity. On the way, I also talk about sex and Plato's Symposium.

After analyzing four concepts of Christian love, this chapter aims to achieve a relevant synthesis. In order to attain this synthesis, the elements are put back together and their relationships with one another analyzed. The chapter studies de Rougemont’s assumption that Christian love amounted to nothing but agapē, even in the Middle Ages, and how it prevents him from analyzing eros and agapē correctly. De Rougemont’s demarcations force him to neglect the ways in which each concept may or may not be Christian, leading him to miss the inherent complexity of the medieval synthesis and making orthodox Christianity unnecessarily difficult to understand. Christianity must decide whether to reject all concepts or assimilate as much of its antecedents as possible. In view of the ambivalence with which all human development regards the past, it is not surprising that Christians should have moved in both directions.

This chapter discusses how religion turns the idea of love into a form of submission. In Christianity, all must believe that man is created in the likeness of God; because a likeness is always inferior to the original, the religious soul must submit to the superiority of God. Spiritual marriage not only entails unanimity but also conformity; man’s will must yield to the will of God. This aspect of Judaeo-Christian love based on submissiveness is referred to as nomos, a concept fundamental in a number of respects to all religious love. Freud believes that Christian nomos, inasmuch as it implies a renunciation of the world, is a mechanism by which civilization controls the individual’s antisocial impulses. It originates from the universal fear of some external authority.

In his celebrated study of Christian love, Anders Nygren identifies the emergence of heresy with the perversion of agape. In Plato's Symposium, the term “heavenly Eros” occurs in the discourse of Pausanias, signifying a practice of desire that begins with physical love but ultimately transcends the physical. Yet Pausanias is not the only, or even the most privileged, speaker in the Symposium. The famous speech of Diotima, cited by Socrates, arguably lays greater claim to representing Plato's definitive views on love. Thus, in referring to “heavenly Eros” as that “of which Plato and his followers speak”, Nygren erases any difference between the Pausanian ideology of eros and that of Diotima/Socrates—the latter of which is purportedly Platonic love. This chapter argues that Nygren falsely conflates the concept of a “heavenly eros” continuous with physical sexuality, as described in Pausanius's speech, with the more strictly asceticized eroticism attributed to the prophetess Diotima and ultimately affirmed by Plato. This is a distinction overlooked by others as well, not least Michel Foucault.

This final chapter explores the politics of love at the heart of a secular theology of language. It evaluates interpretations and critiques of Christian universal love. In order to do so, love is read through the heuristic lens of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. The chapter draws on Freud, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Guevara, Zizek, and Caputo.

This chapter examines the issues of same-sex love and divine desire in Gregory of Nazianzus' funeral oration for Basil of Caesarea. It suggests that Gregory's understanding of friendship as a reciprocal loving relationship between two equals united in their quest for divine truth was irreconcilable with Basil's status as prince of the Church. Gregory's model of male friendship also had to give way to the master-disciple relationship that was for centuries to become the standard model of Christian love.

Robert Butler’s “Invisible Man and the Politics of Love” rebuts the critique of Ellison as insufficiently engaged politically and alienated from authentic black culture, voiced most recently in Arnold Rampersad’s biography and Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Butler argues that this view of Ellison misreads the extent of Ellison’s authentic political commitment, which is far more rigorous and complex than Foley’s reductive treatment of his so-called flight from leftist extremism into “mythic individualism.” Butler explores what he calls Ellison’s commitment to Christian love and integration, bringing into relief a political vision that is far more harmonious with the Civil Rights activism of Martin Luther King than the outmoded Marxism that Ellison abandoned in the early 1940s. In Butler’s view, Ellison’s political concept of integration and mutual love is strongly attuned to the needs of America in the 21st century.

This chapter speculates on the role of Christian love (agape, i.e. love of neighbor) in the context of criminal law and justice. In particular, forgiveness is explored as a virtue that might apply to social institutions, with justice becoming a product of love. It is often argued that forgiveness is risky and incompatible with the law, as it will compromise the legal order the law maintains. Forgiveness and efforts at agape, however, can encourage positive character reform. Of course, hasty and uncritical forgiveness can undermine justice, but so can that frequently inherent self-deception that underlies one's motives to punish wrongdoing. Accordingly, punishments are better viewed as either being consistent or inconsistent with agape; and that while philosophy can neither refute nor justify moral conundrums such as capital punishment, it can at least agree that everyone deserves a chance to turn away from evil.

Chapter 11 explores the revolution in human thought that took place with the birth of Christianity. The chapter begins with a general account of the New Testament and its modern critics. A general introduction is also given to The Gospel of Matthew specifically, which is examined in order to outline the key elements in Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’ doctrine of love is contrasted to the Greco-Roman warrior ethic that has been discussed in connection with Homer and Virgil. It is argued that the Christian value system in effect inverts the previous value system of the pagan world by arguing that what is valuable in the world is in fact worthless. By contrast, Jesus points to the inner sphere of the individual. This also marks a shift in the Jewish tradition, which was focused on the obedience to external law. This can be seen most clearly in Jesus’ ethical teachings when he claims that the locus of sin is not in the act in the external world but rather in the heart of the individual. This is the beginning of an important change in thinking about the nature of responsibility. Christianity contributed in an important way to the development of subjectivity and inwardness. The chapter ends with a consideration of certain elements of Christianity in the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

This chapter considers the moral question of forgiving the unforgivable, using Dostoevsky's story of a general's cruelty towards a child and thus its mother. Recognizing the Christian gospel of love, the general's story is told to a character in an effort to test his capacity for forgiveness. But the passage also mentions that forgiveness may be possible in the realm of the victim alone, that the ones who suffered collateral harm from the wrongdoing might not have the moral standing to offer forgiveness. Still another issue is in recognizing the general's humanity—which should go beyond mere acknowledgement of his basic human rights to an attempt to create fellowship with him. Moreover, the moral distinctions and values surrounding the wrongdoing can tax that fellowship. Unfortunately, there is no clear procedure to be found within the complexity of values present in such circumstances.