Charity

« agapē and eros .

They are totally incompatible.

He goes on to say that Christians have nothing of their own.

The love they show to others is the love that God has infused into them (Romans 5: 5). The renowned Protestant scholar Karl Barth ( 1967 ) also saw the need to distinguish eros and agap ē .

He went on to say, however, that the kind of relationship in which only God was at work and humans were mere channels of divine action could not be described as a covenant relationship, and yet, according to Scripture, that is the true relationship between them ( Barth, K. ).

The initiative in this relationship is wholly and exclusively on the part of God, but that initiative aims at a correspondingly free human act, not the reaction of a puppet.

The Roman Catholic moral theologian Bernard Häring (1979 ), on the other hand, takes the view that all human love can be redeemed.

When, in response to God's agapē , believers commit themselves to God, he says, all their prior dispositions, including eros and friendship, are gradually transformed, purified and raised to a higher level. There has been some complaint in recent times that Christian love - whatever we wish to call it and whatever its relationship to eros may be - does not figure highly enough in Christian ethics.

Referring specifically to Roman Catholic works, and writing in the 1950s, Gérard Gilleman noted that manuals of moral theology had law rather than love as their dominant theme.

He therefore sought to establish 'a method of exposition in which charity will play the role of a vital principle, just as it does in the message of Christ and in Christian life' (1959: xxxvi ).

More recently, some Roman Catholic moral theologians have laid more emphasis than had previously been apparent in their discipline upon the distinction between personal goodness and the rightness of acts.

Personal goodness exists when someone is truly loving (charitable).

Mere rightness of acts does not necessarily indicate personal goodness. One could perform an ethically right act for a variety of motives, not all of them loving. Within Protestantism, attempts to place greater emphasis on Christian love in Christian ethics can be found among some situation ethicists ( Situation ethics ).

One of the best known is Joseph Fletcher, who holds that principles and rules can be enlightening, but never the deciding factor.

That status can only be given to love.

In a given situation, one has to decide what is the loving thing to do.

Numerous writers have lamented the fact, already noted, that the word 'charity' is now used chiefly to denote benevolence rather than Christian love.

It could therefore seem surprising that Fletcher should describe Christian love as precisely benevolence.

Having noted, however, that such words as 'benevolence' and 'goodwill' have taken on a tepid meaning, Fletcher goes on to say that 'Agap ē goes out to our neighbors, not for our own sakes nor for theirs, really, but for God's' (1966: 105 ). Whatever one makes of this contention or of Fletcher 's situation ethics in general, the fact remains that, in recent times, the word charity has been used most often to refer to benevolence in a sense that is not specifically theological, or to beneficence.

One can hardly claim, moreover, that the reason is purely linguistic - other senses of 'charity' having been taken over, so to speak, by agapē .

Outside the confines of theological circles, the Greek word is seldom encountered.. »