ABSTRACT
Love plays a central, complicated, pluriform, and shifting role in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works – and did so even before a renaissance in studies around virtue and virtue theory shaped attention to love as a virtue. While Niebuhr would have deep suspicions about the utility of virtue theory and the paeans to love-as-a-virtue that have arisen since that renaissance, there are, nevertheless, muted ways of thinking about love in his work that link it to virtue theory, albeit in qualified ways. All frameworks for thinking about virtue ethics contain three components: a metaphysical component, a psychological component, and a sociological component. The version of agape as a virtue described earlier drew a distinction between agape-as-kenosis and agape-as-self-sacrifice. Dominant contemporary strains of virtue theory in Christian thought tend toward sincerity rather than irony, progress rather than paradox, clarity rather than ambiguity, and communitarianism rather than liberalism.
