According to the apostle Paul, the whole Law can be summed up in one commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Rom. 13:9, quoting Lev. 19:18). He says something similar at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, one of the most famous passages in the Bible. This beautiful and poetic ode to love, often read at weddings, concludes, “These three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (v. 13).
For Christians, love is everything. Love is at the center of the reconstituted universe announced by Jesus in his preaching ministry and inaugurated through his death and resurrection. It is thus no surprise that love appears at the top of Paul’s virtue list (Gal. 5:22), because love is the foundation of Christian virtue.
This all sounds nice, but also trite. Regardless of the question, love is often the answer, and it has become a wellworn cliché of the modern world.
But the prominence of love was not always taken for granted. It was a revolutionary and offensive idea in the ancient world in which Paul, Peter, and the other apostles announced Jesus’s lordship. For many ancient philosophers, the central virtue was not love but things like self-control, courage, justice, or wisdom. By prioritizing love (Greek: agapē), Christianity distinguishes itself from the philosophical systems and the political realities of the ancient Roman world.
This radical, lovecentered ethic is highlighted in historian Tom Holland’s best-selling book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. From a Roman perspective, the Jewish God’s love for his people seemed bizarre and suspicious, an almost complete contrast with the fickle, capricious, and “heedless” gods they knew. What’s more, in Paul’s gospel proclamation to the Gentiles, this strange but captivating love of God had—incredibly, miraculously, unexpectedly—extended to all people. Even pagans who believed in Jesus could be the object of God’s love and begin to partner with God in building a different type of kingdom, one ruled by Jesus, not Caesar.
No wonder the men of Thessalonica shouted to the city authorities when Paul and his associates arrived: “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also … and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king [or “emperor”], Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7 ESV, emphasis added).
Jesus’ kingdom did not look like Caesar’s, with armies ready to lay siege and force the population into submission. His apostles came armed only with love. And his vision of virtue, unlike the Stoics’, did not have selfmastery and emotional restraint at the center.
Paul said it is only faith expressed through love that counts with the Creator God (Gal. 5:6).
The ethic of love is more than good vibes or warm fuzzy feelings arising from hearing of a God who “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). God’s love for us is only the beginning of the story that finds its fullest expression in our love for the world and for others (1 John 4:19). This gift of love comes with the task to love, to re-form our humanity through the Spirit’s power toward God’s divine excellence. And the path toward sharing this excellence begins with love.
A few hundred years later, the empire built on Caesar’s power and military might was ready to fall, beset on all sides by barbarian hordes and political decadence and dysfunction. But Jesus’ empire continued to grow and flourish. It was around this time that Augustine, the Christian bishop of Hippo, wrote a book called City of God, wherein he beheld the gap between earthly and divine cities. Like Rome, all the cities of this world will pass away, but the New Jerusalem—the divine city ruled by Jesus himself through love—will never pass away.
In City of God, Augustine writes, “A brief and true definition of virtue is rightly ordered love.” Theologian and philosopher James K. A. Smith builds on this insight by describing humans not as rationalistic “thinking creatures” or even as “believing creatures” but rather as “affective creatures.” That is, humans aren’t primarily thinkers or doers but lovers.
We are all lovers whether we realize it or not. When our lives, culture, or world go sideways, it is not for lack of love—humans can’t help but love something—but because we are loving in the wrong way. In other words, our love is disordered. When men do not love well, they do not live well. They love things, even good things that are worth loving, but in the wrong way and in the wrong order. And the chaos, rootlessness, and emptiness of their lives is the natural result of this disorder.
The things that capture our affections—sex, drink, sports, video games, and so on—are often good things, part of the good world God created or the cultures God’s image bearers have made. It is not wrong to love these things. But the fracturing of our hearts and our virtue leads us to love some things too much and other things too little. When a man’s love of sex becomes disordered, he may regularly use pornography. When a man loves beer too much, he may become an alcoholic. When a man obsesses over his boss’s approval, he may burn out after overworking himself to the detriment of his personal life and relationships.
For followers of Christ, rightly calibrated love is key to becoming a godly man, to becoming the most “good” and truly human person you can be. Paul, Peter, John, and Jesus all agree on this point. This re-ranking of virtue is at the heart of the Christian message and the Christian way of life. The path to human flourishing is charted through the reordering of our loves.
Simple enough, right? All we have to do is move a few pieces around inside our hearts and we’ll open up the path to the success, joy, and satisfaction of the life we’ve always wanted! But reordering our loves is much easier said than done.
This is because we cannot directly control what we love. We have some sense of agency in the choices we make, but the desires influencing and often governing those choices are far more difficult to control. As anyone who’s tried to keep a new year’s resolution will tell you, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
At one level, of course, we want to learn a new language, to spend more time with our kids, to spend less time doomscrolling, drink less, or stop watching porn. But the other things we want get in the way. We want the comfort of food, extra sleep, sexual release, a Netflix binge. At any given time, we feel like we can choose our next action, but what we can’t choose are the desires that motivate our actions in the first place. We struggle to change because our loves remain disordered.
This marks another distinction between a Christian view of virtue formation and a rationalistic or Stoic one. Stoicism, like many other philosophical traditions, has a high view of the power of reason to quell our “lower” appetites, passions, and impulses. Christianity, by comparison, has a more pessimistic view of our rational capacities. Christians believe that our wills are broken.
Many claim we humans have “free” will, but, if we’re honest, we admit that our choices feel anything but free. Our appetites are enslaved to disorder and chaos.
So, how do we reorder our passions and our loves? We might wish we wanted the right things, but (as a theology professor of mine once put it) our “‘wanter’ is broken.” We can’t do it ourselves. So, here’s the solution from a Christian perspective: God’s Spirit must do it for us.
If you feel unable to break free, find purpose, or simply make better choices and get out of bed, you’re not alone. You’re like most people. Only a tiny percentage of us have the temperament and wiring to break these patterns through pure will and mental fortitude.
Manfluencers and social media marketers will always take advantage of your sense of inadequacy. They want you to believe that their workout plan, dietary supplement, mindfulness exercise, crypto investment strategy, or jaw-clenching technique will provide the breakthrough you’ve been looking for. But it’s all a load of crap. And if you’re honest, you know it’s a load of crap.
The ancient wisdom of the Christian tradition speaks to these very problems. It is our heart that is the wellspring of our life and our virtue. It is the source (in both ancient and modern conceptuality) of our loves. The oracles of Israel prophesied that until their “heart of stone” has been replaced with a “heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26), God’s people would never be able to live in faithful obedience to him. Christians believe that this prophecy has been fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus, whose indwelling Spirit gives us new hearts with new desires.
With these new hearts, we can finally begin our journey back toward our telos: attaining God’s virtuous excellence by sharing in God’s nature. And the foundational virtue from which all the other virtues flow? Love.
Zachary Wagner is an author, ordained minister, and New Testament scholar. Content taken from Men of Virtue by Zachary Wagner, ©2026. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
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