Divine commands play an important part in Christian ethics. It is a striking feature of the ethics of LOVE set forth in the New Testament that love is commanded. In one Gospel Jesus says: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Similar commands are reported in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. In his last discourse, recorded in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers that:

“The command I give you is this, that you love one another” (John 15:17).

This is a divine command if, as orthodox Christians believe, Jesus is God the Son. Hence, the foundational documents of Christianity teach that the distinctively Christian ethics of love (agape) of neighbor is expressed in the form of a divine command.

In Works of Love (1847), Søren Kierkegaard gives two reasons for thinking that agape must be a matter of duty or obligation. His discourse on Matthew 22:39 draws a sharp contrast between erotic love (eros) and FRIENDSHIP (philia), on the one hand, and Christian love of neighbor, on the other.

Both erotic love and friendship play favorites; love of neighbor is undiscriminating. Kierkegaard says Therefore the object of both erotic love and of friendship has preference’s name, “the beloved,” “the friend,” who is loved in contrast to the whole world. The Christian doctrine, on the contrary, is to love the neighbor, to love the whole human race, all people, even the enemy, and not to make exceptions, neither of preference nor of aversion.

But our spontaneous affections will not move us to love everyone without distinction. Love of neighbor must therefore be a duty in order that we can be motivated to it by our sense of duty. What is more, erotic love and friendship are mutable because they depend on characteristics of the beloved and the friend that can change, while love of neighbor is supposed to be invulnerable to changes in its objects. If the beloved loses the traits that made him or her erotically attractive, erotic love withers; if the virtuous friend turns vicious, friendship dies. Love of neighbor must remain unchanged even when such changes occur. If it is to do so, it cannot depend on the ways in which mutable features of the neighbor naturally attract or repel us.

According to Kierkegaard, it can have the independence of these features it needs only if it is obligatory, for only then can it derive from a stable commitment to doing what one is obliged to do. It is in this way, he says, that:

“This shall, then, makes love free in blessed independence. Such a love stands and does not fall with the contingency of its object but stands and falls with the Law of eternity – but then, of course, it never falls.”

So, for Kierkegaard, Christian love of neighbor must be a dutiful love because only a love motivated by a sense of duty can be both extensive enough to embrace everyone without distinction and invulnerable to alterations in its objects. And what makes love of neighbor a duty is a divine command.

An ethics of divine commands thus has roots in the scriptures of the monotheistic religions and has been developed by means of philosophical and theological
reflection on those scriptures. Such an ethics ought to seem attractive to people within the religious communities that regard such scriptures and the traditions of thought that interpret them as normative. There are, however, serious objections to divine command ethics, and they may undercut or even eliminate the attractiveness.