In New Testament faith the same love (Agape) of Christ which symbolizes the suffering and forgiving love of God by which the sinful recalcitrance of the human heart is finally vanquished, is also the norm of goodness for those who seek to walk in newness of life. So St. Paul admonished: ‘Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savor” (Ephesians 5:1). As the essential sin of the first Adam was pride and self-love, so the essential goodness of the ‘Second Adam’ is sacrificial, suffering and self-giving love.
This ethic of the Cross is as certainly a ‘scandal’ in the field of ethics as the ‘foolishness of the Cross’ is a scandal in the realm of truth. It is a scandal from the standpoint of any common-sense or rational ethic which seeks to establish the good in human relations by some kind of balance of, or discrimination between, competing interests. Heedlessness toward the interests of the self, as enjoined in the ethics of the New Testament, would seem to imperil every discriminating concept of justice by which men seek to arbitrate conflicting claims.
–Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 171.
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