Anders Nygren

Life

Nygren was born in Gothenburg, Sweden. After studying at Lund University, he taught systematic theology there from 1924. Systematic theology is the branch of theology that sets out Christian doctrine in an orderly, comprehensive way. When the Lutheran World Federation, an international association of Lutheran churches, was founded in 1947, he became its first president and served until 1952. From 1949 to 1958 he was Bishop of the Diocese of Lund in the Church of Sweden, then the state church. He died in Lund in 1978.

Work and Contributions

Nygren, together with Gustaf Aulén and others, is known as a leading figure in the theological movement called the "Lund school." This school employed a method of identifying the fundamental motive, or "motif," underlying a system of thought and tracing its development through history.

His best-known work is Agape and Eros, published in two volumes in 1930 and 1936. In it Nygren contrasted two kinds of love:

• Eros: love as understood in Greek philosophy, an acquisitive love of desire that strives upward to obtain a value it lacks.
• Agape: the love of God described in the New Testament, which freely descends and gives itself regardless of the worth of its object.

Nygren regarded the two as fundamentally different. Augustine combined them in the concept of caritas, which Nygren judged to be an obscuring of agape. He interpreted Martin Luther as having recovered the agape motif. Nygren is also known for his commentary on Romans.

Assessment

Nygren's work is credited with bringing the distinctiveness of the Christian concept of love into sharp relief. It served as a starting point for twentieth-century discussions of the theology of love.

It has also drawn considerable criticism:

• Roman Catholic criticism: Catholic theologians have argued that Nygren set eros and agape too sharply against each other. In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love, 2005), Pope Benedict XVI presented a view that sees the two loves as integrated rather than separated.
• Linguistic criticism: In Scripture, agape and its verbal forms do not always denote a sublime love. Words from the same family appear, for example, in the Septuagint account of Amnon in 2 Samuel 13 and in 2 Timothy 4:10, where Demas departed, "having loved this present world." On the basis of such examples, some caution against loading an entire theological concept onto a single word.
• Interpretive criticism: Some have also charged that his assessment of Augustine is oversimplified.

In response to these criticisms, Nygren's defenders argue that his distinction was a study of fundamental motifs, not a word study.