self-loving: so centered on oneself that one's own interests become the point of everything.
This word turns up exactly once in the Greek Bible, at the head of a list of the ugly traits that will mark hard times. It is built out of the ordinary Greek words for "love" and "self," so it does not describe one stingy act. It describes where a person's affection is pointed.
Greek writers used it in two ways. Most meant it as an insult, and Plato called excessive love of self the root of every wrong a person does. Aristotle argued the other way, that a genuinely good person is self-loving in a higher sense, because what he wants most for himself is what is noble. The Jewish writer Philo pushed the word firmly back to the negative side by setting the self-lover against the God-lover, and that is the sense the letter uses. Nothing in the passage points to the rarer, approving use.
The list it heads is held together by "love" words. After the self-lovers come the money-lovers (φιλάργυρος), and the whole run closes with people who are pleasure-loving (φιλήδονος) rather than God-loving (φιλόθεος). Read that way, the word names a life that has been re-centered: the self now sits where God belongs, and the rest of the faults follow from that. Most commentators take its position at the front of the list as deliberate for exactly this reason, though others think such lists are conventional and their order should not be pressed.
What is condemned is self-love that has taken over, not every kind of care for oneself. The closing contrast with loving God is the measure: the trouble is not that these people value themselves, but that in the end nothing else matters to them.
Whether the word stands first in the list of 2 Timothy 3:2 as a deliberately chosen root vice from which the rest grow, or is simply a fitting opener within conventional catalogue material whose order carries no special weight.
- majorityThe placement is deliberate and structural: self-love is the root, with love of money and love of pleasure as its offshoots, and the catalogue is framed by compounds of philos, closing by contrasting lovers of pleasure with lovers of God.; Walter Lock, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1924), on 2 Tim 3:1-5; I. Howard Marshall with Philip H. Towner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1999), on 2 Tim 3:1-5; William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WBC 46 (Thomas Nelson, 2000), on 2 Tim 3:1-5; Ray Van Neste, Cohesion and Structure in the Pastoral Epistles, JSNTSup 280 (T&T Clark, 2004)
- minorityVice catalogues are traditional, conventional material assembled for cumulative rhetorical force, so neither the individual terms nor their order should be over-interpreted.; Martin Dibelius and Hans Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1972), on 2 Tim 3:1-5; Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Anchor Bible 35A (Doubleday, 2001), on 2 Tim 3:1-5
Disputed
Whether the fault named at 2 Timothy 3:2 is self-regard as such, or only self-love that has displaced God from the center of a life.
- majorityThe target is disordered self-love that has taken the place of God, not ordinary self-concern; the closing contrast between lovers of pleasure and lovers of God sets the terms.; Walter Lock, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1924), on 2 Tim 3:2; Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, NICNT (Eerdmans, 2006), on 2 Tim 3:1-5; Oliver O'Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Yale University Press, 1980)
- minoritySelf-love as such is the fallen condition that Christian love overturns rather than measures, so the word indicts self-regard itself and not merely its excess.; Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (SPCK, 1953); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (T&T Clark, 1958)
- minorityA measure of self-love is a natural given that the command to love the neighbor as oneself presupposes without either commanding or condemning it, so the vice here is a distortion of something in itself neutral.; Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (Yale University Press, 1972)