Love which ‘neighbor’?
It’s disappointing enough that our local newspaper only publishes a weekly “Religion+News” page and never a “Humanism+News” page, as though religious doctrines are so irreproachable that any contrary opinion is clearly irrelevant and need never be entertained. What’s worse is that many debatable ideas broached on that page then necessarily go undebated.
For example, a local Presbyterian minister’s recent column on the page very reasonably suggested that, as the Reformation’s 500th anniversary approaches, Protestants (note the Reformation was a protest against Catholicism) should try to learn about what the 16th-century revolutionary movement of Martin Luther meant then and means now. However, she then went on to say that Protestants today should embrace “The Greatest Commandment (to love God and neighbor).”
She was referring to the global sense of “neighbor”: all human beings to each other. Unfortunately, history doesn’t exactly square with scripture, from the Old Testament to the New. The prophet’s time was an epoch of primitive, inward-looking tribalism. History purports that Jesus was a Jew—and Judaic law is all about Jewish purity and shunning of non-Jews, known as gentiles. It seems most unlikely, if the prophet preached neighborliness, he was referring to all fellow human beings and not just Jews among themselves. In those pre-America days, all men weren’t yet created equal.
So, this ancient, ostensibly Christian tradition of loving neighbors as ourselves is technically a very arguable one, stemming from the aggressive exclusiveness of Judaic tradition and its seamless blending much later into more inclusive Christian doctrine.
Viewing such religious neighborliness in the context of actual neighbors living in close proximity and sharing a lot of genes is far different than figurative neighbors who may be a world and ethnicity away. Christians assume Jesus was thinking globally, but if you read the scripture that underpins this, it’s not at all clear.
