Love your neighbor as yourself

Christians affirm the command to love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus draws it from the Torah (Leviticus 19:18) and joins it to the love of God as the second of the two great commandments on which all the law and prophets depend (Mark 12:28-31), and in the parable of the Good Samaritan he widens "neighbour" to include even the stranger and the enemy. Love is thus presented not as mere sentiment but as active goodwill and mercy toward others, the practical heart of the moral life. Christian ethical reflection has long debated how the command's plain universality is to be lived out in practice. Augustine developed the idea of the ordo amoris, an order of love, holding that while all people are owed goodwill, one's concrete obligations are properly weighted toward those nearest in relationship, kin, neighbour, and community, before strangers, a reading later systematised by Thomas Aquinas.

Twentieth-century liberation theologians, notably Gustavo Gutierrez in A Theology of Liberation (1971), argued instead that love of neighbour under conditions of poverty and oppression cannot remain a private, individual charity but must include work for structural and political justice, since to love the poor while leaving unjust structures untouched is not to love them fully; this reading has itself been contested by theologians who worry it collapses the command into a this-worldly political programme.

This commandment is held by all Christians as a defining ethical principle and, together with the love of God, as the summation of the whole moral teaching of scripture. Shared with Judaism, from whose scripture it is taken, it is given by Jesus a universal reach that shapes Christian ideals of charity, forgiveness, and care for the vulnerable. Its pairing of neighbour-love with self-love, and its extension to the enemy, mark it as central to how Christianity understands the demand of God upon human conduct.

The tension between loving one's neighbour, and even one's enemy, and the use of force has produced two enduring and opposed Christian traditions. Just war theory, developed by Augustine and refined by Aquinas, holds that love of neighbour can require the restrained use of force to protect the innocent from graver harm. Christian pacifism, represented by the historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, Church of the Brethren) and argued forcefully by Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), holds that Jesus's extension of neighbour-love to the enemy rules out killing even in a just cause, since the command admits no exception for whom one is permitted to harm. Both traditions claim the same text and the same command as their foundation, which is itself evidence of how much interpretive weight the single verse is asked to carry.