"Love your neighbor as yourself" might be an important part of Biblical morality--in a very limited sense--but it tells you nothing about what it means to love your neighbor in the first place. Like the golden rule, it is inescapably incomplete, deeply ambiguous, and wholly shallow on its own. The New Testament merely quotes Leviticus 19:18, a preceding part of the Bible in the Torah that all Christian theology stands on, when it states this command, the context calling for an analysis of the moral revelation of Yahweh in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Without this context, any simple command to love others is hopelessly unclear and without merit.
Just as there is no automatic way to understand what actions are just even if one understands that the concept of justice entails treating people as they deserve, there is no automatic way to know what one must do to actually be loving if there is no more clarification than this. In other words, New Testament commands about love are utterly unhelpful when considered on their own. Simply using the word love does nothing to actually define moral boundaries in and of itself. It actually is less helpful to bring up unclear instructions to "love others" than it is to not mention anything about morality at all!
Rightly understood, love is a consistent way to summarize the Bible's commands about justice in the Old Testament. Social justice and criminal justice are not unloving, after all--but a kind of "love" that is not wholly overlapping with justice is useless. Moreover, a command to be just is equally vague and useless when there is no understanding of what acts, motivations, and attitudes are just. Reciting ambiguous instructions when the Bible already specifies details about justice and love is pointless and the refuge of philosophically/theologically inept individuals.
Empty quotations of "love your neighbor" are therefore some of the most counter-productive, shallow, and even relativistic proclamations someone could make about moral theology. Moreover, this kind of vague statement is almost only made when someone wants to avoid directly acknowledging a complex situation or subjectively unpleasant command of the Bible. After all, why else would a person retreat behind vagueness except out of ignorance, insincerity, cowardice, or shallowness? At least one of these qualities is present in anyone who chooses to not reflect or discuss Biblical morality more deeply than this, if not more than one or even all four.
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