From “Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World” by Andrew DeCort
In the following chapters, I’ll argue that the practitioners of Jesus’ movement not only preserved his teaching of neighbor love; they expanded and intensified it in their world and across the earth. They hand it off to us today and invite us to continue it in the face of othering.
Having said that, I want to name immediately that Christianity does not have a monopoly on neighbor love, nor an exceptional history of practicing it. My Christian tradition has also often seen itself as separated from or superior to its neighbors. We’ve fallen into othering again and again. As this book’s story unfolds, we’ll see examples of famous Christians, such as Martin Luther, who labeled others as subhuman “enemies,” which contributed to the atrocious othering of the Holocaust. Sadly, some of the gravest examples of othering in history – from America’s genocidal founding and institutionalized slavery to the German Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, and Ethiopia’s civil war – have been perpetrated by overwhelming Christian populations.