Love Your Neighbour 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.