Christians must no longer ask, “Does my neighbor feel loved?” (according to their standards) but rather, “Has my neighbor been loved?” (according to Christ’s Word). Or, to borrow a phrase from the apostle Paul, we all must ask ourselves: Am I seeking the approval of my neighbor or of God? For if I were still trying to please my neighbor, I would not be a servant of Christ (cf. Gal. 1:10).

In view of the importance that our Lord gives the command to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–33; cf. Matt. 7:12; Luke 10:25–28), it is no mystery why Christians have followed suit in making much of the same. This is well and good, provided that we understand what is (and is not) required of us. Unfortunately, there are two common ways the neighbor-love command is hellishly misinterpreted and misapplied.

The first is when someone turns the command into a cudgel for beating the consciences of Christians, all but forcing submission in matters not required by the Lord (whether explicitly or by good and necessary consequence). This is not a new problem, but we did see a recent example of it in the dogmatic insistence that Christians who dissented from the government’s demonstrably arbitrary lockdowns and/or abstained from getting the Covid vaccine were failing to love their neighbors.¹ Cards on the table: I think mounting evidence continues to justify the courage and prudence of those who refused to be blown about by every wind of the zeitgeist. As such, I think it would be good for the souls of any who publicly employed the neighbor-love argument in that way to issue an apology in the form of, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. You didn’t fail to love your neighbor.”

Yet I am even more concerned about the second way that we can abuse the command to love our neighbors, which I fear is even more common—and significantly more destructive—than the first. Namely, there is a growing tendency among many Christians in the West to redefine the second greatest commandment instead simply misapply it. To these misguided minds, when Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he actually meant, “Make sure your neighbor feels loved by you.” The difference between those statements can be a matter of (eternal) life and death.

When Man Is the Measure, Truth Always Comes up Short

Though it was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things,”² it is postmoderns who have embodied that outlook par excellence. For the West today is a place where people not only feel free to determine what is true for themselves but also assume that everyone constructs reality according to their own desires.³ This is why Francis Schaeffer felt the need to speak of “true truth” (a tautology in every age before ours).⁴ He foresaw that a day was coming, and is now here, when people will speak of “my truth” and “your truth” as if such phrases have the power to settle any dispute about reality. Perhaps ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true for you, a Harvard PhD recently opined, but ‘2 + 2 = 5’ is also true for others.⁵ That is the way of madness.

Yet many well-meaning Christians have failed to grasp how the postmodern ethos has infected (to the point of destruction) their own understanding of Christ’s command to “Love your neighbor.” In our hyper-subjective age, this command is emptied of all objective content. The result is that some cannot even conceive of a situation in which a Christian could fulfill this command in such a way that a neighbor who is loved according to God’s standards might not feel loved according to his own.

I have spoken about this with pastors around the country, and I regret to inform you that it is not a problem found only along America’s progressive coasts. To give just one example, a friend who lives in the pejoratively-labeled “flyover country” recently told me that his ecclesial superior rebuked him for failing to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). My friend was not at all certain that this was the case, nor were many of those who knew him best. So he asked, “Who gets to determine whether the truth is spoken in a loving way?” My friend’s interlocutor replied, “It all comes down to whether the person we are speaking to feels loved after we have spoken the truth to them.”

If Feelings Are the Standard, Then Jesus Is Sinful

All who think this way have fallen for the poisonous lie that hurt feelings, per se, are sufficient proof that you have failed to love your neighbor. Yet if that is so, we make Christ himself out to be a sinner! For there were not a few times when his words were poorly received by some of those who heard him.

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