E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
DeCort Reviving the Golden Rule
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1277-2
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1277-2
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Andrew DeCort (PhD, University of Chicago) founded the Institute for Faith and Flourishing and cofounded the Neighbor-Love Movement in Ethiopia, which have reached over twenty million people with the invitation to nonviolent spirituality. He has taught ethics, public theology, peace and conflict studies, and Ethiopian studies at Wheaton College, the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, and the University of Bonn. He is the author of Blessed Are the Others, Flourishing on the Edge of Faith: Seven Practices for a New We, and Bonhoeffer's New Beginning: Ethics after Devastation.
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1
Neighbor Love
The Crisis of Othering and
the Hope of Humanity
May 1, 2010, was a day like any other in Addis Ababa, or so it seemed.
I was sitting at a roadside cafe eating lunch with dear friends. Betena was a favorite spot for Ethiopia’s sizzling tibbs and sumptuous stews. As we chatted, the sun shined on our faces, and a refreshing breeze streamed over the mountains encircling Ethiopia’s capital city. The University of Chicago had recently admitted me to its PhD program in theological ethics, and Lily and I were soon to be married. All was seemingly well.
But inside, my spirit was deeply troubled.
The previous year, I had returned to Addis Ababa to continue working as a pastor at one of the exploding Pentecostal churches in the city. This time, I was invited to serve as the personal assistant to the church’s charismatic founder, an august man who was part of starting one of the fastest-growing Christian movements in the world. Later he became a personal friend to Ethiopia’s Pentecostal prime minister.
But soon enough, I was forced to choose between my church community and my fiancée. Lily grew up in another church across town, and this marked her as “other” to my leaders. They warned that unless she “submitted” to them, she might infect their church with a “foreign spirit” through me and disrupt the church’s “favor” with God. At the time, I expected to work with this community for the rest of my life. But after long and fruitless discussions, my mentor insisted on his ultimatum. I chose Lily, and I lost my place in the church.
This painful event heightened my attention to othering. By othering, I mean seeing “others” as unrelated or less than ourselves. It’s a sense of separation from or even superiority to others. In Christian circles, othering can be triggered by something as simple as attending a different church, despite sharing almost identical beliefs. More often, othering revolves around perceived differences of religious conviction, ethnic identity, or political affiliation. It may sound innocuous, but it’s the prerequisite for normalized injustice, mass violence, and genocide.1 When we see others as unrelated or less than ourselves, we begin to accept treating them differently than we would want to be treated. Others can be ignored or excluded. When othering becomes severe and we see others as less than human, their grief no longer saddens us, and we may see eliminating them as an existential necessity for our survival. The basic responsibilities of ethics are suspended or inverted. In many ways, I see othering as the fundamental crisis of our humanity.2
Soon after being excluded from my church, I began working as the interim pastor of a much smaller community across town. To get there, I needed to commute through Mexico Square—one of the city’s major hubs, with a large roundabout chaotically buzzing with blue Toyota minibuses packed with people.
Mexico Square haunted my conscience and intensified my attention to othering. From early in the morning, the roundabout was lined with suffering people begging for help. One elderly woman in particular caught my attention. Her right eye was covered with milky cataracts. Her left eye had seemingly been torn out of its socket and left to dangle. It was now cocooned in flesh on her gaunt cheekbone. She, along with many others—lepers with limbs rotting off, polio survivors with legs bowed like boomerangs, small orphaned children—would plaintively cry out for care.
But they were all typically ignored or, at best, tossed a few coins. The flow of bodies in Mexico Square was river-like. Shoulder to shoulder, people were there to get somewhere else. In the process, these others became little more than obstacles in our way.
Still, it always troubled me how we could rush past these suffering people as if they weren’t even there, as if we didn’t see them and couldn’t hear their cries of distress. Each trip through Mexico Square felt like another interrogation as I grieved the loss of my church family: Was I just another othering religious leader like the ones in Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, who didn’t stop to give their time and attention to a person left for dead on the roadside? After all, I was literally on my way to church as I routinely walked past the woman with her eye torn out and the others in Mexico Square.
Back to that sunny Saturday, my friends and I were enjoying our lunch at Betena, the roadside cafe not far from Mexico Square.
A teenage boy approached our table and asked us to help him. He was skinny and wearing a filthy hoodie. But this was typical for homeless children in Addis, and he seemed healthy enough. We told him no and continued eating.
As he turned away, his hood slipped off, and I saw that he had a horrifying wound on the back of his head. This time, Mexico Square had come to me, and I was faced with a choice. Would I play the priest again and respond to this boy as yet another other—as someone unrelated or less than myself who could be ignored and excluded from the table? Or would I follow the othered Samaritan and respond to the boy as my neighbor—as someone morally related to me and equally precious as myself?
At heart, this is the meaning of neighbor love. Neighbor love sees and treats others as morally connected to ourselves and equally precious in value. It’s a form of what john powell calls “belonging without othering.”3 This practice embodies passionate will and practical work for others’ well-being. It’s a way of seeing that leads to mutual flourishing rather than caste systems, status hierarchies, and power politics. Crucially, neighbor love is far more than momentary pity or random kindness. It’s a chosen way of life that intentionally transgresses the boundaries of othering and actively recognizes the divine value of others, including those we have been conditioned to see as strangers or enemies. This is how Jesus describes neighbor love in his parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10. The story itself was a daring defiance of othering, since Samaritans were seen as heretics, half-breeds, and enemies—certainly not good. Neighbor love is the abolition of othering, starting within ourselves and spreading between us like ripples in our world.
In that moment, I distinctly heard the voice of Jesus reverberate in my conscience. The voice told me, “If you say no to him, you’ve said no to me.” After wrestling in my soul, I got up from the table and ran after him. It was one of many moments when I’ve learned the truth of Erich Fromm that love is a decision.4
Eyob (Amharic for “Job”) was born in southern Ethiopia. As a small child, he had fallen into an open cooking fire in his parents’ dwelling, and his head was badly burned. Sadly, his wound was never properly treated. Over the years, Eyob’s wound worsened, and his parents removed him from school because the bleeding crater on the back of his head became so putrid. Eyob was seen as shameful to his community—as an other. As such, he was forced to hide his suffering in the shadows and didn’t receive the medical care he so desperately needed.
Eventually, Eyob’s suffering became so severe that his parents put him on a pickup truck and sent him to Addis. They told him to beg for help or die. And that’s exactly how I met him: wandering the streets alone with an oozing head wound in excruciating pain.
When Eyob approached our table, I was wrestling with the meaning of my faith and the practice of neighbor love. Being expelled from my church and commuting through Mexico Square had acutely expanded my awareness of othering. After hearing the voice of Jesus like never before in my life, I felt responsible to take him to a local hospital and advocate for him to receive the care he urgently needed.
My friends and I fought for Eyob’s life over the next several months with the help of international and local doctors. Those countless days with Eyob in the hospital were some of the most meaningful and joyful of my life. I discovered that he was full of love and brilliantly gifted. Whenever we brought him food and gifts, he would immediately start sharing them with the other children beside him. Laughter filled the burn ward.
Eyob’s dream was to become a pastor and professor who could teach hope and love for people in pain. This too was my dream. I learned that this “other” was anything but unrelated or less than myself. He was a precious diamond, full of complex pain and precious worth. In my countless hours with Eyob, I experienced what bell hooks observed: “I know no one who has embraced a love ethic whose life has not become joyous and more fulfilling. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false.”5
Still, after several grueling surgeries, skin grafts, and months of rehab, Eyob was diagnosed with brain cancer. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, his cancer could not be treated. We helped Eyob return to his family in the countryside, and he died in early 2011 at age fourteen.6
I will never understand why Eyob, so gentle and full of love, had to endure such horrific suffering throughout his short life. But what drills into me is that Eyob’s suffering and death were preventable. Far more than cancer, othering killed Eyob. He was born into one of the most Christianized areas in his country, abounding with churches and evangelism. And yet, othered as he was, no one stopped and helped him for...
