Review: *Love Thy Stranger* by Bart D. Ehrman
How Christianity Polluted the Moral Conscience of the West
Since I recently spent 20,000 words denying that Christianity deserves credit for advancing civilization, it’s fair to ask if I believe Christianity has contributed anything to the West. My answer would be a resounding yes. Christianity has been the dominant force shaping the West’s understanding of morality for two millennia—but Christian morality represents civilizational regress, not advance.
An important new book relevant to this history comes from Bart D. Ehrman, arguably the most well-known scholar of early Christianity. In Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman argues that Christianity radically transformed the West’s moral thinking. Whereas Greek and Roman philosophers held that morality should guide the individual towards the achievement of earthly happiness or eudaimonia, Jesus taught something quite different:
In their different ways, the pagan thinkers were all intent on what most people today are mainly concerned about, even Christian people: How can I flourish? How can I lead a good and meaningful life, content and satisfied with who, what, and where I am? How do I find eudaimonia? Jesus, however, did not promote an ethics designed to secure his followers’ earthly happiness. . . . [H]e urged them to focus instead on the welfare of those in need, insisting people live not for their own comfort but for the good of others. (41)
Today most equate morality and altruism—to be moral simply is to sacrifice for those in need. But that is a product of 2,000 years of ideological indoctrination by Christianity, which taught that the essence of morality is to love your neighbor as yourself. According to Ehrman:
This kind of love is not strictly (or even necessarily) a feeling or emotion; it is directed toward the good of others, even at a cost to oneself. One very concrete expression of active love involves sharing material resources, for example through charitable giving; another, less often considered, involves nonmaterial kindness in personal relationships, graphically exemplified in acts of pure forgiveness extended to those who have harmed us (a different kind of “charity”). (3)
Just as people today equate morality and altruism, they also tend to equate altruism with seemingly innocuous demands: be nice to others, give a few bucks to charity. But Jesus was a moral radical. His demand for sacrifice was absolute and extreme. He “repeatedly insisted that to be his follower required becoming as powerless and insignificant as a child (Mark 10:15); serving others instead of being served by them (Mark 10:45); becoming a slave to others (Mark 10:43-44); and taking up the cross and giving one’s entire life for others (Mark 10:34-35).” (94)
For Jesus, you shouldn’t just give to charity—you should sell everything you own to help the poor. You shouldn’t just be nice to people—you should love your enemies and turn the other cheek.
Later theologians would argue that Jesus’s moral advice was not to be taken straight. But many of his early followers did take it straight. Clement of Rome, Ehrman explains, insists that
those who are committed to God are to serve others, not promote themselves. Followers of Jesus are humble, not power-hungry; committed to the welfare of the community, not to self-advancement. Over the course of the letter, the author provides numerous biblical and non-biblical models of this kind of altruistic behavior. In one particularly stunning example, he claims that “many” Christians in Rome have submitted themselves to voluntary incarceration to serve out the sentences of those in prison; many others have sold themselves into slavery for money to provide alms to the poor (1 Clement 55.2). (177)
Similarly, the Christian bishop in Alexandria, Dionysius, praises the Christians who tended to the sick during a plague at the cost of their own lives. “Followers of Jesus realized the right way to live in this world was to be ready to leave it, even in great agony, if that would benefit another.” (178)
To make sense of Jesus’s demand for radical sacrifice, we must remember that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. His advice, Ehrman argues, was not intended to guide us toward long-range happiness, but to prepare us for the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God.
Recognizing the apocalyptic context vitally affects how we understand Jesus’s teachings. For one thing, Jesus’s demand for change was urgent: there was not much time left, and those who lived contrary to the will of God faced imminent destruction. Moreover, returning to God involved extreme demands. Over the centuries many, possibly most, people who have heard Jesus’s teachings have thought he just could not mean them. But he did mean them, precisely because he thought there was almost no time left and the crisis of the moment required both urgent and radical action. . . . Jesus taught his disciples to abandon their homes, spouses, children, families, jobs, and everything else to be his followers. They were to sell all they had and give to the poor, with no concern to save for a rainy day or even to have spending money for the current one. The end was imminent, and to enter the kingdom required a radical commitment. (92)
Alas, the world stubbornly refused to end and this led later Christians to soften Jesus’s moral demands. “If we do not need to worry about the Kingdom arriving, say, next month, there are fewer reasons to sell everything we own and give to the poor. We have to think about the long-term implications of our actions.” (141) Christian thinkers no longer held that following Christ required the complete rejection of earthly values. But the core of Jesus’s ethical teaching—that morality is about self-sacrifice—remained.
What Is Altruism?
Ehrman is a great historian, but he is not a great philosopher. His book is marred by a major weakness: he does not understand what altruism is.
Altruism, he says, “comes from the Latin word alter, which means ‘other,’ and so refers broadly to actions that benefit someone other than oneself. That stands in contrast with ‘egoism,’ based on the latin word ego, meaning ‘I’ or ‘myself,’ and therefore referring to actions that benefit oneself.” (5)
On this definition, what are we to make of an action like running a profitable fitness gym? Is it altruistic, because it benefits others, or is it egoistic because it benefits the gym owner? Ehrman never considers the phenomenon of mutually beneficial actions. If he did, he would see that egoistic actions can and often do benefit others.
In my book Effective Egoism, I explain how every value we can hope to gain from others depends on respecting their own pursuit of happiness. Whether it’s knowledge, trade, or companionship we’re after, we can only get it if we offer values in exchange for values. To be a rational egoist is precisely to be dedicated to forging mutually rewarding relationships with others.
An egoistic gym owner, for instance, loves fitness and wants to dedicate his life to it. But he does so precisely by creating a gym that is designed to appeal to other people. He builds it in a convenient location, he packs it full of the best machines, he hires staff who are knowledgeable and encouraging, he charges prices that will attract customers. He’s out to make a profit doing work that he enjoys—and yet he can only do so if he gives deep thought to actions that benefit others.
But now imagine a gym owner trying to take Jesus’s advice seriously. He would have to build his gym in the worst part of town, where no one else has dared to open a gym. Ideally, he would let his customers work out for free, but since that’s unrealistic, he charges the lowest prices that will keep him from going out of business. He can’t afford to hire the best instructors, but that’s okay: he’ll hire people from the community. Half of them don’t show up for work, and those who do often steal from him. He doesn’t fire them, though: they need the job, and so he turns the other cheek.
Now, on what planet does it make sense to say that both gym owners are altruists because they take actions that benefit others? The two phenomena are radically different, but the difference has nothing to do with whether their actions benefit others. The differences come down to the fact that one is dedicated to his own happiness—the other is dedicated to self-sacrifice. And this gets to the true essence of altruism. In Ayn Rand’s formulation:
The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Note that Rand’s characterization perfectly captures the way of life entailed by Jesus’s teachings, and sharply distinguishes it from moral theories like Aristotle’s, which guide the individual in the pursuit of his own happiness. It neatly separates the profit-seeking gym owner from the Christian gym owner. It illuminates where Ehrman’s definition obfuscates.
Even Ehrman cannot fully escape the fact that altruism means self-sacrifice. For example, he writes: “I do know many Christians who quietly go about the business of helping others, volunteering their time and giving to worthy causes for those in desperate need. Among these I am most impressed with the ones who do not showcase their great personal virtue. They just live the way they think is right, doing good for others even at some expense to themselves.” (163) Why is it more admirable that they “do not showcase their great personal virtue”? It makes no difference to the well-being of the recipients of charity whether their patron gave away his money secretly or did so to great fanfare. It is more admirable only because the former gained nothing, not even admiration, from his act.
Why does this matter? Why is it not only wrong but disastrous to define altruism as taking actions that benefit others? Because it whitewashes the morality of self-sacrifice, and it takes off the table a principled conception of egoism, which rejects sacrificing yourself to others and others to yourself, and embraces mutually rewarding relationships as a vital part of achieving your own happiness.
We can see the disaster unfold when we look at Ehrman’s analysis of two aspects of Christian altruism: Christianity’s view of love and of charity.
Christianity and Love
The closest Ehrman comes to grasping the possibility of mutually beneficial relationships is in his analysis of Aristotle’s account of friendship. “The best kinds of friendship come between two people who are ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ that is, virtuous. Those who embody virtue naturally seek out others like them to enjoy a reciprocal exchange of goodness.” (58)
A “reciprocal exchange of goodness” sounds a lot like two people achieving a selfish joy in sharing their lives with each other. But for Ehrman, this describes “a truly altruistic friendship,” where wanting the best for your friend equals “a selfless concern for the other.” (58-59)
Christianity, on this view, was not so radical after all. It merely said that we should extend this selfless concern beyond virtuous friends to anyone and everyone. But this completely soft pedals Christianity’s moral message. As Ehrman’s own account demonstrates, Jesus’s ethics did not involve extending genuine friendship to all of humanity, whatever that would mean, but of effacing yourself for the sake of others.
Jesus, Ehrman notes, commanded us to “love your neighbor as yourself.” How can love be commanded? Christian love, or agapē, refers to “actions toward others that promote their interests rather than your own.” This “does not necessarily involve passion, attraction, or fondness, though it certainly can. What’s more important is that it is visible in the way you treat others, which can, of course, be commanded.” (112)
What actions, then, are being commanded? This becomes clear when Ehrman explains how Christians hold up Jesus as the model of agapē. “He entered the world and gave his life for others, willingly experiencing the pains of crucifixion to provide salvation for those who were condemned to death.” (172)
The Apostle Paul makes the lesson even more explicit. In Philippians 2, he writes, “Do nothing from selfishness or conceitedness, but out of humility consider one another superior to yourselves. None of you should look after your own interests; look after the interests of others. Have the same mindset among yourselves that was also in Christ Jesus.” (172)
Ehrman draws special attention to 2 Corinthians, where Paul argues he is a true apostle because, “he suffers more. . . . He is pathetic by human standards. But, for Paul, this shows he is the true apostle of Christ. . . . Christ was not glorified in this world: he suffered horribly. So will his apostles.” (174) Ehrman goes on:
He was suffering for others, as had Christ. That, of all things, was his “boast.” He loved others—the Corinthians and his converts elsewhere—so much that he was willing to suffer horribly for them. . . . This, then, was at the heart of Paul’s ethical message: like Jesus, he insisted that care for others should trump all personal considerations for well-being and contentment. Earthly eudaimonia was no longer in the picture. Serving others was the way to live. (175)
That is Christian “love.” It is not shared joy but selfless suffering. It is not rooted in any actual admiration for others, let alone desire, but is rather about dutifully “giving to others to help them in their need.” (180) You owe this duty, not just to your literal neighbors, but to anyone on Earth, including your enemies. “[Jesus] asks: ‘If you love those who love you, what reward do you get? Don’t even tax collectors do this?’ His followers are to bless their persecutors, love people they don’t know or even like, and offer no resistance to those who do them harm. Happiness and fulfillment are not rooted in life here on earth.” (115)
“Who would deny love is a central theme [of the New Testament]?” Ehrman asks. (100)
I deny it.
Love is a tribute, the highest tribute you can offer another person. To hand out that tribute to anyone who stumbles across your path regardless of their character, regardless of their personal importance to you, regardless of whether they want the best for you or want to destroy you, is to make a mockery of love. To treat love as selfless suffering for others is to degrade it: what friend or lover could possibly want to be seen as a source of dutiful suffering rather than a source of selfish joy?
What Christianity offers is not a doctrine of love—it is a love-destroying doctrine of sacrifice. It is only the rational egoist, the person who seeks the best for himself and for those he values, who is the true exponent of love.
Christianity and Charity
Greeks and Romans, Ehrman notes, lauded generosity towards friends, family, and one’s community. But it was only with Christianity that it was seen as a moral duty to give away wealth to needy strangers. (62)
For Jesus, possessing riches per se was a moral problem. “No one can serve two masters; for either she will hate the one and love the other or she will cling to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” According to Ehrman:
Here as well readers think Jesus is speaking about priorities, saying that privileging money over God is bad. In this understanding, Jesus teaches that you should put God first and possessions second. But that is not what he says. He says you can’t serve two masters at all. Even if God is 80 percent of your focus, you still have a competing master. To serve one master 100 percent means you cannot have any other, period. (122)
The solution to the problem of wealth was “to give it all away.” (124) This is a point that Jesus hammers away at again and again. A rich man asks how to be perfect; Jesus answers, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” He elaborates to his disciples, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (125)
Ehrman notes that some Christians try to rationalize away these passages, but others have taken Jesus at his word. Basil the Great, for example, pulls no punches. “Then I read the Gospel, and I saw there that a great means of reaching perfection was the selling of one’s goods, sharing them with the poor, giving up all care for this life, and refusing to allow the soul to be turned by any sympathy to things of the earth.” (193-194) “Those who love their neighbor as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor.” (195) “The more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.” (195) “Those who hoard are robbers who ‘take for themselves what rightfully belongs to everyone.’” (195) “If we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need.” (195)
But if most Christians haven’t given away all of their wealth, Jesus’s teachings have transformed the West’s attitude toward charity. According to Ehrman, “It was only with Christianity that poverty and hunger broadly came to be seen as problems that required solutions. . . . This new way of moral reasoning didn’t solve poverty: ‘The poor you always have with you.’ But . . . it did redirect moral thinking and motivate both private individuals and, eventually, governments to care for the impoverished ‘others.’” (68)
All of that is true. But because Ehrman is largely blind to the possibility of mutually beneficial, non-sacrificial relationships, he can only think about economic well-being through a sacrificial lens. For him, to oppose poverty is to champion charity (and the welfare state). He almost completely ignores that the actual solution to “poverty and hunger” came, not from self-sacrificial charity, but from the selfish pursuit of prosperity unleashed by capitalism.
Consider Ehrman’s assessment of modern prosperity:
[W]e have made progress from our ancient forebears: a much small portion of the world’s population, for example is starving now than then, and most of us deeply lament the suffering of innocent strangers and wish more were being done to stop it, even if we ourselves are not particularly committed to being part of the solution. Moreover, unlike in antiquity, a sizable number of good and hardworking people are committed to ridding the world of hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, injustice, oppression, and violence. An even larger proportion of the Western population is involved in smaller ways, giving money to disaster relief efforts and celebrating those who give part or all of their lives to engaging in them. On both personal and institutional levels, we are different from our cultural ancestors of the pre-Christian world.
Christianity made the difference. (76)
Why are so few starving? Ehrman doesn’t ask, he just takes it for granted that they are. And rather than celebrate capitalism, business, and the profit motive for their roles in making the world prosperous, he is fixated on charity and therefore gives the credit to Christianity.
The closest he comes to acknowledging the role of capitalism is when he observes that, “This kind of charity is a modern phenomenon, made possible by excessive wealth generated by industrial and postindustrial societies that created the middle class.” (218) The fact that capitalism created “excessive” (!) wealth and a thriving middle class is an afterthought—it’s to be celebrated because it made possible more charity.
Actually, “celebrated” is far too strong. For Ehrman, capitalism’s role in fueling charity is at most a mitigating factor in a record that he sees as essentially negative. He bemoans today’s “assertion of personal rights, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the strong stronger, the weak weaker.” (94) How did we end up with the virtual obliteration of global poverty and a middle class capable of unprecedented charity if “the rich get richer” and “the poor get poorer”? Your guess is as good as mine.
Capitalism’s great achievements are rooted in the fact that it liberates individuals to seek their own happiness and deal with one another voluntarily and non-sacrificially. But if you believe that we face a choice between doing good for others and doing good for yourself, then you will be blind to the fact that prosperity is the product of an individual’s own achievements and his win/win collaborations with others. You will only see the needy and incapable, those who sacrificially serve them, and the callous bastards who don’t. You’ll have no moral category for the creator, and no clue what kind of system is required for him to function.
Conclusion
Love Thy Stranger is an important book. It’s important because it drives home that altruism is not common sense. It represents a particular view of morality that replaced the Greek and Roman concern with earthly flourishing with one focused on self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. And it demonstrates what it means to take that morality seriously: throwing away all earthly values—wealth, pleasure, justice, love.
All of that is vital to understanding Christianity’s impact on the West. Christianity did not make the West moral—it prevented genuine moral progress. The Greeks and Romans embraced what Ehrman calls the ideology of dominance—“those who were powerful should dominate the weak” (45). This was an error. But Christianity didn’t correct the error; it just chose the other side of a false alternative. Instead of the weak serving the powerful, it insisted that the powerful should serve the weak.
True moral progress starts with the recognition that no one should serve anyone. That each individual has a right to exist for his own sake. That human beings aren’t sacrificial animals. That morality is not about sacrifice, but about identifying the values and virtues each of us must achieve in order to earn happiness.
Alas, that is not yet something you can learn from a history book.