A chorus of many voices is chanting in unison today that I must at all costs love myself; that self-love needs to be added to love for God and neighbor as a much-neglected commandment; and that dire consequences will overtake me if I refuse—frustration, depression, hostility, inertia, and much else besides. A whole new literature is growing up around this theme. In 1976 we had The Art of Learning to Love Yourself by Cecil G. Osborne (Zondervan), and in 1977 Loving Yourselves by Ray Ashford (Fortress), Celebrate Yourself by Bryan Jay Cannon (Word), and Love Yourself by Walter Trobisch (InterVarsity).
I intended to write a column on this topic when John Piper got in first and cast his “one small vote against the cult of self-esteem,” in his article Is Self-Love Biblical? (See the August 12, 1977, issue, page 6.) I appreciated what he wrote. But then I also appreciated the points made in the letters section in the following issue. Now that the dust has settled a bit, maybe the time has come to stir it up again. I shall begin with a negative critique, but then I shall try to affirm positively and biblically what, it seems to me, the advocates of self-love are really after.
The way that some writers are arguing, namely that we are commanded to love ourselves just as we are commanded to love God and our neighbor, is untenable for at least three reasons.
First, and grammatically speaking, the command “love your neighbor as yourself” is not a command to love both my neighbor and myself, but a command to love my neighbor as much as, in fact, I love myself. That is, self-love is not a virtue that Scripture commends, but one of the facts of our humanity that it recognizes and tells us to use as a standard. The best commentary is the Golden Rule: “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12, NIV). We know instinctively in every situation how we would like to be treated; so let this knowledge determine our treatment of others. We can be sure that this is the right interpretation partly because the Ten Commandments stipulate our duty to God and our neighbor, and partly because Jesus summarized them in terms of love for both. He said: “the first and great commandment is.…; and the second is similar …”; he did not say “the second and third are similar.”
Secondly, and linguistically speaking, the verb used is agapaō; agapē love (a term popularized by C. S. Lewis) always includes the ingredients of sacrifice and service. Indeed, agapē is the sacrifice of self in the service of another. This is extremely meaningful when we are seeking to love our God and neighbor. But how can we sacrifice ourselves to serve ourselves? The concept is nonsensical. Agapē love cannot be self-directed; if it is, it destroys itself. It ceases to be self-sacrifice, and becomes self-service. This may sometimes be quite proper (as in Eph. 5:28, 29), but it is then not true agapē. It is precisely because we should preserve a high doctrine of agape, portraying the love of God (his for us and ours for him) that we should resist the current fashion of self-love as inappropriate. Besides, our Lord’s new commandment is not to love others as we love ourselves, but to love others more than we love ourselves, namely as he has loved us (John 13:34).
Thirdly, and theologically speaking, “self-love,” that is, directing one’s concern and service toward oneself, is the biblical concept not of virtue but of sin. Indeed, a mark of “the last days,” of the interim between Christ’s comings in which we live, is that “men will be lovers of self … rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:2,4). True, the Greek word here is the weaker one, and the contrast is between philautoi (self-lovers) and philotheoi (God-lovers). Nevertheless, the evils of the day are attributed to a misdirection of our love from God to self, and so also (in the context) to money and pleasure. Paul Vitz, in his courageous and perceptive book Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-worship (Eerdmans 1977), is biblically correct that “to worship one’s self (in self-realization).… is, in Christian terms, simple idolatry operating from the usual motive of unconscious egotism” (p. 93). He is referring to what he calls “selfist humanism.”
All of this, however, does not dispose of the question. It may be no more than a game of semantics. For the advocates of self-love, however misguided they may be in their language, are concerning themselves with a topic of great theological and psychological importance, namely what a Christian’s self-image should be.
It is significant that through most of his little book Walter Trobisch uses “self-love” as a synonym for “self-acceptance,” and then writes: “Self-love used in the positive sense of selfacceptance is the exact opposite of narcissism or auto-eroticism” (p. 15). Right. But he also concedes the difficulty, namely that the term “self-love” can equally well mean “self-centeredness” rather than “self-acceptance.” He quotes Josef Piper: “there are two opposing ways in which a man can love himself: selflessly or selfishly” (p. 14). This being so, is it not extremely misleading to use the same expression (“self-love”) for diametrically opposite concepts?
We should be able to agree that selfdepreciation is a false and damaging attitude. Those who regard a human being as nothing but a programmed machine (behaviorists) or an absurdity (existentialists) or a naked ape (humanistic evolutionists) are all denigrating our creation in God’s image. True, we are also rebels against God and deserve nothing at his hand except judgment, but our fallenness has not entirely destroyed our Godlikeness. More important still, in spite of our revolt against him, God has loved, redeemed, adopted, and re-created us in Christ. Anthony Hoekema is surely right, in his excellent little work The Christian Looks at Himself (Eerdmans 1975), that “the ultimate basis for our positive self-image must be God’s acceptance of us in Christ” (p. 102). If he has accepted us, should we not accept ourselves?
We cannot, therefore, agree with Cecil Osborne’s statement that “there must be something truly wonderful about us if he (God) can love and accept us so readily,” identifying this “something” as “that portion of himself he has planted deep within” (p. 138). Thielicke is much nearer the truth when, echoing Luther’s fourth thesis, he writes: “God does not love us because we are valuable; we are valuable because God loves us.”
The problem we all have in relating properly to ourselves is that we are all such mixed-up kids. We are the product on the one hand of the fall, and on the other of our creation by God and recreation in Christ. This theological framework is indispensable to the development of a balanced self-image and self-attitude. It will lead us beyond selfacceptance to something better still, namely self-affirmation. We need to learn both to affirm all the good within us, which is due to God’s creating and recreating grace, and ruthlessly to deny (i.e., repudiate) all the evil within us, which is due to our fallenness.
Then, when we deny our false self in Adam and affirm our true self in Christ, we find that we are free not to love ourselves, but rather to love him who has redeemed us, and our neighbor for his sake. At that point we reach the ultimate paradox of Christian living that when we lose ourselves in the selfless loving of God and neighbor we find ourselves (Mk. 8:35). True self-denial leads to true self-discovery.
