Nuggets from "An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith" by Dave Hunt - Loving God, Not Self!

The church is busy with conferences, conventions, seminars, and workshops, where numerous subjects from healing to holiness, from prosperity to prophecy, from miracles to marriage counseling, are taught and discussed. Yet the subject of loving God is too often conspicuous by its absence. Instead, there is much emphasis upon loving self – a teaching unknown in the church until the recent advent of Christian psychology.

Jesus said, “On these two commandments [first, loving God; second, loving neighbor] hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew:22:40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
See All...). Since these two commandments are the essence of Scripture, nothing further need be nor can be added. Yet to these two has lately been added a third: the love of self. Moreover, this newly introduced “law” is declared to be the first commandment and key to all else. It is now widely taught that self-love is the great need and that we cannot fully love either God or neighbor until we first of all learn to love ourselves.

The preeminence of loving self began to be promoted sixty-plus years ago by Erich Fromm, a blatantly anti-Christian humanistic psychologist who believed in man’s innate goodness. He dared to say that Jesus taught that we must first love ourselves before we can love others when He said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew:19:19Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
See All...). Other humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers picked up Fromm’s concept of self-love and popularized it.

In fact, far from teaching self-love, Christ was rebuking it in the statement quoted above. He was saying, “You feed and clothe and care for yourselves day and night. Now give to your neighbors some of that attention that you lavish upon yourselves. Love your neighbor as you excessively love yourselves.” Such had been the Christian understanding of this verse throughout history. Christ would hardly tell us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves if we did not already love ourselves enough. But Fromm’s perverted interpretation, through Christian psychology, gained an entrance into the church.