Christian Morality, Legislation, and Love
June 10th, 2009 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
My post two weeks ago on the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Prop 8 initiated parallel discussions, one with fellow evangelicals (reflected in last week’s post), the other with progressives.
My friend Dr. Ben Carson is a composer at U.C. Santa Cruz. He has been wondering what sort of conservative I am if I don’t think Christian morality should be legislated. Ben wrote, “What kind of conservative recognizes society as [an] inherently plural nation in which the state has no business re-institutionalizing religious rites? And wants Jesus’ teachings to be considered on a level playing field of alternatives? I think you might consider embracing your inner leftist.”
I replied that the legal expressions of Christian morality are breaking down because our culture no longer lives by Christian morality. I want the motive for Christian morality revived — namely, love. Ethics unmotivated by love have no integrity. Until Christ’s love drives us, rebuilding the legal forms of Christendom can only lead to hypocrisy.
Christianity aims at this transformation of the soul as the key to transforming all else in human life. When Christians are motivated once again by the infusion of love directly from Jesus Christ, I believe the integrity of Christian ethics will quickly produce the most attractive lifestyle on a playing field of alternatives. If Christians do not regain this Christ-infused motivation, they will lose the culture and their souls.
Such is the background for Ben’s further questions, which I thought were important and insightful.
How can I build a moral philosophy on love, a concept “that doesn’t have a clear definition, or a clear criterion that signals its absence or its presence?”
Ben elaborates that love is supposed to be the motivating force behind a wide range of social relationships, sexual and parental in particular. “But it’s so easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated in our language…what check do you have against its ephemeral nature? Couldn’t selfishness sometimes masquerade as love, and then motivate a ‘morality’ that is immoral? If our morality is guided by love, then how do you work with that vulnerability?”
My answer includes scripture references, which I hope will not be tedious but illustrative of a quite different mode of reasoning.
1. In the New Testament, love is not defined in the abstract, but is shown as personally embodied.
I think what Ben says about love is accurate: it is “easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated.” The more love is formulated in the abstract, the more vulnerable to manipulation it is.
The NT exhibits Jesus Christ as the embodiment of love in several ways. The Gospel narratives show him as love in action. Doctrinally, Christ is the security for reconciliation between God and sinners because he died to pay for sin. Ethically, his self-sacrifice for the sake of his enemies is the ground for all moral decision-making (Philippians 2.1-18), and is the standard for love in marriage (Ephesians 5.22-33).
The most neglected way Christ is shown as the embodiment of love in the NT is his participation in unity with the Father (John 17).
So the NT answer to the question of how define love is to point to a man.
2. In the NT, love is generated only through interaction with Christ, who embodies it.
Christ’s resurrection and return are essential parts of the growth of love in the NT. Because he lives now, he is able to give us new life (Colossians 2.6-15) and to form himself in us (Colossians 3.1-17). Because he will return, our ability to love as he loves will be consummated (1 John 2.28-3.3).
Conversely, the NT explicitly and repeated denies that there is pure good apart from the love of Christ (e.g. Colossian 2.16-23).
So, not only is Christ the defining man of love, but is the sole source of it. There is no abstract teaching in the NT that can discipline a person’s mind-and-heart to conform to Christ’s example. There is only Christ’s personal energy.
3. In this moral philosophy, a church’s role is two-fold: call people to interact with Christ and nurture his love in community.
Practically speaking, I have never been successful at changing anyone’s behavior. I do not want to try anything so presumptuous. My role is to point to the love of Christ that a person has already experienced and help him or her proceed further with that love.
This kind of work can only occur in the context of deep trust and interaction. Law can’t even approach it.
In sum, a moral philosophy derived from the NT must be predicated on unbreakable bonds with each other in Christ’s love. NT love says, “My commitment to you is irrevocable because Christ’s commitment to me is irrevocable.”
Love in our society has become an easily-manipulated abstraction, in my view, because we flee belonging in favor of autonomy. We keep the exits from our relationships clear. Our society cannot have a vision of love without strong grounds for self-sacrifice, and I do not hear any such ground articulated by anyone, left or right.
Audio: John’s Use of Scripture
June 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
"Landscape With Ruins," Bernardo Bennotto, 1740, Art Institute of Chicago
The free Christian conscience lies in ruins today. Worn away by legalism on the one hand, and lawlessness on the other, the individual’s ability to make decisions for him or herself before God needs to be rebuilt.
John’s gospel focuses on the responsibilities of a free conscience, and on the role of Scripture in forming and enabling that freedom.
In this sermon, we study these themes to finish setting the context of John 12.
Evangelical Wrath and God’s Righteousness
June 4th, 2009 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Sometimes I slip statements into my posts to see who’s paying attention to what. The award this week goes to my brother Chris, who spotted a matter of some importance in last week’s post about the court decision on Prop 8.
What I said was,
Having entered the political fray with a fractured base — a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact — the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That’s elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.
So the enemies are homosexuals.
This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God.
Chris pulled out the last sentence: “That has a lot of implications. Like, to what extent do we do this to fellow Christians?”
My allusion was to James 1.19-21. In teaching how to endure temptation, James commands us to be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” He is warming up to say later that wrangling and fighting is demonic (3.13-13; 4.1-12). But here, the basic reason he gives to resist anger is that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires.”
Rather, we must lay aside our own wickedness, and “receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” The word of God implanted in the receptive heart-and-mind is the source of godly obedience. Our anger is not the source.
James would say that we do inflict our wrath on other believers to produce righteousness, and we must repent. Here are some specific ways that we do what James forbids:
1. We often rely on conformist instincts to uphold standards.
No one wants to provoke the community’s anger and bring shame or rejection on themselves. It is a high cost to bear. So, much of the time, church-goers keep their heads down. They will avoid any public non-conformity to the church’s explicit and implicit standards, hiding any behavior that might expose them to disapproval.
Threats of the anger of man, in this case, produce lying rather than truth.
James teaches that God’s righteousness is produced when someone responds directly to God’s goodness (1.18). “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” Conformity to other human beings is spiritually barren.
2. We often use guilt manipulation to motivate people to godliness.
Guilt manipulation, to define it broadly, is making people feel bad about what they’ve done. It is what one human being does when trying to control another human being’s behavior. This comes in a range of language from “Burn in hell, you sinner” to “We’re disappointed in you.” We do this because we know that shame is a disabling emotion.
In this method we, the human beings, are supposed to police sin and arrest it.
The use of shame is a kind of vengeance — which is to say, the satisfaction of anger. It does not produce righteousness because it is disabling, not redeeming. God nurtures a living, joyful righteousness.
Obviously, a church needs to confront sins. James is not teaching that we can shirk that duty, nor am I. Rather, confronting sin must be done with abundant listening and the tender maintenance of meekness. God is the one who convicts sin, not us. It is his implanted word that has the power to save, not our emotional appeals.
3. We fight to preserve a culture that reflects our standards, believing that this will save future generations.
The whole motivation behind the campaign against gay marriage is to preserve our society’s reflection of particular biblical values. This and other such issues are labeled the culture wars. They are social battlegrounds. The scenes of anger.
What these battles have unleashed in the conversation of Christians around me is not the righteousness of God. They have unleashed jealousy, mocking, lying, brawling, gossip, slander, and condemnation. If we “win,” I can say with some confidence that not one soul will gain eternal life as a result. As for the souls of our children, many are filled with revulsion.
And all this for a goal that is of dubious value. Jesus Christ does not redeem human cultures. He redeems souls. Those redeemed souls then alter the character of the cultures in which they live.
James would not have shrunk from declaring God’s will for sexuality, nor will I. But let the focus of our speech be where James focused his, on maintaining the meekness of souls to receive the implanted word.
No souls will be saved any other way than by the new birth in Jesus Christ.
Canadian Artist Emily Carr
June 3rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
"Forest," by Emily Carr, c. 1940, McMichael Canadian Art Collection
My wife and I had dinner recently with a local expert on Emily Carr’s work. Our friend’s name is Lydia Harris, a reporter for the Tri-County Newspapers who also teaches at Butte College. I was delighted to learn about such a powerful artist and will be exploring her work more.
Poetry: “The Moon Is a Dirty Yellow Basket”
June 2nd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Christopher Raley
The moon is a dirty yellow basket
low on the edge of night’s walk
where two wanderers carry it to sky
or fall in with its horizontal suicide.
What evil is it craves this for a sign?
Futures shift in swing of possible
like a world of shadow in arc of a lamp.
And the moon is born aloft by the wanderers.
Futures swing from one to the other.
Evil fears death of longing
which curses dark for absence of blessing.
And the moon looks about to catch the wanderers.
What blessing is it grits its teeth when the lamp
sets alight a thousand paths to one hated direction?
Maurizio Pollini Weaves a Dream
June 1st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
I was introduced to Chopin’s music by a record of Pollini, so I’m grateful to the man. Here he is playing Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8. What I like about this is not just Pollini’s clarity and musicality, but also his insight. He teaches me that Chopin is about simplicity. The pianist who can command the virtuosic passages to serve the composer’s simplicity this way is the one I want to hear.
