Liberal Christianity

Lesson 6: Ethics and Morality

So much of what is preached and publicized on behalf of Christian churches today consists of encouraging and sustaining morality as a basis of Christian theology. In fact, one might hear the proposal that morality is theology.

Morality is not theology because it consists, as Alan Watts wrote, “of telling people how to behave.” Focusing on morality - telling people how to behave - does not impact public or private thinking except as it relates to control of behavior. So long as the emphasis is on morality the emphasis is on control.

Preaching morality rather than the virtues of goodness – particularly the common good we all ought to be seeking – gives us mostly sermons and exhortations limited to issues that are defined entirely by judgmental thinking.

Judgmental thinking in a religious or spiritual context drags the positive and negative aspects of human behavior into moral areas where actions are governed out of a concern for reward or punishment. Judgmental thinking has at its core the idea of worthiness based on reward and punishment. Reward/punishment tools of fear, shame and guilt if ever used successfully; always result in the right things being done for the wrong reasons.

So long as we Christians view the Bible and use the Bible in a manner driven primarily by concerns about moral behavior, we remain in a one-down competition with ideas and philosophies that do in fact elevate the concept of doing the right things for the right reasons.

There is value in reward and punishment if the only goal is that of deterrence, intimidating those who would commit acts that would harm another person. In that regard deterrence is a device intended to discourage criminal activity.

This sort of spiritual construct only works if God is likewise viewed as judgmental and punitive, responding to human behavior in a manner that creates deterrence and control. Whether spiritual or civic, this control is legalistic in thinking – it is both spiritual and civic governance by the letter of the law.

It also exaggerates and escalates sin into the realm of criminal activity.

Sin has been incorrectly defined and then institutionalized for the most part as a wicked act, something that is an affront to God who cannot "tolerate sin with any degree of allowance" and also suggests that therefore we too should obsess on sin.

Sin originally meant "missing the mark," as in, to "try and not succeed". If the "sin" has negative consequences on someone else then one is guilty of missing the mark with a wider and more serious consequence. In any regard, sin meant a choice based on poor or faulty judgment.

A changed meaning and image of sin as something immoral which is then married to the image of a judgmental and punitive God creates in our lives a sense that sin is something connected with the more powerful word, "evil". It becomes easy to accept the idea that the monarchical God is offended because when we "sin"; because we commit evil acts.

One might conclude that when the phrase “we are all sinners” is expressed, the horrific “we are all evil” is just around the bend. Sinfulness in that regard relegates humanity to living in a state of criminal activity as viewed by God. That seems to be the desired state needful to those who equate morality to theology.

Once we can conceive of God being offended, we cause Him to no longer be God, because he has become judgmental to a fault. God seeing things only in either/or or black/white terms is something wanting in wisdom and gives lie to any pronouncement of mercy. Jesus understood this and used the Prodigal Son to demonstrate it.

From the labels of sin and evil, the next logical step with sin is a concept of exclusion or discriminatory thinking in which the "sinner" somehow has failed while the rest of us are still acceptable to God. The sinner now has a handicap that leaves him/her "less-than" until the other FORMula (as in form over substance) ingredient of repentance is accomplished.

Exclusionary thinking awakens discrimination at this point when we decide that since the "sinner" is now "less-than" who or what we consider ourselves to be and since we feel "uncomfortable" in the presence of sin and/or sinners, we exclude by condemnation, social avoidance, shunning, excommunication or something worse.

Such is a false and non-scriptural path and reflects the thinking of the Prodigal Son's older brother. When the Father of the Prodigal Son responded to the judgmental and resentful score-keeping older brother, he did not applaud the son’s literal thinking nor the son’s blind obedience. Had he done so he would have agreed that the younger son didn’t deserve the treatment the Father was about to give. He would have been The Judgmental Father of a Judgmental Son and justified 500+ years of Christian moralizing.

We don't have to be bigots to suffer from the illness of self-righteousness. All we have to be is of a mind that one of our spiritual "shoulds" is to discern not "sin" but whoever has "sinned". We allow ourselves to condemn the action and feel to thank God that we have not done what the "sinner" has done. However, we tend not to stop there and many of us behave in a way that suggests that we personally feel in fact more holy and worthy than the sinner - and even more righteous.

“We don’t hate the sinner. We hate the sin, but we love the sinner.”

There is a smugness and condescension in that statement that is almost impossible to hide. It is not the thinking of the Father of the Prodigal Son. It is a thinking that lies at the heart of an attitude which accelerates from hating the sin to advocating punitive action against the sinner. It is not “Go, and sin no more.”

Again, Jesus understood this. He made no attempt to modify the stoning of the woman caught in adultery into something less capital but still punitive. He simply said, “Go and sin no more. Try to stop missing the mark and you will stop harming yourself and others.”

It is not God who insists that we label ourselves and convince ourselves that we are sinners, sinful and essentially evil-natured. It is merely other human beings, equally flawed and imperfect as we are who insist that it must be God’s will that we all walk around labeling ourselves as sinners, as sinful and therefore bordering on evil as our natural mortal state.

Human Nature

“Once saved—always saved.” In this view, salvation had nothing to do with ‘good works or a holy life.’ A drunk who had a born again experience would be among God’s chosen elect whether he stopped drinking or not.

The logical extension of the reasoning is the idea that Christianity could have within itself not ex-sinners but active sinners: as Christian murderers, Christian pedophiles, Christian rapists, Christian thieves, Christian arsonists, and every other kind of socio-pathological behavior possible.

Honest people realize the implications of their own convictions. The logic of one’s convictions ought to be carefully considered because in the real world, the logical conclusions of those convictions, when pursued, may lead to a point of tragic absurdity and inconsistency with the original sources of those convictions.

Murder (killing an abortion doctor) as a consequence of convictions based on the teachings of the Son of God as expressed in the Bible then stands out as an extremely powerful justification for repudiating questionable convictions.

If one’s literal belief in an inerrant Bible leads to convictions that allow one to commit murder which is contrary to “Judge not that thou be not judged,” a logical absurdity is established.

On the one hand there are people who talk about spiritual warfare, evoking images of the spirit world as some sort of zone of conflict in which Satan and God operate simultaneously for and against human life.

On the other hand, others see Satan more as a conceptual part of their attempts to get a grasp on the idea of the existence of evil.

Evil for them is not something we are tempted to do by a supernatural Satan. It is more an active part of life that serves as a kind of resistance or counter force against our intention or tendency to behave in an independent manner – acting in a ways that reflect the "goodness" way that Jesus wants us to be.

EXERCISES:

1. From the liturgical Confession of Sin: “Most merciful God. We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed and by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole hearts. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

a. Discuss whether or not humans are born naturally sinful?

b. Carnal man is an enemy to God. True/False and why?

2. We as a society have systems in place to apply punitive sanctions against those whose behavior crosses the line into criminal activity. Unless we honestly believe that "sin=crime", we have no business in the judgment-and-punish business when it comes to most things we normally consider to be "sin".

a. How should we then relate to those whose actions are something we disapprove of or constituted a danger?

b. If the gospel of Jesus was orthodoxically comprehensive and consistent with teachings and philosophies that insist that humans are sinners and therefore dangerously close to being evil, then, according to doctrine in many Christian churches, Jesus must have required that kind of confession from all those with whom he interacted as portrayed in the New Testament. Why do we not read of Jesus requiring a confession of sin and admission of being morally weak, dangerously tempted and flawed before being willing Himself to give of his own strength and wisdom and bless those who petition?

3. “Be wise as serpents, yet gentle as doves.” Sin originally meant missing the mark.

a. Discuss whether or not it is easier to deal with mark-missers as opposed to trying to encourage souls who are convinced of their inherent sinful and undeserving state of being – bordering on evil.

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