Morality

…Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right.

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

I have to say…yes, and no. Everyone does know the Golden Rule to be right…at least somewhere deep down inside. However, Jesus did teach some unconventional moral ideas: love your enemy, turn the other cheek, to think evil is the same as to do evil. I am not an expert on ethical behavior throughout history and through multiple cultures, but I think it is safe to say these aren’t and have never been widely accepted moral behaviors.

In any case, moral behaviors are to be discovered, not invented. And, in this regard, Jesus did not invent anything new – He was the author of all of it in the first place. “You have heard it said…but I say….” He wasn’t inventing anything new, but clarifying how the moral teaching should be understood.

So, yes, it isn’t new; yet I don’t find some aspects of Jesus’s moral teaching to be universally accepted or acceptable. With this said, the good moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to these basics – I call it a return to the center, how we were always meant to live. Jesus is teaching us this.

One will not find a detailed ethical program in Christianity. What we have been given are principles – principles that can be applied to new and varied situations. Times change, moral principles do not. The application is always individual, local, time and culture bound.

Lewis has identified principles that those on the left applaud, and others which would be applauded by those on the right – and disdained in each case in the opposite manner. Everyone is attracted by bits and pieces of Christian morality, but no one gets to pick and choose only the parts that they like.

You like the “love your neighbor” part, but not the “God made man and woman” part? It doesn’t work that way – it cannot work that way. Creation is an integrated whole. “He Gets Us” without justice is not mercy, it is libertinism leading to nihilism. “Love you neighbor” can never be used as the means for justifying genocide.

Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says; we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.

Everyone has a proof text. Again, it doesn’t work that way.

…I cannot really carry [love my neighbor] out till I love my neighbor as myself; and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God; and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.

The path isn’t by making new laws. A Christian society will only come about when the society is made up of Christians – whole Christians, not pick-and-choose Christians.

Conclusion

…Christian morality claims to be a technique for putting the human machine right.

We are made by God; what is it we will do with what we have been given. With each choice, we either move closer toward being a heavenly creature or move close toward being a hellish creature. We either move closer toward harmony with God, or move closer toward hatred of God.

To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.