Have you ever wondered why Christians are so concerned with morality? What is it about Christians that makes them care so much about doing things a certain way?

By this point you might be expecting me to go off on some sort of liberal screed; instead I’d like to surprise you by saying that it’s obvious why we’re concerned with morality, and even more than that, it’s a good thing we’re concerned with morality.

But I think morality isn’t quite the right word for it; or if it is the right word, it feels much colder than it should. It’s problematic that there aren’t many other good words to describe morality, isn’t it? When I hear the word, I think of a certain moral code, a certain way of doing things, a certain subset of things defined as right, and a certain narrowness of opinion.

Morality doesn’t speak to motivation, though, does it? It’s like describing a piece of music without understanding the intentions of its author or talking about an Olympic event without considering why the competition’s happening in the first place.

We should invent a new word for that or seek to redeem the word or something, because Christian morality, it seems to me, isn’t something that takes place in a vacuum; it’s something that is part of a larger picture or something that needs to be viewed within a certain context.

Imagine God ripped out of the world: imagine being an atheist. If there’s no point to the universe, if there’s no context in which the universe takes place, it’s a pretty mean place. Animals dying and killing and being broken down by even smaller animals until their atoms are part of something entirely different, maybe a plant or an airplane or your baby brother, until the animal is forgotten and all trace of it removed from the earth; then you find out the animal is in fact you, and this is what’s going to happen to you, and you don’t much like it at all so you build a giant statue in what will one day become a desert, and one day Percy Bysse Shelley comes along and writes a poem about you, only it turns out that he’s just telling you how you’ve been forgotten despite your statue (which is also gradually being destroyed by erosion), not to mention that he’s gotten your name entirely wrong and you’re completely and utterly dead. That’s a pretty mean world, wouldn’t you say? Mean, pointless, and spirit-crushing. That’s what the world becomes if you divorce it from eternity, and from God, and from redemption, and from re-creation, and from Jesus.

Morality, as it turns out, seems the same way. It can be divorced from the context in which it was created, but it becomes this method of keeping people in check, like a straight-jacket or a jail cell. Imagine someone coming along a reading Psalm 119 and hearing David be all like, “I love this law, and I read it all the time, and I’ve started memorizing this passage here”, and on and on and on; David is clearly off his nut, as laws aren’t thing you delight in, or that you memorize (can you imagine memorizing Ontario’s traffic code?). They’re things you try to circumvent and try to push as far as you can, because you’re looking at it outside of its framework.

Imagine morality inside your friendships for a minute. Do you steal from your friends? No, unless you’re like the worst friend ever. Do you routinely beat them up? One would hope not. But by don’t you do those things? Not because you subscribe to a set of rules that you’ve agreed on and signed, but because you love your friends. You don’t do certain things to your neighbors because you love your neighbor.

All of that–and I can’t see an exception, really–is in the context of loving God. Jesus came, he did something wonderful, and your response is not only faith, but the things that naturally flow out of faith, those things scripture calls good works.

Sure, you can divorce these concepts from Jesus, and in some place at the back of most people’s minds there’s this place that defined a certain moral code, but why would you want to? Maybe it’ll restrain some evil in the world or something, but at what cost?

I personally feel that a lot of our Christan brothers have got things backwards. Sure, a country that doesn’t marry gays is in a better place than one that does, but what does that mean to the unchurched and nonchristians? Nothing. Why should it? Try forcing that view on them, and outside of the context of Jesus, you have a mean system of morality that denigrates people and calls all sorts of things “bad” without providing the very redemption from those things that Jesus offers.

Maybe I’m just talking to myself here–after all, I don’t enough fingers to count the times I’ve stolen from Jesus, or beat him up, or whatever–and maybe I’m not making much sense. But it looks like it works, doesn’t it? Can you imagine a world blanketed in Christians? Can you imagine an America as a nation of Christians instead of a so-called Christian nation? Can you imagine a Canada that says, “We do this because we love Jesus.”?

Tags: questions, ruminations, theology