Interesting to think about, I am in a book club and we are reading CS Lewis ‘mere Christianity’. We have been discussing morality and Lewis says that we have a “law of right and wrong” in our nature. It has made for interesting discussion. I think that while we do know inside what is right and wrong, wether you want to call that the Holy Spirit or not, the influence of the world around us is sometimes a greater voice. The conscience is still and small.

I think that the church needs to focus more on making disciples. The principles of Jesus are considered superior by many other religions and many people who are seeking spiritual guidance. Why is it that they love Jesus but “christianity” isn’t as appealing? That is a problem. I don’t have the answers, sometimes I feel like I just end up with more questions. But I know I am on the right path.

Really enjoy the blog! Thanks!
Annie

Hi Annie - I think Willard would say that the (seemingly) universal human quest to answer the four questions is an indicator of Lewis’ natural law. Also, he would enthusiasticlly agree with you (as do I!) that our primary focus should be on discipleship. Very serious issue. Thanks!

Jason, I would passionately argue that our concern is actually not morality but dignity. The original construct of the Garden was not concerned with morality but instead the judgment of human value, which was identified in the tree. The rest was freedom. In other words, when humanity lost site of its own dignity, freedom was lost.

Morality is largely a human construct meant to define acceptable action apart from dignity. It’s subjective and based upon human judgment, and thus always changing across culture and even person.

When Jesus said, “love” he was not creating a new morality but addressing the underlying root problem in humanity, which was the loss of dignity. So when the church tries to define morality its missing the point.

We see this issue played out in the UN, which has tried to define a universal set of ethics. And at the heart of this ethic is the respect for dignity. They just couldn’t help but recognize the Golden rule as the foundation for all rights.

Hi Jonathan - I really appreciate how you’ve articulated that, and I would tend to agree that the core issue at hand is one of restoring the imago dei (if I’m reading you right). Where you use the term “dignity,” I have tended to use the term “worth.” I’m not quibbling…perhaps dignity is a better word. I honestly haven’t given it much thought.

Either way, even given that, I wonder if it’s desirable – or even possible – to discard the concept of morality. Perhaps you could interact with how your concept of dignity either contrasts with Willard’s propositions here or fills them out. If, for example, you replace morality with dignity, how does that change the way you handle human behavior formerly labeled immoral? To put it another way, how do you identify and exclude acts of crime, injustice, and personally destructive behavior through the perspective of “dignity” without dignity simply becoming a synonym for what we now call immorality?

Thanks for your contribution. You always add good depth to the discussions here.

Jason, the reason why I commented on this specific element is because I’m releasing my first book in May on this very issue. It is my argument that the root problem God is solving is the apparent loss of dignity (or value) in the Garden. Humanity becomes blinded by its own judgment and the subsequent covering it creates.

The reason why morality is not the issue is because God’s initial construct in the Garden has essentially no judicial system towards the other. The only command in the Garden is in relationship to the self: don’t judge. Moral systems and the law are created because we are consistently judging the every relationship through the covering, which creates fear.

True justice is the presence of truth followed by the response of grace, not punitive justice, for example Cain. It doesn’t release us from consequence, which is the real problem (death). The word rehabilitation for example original meant to help people rediscover their own dignity.

If we examine Jesus response to morality, it was to reduce it to the Great Commandments. In other words, true morality was love. He place the onus back on to the person to love, even in the midst of suffering.

Hi Jonathan,

Yes, I agree. Thank you for unpacking that idea a bit. I’ll definitely buy the book : )

I’m still wondering if there is a place in your conception for judging particular acts or systems as either good or not (moral or not). It would seem that whether or not immorality is the essential ontological problem (and I agree with you it is not, and, incidentally, I think Willard would agree with you as well), we must still pragmatically deal with actual acts and systems of unlove (immorality) in a just way, which must still involve some level of judgment – the right discernment of which is what Willard calls here “moral knowledge.”

Jason, I would suggest that God gave us a means for dealing with immorality but we just don’t like the answer. It’s called dying for the sake of the other. It’s a call to non-violence that is so complete and revolutionary that we excuse it as a too hard.

But what we don’t realize is that love addresses the root problem where morality addresses the fruit problem. And Willard called this sin-management. We spend all of our energies trying to stop the apple tree from producing apples, when that is what it naturally does.

Love addresses the deeper issue of dignity, even to the enemy. God’s economy holds onto the dignity of the self and the other at the expense of harm, because in the Kingdom, human value is more important than anything we can do to each other.

BTW, Thanks for talking this out with me.

Nicely put Jonathan. I absolutely love the grounding in human dignity, and I couldn’t agree more that we excuse ourselves from the way of Christ because it seems too difficult. Reminds me of Chesterton: “Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it’s been found difficult and left untried.” …Or something like that.

Looking forward to the book!

Q2 The church–defined here as Christian institutions, movements, or communities?–have had a sporadic and often compromising example with regard to true Christlikeness. Christ’s body, on the other hand, have always acted the way Christ himself wills and acts. After all, it is his body. We, as individuals and collectives, disappoint and fail. Of course, we also inspire and succeed. When we do so in faith and as a matter of acting the way Christ did/does, then we might consider ourselves a good example of his body. But it is not static and, while there are good individual and collective examples (Bonhoeffer, Mother T, the first Christians, any of our favorite contemporary communities or movements), Christ has a right to reply to us (as you pointed out in an earlier post) “I never knew you.”

Q3 Your conclusions here about Christ’s particularity (“the rule to love neighbors, which includes strangers, aliens, and enemies”) is very similar to what I am attempting to know right now, as my wife and I are in the process of making several promises to each other in this vein. I wrote a description of it like this:

Enemy-love is the hardest and most peculiar commandment or demand that Jesus makes to perspective followers in the Way (Matthew 5:44-45). We love the idea of it, yet we instinctively understand our limitations as well. Nonetheless, this confession has not decreased the pounding in our hearts for the kind of rule and reign where even our enemies can truly find love and blessing in us. It’s clear, though, that we cannot accomplish this kind of intervention simply by being right or good (Matthew 7:21). We know that His rescuing love may only come as we try to follow Him, depend on His grace, learn from our mistakes, and ask for our sins to be forgiven. Of course, we need spiritual support in order to continue on that path. So, with this promise, we seek a creative and life-giving Resurrection faith to pray, worship, and suffer on behalf of those who have desired our harm, humiliation, or perhaps even death. This will require, judging by the little experience we have, an immense amount of prophetic imagination fueled by the Spirit of God. We can recognize the Spirit, for example, in the death-defying examples given by radical followers of Jesus throughout history. We have been inspired by those we have known personally as well as those we have witnessed to via text, movie, story, or song.

We may wonder, like Jesus did, if our enemies even understand exactly what they are doing. But the message of Jesus is clear still, “Father forgive them!”