What is the relationship between faith and morality? Between belief in the God supremely revealed in Jesus Christ and moral awareness? Christopher Holmes explains.
The above are important questions to ask, largely because many of us think that talk about God is irrelevant to talk about moral responsibility.
Our common sense regarding morality has been deeply shaped by thinkers from the era of the (European) Enlightenment, roughly 1750 onwards.
They worked very hard to divorce faith from reason, God from morality, the individual from the community, the natural from the supernatural.
As a theologian, I help students to know God and how all things relate to God.
This involves in part discerning where our "common sense" comes from.
This is a joyful task as the Christian faith relates all things to God, including moral responsibility.
It is also challenging. Many of us assume that the world, ourselves, and our obligations to one another interpret themselves.
But if God does love the world, as God does, then this remarkable statement determines the basic truth of things.
We cannot grasp the full significance of this shocking truth without reflection on how we conduct ourselves in a world that God loves.
Such consideration involves a few things.
First, to be morally aware means being taken over by a reality that transcends oneself, indeed all things.
That is God.
Faithful living is a matter of waking up to the reality and claim of God.
The moral life involves learning to trust, hope in, and, ultimately, love God, and all things in relationship to God.
Second, moral awareness is not something that we can give ourselves.
Left to ourselves, we misunderstand who we are.
We try to do things our way.
We want to be independent, autonomous, makers of a life in which it is impossible for either God or my neighbour to make any claims.
Who are we as human beings?
We are creatures created by God for a life of friendship and communion with God and with the neighbour in God.
At the heart of the moral life is prayer.
"Come Lord Jesus, Come."
When we pray, we begin to learn true freedom.
Prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom reshapes our freedom from within.
We slowly but surely become (by grace) a little less selfish, a little more holy, more oriented towards our neighbour and coming generations.
Moral thinking is not a matter of catching up with the times.
Moral awareness, rather, involves new creation.
At the heart of the moral life is the prayer that God would come to renew our sense of freedom from within.
John Donne, perhaps the greatest poet ever to write in English, prays, in his Divine Poems published in 1633: "Come and recreate mee, now growne ruinous."
As a Christian, I recognise I have "growne ruinous".
That is because I have turned away from God.
But, thankfully, God in Jesus Christ has not turned away from me.
I pray for recreation of myself from within.
I pray, furthermore, for the recreation of the whole cosmos, the world.
And I do so together with God’s people throughout the ages, the communion of saints.
Here in the devastated world there is hope, but it does not come from history.
History cannot in and of itself free us to be competent moral subjects.
Only God can.
Amazingly, God does.
God promises to free us for responsible moral action when we call upon him.
God does so in and through the powerful working of the Holy Spirit.
Yes, moral responsibility is about how we conduct ourselves in a world that God loves and has promised to radically renew.
Moral thinking receives direction from God.
God, Jews and Christians maintain, is goodness itself.
The moral life involves living in light of and out of the fullness of what is.
- The Rev Dr Christopher Holmes is a senior lecturer in the department of theology and religion at the University of Otago.
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Comments
I am happy to learn that God loves the World. This indicates that God will not End the World, as prophesied in fanciful, metaphoric eschatology 'Revelation'. Good news.
The Salvation Army, which has become social activist, used to be 'In the World, but not Of the World'. Tell it to the, er, Judges. Sallies were thrown in clink for praying brass loudly in Milton in the C19th.
Christopher, I admire your blueprint for living morally and worldly. Some cannot do both, and would fare well in monastery life, making libraries and wine, tending orchards and bees. In England, at least, the State Religion largely nobbled that monastic life.
Haven't had my tangential say, which does not address your actual points, I'd like to add that morality may not need to be faith based. Conscience will deter immorality/amorality. The conscienceless are nutters, who will be deterred by social norms.