The air tasted of salt. It was bitter in his mouth. He hadn’t known how tired he was until he stepped off the ship. His arms ached and his legs felt empty, the stubbornly still dock strange under his feet. He closed his eyes against the sound of the sail flapping in the wind behind him, frowning in disgust at the familiar deep flutter that had accompanied him for so many hard months. He imagined he would hear the phantom sound of waves crashing against the hull in his dreams for weeks. Then he saw her.

She’d already seen him and her face had broken open into a smile. Her eyes glinted with tears in the bright sun. Her hands were clasped in front of her, but she shook as if she might explode into a run toward him at any moment. He felt himself move quicker, his empty legs threatening to buckle. But he’d crawl to her if they did. 

He thought he’d never reach her, never see her face, feel her embrace, and then he was there, holding her tight, feeling her shudder against him. 

Her eyes were red when he looked at her again. Her cheeks damp. His smile broadened, and he pulled his wife close to kiss her. There was no premeditation. It was just the thing to do. Love demanded it. Who would begrudge a man pulled from his wife by the sea for so long a time a simple kiss? But he saw the disapproving eyes, and heard the whispers the moment they were apart. He was aware of them watching for the first time since he'd seen her. He swallowed hard, regretting the reckless act. And he was right to. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be put in the stocks by his Puritan brothers for his crime.

The Crime of Kissing

Was it a crime? Um, yeah. The Puritans had all sorts of laws based on their religious beliefs. Laws on clothes, and sports and, you guessed it, kissing your wife in public. (Wouldn’t want to stir up the lust of the hapless standers-by now would we?) It was a strange time where moralism got people executed, “witches” burned, and wore out the hinges on the stocks from constant use.

A Solid Biblical Case

While such laws may seem far-fetched to our modern ears, they seemed downright biblical and necessary to those who followed them. While we aren’t ruled by the Church anymore (thank heavens), and our petty moral rules aren’t law, we do feel the weight of them in our religious communities--like stones for our backpacks. 

Like the lady who told my wife I must not be much of a Christian because I chose not to identify with a specific political party. The friend who told me I shouldn’t say freaking because we all knew it was just a substitute for that far more insidious f-word. Even, at the risk of raising dander, the logic that one shouldn’t smoke because our body is the temple of God.

I could make a solid biblical case for some of those (and a myriad other righteous rules if that's your kink), because they often seem to make sense. (Our body is the temple of God, after all.) But I could also, retroactively, make a strong case for why one shouldn’t kiss their wife in public when it might cause a brother or sister to stumble. See how slippery a slope this can be? (You're composing your rant on the smoking thing, aren't you?)

I See Your Point

It’s not that we shouldn’t have personal ethics or convictions. It’s not even that some of these types of rules aren’t good ideas or maybe even smart or healthy. I'm not against rules. The problem is when we universalize our personal opinions, or stretch the logical conclusions of a biblical principle to its breaking point. These so-called righteous rules can pile up to the point that we feel stagnated in our interactions with others, constantly guilty about not meeting all of them, feel self-righteous when we have, and—most disastrously—more focused on these pulled-out-of-thin-air laws than on Jesus.

Not to pick on the Puritans too much, but they also had folks running around town making sure the citizens were pious enough in their behavior. The Piety Police, if you will. This kind of rule-based righteousness causes us to become curators of our brothers and sisters personal morality. We feel like we should remark on every slightly askew comment, correct even the tiniest error, and shame those other sinners into shape. We beat them to death with the log in our own eye over the speck in theirs.

Love, the bible says, covers over a pile of sins. That doesn’t mean we don’t also lovingly and humbly correct the brothers and sisters who've stumbled into the quicksand of sin--those whose lives in which we have earned the right to be heard. But it does mean that we aren’t walking around with a moralistic magnifying glass, inspecting the every action and word of the other as if that was the be-all end-all of the faith.

Spur one another in love and good works, not harass one another until they snap in two and you win. Our peacock tails of self-righteousness might seem impressive, but they will wilt in the holy presence of God. Instead of adding to the burden of ourselves and others, creating rules that seem like good ideas, but are really just self-righteous indulgence, let us live in love, and preach the gospel of Jesus for sinners to one another. In this way, our message won't be that we’re better people than the world, but that there is One who is good, and there’s enough forgiveness for all. That's like, well, a kiss on the lips.

-Chad West

Moralism

1:00:00 PM

We Christians seem to think the world's problem is a behavioral one. And if the problem is bad behavior, then the solution must be good behavior. And, while we're sinners too, we know the truth. So, we think we should all get together—there’s a heck of a lot of us, after all—and we can totally make a difference in this dark world. 

Christian Life Moralism

9:53:00 PM

I stopped my thoughts before they escaped into words, checking their pockets for hidden slights or contraband foolishness. I might not even say them at all... Just to be safe. There was too much chance they might offend. And who knows what would happen to the eternal soul of some poor listener if I unwittingly ruined the Good News of God with some imperfect pronunciation?

My actions went through the same rigor. I scrupulously weighed them in light of how they might affect my witness to God. I had come to believe that I was the only bible some people would ever read, and that weight was enormous. In my mind, how well I seemed to keep the imperatives of the bible (and those inferred and tacked on by various other Christians for good measure) was indicative of how many people I could lead to Jesus. 

I wish someone had told me that my goodness wasn’t the Good News. 

Moralism The Gospel witnessing

4:05:00 PM

We think it’s about doing things. I mean, consider one of the most popular (I’m doing that quote thing with my fingers) movements of the last few decades: WWJD? Let’s be honest, that was about not lusting and giving it back when you got too much change, or not getting so angry at that horrible driver. That’s all good stuff to shoot for in life, but Jesus is so much bigger than you and I not being such a jerk. But, like that silly fad, we latch onto such things whole hog.

If those bracelets, shirts and lapel pins had any real power, the poor would find themselves better off, the outcasts would find a safe-haven in church and the world wouldn’t be shaking their heads at us about our self-righteous politics, but at our insane concept of thinking of the weak, disenfranchised and openly sinful as just as important as ourselves.

Our problem isn’t our desire to be better, it’s the poor reach of our imaginations. 

We can’t think past ourselves. We can’t seem to think past the socially unacceptable peccadilloes of our particular denominations or personal belief systems. We so focus on sin that we forget that it has been paid for in full by our God and what that means beyond our superficial worries about things like cigarettes and too-tight yoga pants.

It means letting God ridiculously love others through us who show no love (because we are loved even when we turn our backs on Jesus.)

It means allowing God to inspire generosity toward those who might not deserve it (because riches were poured over us at our least deserving.)

It means trusting God to provoke in us radical kindness to the most sinful people we know (because God was radically kind to us at our worst.)

Sometimes, we despise ourselves because of our sin. Other times we despise others in which we see sin. Neither is helpful or particularly Christian. When we see the weak-willed, the cheaters, the speakers of broken theology, the thieves and the sexually promiscuous, we shouldn’t then look away in disgust. We should see reflections of ourselves—those for whom Christ died. They should stir in us, by God’s grace, a great compassion that moves us to love.

We should ask ourselves what good it does to attack the non-Christians due to their sin? What becomes of the world if we change its laws to match our fastidious moral natures? That world fades and dies. A footnote in a long history of poorly chosen wars the Christian church has chosen to fight. But the men and women we love by God's power, without measure, those we forgive the unforgiveable (because that’s what Christ does for us), those whom we speak life into—now we’re talking about Eternity. 

Photo used under CC

Christian Life Moralism witnessing

9:00:00 PM

I don’t have anything to say. I mean, I can sometimes put something on a page that can make you feel or think. I can speak something in front of a crowd that you might take home. I’m pretty good at winning arguments. But that’s not the same thing. I’ve got no meaning. Not without something else. Another important ingredient.

The bible says something interesting about meaning, and it applies to pretty much every situation. It says that I can do everything right. I can feed the homeless, dress the naked, preach the good news and even die for my faith and it won’t mean a thing (nothing!) if it’s not done in love. It’s meaningless. Not less meaningful. Ultimately meaningless for us.

The bible says over and over again that life is about glorifying God. Any Christian who’s been to church more than a few times knows that our Salvation comes solely from God, not our works. They know that even our good works are inspired in us by the Holy Spirit. All praise, ultimately, belongs to God. But, you give us the smallest of reasons to take credit and we’ve gobbled up the whole shebang.

I want a pat on the back. I want the awards and the praise. I want to be recognized and thought of as wise and generous, kind and thoughtful. I just want to pay lip-service to God and secretly hoard it all for myself. I want, and I hate to admit this, religion.

Not that helping widows and orphans nonsense. The tit for tat, good news: Chad is awesome and much better than you sorry sinners religion. I hate that about me.

Capon wrote that God “wants empty vessels: preachers who have no religion left to preach.”

I want that too.

I really do. That’s the Spirit, by the way. I’d ignorantly choose the self-aggrandizing nonsense.

To do that takes total reliance on God. It takes reliance on him, not to clean us out like dirty pipes, Mario Bros. style, but to put whole new pipes in. You think that’s not scary? We’ve got our five-year plan and day-planner to think of!

He wants us connected to him permanently. And not as some integral part to the system, but as a conduit of his perfect love and grace. We’d screw it up. He finished it. He’s the root, we’re the vine. He’s the tree, we’re the branches. But, look, fruit! Connected to God, we become capable of doing that which we could never produce on our own.

So worth it.

When I stop thinking that kumquat of love is all me, maybe then I’ll stop acting as if I’m conveying a message to sinners whom I have nothing in common with. I’ll stop seeing the bible as a first-person shooter, where I’m the hero, blasting those wretched sinners, and realize I’m the wretched sinner. When I’m empty of all my rules-based religion, arrogant correction and unloving speechifying, I might have something worthwhile to say.

My voice will be softer and my eyes might not look so much like razor blades.

I might love the unlovely, the liars, the lustful and the ungrateful, because I finally see myself in their eyes and recall the Savior’s gentle forgiveness. 

Photo used under CC

God's love Moralism

10:05:00 PM

“What is the author trying to say here?” I’ve heard that (and thought that) many times as a student. That phrase has ruined the fun of more than one book for many a person. The reason is because someone is trying to reduce the excitement, truth and downright joy of a book into a moral lesson. You ask most authors what they were trying to write about and they’ll tell you about the characters and the plot. Most authors don’t sit down to try and teach people a lesson. They just tell the story. The bible is much the same.

I was a really bad student. Looking back, I think it was basically due to my immense authority problem. I loved learning—I was always gathering up information about this and that—but as soon as someone told me I had to learn, I was scribbling drawings of superheroes in my notebook. I’m sure I’m not alone here. So, why do we do that?

The law ticks us off.

I grew up listening to the stories in the bible and, to this day, I don’t think I have a favorite bible story. I don’t have one that I recall fondly from my stay in Sunday School. They’re all neutral to me. That’s probably because they were always sold to me as some sort of moralistic puzzle. They weren’t just cool stories about warriors and miracles, they were grassy fields that I had to push through to find hidden meaning. I don’t recall them fondly because I probably never saw them as stories at all, I just saw them as work.

“What is the author is trying to say here?”

We want morals. We want David’s story of killing a giant to be about conquering that tough interview, getting through a Cancer diagnosis or our struggle with porn, with God’s help. We think of Noah’s story in terms of the bad people getting theirs and the good earning a place on the boat.

We never stop to think that maybe not everything has to have a moral, and that God is not one of the Brother’s Grimm. Perhaps all the stories collected in the bible aren’t to teach us how to be better people but rather that God is gracious and will provide a substitution, or that he’s just but has a stubbornly soft heart. Perhaps the bible isn’t just a book of stories from which we are to draw morals, but the narrative of a God whose love is greater than our sin, and is insistent upon our redemption.

In short, the bible might not (gasp!) be about us so much is it is about God. It’s a love story, but we’re the slovenly, cheating prostitute that he can’t help but love. He doesn’t, Pygmalion-style, teach us proper manners and how to pass as the highfalutin beauty as many of us think he does. No, we’re not to read into the Scriptures some formula to look, smell and act better. He comes to put our old selves in the ground completely, reviving us to newness. God’s story is much grander than some instruction manual. It’s the story of his pursuit of us in our evil, but it’s certainly not a story about how to be good.

The bible is the story of a patient Father who will not allow even death to stand in the way of his quest for his children. He will pass through death’s door, and kick it down for good, to be by our side. 

bible God's love Moralism

10:29:00 PM

I saw an info-graphic type deal on Facebook today that, to sum it up, said ethics is not something one has to be a Christian to have. That’s a fact. But, that the argument has to be made at all shows that we Christians are somehow proposing that only Christians can be truly ethical.

That’s just not true.

And it’s fairly easy to empirically show that it’s not true. (Do I really have to waste precious space explaining that non-Christians do good things, too?) So the question becomes why we would be so vested in spreading the lie.

I’m glad you asked.

We espouse Christianity as a life of rules one must follow to appease a watching, angry God. Therefore, our faith is then about doing moral things. And if that’s the case (and it’s not), then how moral we are dictates how close we are to God. So, to imagine a world where a non-believer can be just as moral as a Christian seems ludicrous because “being better” is the domain of Christians.

That’s a corruption of the message of the Bible, but if one believes it then it becomes crucial to think the falsehood that non-believers cannot be moral.

There are lots of non-Christian jerks, and there are lots of Christian jerks. (The fact that there are lots—and lots—of Christian jerks alone should bear witness to the fact that we believers don’t have an ethical leg up on anyone else.) Ethics are everywhere…

…And ethics is not the message of Christianity.

The above is a message of fear, and faith in Jesus is the opposite of that.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:18-19

The Christian faith is about love. To put a finer point on it—God’s love. The message that Jesus gave for us to tell has zero to do with our own morality or ethics. As a matter of fact, it is a message which demolishes any notion we might have that our goodness means a thing (and that's part of the reason we hate the message of grace). The Good News of Jesus only makes sense after one understands the very bad news that our very nature separates us from God and that there is nothing you or I can do to earn God’s love. But that’s why God came. That’s why Jesus chose crucifixion and shame—his great, ridiculous love for us. 

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Moralism The Gospel

11:12:00 PM