Morality

I've been reading a book by Donald Miller that he wrote in 2004, "Searching For God Know What." It's a really good book and has stirred my thinking on a number of things. I'm getting close to the end (and I'll be moving on to his newest book that just came out, "A Million Miles In a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life"). I just finishing up the chapter on Morality and there were a couple of things he wrote that I thought I'd share with you for your reflection:

"Morality..., if you think about it, is the way we imitate God. It is the way we imitate the ways of heaven here on earth. Jesus says, after all, to know Him we must follow Him, we must cling to Him and imitate Him, and many places in Scripture the idea is presented that if we know Him, we will obey Him."

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"The hijaking of the concept of morality began, of course, when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules. It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover. A person's mind can do all sorts of things his heart would never let him do. If we think of God's grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt, but if we think of God's grace as a relational invitation, an outreach of love, we are pretty much jerks for belittling the gesture.

"In this way, it isn't only the moralist looking for a feeling of superiority who commits crimes against God, it is also those of us who react by doing what we want, claiming God's grace. Neither view of morality connects behavior to a relational exchange with Jesus. When I run a stop sign, for example, I am breaking a law against a system of rules, but if I cheat on my wife, I have broken a law against a person. The first is impersonal; the latter is intensely personal."

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"There are a great many other motives for morality, but in my mind they are less than noble. Morality for love's sake, for the sake of God and the sake of others, seems more beautiful to me than morality for morality's sake, morality to build a better nation here on earth, morality to protect our schools, morality as an identity for one of the parties in the culture war, one of the identities in the lifeboat (lifeboat: thinking that some/we are better than others for various reasons, thinking that some/we are worth saving because of met standards verses those who do not)."

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