Related articles and links |  1 of 2

•

This is the first in a new series of columns about Christian morality by David P. Gushee, Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University. Every other month Prof. Gushee will tackle concerns about practical, everyday moral issues that arise for those who seek to follow Christ.

I'm sitting in my office at Union University on an average day. Visiting with me is a young man completely disoriented by the divorce of his faith-immersed, church-immersed, water-immersed, Bible-immersed parents. Dad was once a minister. It turns out that his parents' marriage was a tissue of lies, of repeated infidelities finally culminating in divorce. Now this college kid is supposed to make sense of what kind of Christian faith it was that had so little positive effect on the behavior of his parents—and therefore on the outcome of his life.

Next hour. I hear of a young lady's home-church experience. Here the music minister slept with several women in the church and a lay leader's wife shot herself in the stomach over her husband's infidelities. Now they are back in church together as if nothing happened.

Next hour. I'm teaching a class on great moral leaders, and our topic is the British statesman William Wilberforce. Garth Lean's biography of Wilberforce says that after his conversion, the Christian anti-slavery leader "made a serious [daily] examination of himself in the early mornings and on Sundays and kept a list of his 'chief besetting sins' and 'the chief Christian graces which I want to cultivate.'" He made a pact with his spiritual mentor that each would pay a fine to charity "for lapses pointed out by the other." Eventually, Wilberforce and his reform-minded Christian friends established a kind of life-in-community in which they felt free to "help each other overcome their various defects of character or temperament."

It's Friday night at the bookstore, and I'm leafing through a book of Catholic prayers. Here I find the "examination of conscience" questions to ask oneself prior to going to confession. These questions include the following: Have I neglected my home or my family duties? Have I been lazy, neglectful, or easily distracted during prayers? Have I used God's name irreverently or taken false or needless oaths? Have I missed church through my own fault? Have I worked unnecessarily on Sundays? Have I disobeyed, angered, or been disrespectful toward my parents or those in authority over me? Have I quarreled with or willfully hurt anyone? Have I caused another to sin? Have I been sinfully angry? Greedy? Proud? Jealous? Have I neglected to care for the poor and the needy? And so on. It is a rich moral inventory.

If one labors in the vineyards of most sectors of American evangelical life, it does not take long before one notices the staggering moral sloppiness that frequently characterizes us. It's not just that Christians are sinners, too, and that we mess up like everyone else does. Of course that is true.

The problem goes deeper, to the way in which we have understood the very structure and meaning of the Christian experience. For many of us, Christianity is primarily a faith, that is, a body of beliefs to which we assent. Or it is primarily an experience, that is, a repertoire of inspiring, encouraging, or even ecstatic states entered into through worship and prayer. Or it is an event, that is, a one-time moment of conversion in which we "walk the aisle," profess our faith publicly, and join the church, guaranteeing ourselves a heavenly mansion when we die.

next page... |  1 of 2

share this page

November 2005, Vol. 49, No. 11