When Being Moral is a Threat

This Summer I have been reading a thoughtful and excellent volume by Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005) has certainly caused me to pull back the dregs of "thought slumber" and do some needed mental work. Peterson paints broad and beautiful word pictures that cause you to do much head nodding along with the occasional catch of breath. I would like to render you this sampling...

Jesus' death is our way into salvation. There is no other way.

But however much we admire Jesus, and however many hymns we write and sing about the death of Jesus...this death talk doesn't go down well with us. We can't avoid it in our preaching and hymnody and calendars, but we do manage to find ways to dodge it in the way we live.

The most common way that we in the Christian community have of avoiding or marginalizing Jesus' death is by constructing a way of life that is safe and secure and guilt-free. We have a lot of information on how to live rightly before God...we have considerable stores of wisdom accumulated through the Hebrew and Christian centuries on how to conduct our lives decently and pray effecitively. We take on huge commitments to teach our children and others...

When things go wrong, whether at home or in society, in church or in government, it is easy to find a moral reason: disobedience or ignorance of the biblical commandments is obviously at the root of a lot of what is wrong with the world. We conclude that if only we can educate our children and our parents, our politicians and our professors, our business leaders and our celebrities in right thinking and right behavior, things will imporve dramatically.

All this is true enough.

But the moment this becomes our basic orientation for dealing with what is wrong with the world, we have turned our backs on the cross of Christ, on Jesus as our Savior. The moment the moral life defines our way of life we turn our backs on most of what is revealed in our Scriptures, refuse to admit the presence of God in what is happening around us, but worst of all, refuse to deal with the most significant thing we know about Jesus, having replaced the real Jesus with a crude, one dimensional cardboard cutout. It amounts to a defiant denial of Jesus. We place ourselves in a position to receive Jesus' most serious rebuke: "Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (Matt. 16:24). When we rip the moral life from the living context of the Christ life, pull it up by the roots from the nourishing, loamy soil of Scripture, we end up holding a withered, drooping, and finally dead flower, a cut flower.

I am going to use this term "moralism" to designate this common, seemingly inoffensive, but in fact disastrous betrayal of Jesus...Morality is built into reality as deeply and inescapably as atoms and protons and neutrons. We are moral beings to the core--the very universe is moral. Right and wrong are imbedded in the creation. It matters what is done, said, believed even thought. Morality is fundamental and non-negotiable.

But moralism means constructing a way of life in which I have no need of a saving God. Moralism is dead; morality is alive. Moralism works off a base of human ability and arranges life in such away that my good behavior will guarantee protection from punishment or disaster. Moralism works from strength, not weakness. Moralism uses God (or the revelation of God) in order not to need God any longer. Moral codes are used as stepping stones to independence from God...

If what fixes the world is simply getting everyone forced or conditioned into good behavior, we don't need salvation anymore; we need education and training, political reforms and a cultural renaissance, a stronger police presence and a superior military, more information and more power.

Eugene Peterson
Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places
pp. 144 - 146