Our Western culture militates against moral wisdom.
Paul and his associates confronted a somewhat less foreign culture in the first churches outside Palestine than we do today. When you read between the lines of the New Testament, you still see a constant struggle. On the one hand, Paul himself struggled with defining what was essential from the Old Testament way of life versus what belonged merely to the specific Covenant of Moses. It was easily the bulk of what he discovered in his three years of isolation before engaging Christian ministry. Once he was fairly certain of that territory, it was still a major battle guiding Gentiles into that same world.
Reading his letters in the New Testament, you can sense the conflict. Hebrew mysticism was not entirely foreign to them, but the particular moral assumptions often conflicted with their heathen Gentile morals. To their advantage, the world around them did not flatly deny the mystical approach. Our world seeks to crush it with a malevolence hard to describe.
The moral character of God as revealed in Scripture cannot rest on mere intellectual study. It requires a broad recognition of elements in knowing and deciding that our world seeks to exclude. At best, we have pitiful substitutes based on mere sentiment, which is easily the most dangerous path we can take. Despite the ostensible secularity of our society, it is a nasty and ugly war of one moral outlook (largely Anglo-Saxon) against that of the Bible. Saddest of all is how very much the established mainstream Christian institutions in our society have sold themselves into the service of that competing view and don’t even recognize that following Christ means a radical shift in assumptions about reality.
Against this, Christ calls us to strive daily to find that now-secret path He marked out centuries ago. It is in the midst of this overwhelming tsunami of deception and violence that we struggle to carve out a life consistent with God’s moral character. It’s not enough to recognize His character as an influence in reality, but it is the underlying fabric of all Creation. It is the founding principle, the thing on which all else stands. The Law Covenants reflect that divine moral character.
That much have I written many times here and in my books. Without that understanding, little of what I write will make much sense. Even more so will Scripture seem to offer a useless message, unless you approach Scripture from its own intellectual assumptions. It’s a standard, but one that is living and active and sharper than any cutting implement. This is God’s policeman living in the world today, not some mindless robot, but your best friend. His enforcement policies will ever remain incomprehensible and inscrutable, but nonetheless binding and calling to us always to take the better path for our own good.
I sensed the shepherd’s calling in my youth. Starting from those insane teenage years, I have suffered much turmoil from the pulling of the Spirit against so very much of what everyone in churches insisted I learn. As you would surely expect, the art of marriage counseling was a part of that. Not that I would pretend any level of perfection. Even as I enter the latter years of my life, having moved so very far from the boiling cauldron of Western mythology and into the life and freedom of Biblical morality, the day I don’t screw something up is when you need to check my pulse to see if I yet live. Not just common things, but things critical to romance.
I have come to the point where my internal message system does make some decent progress off of my daily mistakes. That is, I am ever more conscious of what to do with emotional pain. If I get grouchy and it’s not merely a physical issue, I recognize that I am grouchy and try to chase down the source. Most of the time it is a sense of having been injured. I’ve been hurt by something my spouse said or did, and though it’s path out of me may be circuitous and tortured, I tend to let her know. After which, I struggle to make sense of what happened so that I can bring healing, not just to her feelings, but to the source of conflict itself.
Whether you blow up or not, don’t let stuff fester. If love and romance are worth doing, they are worth doing right. Scripture pours so very much into the issue of human romance. On the one hand, the Bible clearly dismisses a large swathe of standard Western concerns. On the other hand, it elevates other issues to such prominence that you cannot escape them. The biggest problem we have in Western society is the double-bit ax that either ignores the stuff that requires thoughtful consideration or traps you in bondage to bogus reasoning about things that don’t matter.
On the one hand, my urge to write is strong, and not merely in response to a few questions here and there. Romance is the foundation of all human social interaction; if this is broken, society itself cannot be healed in any way. I’ll be exploring the quintessential discussion of romance in the Bible, the Song of Solomon. On the other hand, we have to translate that into our world and this is the part that requires a sort of hands-on exploration of our daily experience. Even if I can write it and have it make sense to you, it may not fit into a book. The threads of quantum moral logic require a shift of commitment, not mere understanding. It means you have to embrace that flaming sword of truth at the entrance to Eden, not merely admire it and describe it.
This subject remains open and I’ll gladly take your questions: here in the comments section, privately by email and on Facebook as well.
