In quantum moral reasoning, all questions are related to morality.
Yesterday I went to a restaurant seeking breakfast. There was no particular conscious reason to avoid the place and it was convenient. I ate; it was a mistake. The food was so-so and the service was okay, but there was something toxic in the food. Not in the normal sense of a Health Department violation, but in the sense my body reacted negatively in several ways, the sum of which indicated the food had something not good for me. It was not immoral to eat there in the normal sense of the word, but doing so had moral implications. It affected my ability to obey clear and undeniable guidance from the Spirit of God. Having experienced this, it would be immoral to go back again.
Refresh: There are Two Realms, the Spirit Realm and the Fallen Realm, though other labels can be used. The Spirit Realm is unknowable to the mind; we can’t really talk much about it except through parabolic-symbolic language. But the Spirit Realm does communicate to the fleshly mind in terms of moral justice. That is, while God has woven His character into Creation, only by revelation from the Spirit Realm can we gain any useful understanding or perception of that moral fabric. This realm is broken and will not be fixed; it will be removed at some time in the future. Rather, we have sufficient revelation from God how to live while here in this prison that we can make the most of what is here. We can embrace His revelation, given in the form of moral law, as the means to standing in His glory and participating in what His power can do to redeem the situation. It becomes a down payment, a promissory note on future blessings in the Spirit Realm.
Western intellectual assumptions will find this whole thing utterly foreign, and tends to offer a hostile reaction to such truth. Thus, it’s not enough that we have to overcome our fallen fleshly resistance to His moral truth, but we have a vast weight of intellectual and cultural conditioning we must fight through to even begin the task. The Spirit helps us stumble into some good answers, but if we do not take seriously the task of consciously countering all this conditioning, we will come woefully short of what God offers here.
The Bible was cast intentionally in the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) intellectual and cultural tradition. It’s radically different from the West. A fundamental question in life for folks in the ANE is not, “What is this thing I’m facing?” The proper question is, “What shall I do about/with it?” In our binary intellectual atmosphere, we tend to operate in a highly compartmentalized mode. In the quantum moral reasoning of the ANE, it’s all one organic whole. Questions can be diced up academically, but analysis begins somewhere else entirely. We don’t properly ask what something is; we ask what role it plays in our calling.
The fundamental truth of your existence is your sense of calling from God. For men, the fundamental image is shepherd; the women it’s motherhood. Your specific role in any given context may fluctuate against the roles and callings of others, but this is our fundamental assignment from God. Men are shepherds in one way or another, while women are mothers in one way or another. Only in our foul Western mythology would a woman try to mother her own husband; her role as wife is a branch of motherhood that makes her submissive to him, as the Bible says. Unfortunately, we read into that our vast lore or Western deception and it never comes out right, particularly when we try to explain that motherhood means. And Western men are all about the false dichotomy of being either a little boy or a complete jerk, though most are a fluctuating blend of both. The biblical shepherd is absent from Western social mythology, a concept utterly impertinent. Yet the Bible assumes the shepherd or mother as the starting point of your role as a servant of God.
Notice I didn’t say “identity” because that’s an impertinent question. It presumes a more or less static image of personality, as if you are forced to be that way all the time for the rest of your life. Yes, you have fallen human tendencies, but nobody has an identity in the Spirit Realm except as either spiritually dead or alive. It’s all about your role and sense of calling. If you get stuck on your sense of identity, you’ll never be ready for God to promote you to higher responsibilities. Yes, we know you can’t simply stop thinking that way. It’s not evil to remember how the rest of the world operates, but it’s wrong to stay there. Your entrance into God’s moral truth is an extension, an additional faculty of human operations. You bring your past with you in the sense of what your mind knows, but you add on a vastly larger understanding from the Spirit Realm.
A fundamental assumption is that you never quite arrive while here on this plane of existence. This is why identity is the wrong approach to self understanding. Your internal talk with yourself needs to focus on what comes next: “What do I do now?” Nothing confronting you is simply good or bad, right or wrong. You have to measure the context with your best understanding of Biblical Morality. You expect to stumble and fall, but you don’t expect to stay down.
Thus, I ate some bad food because the Lord didn’t see fit to warn me some other way. For His glory, He led me through a mistake that cost me some physical energy through two workouts and left me in a sub-optimal state of mind. It weakened me, but the Lord allowed healing to come according to His wisdom. It was not a matter of what I needed; that was taken care of, but it was not the focus of attention. His glory was the focus, both for Him and for me. There is no better place to stand than in His glory; it is my best and highest self-interest to be there. Life as a human on this fallen plane cannot be better anywhere else I might stand. So I won’t go back to that restaurant without some really big changes in management, etc. — all highly unlikely.
The proper approach to morality is not one of many academic compartments for thinking about reality; morality is the fundamental nature of reality.
