gobear, that’s a poor caricature of fundamentalist doctrine. Effectively, in their views we’re all hateful sinners who have rebelled against God, and that rebellion is in our genes, more or less, as a result of Adam’s sinfulness – “total depravity” is the Calvinist term, and while only fundies of Calvinist background use it, that’s what is implied in all evangelical doctrine. The result is that God’s justice requires that we all be eternally punished for our sins. In this condemnation they do include themselves (pre-conversion).
However, God is also loving and merciful. And because we are unable to cleanse ourselves of this sin, He in His mercy sent Christ, His only Son, Himself sinless, to atone for our sins and open the way for us to be saved and go to heaven.
From there, the doctrine gets even more convoluted and is subject to disagreement as among various strands of fundy thought. For example, because the Bible is (according to them) the Word Of God, directly inspired in every detail by the Holy Spirit, and protected by Him from any error, hence any evidence in the secular world that appears to contradict an informed literal reading of it (i.e., one that regards it as literal unless there is obvious evidence of figurative language or moral fictions) must be either the work of Satan or the total misunderstanding by the human scholar (weak, sinful, and hence very fallible).
Against this doctrine, one can set the idea that we are people made in the image and likeness of God, His children by adoption and grace, who have access through Christ to His strength and comfort and each of whom was created by Him for their place in His great Plan. It denies no doctrine of the early church and the Creeds, but reads them in the context of a loving and forgiving God Whose work in Creation structured a world that follows an infinitely complex, intricate and divinely laid out Plan for the world. This means that you and I and His4Ever are, by our own free wills, even now acting out the parts that He structured for us to play in this giga-intricate plan which He has for the world and for the benefit of each of us.
Cardinal, I feel that you misjudge the tenor here if you assume that the pagan Rede is the basis for the community moral synthesis. I for one (heterodox as I may be) do see God as having created some absolute moral values to which all humans are called to comply and on their fulfillment of which (or lack thereof) they will be judged.
The problem, though, is that the difference between those values as I understand them and what seems to be the “evangelical moral code” may be compared to the difference between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics. In the latter, every object has a series of absolute characteristics – its length is X, it’s mass is Y, its momentum is Yv, etc. – while in the former there is one absolute – C, the value of the speed of light in a vacuum, and all other things change in relation to this.
Even so, Christ’s teaching on the two laws that are fundamental to all other moral behavior and how one observe those two laws in one’s daily life constitute that fundamental constant, equivalent to C, and all the “absolute moral values” of unthought evangelical doctrine and short passages extracted without context from Scripture are to be observed, or not, in connection with how they fulfill those moral values.
Following God’s command, I strive mightily (but fail far too often) not to judge my fellow man – but if I were to sit in judgment of the conduct of many evangelicals who have posted here, it is in their failure to show Christ to others in the love they (fail to) show their fellow man that they fall short of His command. Certainly everybody here is agreed that God said the pertinent Scriptures always quoted in the morality-of-homosexuality threads – even the staunchest advocates of gay liberation will admit that those words are there in Leviticus and Romans. But the point that seems to escape the brothers and sisters of evangelical bent is that it is not their job to sit in judgment over the behavior of their gay brothers and sisters – and even if they admit this, it’s showing love towards them to warn them of the punishment awaiting them by a wrathful and legalistic God – which in essence implies that they as warners are more merciful than the God they claim is all good.
For me, the passages in Scripture are quite valid warnings about the behavior of lustful humanity – straight, gay, bi, or whatever – and the consequences of using another person, as precious to God as oneself, as solely an object on which to gratify one’s sexual lust. For a Semite of Torah days, Jew or not, to use another man as a woman, whether sexually or in servanthood or whatever, was to assert dominance over him, and to “bottom” for him was to deny one’s own manhood given by God. IMHO, the commands are against the gratification of lust, not against love or the fulfillment of sexual desire in a committed loving relationship. This applies as much to two straight people of opposite sexes as it does to two gay men or women.
I don’t know how I can make it clearer, but the gist of it is that Christ calls on me to live a moral life according to His teachings and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to be concerned about the moral lives of others only insofar as I can provide them with help and loving support as they live out their own lives according to their understandings of Christ’s call to them, to be a witness to the empowerment and fulfillment that His love has been in my life, and to refrain from legalism of any sort towards anyone else.
Connected with this is the necessity to witness to my fellow Christians regarding that understanding of what His call to us is and is not – and therein lies a major problem that I run into with evangelicals on the board, because their view, founded on a legalistic understanding of morality, says that God’s call is to proclaim that a formalized acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord and an ensuing life of adherence to the Law as interpreted by Paul and exegeted by Biblical scholars since is the sine qua non for Christian behavior – and that it is essential to thrust that condemnation for sinfulness in the faces of all who have failed to do so – for their own ultimate good, since of course they will someday wake up and realize that they have indeed been walking down a primrose path.
That it may have been God’s intention that those people walk down that path and see the beauty of the primroses in the cool of the evening as He walks alongside them, they fail to observe. That perhaps God looks to them not for policing the world to ensure that His Word is honored and respected, but rather for helping their brother in need, offering sympathy when he is down, rejoicing with him at happy times… all this seems to have escaped them.
Anyway, that’s my two cents on morality.
