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Tuesday, October 27, 2009

"morality is nowhere near the heart of the gospel.


Len concludes a post on romantic theology with:


...Lately I hear calls to morality in some of the circles I am in. To me this is deeply wrong-headed, another shadow of the “gospel of sin management” that is so deeply rooted in evangelical circles, a failure to appreciate that morality is nowhere near the heart of the gospel. We are “dead in sin,” and a dead man has no power to change or to do anything. Yet we constantly appeal to “dead men” to be better. As one sage put it, “Jesus did not come to make good men better, he came to give dead men life.” (Don Miller has a great chapter on morality in “Searching for God Knows What,” and his final chapter on Shakespeare and the Gospel is another appeal for “romantic theology.”) We are far better to invest our energy in helping those around us come to an experience of God rather than promoting righteousness by works. When someone falls in love, everything changes.
-Len



Ellul:
"Christianity has nothing to do with morality; absolutely nothing."
-Jacques Ellul

1 comment:

  1. it's unbelievable to me how much i needed to hear this argument from this angle. i've been struggling with this very idea.

    ReplyDelete

Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!