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THE GROWING SELF: SALVATION
We have seen a picture of how
the traveller’s life-journey began, and we can now look at the first stage
of his travels.
1. SALVATION: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
‘Salvation’ – ‘You are
saved’ – ‘Jesus saves’. We
are all used to the word, the phrases, but do they have any meaning for us? If a person has been saved there must have been some danger,
some threat or imprisonment from which he has been rescued.
‘My soul has been saved from hell’: that might be offered as an
answer. But what does it mean?
And is it true? You could
still go to hell if you live a bad life, so how have you been saved?
‘I have been saved from the separation from God which is the result
of Original Sin, and so have the possibility of attaining my fulfilment in him’.
This would be a better expression of the doctrine, but does it really
give us a feeling of release and relief?
It doesn’t seem to touch our experience.
As with all the Christian beliefs, the teaching on Salvation (more
technically called the doctrines of Justification and Grace) needs some
interpretation in terms of that experience if its relevance is to be seen. When we looked at the Creation doctrine we saw that
from the moment when the first human persons emerged there was a choice to
love and trust, or not to do so. It
was the failure to love which was the Fall of the human race and the beginning
of evil, suffering and death. If
we are to make sense of that we must examine very carefully what love is and
what it does.
There used to be a series of cartoons saying ‘Love is…’
Some of the best remembered are, ‘Love is a warm puppy’, and ‘Love
is never having to say you’re sorry’.
They were very popular, probably because people liked to catch glimpses
from them of the countless facets of something too vast to capture in a single
description. In the same way we
have read the great poets and writers, hearing from them echoes of what we
know of love from our own experience. We
would be foolish to attempt a definition, yet we do need to get some
understanding of what love is if we are to get anywhere at all.
One helpful and necessary way of approaching something which must
always be beyond description is to say what it is not.
If we list some of the things to which people commonly apply the word,
we may begin to see this:
I love -
my mother
If you then try to replace the
word ‘love’ in each case with some more appropriate word or phrase,
retaining it only where you cannot find one, it can be quite revealing.
e.g., I -
love
my mother
This seems to suggest that the word is most
appropriately used of people, and not of things or abstracts or public
personalities. There is, of
course, nothing hard or fast about the list; many people who have pets might
find it appropriate to say ‘I love my dog’.
Similarly the substitution of ‘adore’ in relation to God might just
look like an avoidance of over-familiarity to some, who would be happier
keeping to ‘love’ in this context. What then is the meaning of this word which we apply
most surely to people, perhaps to animals, but not to things, however valued
or exalted they might be? Clearly
it has to do with our feelings; but is it only or mainly an emotion, or has it
more to do with will and action? We
cannot deny the importance of the feelings which are involved, feelings of
affection, passion, need, bonding, dependence, sympathy, protectiveness, each
according to the particular relationship.
But the difficulty about defining love too emphatically in terms of
feelings is that they are more unstable, unpredictable, ephemeral than the
phenomenon we are trying to describe. Many
a truly loving mother has come to feel more murderous than affectionate
towards the teenage litter lout with whom she has to do daily battle. And can a man be sure that his feelings for his wife will not
waver on the day she insists on his giving up a golf match to take her and his
mother-in-law shopping? Our
experience tells us that our feelings fluctuate with the circumstances, with
our mood, with our health, with the behaviour of others. So if love were entirely or even principally a matter
of how we happen to feel, there could be no security in our relationships.
The dependability of the love between partners, between friends,
between parents and their children, is an essential characteristic of that
love. Without this our world
would be a nightmare. It is this
frightening state which is reflected in some of the religions of the ancient
world, or in certain modern cults and superstitions, where the god’s love is
not seen as permanent and abiding but as dependent upon their whim and mood.
This results in a life of constant pleading and sacrifices to cajole
and placate the unpredictable gods, just as a terrified wife or child
continually tries to please the bully who at one moment is in high good humour
and the next in a towering rage. We
must believe that love, and therefore God, cannot be like that. The main characteristic of love is action.
Love is something we do, far more than something we feel.
This is a view fully endorsed by the American psychiatrist M. Scott
Peck in his best selling work ‘The Road Less Travelled’.
Having arrived at his conclusions through observation in his clinical
practice, Scott Peck says that ‘love is an act of will – namely both an
intention and an action. Will
also implies choice. We do not
have to love. We choose to love.
(p.38) On a very important point
in the question of emotion versus action, Scott Peck tells us that falling in
love is not love. It is erotic
and invariably temporary, a collapse of a section of our ego boundaries which
must then be re-erected so that the work of real loving can start. (pp.84-88) Love
is always either work or courage: the
work is principally attention: the courage is the willingness to face the
risks of loss, of commitment. (pp. 120-140)
Scott Peck affirms that love is a mystery, particularly when one asks
‘where does love come from?’ For
insight into this, he says, we need to look to religion.
(p. 181)
'Love is patient and kind: love is not jealous or
boastful; it is not arrogant and rude. Love
does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not
rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things. Love never ends.’
(1 Corinthians 13 : 4-8) This beautiful passage illuminates what we have said in
describing love as dependable, and as willed action.
But what is the purpose of such action?
What does love do? Scott Peck defined love as: ‘the will to extend one’s
self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’
(p.81) This description offers a
sound basis for our understanding of what love does, but in this work we would
want to extend the scope of its effects. We will suggest that love affects not only our
spiritual but also our mental and even our
physical development. We
will propose that love creates, grows, sustains and fulfils persons.
If that is the case, and if persons are, as we have said, the summit of
all creation, then we must affirm the supreme value of love, without which
persons cannot exist.
The Genesis story of the fall of man suggests that
right from the beginning of our history we have chosen to act in ways which
destroy love, and therefore destroy persons.
The one who does this or has it done to him is thereby diminished,
turned to some degree away from his destined fulfilment.
To the extent that he is damaged by lack of love, whether his own or
another’s, to that extent he is also likely to give less love.
In doing so he causes more damage to himself and to those who need his
love for their growth. It is not difficult to see how this would spread like a
virus throughout the whole race, each infected person infecting those around
him. And the more closely related
they are to each other, the more damage they could do. Original sin can be seen as this desperate need of love and
this fatal tendency to act against it, and actual individual sins as the
non-loving actions by which each of us does the harm to ourselves and to
others. It can make sense of the
teaching that ‘all children are born in Original Sin’ if we think of the
child as having been born into a race which has this desperate need and this
terrible tendency to hurt and be hurt by lack of love.
A parent’s instinct is to shield their child from such dangers, but
in this case they must know that the danger is within the child, just as it is
in the case of a defective gene. The
child is not to be blamed or punished for having it, yet ‘punished’ it
will be in the sense of having to take the consequences.
And in the picture we are drawing, not only will the child suffer for
what he has inherited but he will in turn cause others to suffer because of
it, and he will pass it on to his own children. This portrayal of our state of need may indicate why
the Salvation belief has been preached by Christians with such urgency.
If persons are being damaged and destroyed, and there are those who
believe that they have found a way to prevent this, can they be blamed for
wanting to spread the news to all who will listen?
Many of us have been annoyed or offended by having this preaching
pushed at us ignorantly and inappropriately, on our doorsteps or by ranting
enthusiasts. But this does not
mean that the danger is not real or that the remedy is a delusion. Some elements of our picture are more literal than
metaphorical. When we refer to
‘sin’ as a refusal to love and be loved, this is a quite accurate
interpretation of the word. The
only commandments which Jesus passed on to his disciples illustrate this.
He endorsed the two great commandments, ‘Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your
mind’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, as summing up the whole of
God’s law. Then at the end of
his life he summed up his teaching to his disciples in the words ‘Love one
another as I have loved you’. So
the only actual sin is not to love, and it is easy to see how this is true.
If you truly loved yourself and others, how could you cheat or lie,
take what others have, or use violence against them? The effects of sin, or ‘love-lack’, are crippling
to the individual and to society. Crime
breeds fear and suspicion; it makes us feel unsafe in the streets, or even in
our homes. War and famine wipe
out whole peoples. The earth's
resources and its creatures are ravaged by greed.
And when we look at love-lack in the individual we are offered insights
into its consequences by the psychologists and the social scientists.
Studies have indicated that children brought up without adequate
affection and stimulation can be adversely affected emotionally, mentally and
even physically. Various reports
have suggested that a lack of loving care in childhood is strongly linked to
low attainment in education, to unemployment, to broken relationships, and to
crime. A large proportion of the
prison population is said to come from this kind of background.
As is the case with many scientific studies, such reports only confirm
and reinforce what we already know. Teachers,
for instance, are aware that the so-called ‘bad’ child – disruptive,
lazy, aggressive and so on – is in almost every case reacting to hurt or
neglect where he should have received love and care. A person who lacks love does not reach his potential:
he is unhappy, stressed, and may suffer anxiety and depression, or perhaps
even asthma, heart trouble or ulcers. Medical
research is finding more and more evidence that stress affects the immune
system, making the person more susceptible to many kinds of disease, even
including cancer. Of course this
is not to say that a person who is ill is suffering the effects of their own
sins, or the sins of their parents. Even
if they and their parents had been generously loved and loving, such an
illness could result from air or water pollution, from lack of medical
research, or from poverty. It
could, in other words, be a result of love-lack in the whole society. If this love-lack is the state of mankind, and it might
be difficult to believe that it is not, how can we as individuals and as a
race be saved from it, and from its destructive results?
Once again we should examine our human knowledge and experience to see
what indications they may offer, and then look at the Bible to see whether it
confirms and deepens those insights.
5.
A
PERSON GROWS, SAVED BY LOVE We have spoken of the unlimited potential of persons,
and this suggests that as individuals and as a race we are born to grow and
develop indefinitely. But grow
and develop in what way? Since
man became the being he is now, Homo sapiens, he has not continued to evolve
physically to any extent. This
could be because too little time has elapsed, but it may be that he has no
need of further physical development. The
body of an individual person is derived from millions of years of evolution,
and it develops up to about the age of sixteen, when we are said to reach our
physical peak. Is the person
complete at this point? Few would
think so. Beyond full physical
growth, both the human race and the individual person should continue to
develop mentally, socially, morally, artistically, spiritually.
Yet this is not necessarily the case.
The race or the individual may grow towards fulfilment or head for
destruction. They may be ‘saved’
or ‘damned’. If we examine
this fact that successful development is not automatic, it should shed
considerable light for us on the subject of Salvation. Let us start by considering how a person grows and
develops from the womb and into childhood.
The foetus requires food in order to survive, and this it obtains from
its mother’s bloodstream. But
if the mother doesn’t eat the right things, out of ignorance or greed, or
because the child’s father won’t support her, or because society keeps
them poor, then the foetus will not grow well.
And if the mother contracts a disease, takes a harmful medicine,
smokes, abuses drugs or alcohol, the foetus will be harmed.
We have said that love is the action, closely allied to feelings but
not dependent on them, which creates, grows, sustains and fulfils persons.
If the mother, through her own fault or the fault of her society, fails
to give her unborn child the appropriate treatment which is that love, then
the child will be damaged and will not grow as it should.
But if the mother does all she can to help her baby to develop well,
supported in what she does by family, friends, doctors, society, then the
actions of her love and theirs will help the baby to grow towards his
fulfilment. This is the beginning
of the salvation offered to him by God through those who are responsible for
loving and caring for him. It is important to emphasise this point that salvation
comes to us from God and through our fellow men. If we imagine it coming in some way directly from God then we
start to lose track of reality, and as we have said, the Christian God is God
in the reality of this world, in its space and time and material existence.
If we ever lose our hold on that truth then we have made it possible to
argue that really everyone is saved, that anything else is unfair, and so on. The world then becomes a puppet show, and ourselves
marionettes dancing and jerking on strings manipulated by the puppet master.
But if we believe that God has entrusted us with the task of bringing
his salvation to each other, then this restores us to the dignity of being the
'images of God'. Then we must
take our duties seriously; we must do our best to be good for our families and
partners, to be good parents and good friends.
And we must do what we can to ensure adequate healthcare and education,
proper work opportunities and decent housing for all.
Christians have sometimes been accused of looking to some other world,
and thereby neglecting to care for this one through social, intellectual and
political action. If this is true
it would be because we have not understood that God has given us his saving
power, the love which is the only power he has, to use on his behalf.
The Jewish people have a saying which expresses this: they say that as
God could not be everywhere, he made mothers.
So what a mother does really matters for her child’s fulfilment, and
we rob parenting, and human attempts at growth, of any seriousness if we say
that God will make it all right in the end, whatever we do.
It is true that his salvation and his mercy and his love are beyond
anything we can ever calculate or even hope for, but that does not mean that
we can just leave it all to him and accept no responsibility for ourselves.
Our only proper course is to act for others as though their salvation
were entirely up to us, and then leave the outcome entirely up to God. Returning then to the mother’s care for her unborn
baby, it is her responsibility, supported by her husband and family, to do all
she can to ‘save’ her child by her appropriate loving actions, rescuing
him from the dangers of a damaging start, and setting him on the road of
freedom to grow. She would try to
eat what is healthy and to avoid harmful substances and infections.
Her husband and family would help her to get enough rest and avoid
undue stress. Her society would
direct good medical research towards knowledge about what is best for the
developing foetus, and would ensure that there is decent housing and adequate
financial provision for every child coming into the world. After the baby has been born, its needs extend to
include warmth, shelter, air, cleanliness, safety, medical care.
Now as before, he is absolutely dependent upon the care he receives
from his family and community if he is to survive and grow.
And his development as a person is even less an automatic process than
is his physical growth. Only with the saving help of others can he develop the
ability to move, to talk, to understand and communicate, to relate to people
and to behave socially. Although
we have said that love is more a matter of will and action than of feelings,
we have also stressed the importance of the feelings we experience in our
relationships. It has been said
that a baby can receive adequate material care and yet not thrive if the care
is given in a cold impersonal way, without warmth and affection.
He must not only be loved: he must know and feel that he is loved.
6.
SALVATION
IS LOVE ACCEPTED WITH TRUST: ABRAHAM If we now look to the beginning of what has been called
the ‘Salvation History’ in the Bible we may see how this first stage of
growth of a person through love is reflected in the accounts of Genesis and
Exodus. We saw that God brought
our race into being, and that he gave us all that we would need to live and
grow. And we understand from the
accounts that he did this for our sake, and not to fulfil any need or purpose
of his own. The biblical writers
depict God as creating us so that we may share the life and happiness which he
enjoys and not so that he can have someone to worship and serve him, just as
parents ideally bring a child into the world to give him life and a chance of
happiness, rather than to flatter them with his achievements or to insure
their old age. Persons should
come into being to be loved, not to be used. The next episode we will look at is one which is
regarded by all ‘People of the Book’, the Christians, Jews and Muslims, as
the beginning of the history of their relationship with God.
This is the story of Abraham (called ‘Abram’ at the beginning of
the story). Abraham was born in
Ur, then went with his father and all his family to settle in Haran.
There God spoke to him: ‘Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country
and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make
your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse:
and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves." So
Abram went, as the Lord had told him.'
God asks Abraham to do
something very hard: he asks him to leave his family and everything he knows,
and to believe that he will find a land, have many descendants and be a great
man to all future generations. And
Abraham puts his faith in God, and goes.
God promises to love and care for Abraham, and Abraham trusts that
promise and accepts that love. This,
as we shall see in looking at early childhood, is a portrayal of the essential
foundation of a person’s growth: we need to receive love and to accept and
trust it, however difficult that may seem, if we are to grow towards our
fulfilment. As the story goes on we see Abraham’s trust being
tested. God has said that Abraham
will be the father of a nation, but he has no son and his wife is past the age
of childbearing. When he
expresses his doubt God ‘brought him outside and said, “Look toward
heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them……So shall
your descendants be.” And he
believed the Lord: and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.’ Later we see that Abraham has
come to live in the land, as God had said that he should, but he still has
moments of doubt even in the face of God’s assurances: ‘And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you
out from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.”
But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” God then gives Abraham his
most solemn promise, in the form of a covenant: ‘On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram,
saying, “To your descendants I give this land,…”
(Genesis 25 : 18) ‘…and God said to him, “Behold my covenant is
with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.
No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for
I have made you the father of a multitude of nations…And I will establish my
covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their
generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants
after you.”’
(Genesis 17 : 3-5, 7) This covenant, made with Abraham and renewed with
Moses, is for the Jewish people the fundamental element of the relationship
between God and man. For
Christians it has the same significance, but a significance confirmed and
transformed at the Last Supper, when Jesus renewed the covenant in his own
blood. In the covenant God offers
salvation to the human race through Abraham and his descendants, choosing
freely to promise them his unconditional and unending love.
Abraham begins to accept salvation for the human race by having faith
in God’s promise, even though it appears to be impossible.
This act of faith and acceptance of love is all that is needed for
Abraham to be ‘reckoned righteous’, or ‘saved’.
God makes a solemn covenant of his enduring love for us; and Abraham,
representing all the children of God who will follow him, promises to trust in
that love. Although there are some historical elements which have
been connected to the story of Abraham, we do not need to know to what extent,
if at all, this is a factual account. The
biblical writer has used the well-known legend from his community’s
tradition to present the truth that God has freely chosen to give us his love,
and that man’s salvation lies in his faith in and acceptance of that love.
The truth offered here is of the greatest importance to
our understanding of our human condition.
In the story we see that Abraham did nothing to gain God’s love:
God simply chose to love him. Love
cannot be earned or deserved: it is a gift of free choice.
Any parent, marriage partner, friend, who feels that he or she deserves
to be loved is probably doomed to disappointment; not because they are not
loveable, or because there is no such thing as duty, but because love demanded
cannot be freely given, and because love is too great a thing to be bought or
bargained for. Love is pure ‘grace’
– a term from the Christian tradition which has been disastrously
misunderstood. ‘Grace’ is
precisely the word used in Christian theology to indicate God’s undeserved
love, yet for some time it has come to mean the exact and corrosive opposite,
an almost material commodity which we can earn from God by ‘being good’. If we look back to the child in his first years we can
say with certainty that he must be offered unconditional love if he is to be
‘saved’, freed to grow and develop in confidence and openness to all that
he will experience. If he is
given love only when he is a ‘good boy’ instead of unconditionally, we
will see a person distorted from the beginning of his life in a way which will
be very difficult to overcome. One
thing upon which developmental psychologists would agree is that everyone
needs to be accepted, loved and valued for themselves, and not for anything
they may have or do. The person
who does not receive this affirmation of his worth, especially in his earliest
years, must always be seeking it, and his need will imprison him within
himself, curbing his growth and cutting him off from others. It is essential that a child should be offered
unconditional love, and that he should accept and trust that love.
This is the basis of all his future faith in himself, in others, and in
the possibility of goodness and happiness in this world or beyond.
We will be referring to the work of Erik Erikson, a leading
developmental psychologist, whose ideas on how human beings develop throughout
their life cycle form the basis of much of the work done on this subject.
Erikson proposes that we all go through a specific set of stages as we
proceed from infancy to old age, and he has identified particular tendencies,
needs and qualities which he believes to be associated with each stage.
He says that at the stage of 0-1 years, if a baby is cared for with
warmth and affection he develops a sense of trust, seeing the world as a safe
place to be and people as helpful and dependable.
But if he does not receive that care he develops a sense of mistrust,
fear and suspicion and can become apathetic and withdrawn.
If the child does achieve an attitude of basic trust rather than
mistrust, Erikson says that he can then develop the human quality of hope, the
first of a number of qualities which build upon each other in a person who is
growing well. The story of Abraham shows us that when a human being
receives unconditional love and responds with trust he is able to go out into
life and pursue the destiny which has been placed before him, and this is a
picture which modern developmental psychology would endorse.
8.
LOVE
SETS US FREE : THE EXODUS We said that a person who does not receive that affirmation of his worth which love gives him will be imprisoned within himself by his need, lacking the freedom he must have if he is to develop his potential. The biblical story which offers us a picture of how we are rescued from this imprisonment is the story of the Exodus. We are told that God’s people were in captivity and slavery in Egypt, and that God chose one man, Moses, to rescue the people and lead them towards freedom in the land he had promised them through Abraham. God gave his love to his people, with no prior action on their part; he saved them from a captivity which threatened their survival, and began the long process of caring for them as they set out on their journey towards their fulfilment in the Promised Land. This dramatic story of rescue from a wicked king, of
terrible plagues, of the seas parting just in time for the people to escape,
only to sweep together and drown the pursuing enemy, this is a story in the
best tradition of the folk tale, reaching deep into our minds and emotions
with its archetypal figures and events. As
such it is able to portray to us our feelings of helplessness and need, and
the joy and gratitude we can experience when someone loves us, setting us free
to be ourselves. The stories of Creation and of Abraham may be seen as
portraying the needy state of mankind. Then
we are given an account of how God has offered us salvation from this state,
in acting through a particular chosen person to rescue a people from slavery,
and set them free to become the People of God, the race of Israel.
If the story of the Exodus were regarded as a myth it could not then be
seen as a revelation of how God acts in history and through people.
There can be little doubt that the facts of such an event cannot be
recovered, and that there are fictional elements and additions in the story,
but it is essential to the biblical concept of what man is and what God does
for him that the Exodus account should be understood as being based on an
historical event. The Exodus is not just a folk tale: it is regarded by
both Jews and Christians as the great saving act of God upon which their faith
is founded. It is not just a
story illustrating how the parents’ love saves and frees a child, building
his trust and giving him hope in his future: it is the account of the act of
God’s love which gave us the power to help our children in this way.
In the Christian sacrament of Baptism the parents bring to their child
the saving love of God, given to us in the Exodus and in Christ’s death and
resurrection. It is in this love, and through the love they give, that the
child is set free.
9.
LOVE,
IF IT IS TO SAVE, MUST BE ACCEPTED AND LIVED
: MORALITY ‘So God saved his people and set them on their
journey to the Promised Land’. That
sounds rather like the end of the story: ‘And so they travelled off into the
sunset, and lived happily ever after’.
But we know that this is not what happened in the biblical story, and
that it is not what happens in our lives. If you have been given a gift, can anything prevent you
from benefiting from it? It could
of course be taken away from you, by the person who gave it to you or by
someone else. But let us say that
this does not happen: can anything then prevent you from receiving it?
Yes: you could refuse to accept it or use it. How and why would a person refuse to accept the gift of
love? Can a baby refuse to accept
his mother’s love? At first it
is impossible for him to do so, but by four or five years old, or sometimes
earlier, he can begin to act against that love. He can refuse, displease, annoy, be naughty.
Some of the actions which his mother does not like are just a matter of
his curiosity, his attempts to learn new things and to do things for himself
in his own way. But there are
actions which are directed against others.
The idea of total innocence and goodness in childhood is just not true.
Even quite young children act against others and against love. They may not be fully conscious of what they are doing, but
neither are they behaving ‘instinctively’ or ‘naturally’.
Animals do not behave in this complex and irrational way.
Why we do this is the mystery we have referred to in the doctrine of
Original Sin, the mystery of our having a nature which has been turned towards
harm for ourselves and others. We are now looking at the beginning and the meaning of
human morality. A person needs to
receive and accept love in order to survive, grow and develop.
But just as the giving is a free process, so also the receiving becomes
a free process as the person becomes old enough to choose consciously.
People can refuse to accept, or can act against, the love upon which
their lives depend. And they do,
which seems nothing short of madness. Unless people realise that morality is about accepting
and giving love, or refusing to love and be loved, they may get a distorted or
trivial view of it. Young people
often assume that it is natural, even attractive, to be ‘a bit bad’, and
that it is not human to be too ‘goody-goody’.
If they are talking about false piety, about harsh rules, or about
being conformist and anxious to please in order to be thought good and
respectable, then there is truth in what they say because these things have
little to do with real human goodness. But
once we see ’badness’ or ‘sin’ as a matter of acting against
life-giving love, then we can no longer regard sin as natural, or think of our
wrong actions as being ‘not really bad’.
There is no neutral ground in morality: to a greater or lesser degree
we are either accepting or refusing, giving or withholding love, in every
action of our lives. Of course this does not mean that it is always easy to
know what would be the most loving thing to do in any given situation.
That is why we say that there are ‘grey areas’ in morality, and why
good people may take opposing views on such matters as euthanasia, artificial
fertilisation and re-marriage. Every
person has to make their own moral judgement about their actions, on the basis
of the best guidance they can obtain. But
we can take wrong decisions and harm may result, even when we have done our
best to get things right. In such
a case our action is a moral one and does not diminish us, yet the harm will
occur because we have not fully understood the consequences of our decision.
10. THE STAGES OF MORAL
GROWTH: FROM RULES TO LOVE It is obvious that it is not an easy matter to do what
is best, and in this as in every other aspect of ourselves, we are not born
knowing what is good or bad for us and for others. We have to learn those things from the people whose task it
is to grow us in love. Psychologists have offered descriptions of the various
stages we go through in our development as moral persons.
One such description might be as follows:-
(the ages are of course very approximate) 0 – 2 years:
There is no real possibility of acting against love.
The parents physically prevent the child from damaging himself or
others. 3 – 8 years:
The parents’, and then also the teachers’, care operates to an
increasing extent through rules given to the child for his safety and well
being. He keeps or breaks these
rules, but without fully understanding that they are for his benefit. His main motivation for keeping them will be to please the
adults. 9 – 12 years: Parents
and teachers and society in general begin to ask the young person to impose
self-control and self-discipline, while still providing a ‘safety net’ of
rules and external discipline for him. The
young person can gain self-control and act for the benefit of himself or
others, or he can refuse to be controlled by himself or by any authority,
acting instead in a way which is dangerous or detrimental to himself or
others. Now his motivation is
primarily a matter of gaining the approval of his friends, and he is as likely
to conform to the ‘rules’ of his peer group as to accept guidance from his
family and teachers. 16+ : The
parents show their love and care by giving the young person increasing amounts
of freedom, independence and responsibility.
To a greater and greater extent they no longer guard him from the
consequences of his own actions, and this makes it the hardest part of parental loving.
The young person goes on to become an adult, either acting and
developing against what his parents’ love was meant to grow in him, or
making use of it to become a free moral being motivated by love in all that he
does.
11.
FROM
PUNISHMENT TO CONSEQUENCES An essential part of the maturing of a moral being is a
maturing of his understanding of punishment.
At first the child sees it as something arbitrarily imposed upon him by
others when he has done something which they do not like.
But he should gradually come to understand that punishment is a
safeguard and a deterrent, an artificial ‘wall’ put up to protect him from
having to suffer the real consequences of his actions. We may illustrate this in the following way:-
Unfortunately, even when we are supposedly adult we do
not always see or care about the consequences of what we do, and as a result
we harm ourselves and those around us. In
order to limit the extremes of harm which may be inflicted in this way each
society has to impose laws, like the rules we give to young children, and
punishments to deter people from breaking them. Once again, punishments such as fines or imprisonment are
artificial substitutes for the real consequences to the offender, and to his
family and society, which he is too immature to care about or understand. We have suggested that a person will not be likely to
be morally stunted in this way as an adult if he has had sound loving as a
child. To the extent that he has
received and accepted his parents’ love, expressed at the appropriate stages
in rules and punishments, to that extent he may be ‘saved’ from the harm
and hurt and unsatisfactory development which he might otherwise have
suffered. Their discipline and
guidance were an essential yet temporary expression of their love, intended
not to keep him in obedience but to guard and guide him as he moves towards
freedom and autonomy.
12.
ACCEPTING
GOD’S LOVE: THE COMMANDMENTS If we now go back to the scriptures we may see a
similar picture of saving love being given by God through the different stages
of his people’s development. In
the Exodus we see God leading them out of Egypt, and then protecting and
caring for them by night and day as they make their way towards their future
life. At first the people cried
and complained constantly that they had no food, no water, and that they
should have been left in Egypt where they had plenty.
God patiently answered their cries and supplied all their needs. But then in due time God taught his people how to
co-operate with him in his care of them rather than acting against his love in
a self-destructive way. Like a
father guiding his young children, God gave his people rules to keep them safe
and growing towards maturity. This
is how we may see the event in which he gave the Ten Commandments to Israel.
These laws formed part of God’s covenant with them, renewed now
through Moses, which assured them that if they followed his guidance they
would journey safely towards their freedom in the Promised Land.
(Exodus 20 :
1 – 17) The Commandments originated in the time of Moses, said
to be around 1250BC, and were recorded in the book of Exodus, written in about
1000BC. They came down to the
biblical writer from the earliest traditions of his community, couched in
terms very like the law-codes of the Ancient Near East, the best known of
these being the code of Hammurabi. Such
law codes set out the terms of the relationship between the king and his
people. They would begin by
indicating those things which the king had done for the people, the actions
which gave them reason to trust and obey him.
The king would then set out his laws regarding their conduct
towards him and towards each other.
The contract offered was not an equal one but it did promise that if
the people obeyed the laws the king would give them his protection.
This arrangement of protection given in return for duties performed is
not unlike that offered in the English feudal system. When we look at the Ten Commandments we see that they
are set out in this law-code pattern: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the
land of Egypt, and out of the house of bondage.”
-
The record of the king’s past actions for his people “You shall have no other
gods before me. - The duties owed to the one who protects the people. These are not arbitrary, or for the benefit of the king himself. It makes sense that the kingdom cannot be kept safe if the people are dividing their loyalties, or are offering disrespect to the one who embodies their nationhood. “Honour your father and mother….. -
Rules of conduct within the community.
If the people are not at peace with one another then they will be weak
in defending themselves against an enemy, and their king will not be able to
protect them. There has been discussion about how we should regard
the Ten Commandments. Are they
simply a law-code imposed upon an ancient desert people to ensure their safety
under, and allegiance to, their leader – in this case the God of their
people? Or are they a universal
code of morality, given by God for all times?
They were indeed a tribal law-code, and as such they would have been an
effective and practical guide for the lives of that particular people.
But they also form an integral part of the covenant which is
constitutive of the relationship between God and his people, in both the
Jewish and Christian religions. In
this context they have a universal application, giving as they do very sound
and indeed common sense indications of what must be our attitude to God and to
our fellow men if our relationships with them are to make sense and offer us
security. We can see, however, that the Commandments, and the
endless rules derived from them ever since, are not needed by anyone who has
grown to the understanding that they are summed up in the injunctions, “Love
God” and “Love your neighbour”. As
Jesus indicated, (Luke 16 :
16-17), these do not replace or do away with the Commandments: they
express them fully and simply for anyone who has grown to moral maturity. The biblical writer has given us a picture of God
giving rules to his people to protect them from harm while they were as yet
unable to understand the real consequences of their actions, and this is a
picture which is in keeping with our present perception of the stages through
which morality must develop. Similarly
the writer portrays God as imposing punishments for breaking those rules, and
we may now think of those punishments as defending a vulnerable people from
the consequences of their actions if these were left unchecked, rather than
seeing them as the vengeful responses of an angry despot. There is a sense of unease when the God of the Old Testament
is said to punish severely those who break his laws. But the writers are expressing an understanding of laws and
punishments which we can recognise as being true to the early stages of a
person’s moral development. The ‘God of the New Testament’ is of course the
same God, but now he is seen as the Father of a Son whose morality is wholly
expressive of his love, a Son in whom all mankind is able to achieve that
maturity. In Jesus, and in his
teaching, we are able to be moral adults, though it is of course questionable
how many of us actually attain this level.
But it is regrettable that the freedom from the necessity of observing
rules which Jesus’ teaching on love implies has not always been emphasised
by the institutional Church. While
it is true that the Church must talk in terms of rules and sanctions for those
who are at the stage of needing that protective ‘wall’, it is also true
that people must be allowed and encouraged to grow towards a more mature
morality, and this the Church, like many an over-protective parent, has not
been so willing to do. It would
seem that there are good people whose religious upbringing has encouraged them
to remain in the moral stage seen in the pre-teen child and portrayed in the
early history of the people of Israel. Such
people will continue to look for rules to govern their behaviour, and will see
security in the Ten Commandments, the laws of the Church, and other such
authoritative pronouncements long after they have become mature adults in most
other aspects of their lives. It
is not that those rulings are not valid guides to moral living, but that they
cannot be seen as replacing the conscience of the person who has achieved a
mature understanding of his relationship to God and to others.
Such a conscience must be a more subtle and sensitive guide in
particular situations than any general ruling could be. The person who clings to rules for a sense of security
and certainty in his moral life will also see divine punishment as a real
thing, rather than as a substitute, a metaphor, for the actual consequences of
his actions. While a person is
unable to understand the harm which sin causes in himself and to others, the
belief that God literally punishes us may act as a protective deterrent ‘wall’
for him. But if he continues to
hold this belief unchanged into adult life then he cannot become morally
mature, since he will be acting out of fear and not love.
Such a belief must also lead him into insuperable problems about the
mercy and the justice of God. Even
if he avoids the horrific idea that suffering in this life is a punishment for
sin, he will still believe that God has made a place hereafter where suffering
will be inflicted upon us by God, to pay us for what we have done wrong.
It is not surprising that we should hold such an idea at an early stage
when we are trying to be good by keeping rules, but it is wholly inappropriate
once we have begun to grasp what goodness really means. We have said that sin is a lack of that love which
grows and sustains persons. If a
person were to refuse, totally and absolutely, to love or be loved, then he
must lose his selfhood, all that he is as a person.
This lost and desolate state would certainly be what we have called ‘hell’.
But God never designed such a state, nor could he ever ‘send’ a
person to it, as this would violate his love and their freedom.
No parent constructs a hell of homelessness, abuse and despair for his
child as a punishment for disobedience. God,
like that parent, can only watch helplessly as the person creates that state
in and for himself. We know that
we do suffer for our lack of love, but it is difficult to believe that any of
us could achieve that completely loveless condition.
Such a hell must be possible, not as a punishment but as the potential
consequences of a loveless life, yet we may believe that no one has ever made
it his ultimate reality. If
anyone has, we may not hold God to account for it.
He created us to be free to love or not to love.
His justice is expressed in the fact that what we do has its results in
what we are. His overwhelming
love and mercy are expressed in the fact that, like any loving parent, he
would give his life to save us from those consequences, but without robbing us
of our essential freedom.
13. GOD PURSUES US WITH HIS SAVING LOVE: YET WE ARE NOT SAVED The writers of the Old Testament have set before us a
history of the people of Israel in which God constantly offers them his saving
love, while the people constantly act against that love by breaking the laws
of his covenant with them. It is
a sad story, and one we could parallel with any story we know of a child
hurting himself and his parents as he grows, constantly making mistakes,
getting into bad company and bad ways, while his parents do everything they
can to keep him from harm. The biblical writers show us God as just such a loving
parent, but this is just one of the many metaphors they use in trying to
express what they believe him to be for us.
Among these we see him as king, as shepherd, as vineyard keeper;
sometimes he is shown as a husband, perhaps even as a devoted servant, willing
to suffer anything for love. If
we were to take one of those pictures, that of the husband, we would be able
to use it to see the whole salvation history of the Old Testament for what it
really is – a love story – the story of the turbulent relationship between
God, the ‘husband’, and ourselves, the ‘wife’, whether as individuals
or as a race. (See
‘The Bible Story’ for an example It may seem strange to think of the relationship
between God and man in this way, but in fact that is exactly how the prophet
Hosea portrayed it in his story of the loving, forgiving husband and his
faithless wife (Hosea CH 1-2).
And indeed the biblical writers as a whole have presented us with a
moral tale of this kind, constructed from the events of Israel’s history and
its traditions. It has been
suggested that they were attempting to explain how Israel could be God’s
chosen people and yet, far from becoming victorious over all the nations, they
were still rather insignificant and frequently the subjects for conquest.
In explanation of this, the Old Testament sets before us a sad tale of
how the people continually broke their covenant with God and acted against his
saving love. We are told,
particularly in the narratives of the Kings, that time and again the people
did wrong, and that this always resulted in harm and misery for them – as it
did in the period of the Exile. But
always the writers show us a picture of God pursuing the people with his
saving love. In looking at how persons develop, we saw that they may
receive all the love they need to grow towards their fulfilment, and yet may
refuse or be unable to accept that saving love. This fact of human existence is graphically illustrated in
the Old Testament accounts: we see God giving his people a home in which to
grow, rules to keep them safe and loving, judges, kings and priests to guard
and guide them and to represent his love to them; and yet we see the people
constantly refusing, misusing and misunderstanding that love.
Why? Why do we do this?
Why do we reject and misuse the love which alone can save us and allow
us to grow? What can anyone do,
what can God do, to bring us to the love that saves us?
**************************************** For us men and for our salvation ****************************************
1. SALVATION: WHAT
DOES IT MEAN? What does ‘Salvation’
mean? What are we saved from?
The story of the Fall of man suggests to us that it is the failure to
love which lies at the root of evil and suffering, and of our need to be
saved. To understand Salvation we
need to understand love, what it is and what it does.
2.
WHAT IS LOVE? Love has to do with the
feelings, but it cannot be too dependent upon them since they are
unpredictable. Love is
principally an action. 3.
WHAT DOES LOVE
DO? Love creates, grows, sustains
and fulfils persons. As persons
are of supreme importance, so therefore is love.
4.
SIN:
THE LACK OF LOVE Sin is the lack of love.
Original Sin is our inborn need for love and our fatal tendency to act
against it. Actual sins are our
own actions by which we harm ourselves and others.
Our Salvation would be to receive the love we need and to be able
therefore to overcome our harmful tendency.
5.
A PERSON
GROWS: SAVED BY LOVE People are saved by love.
We see the beginning of this in the mother who saves the child in her
womb by her loving care for its needs. God
saves the child through her, and through the support of all who love him as he
grows.
6. SALVATION IS LOVE ACCEPTED WITH TRUST:
ABRAHAM The story of Abraham shows us
that Salvation is love freely given, and accepted with trust.
7.
LOVE MUST BE
UNCONDITIONAL We need unconditional love if
we are to grow well. Erikson
tells us that if the young baby is loved in this way he will develop a basic
sense of trust, and from this he can then achieve the quality of hope, which
is essential for human growth.
8.
LOVE
SETS US FREE: THE EXODUS As the story of Exodus
illustrates, love sets us free from our state of helplessness and gives us the
chance to seek our fulfilment. 9.
LOVE,
IF IT IS TO SAVE, MUST BE ACCEPTED AND LIVED:
MORALITY But if love is to save us it
must be accepted, and must be lived out in what we do. 10.
THE
STAGES OF MORAL GROWTH: FROM
RULES TO LOVE Our morality develops in
stages: from following rules because of rewards and punishments we should grow
towards doing what we believe is right and loving, just for its own sake. 11.
FROM
PUNISHMENT TO CONSEQUENCES Punishment is a false ‘wall’,
put up to protect the immature from the real consequences of their actions.
12.
ACCEPTING
GOD’S LOVE: THE COMMANDMENTS God gave his people the Ten
Commandments, and punishments for breaking them, in order to protect them
while they were learning to act out of love.
13.
GOD
PURSUES US WITH HIS SAVING LOVE: YET
WE ARE NOT SAVED God has offered us the love we
need, yet like the people of the Old Testament, we are not necessarily saved.
Why? What can anyone do,
what can God do, to bring us to the love that saves us? Return to Home Page Return to Book Contents & Summary Start of Chapter 3 Go forward to Chapter 4 |