As it turns out, we have the capacity to turn almost any virtue into a vice, so creative are we sinners. It takes no imagination at all to envision a man who is nice, considerate, and generous (we would call those "virtues") for the purpose of getting a girl to go to bed with him (we would call that "selfish"). The man so humble (we would call that a virtue) that he cannot admit to believing in anything at all "because I just might be wrong" is frozen, unable to function (a bad thing). And so it goes.
Paul wrote even about spiritual gifts:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing (1 Cor 13:1-3).Without love, there is no value in the good things of speaking in tongues, prophecy, wisdom, or generosity. You see, virtue is not virtue all by itself.
People debate about the nature of Man. Is he intrinsically good? Is he intrinsically bad? The Bible paints Man as a sinner at the core. Moderns prefer to think of him as a good guy gone astray. You know ... "Babies are innocent; it takes time for them to turn bad." Because we start out good and then stray. But when human beings are not only able, but prone to turn virtue into vice, it seems to me the biblical description ("All have sinned", "dead in sin", "slave to sin", etc.) is much more appropriate than the modern perspective "We're all basically good". When we can take good things like sex (designed by God for specific and wonderful purposes) and virtue and even spiritual gifts and make them into vulgarities, it does not speak well of humans.
2 comments:
Good is a meaningless word anyway if there is not a objective and true standard by which to measure it. I got a radio talk show host once to say that Hitler (1) should not be judged so harshly by simply applying his (the talk show host's) standards of judgement to his own argument. Once he realized what he had said and where the discussion was going, he hung up on me.
1. The guy was saying that President Bush was taking the same path as Hitler did in order to take over the world and steal all the oil.
Since the bulk of my readers are Christians, I would imagine that "no objective standard" is not an issue. For all atheists (including "practical atheists"), it would be. Very few atheists read my stuff. None of them agree with it.
Post a Comment