April 14, 2003
Valentine: America needs virtue & values
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___ABILENE--America desperately needs to recover a sense of virtues and values, Foy Valentine said during the T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology April 7-8.
___"Most American churches are alienated from any moral standards and almost utterly without any substantive commitment to reject wrong rather than do right," claimed Valentine, retired executive director of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission.
___Christian ethics, "the business of determining who Christian believers ought to become and what Christian believers ought to do in this world," has a long history but has grown into disfavor, he said, in
sisting it still defines faith and life.
___"Christian ethics has to do with believing and behaving. Christian ethics understands that humanity's supreme good is to know and do the will of God," he said.
___"Christian ethics is concerned with keeping faith and works joined together in vital union. Christian ethics is everlastingly engaged in mortal combat with Christianity's gravest heresy--the separation of religion and life, ... the sundering of church and the world."
___Although Christians have been taught Jesus' command to love God with their whole hearts and their neighbors as themselves, "we keep wallowing in scandal," Valentine observed.
___In addition to high-profile corporate failures, such as Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson, "we keep sliding down the slippery slope of the pedophile priests and crime-coddling bishops; ... reeling under the devastating blows of terrorism, violence, wars and rumors of wars, adultery, child abuse and greed; we keep tolerating perverted justice, bought elections and the shameless rejection of campaign financing in the political arena."
___Rather than addressing such moral ills, the church turns in upon itself, he declared.
___"We turn our attention interminably to building bigger barns, bigger temples, bigger cathedrals and bigger staffs; to good, safe uncontroversial matters like measuring the temple, counting the commandments, naming the apostles and mounting new crusades to talk about the Bible, talk about family, talk about spirituality, talk about evangelism or talk about missions."
___Several factors account for the "sorry plight of Christian ethics today," Valentine said. They include:
___ "Ethics is nearly always controversial, and any time institutionalism confronts controversy, the establishment nearly always prefers to run like a scalded dog. Bishops and administrators and CEOs very seldom welcome ethics-focused boat-rockers, status quo-disturbing prophets."
___ "Theologians, philosophers of religion, religion writers and CEO-style pastors are nearly always more comfortable in safe cubicles or secluded studies with unlisted telephones, far behind the dust and heat of frontline fighting where a body can get hurt."
___ Christians who intend to interpret religion for popular culture tend to argue fine points of theology, instead of helping people deal with the "excruciatingly hard work of Christian ethics as it has to do with war, peace with justice, abortion, male chauvinism, violence, terrorism, racism, dysfunctional families, systematic poverty, slum housing, citizenship, public affairs, vouchers, church-state separation, alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, gambling, pornography, television programming, corporate greed, world hunger and the like."
___ Contemporary church music, which influences worshippers, "is generally as free of ethics as a frog is of feathers."
___ "Preaching from today's pulpits mostly eschews ethics like the plague, pussyfoots around prophethood and recoils from relevance as if it were a coiled rattlesnake."
___Calling for a return to virtues and values, Valentine said: "We need this in the pulpits and the churches and most particularly from pastors who will take seriously the call to be upright and live beyond the shadow of any doubt and demonstrate it makes a difference to have been with Jesus."
___Virtues are personal qualities, such as purity, strength, valor, courage, uprightness of heart, integrity of soul and virility of spirit, Valentine said. Values are social qualities, "the irreducible minimum by which folks ought to live."
___Together, they comprise "ultimate seriousness" that undergirds both culture and religion, he said. Christians must give attention to this "if integrity is to be recovered and if civilization is to be preserved."
___Fortunately, despite the current outlook, Christian ethics is not in danger of annihilation, he said. Throughout Christ's church, "vigorous and formidable proponents, defenders and champions" still take up the cause of ethics.
___"The people of God need to discipline ourselves to preach, teach and write ethics so as to communicate the full gospel that reaches out with relevance to a needy world," Valentine urged. "The people of God need to embrace the insight that church is not steeples and stained glass but God's kind of folks doing God's kinds of things in this world here and now."
___
"Christian ethics is everlastingly engaged in mortal combat with Christianity's gravest heresy--the separation of religion and life."
The Baptist Standard
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