Morality and the Christian

kootvan wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangj  Campus

South Korea

Conjoin lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

            The word morality is derived from the word mores which is a habit which by the vote of the majority became consensus morality. 'Morality by the society' sounds very beautiful to the listener but one must know that they designed the concepts of morality basically apart from the Bible and preferably without. Inroads by the Bible are made by Christians participating in these meetings but in essence, the global tendency is to leave the Bible completely out of these considerations.

             Cutting the revelation of God out of the consideration of morality means that the society's concept of morality is in essence handicapped.

              People may argue that an ecumenical consideration of moralities of different religions will give one a fusion morality that can serve everyone and is thus of a high standard.  Not so for the Christian. Although a fusion of all religions may lead to the upholding of six of the ten commandments of the Bible, it is a fact that Sabbath, creatorship. only God worship demands, cannot be met.

              True morality is always revelation connected. It is embedded in a relationship with God and Adam and Eve received their morality directly from their walk and talk with Christ in the garden of Eden. Eve turned her back on the relationship with Christ and focussed on the beauty of the fruit. The forbidden fruit and forbidden zone. If she probably would have withstand that simple test of loyalty, 6000 years of pain would have been non-existent. The devil would have been destroyed then and all would have lived without pain into eternity. God had to proof to the heavenly beings that did not fall, that Satan was the origin of the problem and not the character or will of God.

               True morality came for Adam and Eve in direct walking and talking to God. Then after that God walked and talked with some individuals who wrote down the content of the revelation for later generations with the help of the Editor the Holy Spirit.

               True morality for us comes from a knowledge of His word. Without the Bible no decision for morality can be made. If it is made without the Bible the decision is bound to be skew or handicapped.

                From 30 BCE to 538 BCE the morality that was popular was Roman Morality. To try to say something positive of this, would be in contravention to the picture Procopius gave us of the last Roman emperor before he turned theologian in 538, the great law-collector Justinian and his wife Theodora. For those who did not read the online book of Procopius on the life of Justinian and his corrupt and vile wife, one can only say, you will shake your head.

From 538 to 1798 the Holy Roman Morality was an ecclessiastical morality as outlined by the Roman Catholic Church for this period. Deviations of these precepts led to persecutions and listed example can be found in the book by A. Helwig in 1610, 1630. Much is available also from other authors of the same time. Ecclessiastical morality should not be confused with biblical morality. Biblical morality is purely the morality from the Protestant Canon without the apocrypha or pseudepigrapha. However, Roman Catholic Morality is compounded from Bible, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Church Fathers, the Councils decisions and the decreeds of the Pope. The endresult was that the building blocks of this kind of morality was with bricks that had cracks (except the Protestant Canon Bible of course) and this is the major objection against Catholic Morality.

              When the Holy Roman Empire was superseded by the civil world order, the global rule was that a morality should be designed without any religious imput. Surprisingly, the Bible did play a major role in the setting up of the USA constitution and religion did play a backstage part. However, in 20th century terms, all such religious and biblical imput are to be set aside or denied or curtailed or even abandoned. The popular morality became the rule after the Second World War. A civil right focused morality that is void of any religious references are at place today. It is the vote of the majority and the consensus of nearly all. However, a Seventh-day Adventist cannot abide by such a concocted morality.

The morality is hybrid, fused, ecumenical, biblically skew and even opposed. So in the cradle of post-modernism, morality finds itself outside the Bible rather than inside.

Scholars talking about abortion, euthanasia, homosexual rights, feminine rights, anti-colonialism agitations, are doing so outside the borders of the Bible. A morality that needs to apologize for not following the biblical line of thought or that the Bible is for those days but we live in modern times, is bound to be skew and not appealing to any Seventh-day Adventist.

           Whether you want to talk about the rights of woman, clones, abortion, homosexuality, civil rights, anti-colonialism agitations, you have to go and ask what the biblical principles are regarding these matters. A Christian cannot just go with the flow of the majority vote in the area where they are residing. God's revelation gives the principles upon which a sober decision should be made.