This paper brought up so many ideas and made me think hard about a lot of things after which I came to no greater understanding or conclusion of the matter. This paper presented a lot of the same ideas about the Moral Law as Lewis talked about in Mere Christianity. Lewis talks about there being "sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another." and that our feelings related to good and evil "have been socially conditioned."
We talked in class about how it used to be socially acceptable for men to have multiple wives and how that has evolved today (in most cultures) into being frowned upon by society. Was that because our morality evolved? When we look at Paul's letters, we see that this change in morality happened between the Old and the New Testaments. I find this really interesting to have happened before the Christian church really exploded. Could it be that the evolution of Greek and Roman culture changed and since our world has been so heavily influenced by Greek and Roman Culture that the rest of the world's view of polygamy changed as well?
Lewis talked about an overarching standard to which all morality conforms. The views of what is good and what is evil can vary from culture to culture, but there is some center that all humanity is drawn to. Why is that? Can man even "create values" or a can a "community choose it's 'ideology' as men choose their clothes." I would provide some deep theologically influenced answer to this question, but as Lewis so often says in his writings, I have no theological background other than growing up in the church and I am merely human. Usually I avoid these types of questions because I hate not having answers; but this class has stretched my thinking zone-almost to the point of insanity. If we knew the answers to everything though, we wouldn't need faith and without faith-our whole belief doesn't mean anything. I really liked how Lewis talked about how God is not a human and therefore cannot be comprehended by the human mind. The important things we need to know about God have been presented to us in the Bible and Creation-everything else, we can only try to understand. I'm still turning this over in my mind, but here's what I have so far :)
I really like your consideration of the Roman and Greek culture here. I think we as Christians can be tempted to say that all moral progress is the result of Christianity itself, when in fact God has plenty of other means of working things out in the word (insert reference to Common Grace here).
ReplyDeleteI also liked that you point out that the human mind cannot fully comprehend God. He has revealed himself to us in part (general and special revelation), but we do not/ cannot know all. This means we shouldn't be ashamed if we fail to find answers to difficult questions: sometimes wisdom comes, not in finding answers, but in searching for them.
I really like that this class makes us ask those questions you talked about that don't have any easy answer and maybe don't have answer we can find at all. In some ways I hate not knowing the answers to all the questions but in other ways I love it because it gives us something to pursue. It means that we'll never be without a question that is unanswered and think of how boring the world would be if all the questions were answered.
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