by Matthew Raley My post two weeks ago on the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop 8 initiated parallel discussions, one with fellow evangelicals (reflected in last week's post), the other with progressives.

My friend Dr. Ben Carson is a composer at U.C. Santa Cruz. He has been wondering what sort of conservative I am if I don't think Christian morality should be legislated. Ben wrote, "What kind of conservative recognizes society as [an] inherently plural nation in which the state has no business re-institutionalizing religious rites? And wants Jesus' teachings to be considered on a level playing field of alternatives? I think you might consider embracing your inner leftist."

I replied that the legal expressions of Christian morality are breaking down because our culture no longer lives by Christian morality. I want the motive for Christian morality revived -- namely, love. Ethics unmotivated by love have no integrity. Until Christ's love drives us, rebuilding the legal forms of Christendom can only lead to hypocrisy.

Christianity aims at this transformation of the soul as the key to transforming all else in human life. When Christians are motivated once again by the infusion of love directly from Jesus Christ, I believe the integrity of Christian ethics will quickly produce the most attractive lifestyle on a playing field of alternatives. If Christians do not regain this Christ-infused motivation, they will lose the culture and their souls.

Such is the background for Ben's further questions, which I thought were important and insightful.

How can I build a moral philosophy on love, a concept "that doesn't have a clear definition, or a clear criterion that signals its absence or its presence?"

Ben elaborates that love is supposed to be the motivating force behind a wide range of social relationships, sexual and parental in particular. "But it's so easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated in our language...what check do you have against its ephemeral nature? Couldn't selfishness sometimes masquerade as love, and then motivate a 'morality' that is immoral? If our morality is guided by love, then how do you work with that vulnerability?"

My answer includes scripture references, which I hope will not be tedious but illustrative of a quite different mode of reasoning.

1. In the New Testament, love is not defined in the abstract, but is shown as personally embodied.

I think what Ben says about love is accurate: it is "easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated." The more love is formulated in the abstract, the more vulnerable to manipulation it is.

The NT exhibits Jesus Christ as the embodiment of love in several ways. The Gospel narratives show him as love in action. Doctrinally, Christ is the security for reconciliation between God and sinners because he died to pay for sin. Ethically, his self-sacrifice for the sake of his enemies is the ground for all moral decision-making (Philippians 2.1-18), and is the standard for love in marriage (Ephesians 5.22-33).

The most neglected way Christ is shown as the embodiment of love in the NT is his participation in unity with the Father (John 17).

So the NT answer to the question of how define love is to point to a man.

2. In the NT, love is generated only through interaction with Christ, who embodies it.

Christ's resurrection and return are essential parts of the growth of love in the NT. Because he lives now, he is able to give us new life (Colossians 2.6-15) and to form himself in us (Colossians 3.1-17). Because he will return, our ability to love as he loves will be consummated (1 John 2.28-3.3).

Conversely, the NT explicitly and repeated denies that there is pure good apart from the love of Christ (e.g. Colossian 2.16-23).

So, not only is Christ the defining man of love, but is the sole source of it. There is no abstract teaching in the NT that can discipline a person's mind-and-heart to conform to Christ's example. There is only Christ's personal energy.

3. In this moral philosophy, a church's role is two-fold: call people to interact with Christ and nurture his love in community.

Practically speaking, I have never been successful at changing anyone's behavior. I do not want to try anything so presumptuous. My role is to point to the love of Christ that a person has already experienced and help him or her proceed further with that love.

This kind of work can only occur in the context of deep trust and interaction. Law can't even approach it.

In sum, a moral philosophy derived from the NT must be predicated on unbreakable bonds with each other in Christ's love. NT love says, "My commitment to you is irrevocable because Christ's commitment to me is irrevocable."

Love in our society has become an easily-manipulated abstraction, in my view, because we flee belonging in favor of autonomy. We keep the exits from our relationships clear. Our society cannot have a vision of love without strong grounds for self-sacrifice, and I do not hear any such ground articulated by anyone, left or right.

by Matthew Raley Sometimes I slip statements into my posts to see who's paying attention to what. The award this week goes to my brother Chris, who spotted a matter of some importance in last week's post about the court decision on Prop 8.

What I said was,

Having entered the political fray with a fractured base — a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact — the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That’s elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.

So the enemies are homosexuals.

This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God.

Chris pulled out the last sentence: "That has a lot of implications. Like, to what extent do we do this to fellow Christians?"

My allusion was to James 1.19-21. In teaching how to endure temptation, James commands us to be "quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." He is warming up to say later that wrangling and fighting is demonic (3.13-13; 4.1-12).  But here, the basic reason he gives to resist anger is that "the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires."

Rather, we must lay aside our own wickedness, and "receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." The word of God implanted in the receptive heart-and-mind is the source of godly obedience. Our anger is not the source.

James would say that we do inflict our wrath on other believers to produce righteousness, and we must repent. Here are some specific ways that we do what James forbids:

1. We often rely on conformist instincts to uphold standards.

No one wants to provoke the community's anger and bring shame or rejection on themselves. It is a high cost to bear. So, much of the time, church-goers keep their heads down. They will avoid any public non-conformity to the church's explicit and implicit standards, hiding any behavior that might expose them to disapproval.

Threats of the anger of man, in this case, produce lying rather than truth.

James teaches that God's righteousness is produced when someone responds directly to God's goodness (1.18). "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures." Conformity to other human beings is spiritually barren.

2. We often use guilt manipulation to motivate people to godliness.

Guilt manipulation, to define it broadly, is making people feel bad about what they've done. It is what one human being does when trying to control another human being's behavior. This comes in a range of language from "Burn in hell, you sinner" to "We're disappointed in you." We do this because we know that shame is a disabling emotion.

In this method we, the human beings, are supposed to police sin and arrest it.

The use of shame is a kind of vengeance -- which is to say, the satisfaction of anger. It does not produce righteousness because it is disabling, not redeeming. God nurtures a living, joyful righteousness.

Obviously, a church needs to confront sins. James is not teaching that we can shirk that duty, nor am I. Rather, confronting sin must be done with abundant listening and the tender maintenance of meekness. God is the one who convicts sin, not us. It is his implanted word that has the power to save, not our emotional appeals.

3. We fight to preserve a culture that reflects our standards, believing that this will save future generations.

The whole motivation behind the campaign against gay marriage is to preserve our society's reflection of particular biblical values. This and other such issues are labeled the culture wars. They are social battlegrounds. The scenes of anger.

What these battles have unleashed in the conversation of Christians around me is not the righteousness of God. They have unleashed jealousy, mocking, lying, brawling, gossip, slander, and condemnation. If we "win," I can say with some confidence that not one soul will gain eternal life as a result. As for the souls of our children, many are filled with revulsion.

And all this for a goal that is of dubious value. Jesus Christ does not redeem human cultures. He redeems souls. Those redeemed souls then alter the character of the cultures in which they live.

James would not have shrunk from declaring God's will for sexuality, nor will I. But let the focus of our speech be where James focused his, on maintaining the meekness of souls to receive the implanted word.

No souls will be saved any other way than by the new birth in Jesus Christ.

by Matthew Raley There is only one issue that concerns me anymore.

I went through a conservative optimist phase in my not-so-distant youth, when I thought American society was salvageable by political means. I also went through a conservative pessimist phase, during which I groused about how days gone by were better than these.

I remain a conservative, but I follow the issues the way a sportsman follows athletes -- without a sense of personal investment. Today, I'm unimpressed with the teams of both right and left. Neither offers a coherent vision of what our culture should be.

The religious right is convinced that gay marriage is the tipping point for culture, where we shoot off the slippery slope into free-fall. So evangelicals across the country have poured resources into this battle appealing to the average American's supposed traditionalism.

Take that point of view apart.

1. The tipping point for our culture came decades ago. There was not a Christian campaign against no-fault divorce in California, the innovation that actually pushed the institution of marriage off its foundations. If evangelicals want state law to reflect marriage as God designed it, they should campaign for "One man, one woman, til death us do part."

Evangelicals won't be campaigning that way anytime soon because they've embraced the divorce culture. Statistically, as has been documented many times, there is no difference between the practice of evangelicals and other Americans. Anecdotally, I learned about divorce as a child by watching the splits of my parents' church friends.

Consider the consequences of so many broken evangelical families.

When the world says life is about personal fulfillment not personal holiness, we apparently agree. Christian counselors are sending couple after couple to the divorce courts on this basis -- and it's not as though this is a secret among evangelical church-goers. Our counseling center routinely helps couples who lost hope because of their Christian psychologists. In living this way, we have taught several generations of children that evangelical religion is about crying out to God on Sunday and being selfish during the week.

We have, indeed, manufactured the unbelieving majority in our country. The cynicism of young voters about traditional values was learned from church, not from Hollywood.

Gay marriage is not the tipping point. That point is long past.

2. Having entered the political fray with a fractured base -- a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact -- the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That's elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.

So the enemies are homosexuals.

This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God. And like all works of the Pharisees, it is doomed to ignominious failure.

Gays are not my enemies.

3. Appealing to the self-righteousness of the average American is anti-Gospel. The Bible teaches that the average American does not need a Savior from the sins of others, but from his own.

So much for the team on the right. The left has its own problems.

1. Not so long ago, the left was portraying the family as an oppressive institution. Academically, many analyzed family relationships in terms of economic power. Politically and culturally, many more worked to eliminate the legal and economic incentives to marry and stay married, to "educate" young people out from under sexual "repression," and to stigmatize the traditional family as a relic of 1950s conformism.

To a great extent, the left has succeeded in blasting away the living culture of marriage. But now that the oppressive structure has been overthrown, it seems to have an Arcadian mythic elegance. I sometimes wonder if same-sex marriage is leftism, wistful for bourgeois tenderness, bringing a picnic to the evocative ruins.

2. Last fall the response of some to Prop 8's victory was to search out its supporters and harass them. This was condemned by many gay marriage supporters for what it was, thuggery. But there is still an unwillingness, most recently expressed by the New Hampshire legislature, to codify religious protections into law with regard to this issue, as if those who oppose gay marriage, as I do, should be compelled to endorse it.

This elevation of gay marriage over the health of civil society will inflame, not persuade.

The maneuvering of left and right leaves me cold because it obscures the one issue I care about.

Marriage is an expression of Jesus Christ's redeeming love for his church. I care that his power to transform and nurture is exhibited deeply in my relationship with my wife and sons. I care that his power is exhibited in the congregation I serve. I care that his power should reach people who at this moment may be antagonized by his name.

I'm grateful to the homosexuals who have come to the church, and those who've admitted me into their lives as a friend. In a time of rancor, I appreciate the chance to show respect and care even in the face of profound disagreement. I am confident that Christ can and will show himself in this way.

The California Supreme Court's decision yesterday contributes nothing to this overriding project.