What is morality? According to my tweet peeps here are three working definitions.

jramboz: A sense of what is right and wrong. Now, how you define “right” and “wrong” is where it gets tricky.

sidfaiwu: RE morality: 1st attempt at a definition for me: a system of principles aimed as separating right from wrong.

Rasplundjr: Morality is the personal code of Right and wrong it’s that line that you can’t cross no matter what

I think that those are all certainly good definitions and nothing earth shattering. I’ve heard it said by a number of people that if you aren’t a Christian, you can’t be moral. If the above definitions of morality are sound then I can’t quite agree with that. I think that there are plenty of moral non-Christians and more than a few immoral Christians. Morality is very subjective.

It might be determined by what you believe religiously. You might engage in all manner of intense moral calculus to come up with your own code. You could look to certain people in your life or ones that you admire. All of these are ways of coming up with your own moral sense. Interestingly enough the words moral or morality don’t come up that often in the Bible. A quick search only gives me between one and five hits depending on the translation.

Now righteousness that’s a different story. I get over five hundred hits on that. So what’s my point? My point is that I think when we point fingers at non-believers and talk about how “immoral” they are or how unethical they are, we need to check ourselves. The only thing we need to be concerned with is righteousness. What is righteousness? Well I suppose it could be defined as Biblical or Godly morality. That seems a good place to start.

“A-ha!” I hear you say. “Then we can be sure that the non-believer is unrighteous.” Of course they are, and so are you. You don’t have righteousness because of your own acts, though by faith in God you may come to live a life that is more in line with what God wants (of course even those acts are corrupted by our nature), in fact you don’t have righteousness at all. The only righteousness anyone has is credited to them by faith and that through grace (which means you didn’t deserve it). As a result it shouldn’t be something that you lord over others. It is the grace that you received your right standing with God and it is that grace that you should share.

Christians are in such a hurry to take God’s righteousness (as best we understand it) and make it our morality. If we stopped there it might not be bad. Unfortunately, we try and cloak others with it by making our own laws some reflection of God’s Law. We might claim to be doing the world a favor by making it that much more difficult to be “immoral”. We think we are encouraging people to live the right way. We want our country to benefit from the laws of God as it has been passed down to us. We want the world to see the benefits of living in a Christian country with Christian laws.

Even if we did stop at our own fingertips, what does that do to Romans 3:20? “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” So by taking our morality, informed as it may be by God’s righteousness, and using it in a wrong headed way we do harm. We become not Christians, living our lives informed by the grace that we received and passing that grace on to others, but moralists using codes to fence in sheep. Instead of saying “Live the right way!” we should be aware that none can live up to that standard. That’s the point of the Gospel. We all fall short of righteousness and there is covering enough for us all, whatever our morality might be.