This week STEP class is about church teachings on morality. This week's assignment asks:
Explain the basic principle of Christian morality. What is at the heart of all behaviors and actions?
As usual no more than 200 words, so here goes:
Love is at the core of Christian morality. "This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:12-13) "So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (1 Cor 13:13) "I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt 5:44)
Loving our neighbor is hard. Loving our enemy is even harder. But CS Lewis put it well:
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
Yet, as this week's reading explained, love is not enough. "Love alone, set adrift from moral direction, can easily descend into sentimentality ...." By itself, love is undirected and uniformed. It needs norms and principles to channel feeling into action. And then the Grace to obey the rules and put love into action.
