Sons of the Baptizer: character

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Thrust of Christianity, The 3rd

The thrust of Christianity is not pure goodness, as in category fixes. It seems to me we prefer a world where the good guys are all good and the bad guys are all bad; a world where the teams are fixed so that there are no good guys on the bad side and no bad guys on the good side. I think we want individual and team category clarity. That doesn't seem like a terrible desire, but it's not how God has made the world. I think of this in part because my family has recently been reading the Bible stories about Samson (Judges 13-16). Samson, a Judge of God's people, is repeatedly said to be led by the Spirit of the LORD. He also came to exist through a miraculous conception (his mother was barren). And he is said to be an instrument of God's judgment upon the Philistines, among other good things. Yet, Samson is often viewed by Christians as a mostly evil man, slaughtering innocents and chasing immoral women. This is strange in light of how Christians tend to think of King David. David is normally considered a good man . But David was a killer; a man of war (1 Ch 28). He was responsible for many more deaths than Samson. And, he had hundreds of women. Isn't it strange how we pick our heroes.

Frankly, I like Samson, and David, and Jonah, for that matter. I see faith in these men. No matter what phase of history, or the present, we look into, we will find that our heroes, and our family and friends, are mixed in their characters. And often it is their good qualities, unchained, that become their bad qualities.

All of this points us to Jesus Christ, the purely good One, as God defines goodness.