A person's priorities reveal an enormous part of their worldview. Priorities also reflect how sincere someone is about about understanding and living out their ideologies. This is true of Christians and non-Christians, no matter how much they have actually thought about their worldviews or how rational their specific stances are. One of the most ironic ways that evangelical Christians unintentionally display erroneous priorities is their statements overemphasizing the importance of personal salvation and trivializing moralism. Even if morality and therefore salvation do not exist, it would still be conceptually backwards to care more about the personal benefits of salvation more than just doing the right thing because it is obligatory.
If you care more about a salvation that you are not ultimately guaranteed to have (in that it is logically possible to fall away from salvation and the Bible in no way explicitly states that loss of salvation is something no one can bring upon themself) than you do about the concepts of truth and morality, you care less about the things that must be in place in order for salvation to even matter than you do about your own personal escape from divine justice. This set of priorities clearly emphasizes personal desire for an easy afterlife over doing that which one should do regardless of outcome. Ironically, Christian morality, as any consistent moral system would be, is about doing what is just and therefore obligatory no matter what will or will not come from it.
It is salvation that is secondary to the more central and important issues of epistemology and morality, not morality that is secondary to salvation. There is no reason anyone would believe otherwise other than delusion or the sheer selfishness of thinking that getting mercy so one avoids a deserved fate is more significant than understanding reality and being on the right side of it, which inevitably includes fulfilling any moral obligations one has, the violation of which is the only reason salvation would ever be needed in the first place. Yes, it is nothing but selfishness and stupidity that would drive a person to think that, inside or outside of Christianity, them receiving divine mercy could possibly be the most significant part of reality to embrace.
Morality, if it exists, inherently matters more than any hypothetical redemption. A selfish person wants the most pleasant outcome for himself or herself irrespective of what is deserved, and a person who does not want to admit that doing the right thing is more always important than anyone avoiding the second death ultimately cares about convenience more than truth and morality. The fact that most evangelicals constantly emphasize redemption and eternal life over philosophical consistency and moral character, as evident in the agreement in evangelical circles that nothing matters if someone does not have a certain attitude towards Jesus, reveals that they only care about truth and morality in any sincere kind of way when they think it is relevant to their theology of salvation.
No comments:
Post a Comment