who lives by certain rules and regulations imposed upon
him by divine or ecclesiastically dictated 'thou shalts' and
'thou shalt nots,' and that behavioral conformity to these
moral codes of conduct is what the Christian strives to
perform in order to please and/or appease God." The tragic
part of this misconception is that Christian religion has
"faked" the world into believing that such is the essence of
Christianity.
The French social analyst, Jacques Ellul noted this
misrepresentative tendency:
"In the eyes of most of our contemporaries, Christianity is a
morality first of all. And have not many epochs of Christian history
been characterized by the church's insistence upon actions and
conduct?” 1
"We have to recognize that Christians themselves have done all
they can to create this confusion. God's revelation has nothing
whatever to do with morality." 2C.S. Lewis similarly explained,
"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though
Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties
and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that,
into something beyond..." 3In this chapter it will be our objective to explain what
there is about Christianity that is "beyond" all morality.