Doing versus Being
Posted
Friday, January 05, 2007
by
Charlie Trimm
Categories:
Culture and Theology
I was reading 1 Corinthians 6 the other day and I came across the command to not associate with a so-called brother who was covetous, along with a list of other bad things. But when was the last time you saw church discipline being conducted because of coveting? I never have, and I come from a church where church discipline is practiced. As I was pondering why this was, it occured to me that perhaps this is another effect of the Enlightenment and the rise of science. Attention was given to things we could prove and show by argument. If you could not show prove it objectively, then it was subjective and worthless as far as proving anything. Hence, church discipline was done only on things that could be "proven" objectively. The focus is no longer on being godly, but on acting godly. While I do not want to undervalue acting godly, it seems that we focus so much on doing that we forget about being. As another example, look at many evangelical. books about developing a heart for God. What do they tell us: they give us a list of things to do. We need to focus on being godly and loving God as well as living godly.
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