Quotes about Morality

Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.

The day the church can no longer say, "We must obey God rather than human beings" (Acts 5:29), it ceases to be the church.

The line between justice and injustice, between things being right and things not being right, can't be drawn between "us" and "them." It runs right down through the middle of each one of us.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.

It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to "fix" the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn't a mistake there's no way back.

How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!

The line between good and evil runs, not between 'us' and 'them', but down the middle of each of us.

There are temptations to idolatry at every level, and the greater the good the greater the temptation.

But what then is this "righteousness of God"? In Israel's scriptures, to which Paul explicitly appeals in 3:21b ("the law and the prophets bore witness to it"), God's "righteousness" is not simply God's status of being morally upright. It is, more specifically, God's faithfulness to the covenant—the covenant not only with Abraham and Israel, but through Israel to the wider world.

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.

Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a "religion" called "Judaism" in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.

Sin," then, is not simply the breaking of God's rules. It is the outflowing of idolatry.