THE CHRISTIAN RULE OF LIFE

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ... Mark 12:30-31Having passed beyond life's ninety-mile marker, I find myself once more sitting at the feet of a man that deeply marked my life. I walked into his classroom as a floundering young student, grasping to recover a place as a serious student after having failed one attempt. Some seven decades later I am realizing just how much he impacted my life.

Moreover, I am realizing anew the practical worth of his thesis, which was that "Men ought to act on the faith that human life is capabble of high attainment and ought to seek to prove, by demonstrating .  quality of life of which man is capable, that this faith is not a vain one."  I find it necessary to return to Warner Monroe's classroom via the 1947 text he published at Warner Press after completing his doctoral studies at the University of Washington in 1947.

Who was Warner Monroe? He was the son of early Church of God missionary followers of D. S. Warner who had become the Patron Saint of a body of religious reformers in British Columbia, Canada.   When born, Warner was named after the Northwest Ohio reformer, D, S. Warner, and eventually migrated to America where he came part of the educational Ministry of A. F. Gray and Otto F. Linn. Gray launched the tiny preacher's school in Spokane, Washington and Monroe spent his life teaching in the small Bible College on the relocated Portland, Oregon campus where Gray and Linn were the President and Dean.

There in Portland, he was part of an elite faculty that some considered the finest in what had become known as the Church of God Reformation Movement. When I walked into his classroom five weeks late as a probationary student five weeks late, I had accumulated 17 hours at Anderson College, spent a brief hitch in the United States Air Force, and married a wife that I discovered had a death sentence hanging over her head and no promise of reaching her twenty-first birthday,  We were determined to take all the life the God of our faith would give.

It was a class in Roman History that I walked into that day in early January 1948, but it was Monroe's text in Ethics that would influence the remainder of my days.  Only now, some seven decades later, am I beginning to realize the extent of that influence. It comes at a time when our nation is in a very real sense hog-tied by coronairus pandemic. Cities across the nation have been looted and burned  as people have reacted in thoughtless rage and anarchic behavior as a result of the exploding rage of people who have not found a more effective way of making their lives seem useful and meaningful. And that brings me back to my much loved professor who spent his life so very wisely in a variety of educational endeavors, only to lose his life by losing his footing while smelt fishing, as Oregonians love to do.

Monroe spent his educational career  and his entire life proposing that to live as a Christian one will "Always so act as to cause everyone who beholds your act or is affected by it to realize the great value of human life and the attainment of which it is capable" (Chr Ethics, 75). It is this unique quality that makes us distinctively human, as opposed to being of the animal kingdom. Monroe believed we have a unique and distinct spiritual quality  that gives life a distinct quality that behavioral psychology knows nothing of, and in fact denies. Monroe proposes four levels or forms which our right action may take in accomplishing this realization.

First,
we can lay the foundation for developing this more abundant life, and realize its value, by shaping or conforming our purposes to the demands necessary for a moral order.
Only then can we build  a society in which all men can move freely about and at the same time find the means of their accomplishing truly worth-while purposes.

Second,
we can ourselves realize, and cause others to realize, their value of life
by developing our own capacities in the fullest measure and by choosing worth-while purposes ourselves.

Third,
we can cause others to realize their value
by helping them to accomplish their own worth-while purposes.
This, concludes Monroe, is the most commonly understood way of showing Christian love. It arises not only in the physical welfare of others but in their spiritual welfare. This might well be our most common way of fulfilling the command of Jesus  when he instructed us to love our neighbor as we love our self.

Fourth and finally,
Monroe says we realize, and cause others to realize, the value of life
by helping them to find worthy purposes in life and by bringing them to a knowledge of right and devotion to it.
This is the end result of all Christian teaching and evangelism. Our duty is to honor God most because he is greatest in goodness, It is also to reverence human personality wherever it is to be found,
      because of the heights of attainment of which it is capable,
      and this love for man affects the activities of our lives, perhaps even more than our love to God.

Foundational to Monroe's four Christian rules of life are the words of Jesus, in the traditional translation of Monroe's generation:
                    And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thyheart, and with all they soul,
                    and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; this is the first commandment.
                   And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ...
                   Mark 12:30-31

From walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com