My response to friend and associate Jerry Newcombe’s national column on manners…
I argue, at a fundamental level of Biblical doctrine, that manners and morals must intimately walk together. Manner means way of conduct. Formalized manners are a system of normal conduct, of Biblical self-government.
From where did America’s traditional manners come? Emily Post’s first Etiquette with a foreword written by a Christian minister suggests that all manners grow out of the Two Commandments of Christ. The Bible says there is a way that is right to man, but the end thereof is death. Jesus is the Way. Early Christianity was called the Way. Apostle Paul shows a more excellent way. How we walk, the manner of our walk, is a fundamental of God’s requirement of a godly man, which of course He empowers us to live. A free society requires historically extraordinary manners, among our best legacies.
This suggests that God’s negative Law is the forensic answer to the lack of manners, that is poor self-government. “The Law is for the lawless.” Of course, the childish and bratty Cain, the man who never grew out of his sinful childishness because his parents had no tools to reckon with the new sinfulness, became the first murderer. So in a sense, the civil punishment of all crime, starting with Genesis 9:6, is God’s answer to a lack of manners from an evil heart.
It is ironic that some who most demand freedom for themselves do the most to destroy freedom—from bad drivers, to rude customers, to Hell’s Angels and skinhead extremists, to the elite ruling class. None of them seem to realize that their selfish freedom means presuming on their neighbor’s freedom. Such presumption typically creates push-back. When no one respects his neighbor and everyone pushes back, freedom for all evaporates, including the freedom of those who first presumed. This is why freedom is only suited to a moral and loving people, capable of the restraint of self-government.
Here also, the suffering of the Christian comes into play. We are shock-absorbers and evil-dampeners for the presumptuous, selfish and lawless.
Again, these things all work intimately together.