Wednesday's Word: Godliness (13 August 2014)

            On this day in 1667 Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland, died of a fever.  Taylor had buried one of his sons on the 2^nd of August, but this sorrow did not prevent him from visiting a sick person and catching that person’s disease.  Eleven days after burying his son, Taylor followed him into death.

            Bishop Taylor lived during the tumultuous times of the English Civil War.  He was a known royalist and was imprisoned several times after the defeat and execution of Charles I.  Taylor was allowed to take a private post as a chaplain to an aristocratic family in Wales where he continued to exercise his gift of writing.  His writing is poetic and, for the time in which he lived, quite clear.  Some have even called him the ‘Shakespeare of English theologians’.

            Although his written works cover a multitude of subject, both spiritual, theological and historical, there is one aspect of Taylor’s writings that I particularly appreciate.  Taylor is concerned with ‘godliness’, an old-fashioned word that seems to have gone out of favour these days.  Unfortunately, most contemporary folk have confused ‘godliness’ with ‘self-righteousness’ and, by doing so, have alienated religious seekers.

            ‘Godliness’ means ‘becoming more like God’.  Every human being is made in the image of God, that is to say, every human being has the ability to create or to destroy, to love or not to love, to reconcile or to divide.  Our challenge, as we live our lives, is to grow into God’s likeness, in other words, we are called to learn how to act consistently like God in all the dimensions of our lives.

            Becoming like God is never easy.  Borrowing an idea from Diana Butler Bass, the American sociologist of religion, I can describe becoming like God as belonging, behaving, believing.  To become like God one must belong to a community that is committed to just this sort of life’s pilgrimage.  Belonging to a community is vital, because we cannot undertake this journey alone.  We need companions, people with whom we can ‘break bread’.

            When we belong to a community, we find ourselves behaving in particular ways.  Every community has practices which strengthen its communal life and identity:  eating together, playing together, working together, worshipping together.  Life-giving communities do not assume that their way of ‘behaving’ makes them better than other people; it’s simply the way that they do things and these practices shape an identity.  Having an identity provides a foundation necessary to becoming more like God.

            Belonging and behaving eventually lead into ‘believing’.  ‘Believing’ is akin to the German word, ‘belieben’, which means ‘to love, to be beloved’.  Believing is not some arid and abstract intellectual process; believing is falling in love with the God who is known in community and whose presence finds expression in the actions of that community.  Falling in love with God is perhaps the most necessary step in becoming more like God.

            In John 1 we are told that all who choose to live in community with God and who choose to act in God-like ways are given the power to fall in love with God (John 1.12-13).  This is what ‘godliness’ is:  falling in love with the Lover who brought all things into being, who came among us in the person of the Beloved and who binds us together in Love.