Why is honor so important

As a child, I visited my grandmother every summer. She owned a very large Bible that graced the coffee table in her living room. She would read it every day, writing notes and prayers inside its massive pages. No one was allowed to touch her special Bible. After years of watching how she cared for that Bible, I also gained an increasing level of respect and honor for it. Although at that point in my life I did not see it as much more than just a very large book, because I loved and honored my grandmother I also learned to love and honor what she loved and honored—her Bible.

Biblical honor, at its root, implies the bestowal of value or worth. Although the definition is quite elementary, the application is not as simple. As Christians, we realize that honor takes root in the understanding of lordship. God, the creator, created the heavens and the earth. As the creator, He is the rightful owner. As the owner He is, in fact, the Lord over all creation. In the act of creating all things, God established for Himself a place of honor in all that He created.

Now we, His created beings, should, in turn, give Him the honor He is due based on His role in our existence. Some people resist this; nevertheless, their resistance does not make this fact any less true. The honor of the Mafia is different from the honor of hockey teams. So, our definition of honor can change over time and depend on context. Furthermore, our cultural attitudes toward honor are all over the map.

Sommers writes:. On the one hand, we have deep nostalgia for the honorable way of life. Nobody teaches us about honor. To my surprise these cultures had a starkly different way of understanding responsibility and its connection to freedom. Like most philosophers in my area, I was obsessed with questions about how we can be truly free in a world governed by the laws of nature. Sommers was drawn to the courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, and a sense of purpose and meaning that exist within honor-based cultures.

The approach is too systematic, too idealized and abstract—incapable of reckoning with the messy complexity of the real world. In an era where honor is lacking, a just future is built by those who have it. In Christ, —Rev. Dominic Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Previous QAnon: Eerily Familiar…. Next Budget Matters.

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