Gluttony and other things deadly
The Girl Talk blog, authored by four women from one family in Sovereign Grace Ministries in the US, is a blog that I read quite regularly. They have this week asked for suggestions for an upcoming blog series on food and gluttony, which I am going to read with interest. I recently did some thinking on the subject while pre-reading the chapter Clement on Gluttony by Richard Gibson, which is contained in the book, just launched last week at the Moore College School of Theology, and essentially a festschrift to Michael Hill, lecturer in Ethics, called Still Deadly: Ancient Cures for the 7 Sins. I am looking forward to receiving a copy of the book, and thought I would just here post snippets from the forward and afterward written by Andrew Cameron, to tempt you all:
Each of the seven deadly sins represents a malfunction. Some good thing, originally given by God to be enjoyed with thanks, has filled someone’s horizon. Their desire grips them so intensely that it eats away from within like a cancer, wrecking their relationships ...
Our method will be to watch and talk about people’s habits of action and feeling. When these are good, we call them ‘virtues’, but the seven deadly sins are examples of the dark side of virtues, called ‘vices’. We have attended to these seven vices because they offer us a vehicle for examining our desires when they have gone haywire. In 1 John 2:15-17, the apostle John tells of a problem that we all carry behind our eyeballs (in what is elsewhere called ‘the heart’). He notices the way people become lost in ‘the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes’, and ‘pride in possessions’ ...
We hope then that our attention to the seven deadly sins will offer sober opportunity to assess this malfunction in our emotional world, because until our emotional world begins to be changed (with God’s help), we won’t be free to enjoy the goods that God dreams of for us ...
Attention to the seven deadly sins has been a teaching tool to enable people to begin to see what love doesn’t, and hence does, look like in several of the small moments of their lives. By arguing against various vices, we have commended other virtues. But the language of virtue ethics, which is amply attested in the New Testament, is a help to us precisely because it offers brief descriptions of the way an agent and his or her affections intersects with the order of reality that surrounds her, voiced in a supple, varied and creative language. In the heated moment of decision, virtue language offers a statement of aim: I can quickly weigh up who I want to be in the moment ...
I haven't yet read the book in entirety, but I reckon it will be worth it!