There are two types of morality: socialize morality and personalized morality. Personalized morality is no one's business but the individual's and God's. It consists primarily of the Ten Commandments. Socialized morality is everyone's business. It includes sin such as oppression, exploitation and degradation.

There is of course a justifiable need for some intervention in protecting the victims of significant, personalized immorality. There is a threshold which is crossed when the public gets involved in private matters to protect victims.

Christ said very little about personalize morality besides saying that the Ten Commandments still apply. Not only is personalized morality no one's business, but little can be done to improve morality at the personal level beyond trying to avoid sin.

Socialized morality is where sin is overcome. A person has to correct relationships to other persons to overcome sin, and that is done through socialized morality including the love which gives it meaning.

Christ taught human responsibilities for overcoming sin. But his teaching is often blocked by claiming that repentant Christians do the work of the Holy Spirit, a concept derived from Paul.

Paul did some moralizing, but it was the type of trivia which disappears on the page and never gets used for anything. If the trivial moralizing is relevant, then why isn't all of the rest of morality relevant?

To some extent, God gets involved in everything; but it is no one's business what God is doing; and humans cannot evaluate it. God's work cannot be generalized.

Christ often mentioned the Holy Spirit, but not as a replacement for human responsibilities. Christ taught human responsibilities in terms of the objective realities of life.

The purpose here is to describe the moral responsibilities which individuals have. It is thereby a study of what Christ taught.

Martin Luther did not want to create an alternative religion. He was dragged kicking and screaming, because God needed alternatives. Diversity was needed to create the freedom and interaction of realities which allow truth to evolve and corruption to be overcome.

All Martin Luther wanted to do was prove to the Vatican that people were saved by faith and not by works. There would have been nothing to it, since that's what Paul said. But the Vatican knew that and would not let him in.

After Luther created Protestantism, the Catholics held a council meeting and said people are saved by three things: faith, hope and charity. In addition to changing works to charity, they threw in a third item for good measure. It could have been five or ten more items.

There has never been an explanation within Catholicism of why Paul said people are save by faith and not works.

One commonly suggested explanation of why Luther said that was that he had one or more moral problems which he could not conquer, and he expected to get saved anyway, which was faith without works.

So we are left with a lot of confusion, and we need to see what Christ had to say about it.

Whenever someone asked Christ what they had to do to get saved, he told them to follow the Ten Commandments (Luke 18:20). But it never ended there. That was never enough. So he then said they needed to sell their possessions, give to the poor and follow him (Luke 18:22). Socialized morality is summarized by giving to the poor.

Socialized morality was not significantly developed prior to Christ's time. However, it was the primary focus of what Christ taught.

Before then, Isaiah and Jeremiah certainly mentioned socialized morality, saying that the oppression of the needy was the primary cause of the demise of Jerusalem. But they could not develop the complexities of the subject, as demonstrated by Christ's teaching.

The limitations of personalize morality are a stark reality and a major theme (esoteric) of the Old Testament. To understand this, we must consider the evolution of reality.

All constructive realities evolve. This includes truth, knowledge, technology, biological life and social institutions. Designing that evolution is a large part of God's work.

We'll look at some of the major elements of the evolution of moral concepts, because the evolution is quite informative.

One of the points of Genesis is that there were no moral rules to go by at that time. The response to sin was usually more sin. Who was to say it was wrong?

So a law-giver was needed; and he created the Ten Commandments. But instead of solving the problems, the result was religious disputes on top of the other problems.

One of the excuses given for crucifying Christ was that he broke the law, meaning Ten Commandments, because he supposedly blasphemed (Mat 26:65). In other words, religious authorities could just about see anything they wanted to see in the Ten Commandments.

One of Christ's purposes was to teach how to evaluate morality under all conditions; and of course, there hasn't been any religious disputes since. Well, maybe there were different reasons for them afterwards.

We now return to Martin Luther. The reason why works would not solve his problems is because he was expecting personalized morality to do it all, and it is inadequate without socialized morality. Sound preposterous? Let me dig out the moral philosophy and explain why.

Sin stems from a psychologically conditioned force in subconscious minds. The force develops from the desire to prevail against other persons. So it creates an improper relationship to other persons. And overcoming it requires proper relationships to other persons. Accomplishing this requires social activity, not personal activity.

In other words, a person cannot focus upon himself and overcome sin. He must be relating to other persons to correct his relationship to other persons.

But of course, not just any old relationship does the trick. A lot of human interactions create more sin. Christ described what types of relationships solve the problems.

Basically, he said to do something good for other persons—enemies as well as friends (Mat 5:43-45). One cannot prevail against others, which always includes degrading them, while doing something good for them. So the act reverses the original premise that one must prevail against others.