The Bible, the church and ethics

In 2012, two of our traffic give-way rules changed in New Zealand. One was the uncontrolled T-intersection rule; the other was the left-turn vs. right-turn rule. I was okay with ‘bottom of the T gives way to top of the T’, but the right-hand rule drilled into my brain just before my driver’s license test wanted to stay exactly where it was.

I like to know what I am supposed to do, so staring at another driver and trying to remember whether to stop or go was uncomfortable, and a bit embarrassing. Sometimes that driver was gracious and signalled for me to go; sometimes they weren’t and vented their frustration. Sometimes neither of us were sure what to do, so we both just sat there. Anyway, after a while I got the hang of it. Now I prefer the new rules. But I do remember the discomfort and embarrassment of not immediately knowing what to do.

We all like to avoid uncertainty, don’t we? We all want to know what we should do, but knowing it is a constant challenge. Sometimes it’s clear to us, so we do it and carry on as if we’re on autopilot—no worries! Sometimes it isn’t that clear, and whatever we decide to do, we don’t feel entirely comfortable.

The process by which we try to figure out the right thing to do is called ethics. We all ‘do’ ethics. Developing our own ethical framework is part of what it is to be human.

There are some things that ethics isn’t. Ethics is not the same as how we feel. People may feel bad about doing something wrong, but they may also feel good about doing something wrong. On 7 January this year, two gunmen entered the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people, including two policemen. They felt that they had done the right thing. They were wrong.

Ethics is also not the same as obeying the law. We hope that our law-making is ethical, but there are plenty of examples in history of corrupt law-making. In 1935, the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying people of ‘German or German-related blood’. At the same time in America, African-American people were drinking from ‘coloured’ drinking fountains and entering movie theatres through the ‘coloured’ entrance. Utah had a law banning marriage between a white person and anyone considered a ‘Negro’ (African American), ‘Mongolian’ (East Asian), or a member of the ‘Malay race’ (a classification used to refer to Filipinos). That law was only repealed in 1963.

In New Zealand, the confiscation of Maori Land was achieved through laws such as the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 and the Public Works Act 1864. Today in New Zealand, we do not have legislation that is so blatantly unethical, but we still need to be careful. Are those with little access to financial and educational resources unfairly disadvantaged? Are the challenges of disabled people properly considered? Is the provision of palliative care for terminally ill people adequate?

Throughout history, there have been many approaches to developing a system of ethics. Five of these can be briefly understood by summarising material supplied by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University:

• The Utilitarian Approach: An ethical action is the one that does the most good.
• The Rights Approach: An ethical action is the one that best protects human dignity and human rights.
• The Fairness Approach: An ethical action is the one that treats all people equally.
• The Common Good Approach: An ethical action is one that protects and develops the community as a whole.
• The Virtue Approach: An ethical action is consistent with virtues such as honesty, courage, compassion, generosity and tolerance.

These five approaches offer a reasonable characterisation of humanity’s thinking about ethics. They represent some of the best of human philosophy and have made a contribution to the more praiseworthy parts of human history. If there was no other source of ethical guidance available to us, this would probably represent the best we could do. But those who follow Jesus Christ recognise and experience him, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, as not just another source of ethical guidance but the ultimate source.

The revelation of God through the person of Jesus Christ discloses a God who is for us; that is, he is pro-human. That is not surprising given that humanity—indeed, all of creation—is an act of God’s will. But more than this, God is pro-human in the sense that he wants us to know and live life to the full (John 10:10). As a good father wants his child to do well, so God the Father wants us to experience the best life possible. This is achieved through our pursuit of God’s will, rather than human self-interest. The thing that God would have us do is the right thing to do.

The Salvation Army recognises three ‘pillars’ that provide a secure foundation for Christian faith and practice: the teaching of Scripture, the direction of the Holy Spirit, and the consensus of the Christian community. They are ‘pillars’ because of the way they mediate Jesus Christ to us.

The focus of the Bible is Jesus. Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes it is a little more obscure, but Jesus is the focus. He is the main character in the Bible’s presentation of the story of God and his creation. The Bible is the detailed account of God caring for humanity and humanity encountering that care. It is primarily a narrative, rather than a code of practice, but it does provide a resource for people seeking to understand what living according to the will of God looks like.

The Holy Spirit brings the person of Jesus Christ to us. He makes us new people and continues to make us like Jesus Christ (see 2 Corinthians 3:18). Christian ethics is unintelligible without the Holy Spirit, because he makes our experience of the Bible and of Jesus Christ a personal one. In this way, Christian ethics becomes internal rather than external. It becomes a process inside us, rather than a code or set of rules outside of us that we take (or leave).

The Christian community (the Church) is the body of Christ. But it is not just this in a figurative sense. It is intended to be the physical body of Jesus Christ on earth. When it brings Christ to the world, the Church does so in actuality, not in theory. This is its calling and responsibility. That is why it must act out of a deep wisdom and humility. If the Church is the physical reality of Jesus Christ in the world, it will have something important to say about what constitutes ethical behaviour—about the right thing to do, about the specific ethical and moral issues we face today, many of which did not exist for the biblical authors.

In these three pillars we have the foundation for Christian faith and practice. But when you are building a house you don’t do it by continually pouring one concrete slab after another on the foundation, you build a house on it! A house that can be renovated, remodelled or restored when necessary. And so the Church’s understanding of ‘the right thing to do’ continues to develop. The Holy Spirit continues to speak to the Church, empowering and guiding it.

The Church must continue to remind itself that that which is built on rock is not cast in stone. It has a responsibility to take a position on moral and ethical issues, but it fails in that responsibility if it believes that any position is the last word on a subject. The last word does not go to the Church, but to the One who inhabits it: Jesus Christ.

Captain Ross Wardle is chair of The Salvation Army’s Moral and Social Issues (Ethics) Council.

Go to  www.salvationarmy.org.nz/masic for more articles.

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by Ross Wardle (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 21 February 2015, pp10-11
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.