Christian ethics?
In the Bible,
people get into
trouble for the first time for trying to get at "knowledge of good and
evil,"
all humanity gets into trouble another
time for trying to organize themselves and work together as a
community,
sinners are accepted by God, the
alienation having been solved at his initiative and his
expense,
laws are considered a problem, and
people who are ostensibly righteous are rejected by God.
How, then, can we expect to construct an ethics on the basis
of the Bible?
In liberal theology, ethics judges the gospel.
In liberation theology, the gospel serves ethics.
In evangelical theology with "principles," the gospel provides ethical rules.
In biblical theology, there is no ethics, just obedience to the gospel.
If we have ethics, we know what to do.
If we have ethics, we have to know what to do.
If we have ethics, we can fall.
If we have ethics, we can judge.
If we have ethics, we judge ourselves.
If we have ethics, we can think that we are independent of God.
Even if we have ethics, we don't know what to do.
If we obey God, we need not know what to do.
If we believe the gospel, we can never fall.
Jesus said "Judge not."
God is our judge and our savior.
Salvation is the premise of all that we do as Christians. It is not an issue.
Ethics is the attempt to uproot the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and transplant it out of God's garden and into our own, to make it our own.
God gave Adam and Eve a choice between the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
Given all that, I can still say that doing Christian ethics
is a good thing, as long as we understand it as an exploration of what it is to
believe and obey. With that approach, specifically Christian ethics is an
exploration of the counter-intuitive, the non-accepted, and the unknown. This is
because sin has made obedience to God unknown and unnatural to
us.
We Gain Nothing from Ethics
The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical
reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this
knowledge.
Already in the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil Christian
ethics discerns a falling away from the origin. Man at his origin knows only
one thing: God.
The gain in the garden was knowledge of good and evil. The loss was the
garden itself, that is, the place where people know God face-to-face. The way in
which God has made it again possible for us to know him is by becoming a human.
This relationship is essential and is the one thing we least want to do. One of
the shocks for Christians about living after Christendom is that people have
found it possible to take bits of Christian belief (or what they think is
Christian belief) and consciously leave aside other bits of Christian belief (or
what they think is Christian belief). There is no glue holding Christianity
together in a cohesive, all-or-none package. What we can say to people who take
this pick-and-choose approach must come ultimately down to this: There is (not
just was) a real person, the son of God, named Jesus; it is him with which we
have to deal; and he refuses to be reduced to a set of ideals that he
"represents."
That real person Jesus plays a role in
relationship to our universe that no one else does or could carry out. He
is master and teacher. Those who are loyal to him know him, both
personally/individually and as they are gathered together, as
their
master and teacher. A master calls for obedience, and a teacher calls for
imitation. Both metaphors are necessary for us to understand what God wants from
his people.
Obedience is different from
adherence to a set of norms or standard operating procedures. An absent master
might give a set of generalized instructions and standard ways of getting things
done. An absent God might have left us with an ethics. But for our actions to be
identifiable as obedience to a God who is present we must be able to hear God.
We must be in relationship with him. We obey only if we have set aside our
rulebooks and schedules of good works and then listen. Abraham heard when God
told him to sacrifice Isaac. It turned out to be a test of Abraham's obedience,
but it did not look like that from the beginning. Abraham did not just go along
with the voice of God, thinking all along the way "This will turn out okay. God
will cut this off, because, after all, he does not like human sacrifice." He
heard the voice of God, because he was accustomed to hearing it, and he did what
God said to do, because it was what God said to do. We might want to qualify
this readiness to obey even when it goes to such illogical and violent ends, but
the only meaningful qualification, since God is our master, would have to be
based on our predilection to be deceived, to believe that we hear God's voice
when we do not hear it. The fundamental principle remains: we do what we do not
because it is right but because it is what the master tells his servants to
do.
What can ethics tell us? What is that "knowledge of
good and evil"? At best, it can sum up past experience by saying "these are the
sorts of things that God has told us to do in the past." All the other things
that ethics might do, from giving us a list of dos and don'ts, to naming matters
to be taken into consideration in decision-making, to describing the sorts of
people that do the right things, are "knowledge of good and evil," that is,
attempts to avoid the need to listen to God and obey. After the fall, God set
apart a part of humankind so that he could begin his redemption of all through
that part of humankind. As part of that process, God gave that people the Torah,
a civil and religious code, a way of living together that shared many features
of other civil codes. I am not an Israelite. When the Israelites received the
Law of Moses, my ancestors had not even started painting themselves blue yet.
The gospel preceded the law in coming to non-Israelites. It is only because we
know Jesus that we bother ourselves with knowing the Torah, and we are led
astray by regarding the religious-civil code in the Torah as a pattern for how
God communicates with his people. We should not look for something that follows
such a pattern, that consists, that is, of a list of prescribed and prohibited
actions.
The teacher whom we obey is God the Son. To gain our salvation, God pointed
himself in a downward direction. God the Son "emptied himself, taking the form
of a servant..., humbled himself, and became obedient to death, even death on a
cross" (Phil 2:7f.). The Creator became a human teacher, which is taking a
tremendous pay-cut. He became like us so that we can become like him. But we do
so only by hearing him, by seeing what he does, by being in relationship with
him. What it is that we see him doing is to come down, to accept suffering
as the normal experience of the person of God - and of God himself - in this
world. Atonement was achieved by God becoming subject to human violence, by
becoming the sacrifice for sin. And he told us to take up the cross
also.
He said many other things as well, and his teachings
were lovingly brought together and, combined with what was learned in the
earliest communities who knew Jesus as teacher, preserved for us later disciples
of Jesus. That we have this written collection does not mean that we are in a
less direct relationship with Jesus. It means that we acknowledge that we
are together with those first generations in knowing the same Jesus and that we
receive their God-inspired help in knowing him.
Master-servant and teacher-disciple are types of relationships that do not mix
straightforwardly, but both metaphors agree in pointing to the focus on
someone else, the master/teacher, as one's sole voice of authority, and
therefore to the need to listen, to be in relationship with that someone
else. Our inclination is always to look for an easier way. This is why we
substitute ethics, "knowledge of good and evil," for listening and doing. The
desire to be independent of God is stronger than sex. Acting against that desire
is what Christian humility is all about. We need training, but not in good and
evil. We need training in listening to our master/teacher, in that relationship,
in that humility. Being good and doing right is what God has already done and is
doing. What he wants from us is not that but to be his
people.
In that knowing, that relationship, all our
knowledge of theology, ethics, "good and evil," is nothing next to a single
prayer. Prayer to the God whom we know through Scripture is at the heart of the
functioning of that relationship.
But prayer to this God is what we least
want to do. So we reshape him or make him absent.