2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutism

1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
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12. As seemingly obvious as the idea of contextualization is, it is messy. Let's say that some ethical norm that is important to you is dismissed or downplayed by someone or somewhere else under the name of "that was just cultural on your part." For example, what if a Christian from some part of the world were to say, "Why don't you American Christians greet each other with a holy kiss? 1 Thessalonians 5:26 clearly says to do so."

Maybe the American Christian responds, "That was a cultural practice of the Mediterranean world. Can't I just give you a handshake?" This isn't an issue of debate for us currently, so it is an answer we can easily accept. 

But what if it's an issue of greater significance? The German Christian says, "Your absolute prohibition on drinking is cultural. Can't I just drink in moderation and not get drunk?" What if someone says, "They didn't understand homosexuality in biblical times. What's wrong is visiting a temple prostitute or having sex with boys or forcing yourself on another person"?

You can begin to see the alarm that arose among some when the concept of contextualization came to the fore in the 1970s. "You just don't want to obey God. You're making excuses." And no doubt the concept of differing context has great potential to undermine moral principles. The fallen human mind has exquisite skills at rationalization, which is where you make excuses for inappropriate action. Rationalization is "reasoning away" your guilt or wrong behavior. We're very good at it.

In fact, humans are quite good at arguing that evil is good and good is evil (Isa. 5:20). The high priest "rents his clothes," rips them in a symbolic gesture, when Jesus acknowledges that he is the Son of God (Mark 14:23). "What further need of witnesses do we have?" It doesn't occur to him that Jesus actually might be the Son of God. He is making the good out to be evil.

13. So there is some legitimate concern about someone using the concept of culture to try to "wiggle out" of obedience to God's will. One might also suggest that the situation is different. Someone might say, "Normally it would be wrong to lie, but in this situation it is appropriate." There is a legitimate concern that the person is making excuses for sinful behavior.

About a decade ago, my church expanded its sense of legitimate reasons for divorce to include spousal abuse. It not only included physical abuse but emotional abuse. The idea is that a spouse can be unfaithful in ways that go well beyond sleeping with someone else. In my opinion, this is a good example of an ethical standard that is fully in keeping with the principles of Scripture without it being explicitly ennumerated in the Bible.

The problem is verifying it. "What if someone says they have been abused when they haven't?" I know of a case where a minister divorced his wife in the name of spousal abuse, but there were many who didn't believe him. There was actually an investigation to see if he could keep his ministerial credentials. Legislation was proposed to try to prevent abuse of the abuse clause.

Here we get to a fundamental issue -- if you make exceptions and allowances, someone is going to get away with cheating the allowance. I have heard of middle school teachers and substitutes who simply don't allow their students to use the restroom during class periods. "If you give an inch, they'll take a mile." If you say, "Lying is allowed under certain circumstances," then some people will take advantage of the allowance. If you say, "The prohibition on drinking is cultural," then some Christians are going to take advantage of it. Loopholes can open the door for bad behavior.

When I was an academic Dean, I realized that many policies come into existence because of people who "abuse the system." I remember a couple of faculty members who tried to drive a truck through the fact that there weren't explicit rules against practices that the rest of us followed as a matter of common sense. It was a little funny to me. They were really good at policy-making -- not themselves, but inspiring the rest of us to make policies so they couldn't abuse some aspect of the system.

14. However, in the end, I have a few responses to the fear of people abusing the concept of contextualization. The first is the old saying that "abuse is no excuse." The fact that someone might take advantage of the concept is a different issue than whether the concept is true or not. This is a form of the "fallacy of diversion." It confuses the application of a truth with the truth itself.

As we will see, it is simply the case that moral principles can play out differently in different situations and different contexts. I have a friend who thought he was having a major medical emergency. He had his wife drive him quickly to the hospital in the middle of the night. Later on, telling his young daughter about the incident, she was alarmed to find that her mother had driven through red lights on the way to the hospital. 

In the binary ethical thinking of childhood, a red light is a red light. You don't run it ever. No exceptions. It's an absolute. It wouldn't matter if you were having a baby or dying of a heart attack. A rule's a rule.

Take the question of abortion. It is sometimes argued that, if we prohibit abortion, women will die in unsavory places trying to get one illegally. But this is a bad argument against prohibiting abortion. The objection to the prohibition relates to the application of a moral principle rather than the validity of the principle itself. Possible implications are a motivation to make sure we are right about the core ethic rather than an argument in relation to the ethic itself.

15. A second response is of course that God knows. No one is truly getting away with anything. God knows when we try to make evil good and good evil. In fact, God knows what is really going on inside our hearts even when we don't. We can hide our true motivations from ourselves. But God knows.

I suspect that some of the push back on these concepts is ultimately about control. We want to be able to police those who might abuse allowances. When my wife was in elementary school, a teacher expressed frustration to her father that she was always out of her seat. My father-in-law asked the teacher, "Why don't you tell her to sit down?" His response was full of pathos: "Because she always has a good reason!" Apparently, she had mad skills at coming up with reasonable excuses for undesired behavior.

I once worked with a professor who had elaborate systems to catch students at cheating. It's not that I didn't have my own techniques too, but he seemed to enjoy the quest to catch the cheater maybe a little too much. At some point, we have to remember that God is in control. It's not our job to catch every person whose motives aren't pure. In the end, God is the judge of our intentions (1 Cor. 4:3; Rom. 12:19; Heb. 4:12-13).

16. It is no surprise that as awareness of context became clearer and clearer in the missions circles of the 1970s, opposition to the concept of contextualization rose as well. In the first chapter, I talked about the predictable opposition to difference that arises when a new idea or practice is introduced that shakes or threatens to undermine the status quo. When we have unexamined assumptions about ideas or practices that are important to us, we can react very negatively toward the introduction of other thinking or approaches.

There are rhetorical machines that go to work to maintain the status quo. I've suggested that binary thinking is a predictable response -- the new idea or practice is evil or stupid. Rhetorical machines produce fine-sounding arguments why the new idea or practice is wrong. Some of these arguments can be quite clever. I often use the word ingenious for an incredibly intelligent work-around what seems more or less straightforward.

I had a oneness Pentecostal student once. Oneness Pentecostals don't believe in the Trinity. They are "modalists" who think that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all the same, one person in different modes during different periods of history. 

This student was incredibly bright. At some point, we got into a discussion of Matthew 28:19, where Jesus tells his followers to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The most obvious reading of this verse, it seems to me, is that three distinct persons are mentioned here.

His response was ingenious. "Notice that the word name is singular. Even though there are three titles given here, they all relate to the one person who ultimately only has one name." Ingenious!

He didn't come up with that argument, of course. It was an argument created by the "machine" of his church to explain away what I would call "naughty verses" for them -- verses that seem to go against their theology. Every theological system has them. Some verses just fit more easily into our theological systems than others. More on paradigms in a later chapter.

17. Other arguments against a new concept are not quite as clever. You might call them "above average" arguments. They sound intelligent enough that, if they are arguing for a position you like, they provide an excuse to keep the ideas and practices you started out with. They work inside the bubble. Social media and legacy media are constantly giving us talking points that allow us to keep the positions we want to keep.

Of course binary thinking doesn't stop with letting me maintain a belief or practice. Rhetorical machines typically go on the offensive. They provide me with smart sounding reasons not only for why I am correct but why the other side is either stupid or evil. This is especially the case with political rhetoric.

In push-back to moves toward contextualization, an above average rhetorical machine went into action. It used the concepts of absolutes and relativism to try to undermine what it called "situational ethics" and "ethical relativism." These concepts became tools in the arsenal of idealological resistance. If you are claiming that Christians in some other place don't have to follow certain norms, we can shut you down by labeling you a relativist. If you are claiming that it's ok to steal if you're hungry, we can shut you down by calling that "situational ethics."

However, upon the simplest of examinations, this rhetoric doesn't actually do what it wants to do. Fundamentally, it tries to put all ethics into two boxes -- people who believe in right and wrong and those who don't. Absolutists are those who believe in right and wrong. Relativists are those who don't. It is an either/or, binary option. In the end, it is the fallacy of false alternative.

For example, an absolute by definition has no exceptions. Now consider the biblical instruction to submit to those in authority over you (Rom. 13:1; Heb. 13:17). Is that an absolute without exceptions? 

Apparently not. Peter tells the Sanhedrin that they will not submit to its authority. "You tell us whether it is right to obey God or you" (Acts 4:19). That is to say, the principle of submitting to authority is a universal principle with exceptions. By definition, this is not an absolute. But it is not relativism either. It is another option on the ethical spectrum -- universal norm with exceptions.

18. Biblically, we find absolutes. But we also find universal norms with exceptions, and we also find instances of relativism. I would argue that the default scope of moral instruction in the Bible is universal with exceptions. Don't work on the Sabbath, but if your ox is in the ditch, make an exception (Matt. 12:11; Luke 14:5).

In this case, Paul goes beyond the Sabbath as a universal norm to more or less consider the Sabbath legislation as a matter of whether you are a Jew or a Gentile. He tells the Gentile Colossians not to let anyone judge them on whether they keep the Jewish Sabbath (Col. 2:16). Paul's teaching on the Jewish particulars of the Law approaches a kind of cultural relativism. I suspect he taught that it's fine for Jews to continue to abstain from pork, but Gentiles are not obligated to keep the food laws (so also Mark 7:19).

Indeed, you could argue that Paul makes Sabbath-keeping a matter of individual conviction in Romans 14:5 -- one person believes they must keep the Sabbath; another doesn't. Let that sink it. Paul makes Sabbath-keeping a matter of individual conscience and conviction. That goes beyond cultural relativism to individual relativism!

19. In short, the absolute-relativism rhetoric in the end doesn't do what it tries to do. Yes, the command to love God and neighbor is absolute -- no exceptions (Matt. 22:36-40). But other biblical commands seem to imply that there can be exceptions. There is the old question of someone hiding Jews during Nazi occupation during World War II. Do you lie when they ask if you are hiding Jews? The story of Rahab in Joshua 2 seems to imply as much. [8]

Upon considering this scenario, I had a student who said, "I guess it's ok to sin under some circumstances." But that is NOT what this argument is saying. We are saying that the right thing to do in some circumstances is to make an exception and that the wrong thing to do in some circumstands is to keep a rule. This student had the frameowork of absolutism so deeply carved on her mind that she couldn't see that it could actually twist morality in some extreme cases. [9]

But if there are potential exceptions, then the rhetoric falls apart. A concept or action cannot be dismissed simply by labeling. Now we have to do the hard work of ethical thinking. We have to identify moral principles that are in tension with each other and figure out which one takes precedence in this context or situation. But if we have to argue that out, then the rhetoric doesn't work as a quick answer to all our ethical questions.

If there are ethical norms that are universal but have exceptions, then I cannot use language of absolutes to shut down conversation. I have to do the hard work of ethical thinking. In the end, what a lot of people mean when they say "there are absolutes" is that "there is definite right and wrong." The problem is that relativists believe this too. They just think it depends on the culture, person, or situation. The rhetoric falls apart.

20. I grew up believing in convictions. Romans 14 is all about them. God may require something of me that he doesn't require of you. The Nazirites of the Old Testament were not allowed to drink or cut their hair. But everyone else could. This is an example of relativism.

There are individuals who were an alcoholic before they became a Christian. I have a friend who, while recognizing that the Bible fully allows the consumption of alcohol, would never drink himself because of his background. Abstinence for him is a personal conviction. This, again, is an example of ethical relativism, and it is biblically sanctioned.

Once again, we see that the "above average" machine of argumentation doesn't accomplish what it set out to do. Rhetoric of absolutes and relativism was meant to shut down any sense that ethics involves contextualization or the consideration of individuals or situation. But Scripture itself shuts the argument down.

Rather than morality being a binary of black and white, it involves a spectrum of possible decisions. There are moral absolutes. We've mentioned loving God and loving neighbor. All other ethical imperatives flow from these two. "Thou shalt not murder." This is an absolute because it does not include war or capital punishment or self-defense. If we worded it, "Thou shalt not kill," it would not be an absolute.

However, most ethical norms, it would seem, are on the level of universal principle with potential exceptions. There is a place in Scripture also for culturally relative norms -- wrong for one culture, allowed for another. And there is a place in Scripture for individual convictions, which are instances of personal relativism.

As you can see, morality is not a binary in this respect. It is a spectrum. We mentioned at the beginning of the chapter that moral nihilism is the approach to ethics that doesn't believe in any right or wrong. Relativism does believe in definite rights and wrongs. It is definitely wrong for my friend to drink, even though he would allow it might not be wrong for others. So it isn't even accurate to say that relativists don't believe in right and wrong.

Former President Biden is apparently a relativist when it comes to the subject of abortion. He believes it is wrong, but he wouldn't say it is wrong for others. The argument against him should not be, "That's relativist." The argument should be, "This is not an issue on which relativism is appropriate."

In the end, the absolutism/relativism argument fails to do what it sets out to do. On various issues, the Bible can be seen to take positions across the spectrum of moral scope. We therefore have to determine what the appropriate moral scope is for each action. We cannot simply dismiss an action by categorizing it. We have to do the hard work of moral reasoning.

We will return to ethics in chapter 8. Our purpose in this chapter has been to start us on the journey. The first step is to realize that we have moral assumptions we didn't know we had. The second step was for us to realize that binary thinking, while a natural response to new ideas, does not ultimately seem to work. There is a spectrum of moral scope. We will try to set a firmer philosophical basis for Christian ethics in chapter 8.

[8] Around 1800, Immanuel Kant coined the phrase "categorical imperative" in ethics. His philosophy was that, if something was wrong, it was always wrong without exceptions -- it was categorically wrong. He tried and tried to reformulate it so that it would make sense, but his difficulty ultimately belies the fact that he was just wrong. 

His particular German culture was absolutist, but he couldn't pull off the argument. He finally said his categorical imperative amounted to the Golden Rule. But an exceptionless moral absolutism inevitably would violate the Golden Rule by applying an absolute standard to situations calling for exception or mercy. It inevitably leads to immoral action under extreme circumstances.

[9] I might add that while I am making my thinking fairly explicit in this series, I function more as a facilitator in teaching. In this case, I did not argue against the student's position, but I wanted her to understand accurately the nature of the argument.

Jesus and guns

I have finished editing my notes on Christian ethics and will self-publish in the next day or so. I did add a section on gun control to the article on "There are exceptional circumstances where force is permissible."

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The question of gun control has become a fairly serious discussion in recent years. The United States has in its Constitution the right “to bear arms.” This right presumably was put in the Constitution remembering that the country was founded in a rebellion against its ruling authorities, with individuals taking up arms against its government.

It seems strange that some aspects of this topic would be significant enough for Christians to merit inclusion in a book on Christian ethics, but it seems appropriate. On the one hand, the Bible has no prohibition about owning weapons. Israel went to war. Peter has a sword of some kind with him in the Garden of Gethsemane, presumably not only for utility but also for protection (John 18:10).

However, after Peter cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus gives the more basic Christian attitude toward violence: “Put your sword back into its sheath” (John 18:11). In this article, we have argued that the use of force can be justified in some rare circumstances. But it is the exception. The fundamental bias of Jesus is toward peace, and we have no reason to think that Jesus himself carried a sword.

Jesus’ default instruction was to “turn the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39). The more fundamental orientation of the New Testament is to show the power of God in your unjust suffering (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:9): “Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse, but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing.” Paul says the same: “Never avenge yourselves but leave room for the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:19).

This teaching is hard, and many American Christians implicitly reject it. Our culture has a cult of freedom and rights, and the church sometimes cannot tell where its faith ends and its Americanism begins. Bonhoeffer would be appalled at the way one moment of allowing for violence against Hitler under the most extreme of circumstances has now made him a hero for a fundamental attitude of violence by many in the American church. [1] The fundamental attitude of the New Testament in relation to these things is one of peace. “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). Paul did not mean peace at the end of a gun.

In general, it seems permissible to defend yourself, but the use of violence is not the fundamental bias of the Christian. Violence begets violence. Peace begets peace. In the light of the New Testament, which seems to fit Jesus’ bias better: let us have more and more guns or let us have fewer and fewer? If you answered “more,” you are probably not reading the New Testament with a clear head. In the decade after the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was allowed to sunset in 2004, mass shootings more than tripled. No objective reading of Jesus will likely conclude that the Christian way is “more and more guns.”

Is there not a happy medium between all or nothing? As we will continue to explore later, the Christian ideal for a country would be a place that maximally “loves its neighbor as itself.” If we were to put this idea into secular philosophical terms, “What structure of government brings about the greatest good for the greatest number without violating the fundamental health of any minority in the process?” In philosophical terms, this approach is a mixture of utilitarianism (greatest good for greatest number) and something called universal ethical egoism (maximal benefit for every individual). Because love of neighbor is one of the chief ways in which we love God, such a structure also loves God in the process.

We can thus see an intersection between Christian values and secular values in the question of what approach brings about the greatest good for the majority of people without hurting some segment of the population. Obviously less violence for more people is an easy answer. Further, an unlimited and unregulated freedom to have weapons is arguably neither in the best interests of the majority nor does it hurt the health of some minority. None of the rights in the US Bill of Rights is absolute. They all balance against each other.

As a side note, during this phase of history, God is not yet forcing the world to serve him. In other words, loving God does not mean forcing the rest of the country to follow Christian rules. God allows other religions to exist. During the days of Israel, he allowed other nations to exist, and during the days of the New Testament there was no political entity that was a theocracy, a country supposedly ruled directly by God. In practice, theocracies end up being rule by religious leaders who are the ones who relay to the people what God supposedly thinks.

What is the New Testament view of rights? We should note that Paul clearly subordinates his individual rights to the benefit of others. As someone working for the benefit of the Corinthian church, he had a biblical right to their material support. They had an obligation to support him, Paul says. Nevertheless, “we have no made use of this right… rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Cor. 9:12).

He advises the same to the Corinthians, some of them clearly felt the freedom to eat meat that had been sacrificed to another god, perhaps even at a pagan temple. Paul urges them that the way of Christ is not a way of insisting on my freedoms. “‘All things are permitted,’ but not all things are beneficial… Do not seek your own advantage but the other” (1 Cor. 10:23-24). Even if your conscience is clear, Paul says, sacrifice your own freedom for the benefit of the person whose conscience is not clear (1 Cor. 10:28-29).

There are of course limits here. Sometimes the faith of the other person is not in danger because of my freedom. They’re just going to get ticked off. Paul does not say, “Don’t wear a wedding ring because you’re going to offend someone who doesn’t wear one.” Nevertheless, even here, the Christian does not have a bias for giving offense. The Christian bias is for peace, even when the other party seems to be acting unreasonably.

The law is complicated. Laws often have unintended consequences. Let me merely do my best to suggest what I think Jesus would do in relation to gun control. Let us assume that Jesus did not tell Peter to get rid of his sword. Let us therefore allow that there is nothing intrinsically unbiblical about a Christian owning weapons. There is nothing unbiblical about hunting. There seems to be allowance for self-defense.

However, something seems a little off with a thirst for human-killing weapons. We are not talking about the military. We are talking about individuals who stockpile weapons. I cannot say it is prohibited. It simply does not obviously fit the spirit of the New Testament.

Would Jesus have supported an assault weapons ban? Would Jesus have supported some regulations on who can own a gun? Would Jesus have supported background checks to get a weapon? Perhaps Jesus would have said, “Let Caesar do what Caesar wants.” Nevertheless, it is hard to see where Jesus would not have said “yes” to the values behind these questions. This is the value of preserving life. Among his own followers, he would have surely supported limitations, with abstinence from weapons likely preferred when feasible.

When the groups we are part of get into ideological fights, it is sometimes hard to get our heads straight. We are in streams of culture, including Christian culture. We get pushed along. Sometimes we are like that frog in the kettle that does not realize he is being boiled until it is too late. In the early 2000s, I used to joke that the reason some in my family supported the NRA was because they were against abortion. In other words, because they are against abortion, they are Republican. Republicans tend to be aligned with the NRA. Therefore, by the transitive property of equality, they support the NRA because they are against abortion.

This sequence of thought is of course illogical, and it probably is not as funny today as it was twenty years ago. Many Christians have been boiled in the kettle of the pro-gun movement to where, even after so many school shootings, there is still a strong resistance to even basic regulations on weapons. You hear comments like, “Guns do not kill people. People kill people.” This is a distraction. Would you hand a young man some pornography and say, “Remember, son, it’s your choice whether you look at this or not.”

I offer these thoughts as a plea for the church to remember who it is. God has not called us to violence, but to peace. The goal of this section is to remind us of our fundamental principles and values. Legislation is almost always complicated with nuances, exceptions, and unintended consequences. But let us be confident on our fundamental values as believers. Jesus is the Prince of Peace!

[1] It seems to me that this is the fundamental (mistaken) attitude in general of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010). It seems doubtful that Bonhoeffer himself would approve of Metaxas’ general take.

The social structures of society can be more or less loving.

Filling another gap in my write-up on Christian ethics (I'm at about 225 pages). I should have it ready to publish by the end of the weekend. Feedback welcome.

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Is it possible for the structures of society to be set up—formally or informally—in such a way that certain groups of people are benefited while others are disadvantaged? It is hard to see how the answer is not an unequivocal yes. When slaves were not allowed to vote or move or own property or even stay with their own families, they were clearly disadvantaged by the structures of society. The same could be said of women, who were not allowed to vote in the United States until 1920. In these cases, the structures of society were “less loving” toward slaves and women than they are now toward African Americans and women.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were initially some promising developments for former slaves. In the 1870s, more than a dozen African American men were elected to Congress. But after the debacle of the 1877 election, government soldiers left the South, and southern society quickly found ways to unofficially re-enslave the “freed” slaves. [1] In most of these states, it would be over 100 years before a black representative was elected again. 

In the aftermath of World War II, the GI bill allowed white soldiers returning to buy houses and start a profitable economic path to middle-class prosperity. However, the same black soldiers returning from war often found themselves “redlined.” Redlining was the practice of declaring areas of cities where African Americans lived as risky for banks to give loans. Meanwhile, blacks were not usually welcomed in other areas of the city. From 1945-1959, African Americans received less than 2% of all federal loans. [2]

The 1960s saw a number of landmark laws passed, attempting to change these “structural injustices.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended the Jim Crow era with its segregation of blacks into different theaters, accommodations, and schools. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made illegal all the underhanded obstacles that whites had created to keep blacks from voting—things like literacy tests and poll taxes, not to mention harassment and other economic reprisals. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made practices like redlining illegal.

Although the Wesleyan Methodist Church was founded as an abolitionist movement, the Wesleyan Church largely did not participate in the civil rights movement. At best, its churches were silent. At worst, they looked down on “troublemakers” and “law-breakers” like Martin Luther King Jr. The evangelical church in the United States gets no credit for these developments that very much fit the spirit of Christ to set the captive free (cf. Luke 4:18). Indeed, the movement toward desegregation in the mid-1900s resulted in a dramatic surge in white Christians attending private Christian schools.

What are the principles on which Christians should agree, especially those in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. First, it should be clear from the previous paragraphs that the structures of society, both formal and informal, can be unjust and unloving. Christians should delight when laws are passed such as those mentioned in the 1960s. We have been focusing on issues of race, but the same kinds of issues have historically existed in relation to women and others as well. It is fallen human nature.

[textbox: The Origins of Race

The concept of race as we understand it today was not always obvious. The slaves taken from Africa did not view themselves as “black.” They distinguished themselves by tribe: Mbundu, Yoruba, Igbo, etc. Similarly, the slave traders did not initially think of themselves as “white.” They were Portuguese, Spanish, English, and such.

The concept of “white” and “black” thus came into existence as a result of the slave trade. Even here, the precise connotations developed over time. The slaves that were first brought to America in the 1600s did not have to be lifelong slaves. Till the time of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, black slaves had much in common with white indentured servants. Thereafter, slavery almost inevitably became the life-long identity of the black person.

Similarly, not everyone with light skin was initially considered white. Irish and Italian immigrants were not immediately considered to be white when waves of them immigrated. This is why we say that race is “socially constructed.” Our skin color is simply a continuous scale of how much melanin is in our skin. Prejudice against new groups coming to the States is as old as the second group to arrive. Indeed, prejudice against “the other group” is as old as humanity.]

While the Wesleyan position on homosexual acts and LGBTQ lifestyles is clear morally, secondly, we clearly do not support the harassment or oppression of any group, especially in the name of Christ. Whether it actually happens or not, the sentiment of the Declaration of Independence is noble when it claims that “All men [and women] are created equal.” Scripture binds us to love our neighbor and our enemy. No one else is left.

Therefore, the use of Scripture or theology to harm or oppress others is fake Christianity. Any use of the gospel to hide hate or mistreatment is a false gospel. It is the Devil masquerading as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). Just as we abhor the fact of pastors who belonged to the KKK, we abhor using Christ as a pretense to hate gay or transgender individuals. Just as we abhor the fact that church people might attend church and then go to enjoy a public lynching, [3] we abhor any attempt to hide behind Christ to keep LGBTQ individuals from employment or access to the normal opportunities of secular life.

Racism and prejudice are good at hiding behind impressive-sounding argument. The one giving such arguments sounds smart and likely indignant at the “real wrongs.” They think they are the ones fighting for truth and justice. We saw the same pattern after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. After an initial sense of outrage, the machine of rationalization and white supremacy took over. Indeed, in the end, the quest for racial justice probably lost ground. The real injustice, the real evil, the predictable backlash says, is “CRT,” “critical race theory.” [4] How dare someone suggest that whites are racist or that whites are somehow privileged in society? 

It is distraction. And so the initial injustice is forgotten in a sea of pretend righteousness, with the white church on the front lines. In the end, someone put it well at that time. "If you want to know what you would have done during the Civil Rights era, you are doing it now."

The concept of equity is a third principle. Equal opportunity is a great concept, but it is only as helpful as it is truly available. You can tell me I am free to get a job, but if I do not have a ride, I do not really have the same opportunity as someone with a car. The concept of equity is the notion that truly equal opportunity may involve more empowerment for some than for others. The application of the idea can be complicated to be sure. Sometimes we create more problems trying to fix something than were there in the first place. But the goal remains.

This was a fundamental principle of Jesus’ earthly ministry. “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick” (e.g., Luke 5:31). Women in Jesus’ day were not full members of society. Jesus elevated them. The “poor” of Jesus’ day were not just those who could not feed or support themselves, they were individuals displaced from where they were supposed to be in society. Those with skin diseases were on the margins of society. Jesus gave them re-entry. And the same went for the demon-possessed—their problems went beyond the spiritual.

We cannot make everyone the same. Redistribute the wealth and, ten years later, natural giftedness will likely redistribute it again to some extent even given equal opportunity. We are talking about getting everyone to a baseline and removing obstacles left by inequitable structures.

Yes, “correlation is not causation.” Unevenness in numbers and statistics is only the beginning of the conversation. What are the actual causes? Where in the “system” is the actual injustice? Some issues may be so baked into our culture that it will take more than one generation to work them out.

Yet it is not the spirit of Christ to give up. Social inequity and injustice may seem like hopeless causes, yet God so loved the world. In the well-known story of starfish washed up on the shore after a storm, we may not be able to save all the starfish, but we can save one, then two, then three. And I do not mean to suggest that the “we” here are the whites saving the blacks, for that in itself is a racism of superiority, a condescending “helping those poor people” mentality. We are in this game together. We save each other together. We will fail often but, perhaps, we will succeed some.

We dare not wait for Jesus to come fix it. That is truly burying our talent in the sand. “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

[1] In 1933, my mother’s father spent a summer in Virginia pastoring a rural church. My mother remembered the lights of prisoners building a highway at night in the distance. A little research showed this was a “chain gang,” a group of African American prisoners. The Jim Crow south after reconstruction made it possible to arrest black men for everything from unemployment to just hanging out in the wrong place, “vagrancy laws.” Then the state rented them out to former slave owners, a clever way of re-enslaving them by other means. Over time, these practices have created a tendency for white culture to see black men as dangerous and likely criminals.

[2] And it is not like these sorts of "structures" only existed in the South, even if they were much more extreme in the Deep South. After the "Great Migration" of the early-1900s, blacks were more or less "ghettoed" into certain parts of northern cities. You can still see the wall in Detroit built in 1941 to separate incoming whites from existing blacks. That the black parts of town became slums was virtually a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[3] In the notorious lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia in 1899, some 2000 “Christians” went to church, then traveled to the lynching site, many by special train from Atlanta. There Hose had his ears cut off and his body mutilated by knife. His body was doused in gasoline and set on fire. Spectators took pieces of bone and flesh as souvenirs.

[4] In my mind, there are extreme elements to some critical race theory, which itself is not monolithic. That is not the point. The point is that the outrage at CRT is mostly a smoke screen, a distraction to get us off topic.

Wesleyan philosophy 5b -- Gender and Sexual Ethics, Part 1

And now, where angels fear to tread. Next installment of one Wesleyan perspective on the topics of philosophy.

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Truth and Relationships
We should distinguish carefully between what is true and the impact of truth on real people. This distinction is often lost in an era where postmodernism has given a green light to subjectivity. Truth becomes mostly or only personal. I do not mean this critique in a simplistic or stereotypical way. Our perspective on truth is inevitably subjective. But without the goal of objectivity, everything falls apart.

As we will see a few posts from now, I am a critical realist. There are facts. There is objective truth that God knows. God knows all the data and all the proper interrelationships between all the data. I do not. My view of both the data and their interrelationships is both fantastically finite and skewed. So I believe that objective truth exists, even though I do not have full access to it. Even my understanding of the Bible is inevitably partial and skewed by the cloudiness of the "glasses" I wear.

I therefore affirm strongly the distinction between what is true about ethics and the matter of how we should engage other people in relation to those truths. Let me give a scenario. Let us say that I am diagnosed with an advanced and aggressive stage 4 cancer. Let's say there is no question. Apart from a miracle, I am going to die in days, perhaps hours.

When I speak of the distinction between truth and relationships, truth is something like the prediction that I am going to die in the next few days apart from God's intervention. It is objective truth. Nevertheless, all sorts of subjective factors circle that truth. The doctor could be a jerk about telling me. My family could laugh about it. A stranger could show me kindness.

So with gender and sexual ethics, we can speak of truths revealed either by Scripture or nature. But those truths are distinct from questions of how we should relate to one another in relation to those truths. God has tasked us to love our neighbor and enemy. We thus cannot hide behind truth to satisfy our fleshly urges to hate others. Someone can manifest sin while proclaiming a truth. Perhaps someone enjoys oppressing someone whom they believe is in the wrong. They are also in the wrong in a different way.

Beating up someone who is gay is arguably a worse sin than engaging in a homosexual act. The latter might actually be done with affection for the other. The other clearly is done in hate. The Bible clearly indicates that there are greater and lesser wrongdoings, with love as the standard. Someone who viciously murders someone has committed a greater sin than someone who steals a fellow student's homework. The measure of sin is intentionality, with love as the standard. Paul expels from the Corinthian church the man sleeping with his father's wife. He does not expel those who think they are better than others in the congregation.

The expression "all sin is sin" is thus unbiblical. It probably derives from the sense that whatever sin we have committed before we come to Christ falls away equally at the cross. Perhaps the popular sentiment "all sin is sin" comes from a similar theology of eternal security after coming to Christ. However, the New Testament does not teach anything of the sort, as Wesleyan theology affirms. Take 1 John 5:16-17 for starters: "There is a sin that leads to death... there is sin that does not lead to death." Sin can differ in intensity, depending on the measure of how unloving it is. 

Chances are, the world around us knows well enough our positions on the truth of sexual ethics. But some people draw satisfaction from telling other people off. This is sin, lacking in love. A lack of willingness to understand the struggles of others is also sin. It is easy to make light of people who struggle with something you do not. We can disagree with others and yet show the love of Christ to them.

Holiness
I have witnessed a dynamic where the fact that God is holy is put in conflict with the fact that God is love. God loves the sinner, but his holiness demands he blow them away.

God is no slave. He is no slave to his supposed nature. Everything God does, he does with purpose and intentionality. He is surprised by nothing.

When Uzzah was struck down for touching the ark of the covenant in 2 Samuel 6:7, it looks automatic. But God knew Uzzah would touch the ark before the foundation of the world. There was a reason, a purpose in God doing it. We cannot see fully into God's mind, but we know that the act did not contradict God's love for Uzzah.

I take two lessons from this story. The first is that death in itself is not evil. Is Uzzah being punished, or is Israel being taught a lesson? David's reaction may suggest that it appeared to be an unfair act on God's part (6:8). But it cannot be in contradiction to God's love. This fact may suggest that death in itself is not evil.

It seems to me that the best explanation for why a loving God would bring about the death of someone for touching the ark is to demonstrate the seriousness of serving God in the context of what was an extremely harsh world. It was an object lesson. The God of Israel is serious stuff, more serious that the surrounding gods. His stuff must be recognized as holy. Uzzah's death is an object lesson.

God did not strike down every unholy high priest who touched the ark. Eli's sons did die in battle but those evil-hearted priests touched the ark many times before God finally let them die. There was a reason at this point of Israel's history to remind them who God was.

Similarly, not everyone who lies about what they have given to God is struck dead like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. There are likely many televangelists who have misappropriated the Lord's money who were not struck down. There was a reason at that point of the early church to make a point.

Let us not fall into the trap of saying, "Homosexual activity defies God's holiness and thus has nothing to do with loving others." Everything about God coheres perfectly with God's love for the world.

The New Testament is also the telos or goal of the Old Testament. The barest of hints of life beyond death in the Old Testament become fully revealed in the New Testament. The human kingship of the line of David in the Old Testament is revealed to be the eternal kingship of Christ in the New. A strong sense of collective and unthinking sin is overtaken later in the Old Testament by a sense of individual guilt (e.g., Ezek. 18:1-4) and a New Testament emphasis on intentionality that we have seen.

The theology of the Old and New Testaments is thus the same but it differs in emphasis and precision. Jesus is God's final word. The New Testament gives a fuller and more precise understanding than the Old, even though they agree. God judges in the New Testament as well as the Old, but the Old Testament in general paints a harsher picture of God than the New. God is holy in both the Old and New Testament, but the New Testament gives a fuller and more precise picture of God's holiness than the Old. The New Testament gives a fuller and more precise picture of God's love than the Old, not least because the New Testament shows us the fullness of Christ.

I mention this principle of biblical theology because there is often a tendency to read the Bible in a "flat" way that does not recognize the growing theological precision from the Old Testament to the New. We should take context and the inner logic of biblical passages into account when we are building a biblical theology of sexual ethics.

The Principles
What then are the fundamental biblical principles underlying a Christian and Wesleyan sexual ethic? The three principles that are candidates are 1) the holiness of God, 2) the love of neighbor, and 3) societal stability (which is a working out of the love of God corporately). Let us start with the more obvious and work to the more uncertain.

Adultery

Adultery is clearly unloving toward one's spouse. It is a violation of relationship and commitment. It is hard to see how it is not a worse sin than homosexual acts, because it is full of disregard for neighbor, for spouse, for children, for the spouse and children of the other. In the justice-by-revenge world of the Ancient Near East, adultery created tremendous social instability.

Rape
Rape is even worse than adultery. In context, this is clearly part of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah that is attempted. This is an act similar to what would later take place in Benjamin (Judges 19:22-29), where after initially threatening to rape the man, in the end they raped his concubine to death. These are violent men, not the modern understanding of a homosexual. It is an act more akin to prison rape than modern homosexuality. In that culture, they likely had wives and children.  

This interpretation is not particularly controversial from an inductive standpoint. The homosexual nature of the proposed act is likely also a component of the vice of these men, but in context it comes behind the sins of violence and mistreatment of the stranger. When Jesus mentions the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, he is focusing on how these men treated the messengers of God (Matt. 11:20-24).

Incest
Incest violates both the love of family and societal stability as well. If rape is evil in itself, incest is the rape of one's family. The compounding of unlovingness is the compounding of the evil. 

Polygamy
The Bible nowhere prohibits polygamy. In fact, the Pentateuchal Law assumes its practice. Deuteronomy 21:15-17 assumes that a man might have two wives. The law of Levirate marriage probably assumes a man will take on the wife of his dead brother as an additional wife (Deut. 25:5-6).

We are thus reading things into Genesis 2:24 when we think it is assuming monogamy. A man became one flesh with each of his wives. Someone who visited a prostitute became one flesh with the prostitute (1 Cor. 6:16). Becoming one flesh is not the same as getting married, although it is supposed to take place in the context of marriage. Becoming one flesh is about having sex with someone.

Marriage between one man and one woman is therefore the trajectory of Scripture but not the explicit teaching of Scripture. Once again, the Old Testament is less precise in this area than the New Testament, which seems more or less to assume monogamy. Even here, though, monogamy is more a description of marriage in the New Testament than an explicit prescription. Overseers in leadership in the church are supposed to be the husbands of one wife, but nothing is said of non-overseers (1 Tim. 3:2). [1]

What therefore is wrong with polygamy? It does not normally give the woman full status and value. In other words, it violates the principle that women are equally created in the image of God. Polygamy is thus less than God's ideal that "in Christ there is not male and female" (Gal. 3:28). Although it contributed to societal stability in the ancient Near East of Israel, it is deficient from the standpoint of the love of neighbor.

Pre-marital Sex
In the Old Testament, having sex with a virgin to whom you were not married upset the stability of society. To resolve the situation, the man either had to marry the girl (if the father wished) or had to pay the bride price (Exod. 22:16-17). In the latter case, she presumably would remain with her family. In both situations, the woman had a secure place in society.

In the New Testament, Paul assumes that random burning with passion is at the very least not desirable (1 Cor. 7:9). At least in the earlier days of his ministry, his preference was for virgins to remain with their families (1 Cor. 7:38). Although he does not give reasons, Paul clearly assumed that the unmarried should not be having sex with each other. We might speculate that sex should always take place in the context of commitment, which preserves the stability of human society.

Prostitution and Pornography
The Old Testament indicates that no Israelite woman should be a prostitute (Lev. 19:29; Deut. 23:17). The apparent reason is that it degrades her. The man is simply using her. Prostitution violates the love of one's neighbor. 

In the new covenant, it is clear that God cares about all men and women, not just the Israelite ones. Men and women of all peoples are created in the image of God. For this reason, no woman or man should be a prostitute because no human being should be devalued as some simple toy or plaything. And, accordingly, no man or woman should visit a prostitute because it violates love of one's neighbor.

We can extend the argument further to pornography. Although no physical contact is made, the man or woman is mentally using the other. Since sin is ultimately a matter of the mind even before the body acts, to lust after another in pornography is to use them and have sex with them in your heart. Meanwhile, the men and women in pornography have been degraded as prostitutes of a sort. It also seems that human trafficking stands behind much pornography. For this reason, to use pornography is to promote the enslavement of others, which clearly violates the love of one's neighbor.

Don't do it.

Conclusion
In the above cases, we have found good reasons for traditional sexual norms both in the love of one's neighbor and in the preservation of society's stability, which is also part of loving one's neighbor. In that sense, the holiness of God is offended because the love of others is offended. It does not seem that the holiness of God is directly offended in these cases but rather that it is offended because others are violated.

[1] It is possible that this passage is saying that a church overseer (probably the role of being one of many elders) should only have one spouse in their lifetime.

Wesleyan philosophy 5a -- How should we live as individuals?

next installment
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Being versus Doing
The branch of philosophy that deals with the question of how we should live our lives is called “ethics.” Should I shoot my neighbor? What is the “Christian’s secret to a happy life”? What is the greatest good, the summum bonum? Ethics deals with the “should” questions, especially those that concern us as individuals.

Clearly, ethics is extremely relevant to life, especially to us as Christians. If there are areas of philosophy that sometimes seem less crucial, ethics is not one of them. Every day we make decisions of an ethical nature. “How should we then live?” is a core question of our Christian faith and, indeed, of any religion.

Approaches to ethics tend to focus more or less on either who we should be or what we should do, being and doing. The question of who we should be is a question of character. From a Wesleyan standpoint, our character has especially to do with our intentions, our attitudes, our motivations, and our choices. The Bible often refers to this dimension of who we are as our “heart.”

It is easy for us to divert from questions of character and virtue to questions of action. It is hard to see the heart. We can be fooled. Indeed, we can fool ourselves about our own character. In the words of one cartoon character, “I am such a good person.” It is much easier to see action. It is easier to know what a person did than who a person is.

For this reason, a focus on being easily deteriorates into a focus on doing. We become “legalistic,” where we are concerned primarily about rule-keeping rather than the reasons behind the rules. We love the rules for their own sake rather than for the purposes of rules.

On the other hand, we can also focus so much on some hypothetical sense of who we are that our actions become irrelevant. The extremes of Protestantism have sometimes run into this territory. Martin Luther famously said that we are “at the same time righteous and sinner, as long as we are always repenting.” This can be an inappropriate conclusion for someone who believes in “eternal security,” “once saved always saved.” They might conclude that it does not matter what a person does after they become a Christian. God looks at Christ’s life and not mine.

This is neither the ultimate direction that Luther or Calvin went nor is it what the Bible actually teaches. Protestants may believe that we are “saved by grace through faith” (Eph. 2:8). We only can get right with God by trusting in what God has done through Christ, not through our human efforts (Eph. 2:9). Nevertheless, all mainstream Protestants believe that real righteousness will follow to some extent or another. Wesleyans believe that God actually wants to make us literally holy, not just fictionally. [1]

Clearly, both who we are and what we do are important, and they flow naturally from one to the other. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reorients ethics from mere action to the heart that results in the action. It is important not to murder. It is important not to commit adultery. But Jesus indicates that these sins are committed in one’s heart long before one actually picks up a knife or goes into your neighbor’s house (Matt 5:21-30). The sins we do with our bodies happened in our minds beforehand.

Our orientation to doing can easily lead us to miss the primary point of Matthew 5. We might more or less stop at 5:17-19–all the commands of the Old Testament are still in force, even the least of them. But Jesus goes on in the chapter to demonstrate what it means to fulfill the Law, and his fulfillments undermine a doing approach to the Law. The Law says to keep your oaths. Jesus says not to make oaths. The Law says “an eye for an eye.” Jesus says nope.

What Jesus is doing in Matthew 5 is reorienting Law-keeping around the love commands. When asked how we should live, Jesus reduces the entire Law to do of its commandments: love God and love neighbor (Matt. 22:34-40). This is a “being” approach to ethics. The core value is to love. The right actions will naturally follow.

Biblical Virtue
The approach to ethics that focuses more on who we should be than what we should do is called “virtue based ethics.” Approaches to ethics that focus more on doing are called “act based ethics.” From both a biblical and a Wesleyan perspective, the heart of ethics is virtue based, resulting in actions characterized by love.

The core biblical ethic is love. As Jesus indicated to his opponents in Matthew 22, the heart of the Law is love. “You will love the LORD your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37). This plays itself out in our lives as love toward others. “You will love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39). Not only Jesus but Paul also says that this command sums up the Law (Rom. 13:9).

And if someone should want to wiggle out of the command by how they define their neighbor, Jesus gives no out. In Matthew 5:43-48, our enemies are included within the scope of those we must love. Similarly, the Parable of the Good Samaritan makes it clear that my neighbor is anyone who is in need, even if they come from a “hated” people group (Luke 10:29-37).

John Wesley and the Wesleyans who have followed have centered their ethic on love as well when they have been at their best. Like most traditions, we have at times become distracted with the minutia of doing. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath law? Can I go to a restaurant on Sunday? Can I watch television on Sunday? Should I even have a television or go to a movie?

At our best, however, we have focused our ethic on the love command. Wesley formulated Christian perfection in terms of “perfect love.” Similarly, entire sanctification in our tradition has predominantly been understood as an experience of the Spirit’s empowerment that enables us to fully love God and our neighbor.

While Wesley acknowledged that the Bible includes broader understandings of sin, he defined sin “properly so called” as a “willful transgression of a known law of God.” This focal understanding of sin is thoroughly in keeping with the New Testament. While the Old Testament includes a broader sense of sins committed in ignorance, both individual and corporate, the focus of sin in the New Testament is overwhelmingly on wrongdoing that is intentional.

According to James 4:17, a sin of omission is when a person knows the good that he or she should do but they do not do it, an intentional omission. In Romans 14:23, Paul describes a situation where whether an action is sin or not depends on whether a person thinks it is wrong to do or not. “Whatever is not of faith is sin.” In other words, sin is when you intentionally do something you know you should not do. These are sins of commission.

In both cases, sin is not “to miss the mark,” a common definition that has no basis in the New Testament. The definition is based on a number of word fallacies the chief of which is the idea that some meaning a word had in its history is determinative of what it means later. There is also the lexical fallacy which supposes there is some root meaning in play whenever a word is used.

No, sin in the New Testament is overwhelmingly a function of intentionality. Paul’s argument in Romans 14 is particularly insightful, for it points to a situation where two individuals could do exactly the same action and it be sin for one and not the other. The difference would be the intentionality of the actor. And the standard of intentionality is the extent to which it is or is not loving in its intention, where love toward others is seeking their true benefit.

Both the Old and New Testaments are heart-focused in their ethics. God famously tells the prophet Samuel that “A human looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Actions are a matter of outward appearance. Jesus similarly makes it clear that evil is something that comes from the inside out. It is not something that attaches to you by what you touch. “Out of the heart” flows all evil (Mark 7:21-23).

These observations indicate that the ethic of Scripture and of Wesleyanism are appropriately virtue-oriented, with actions flowing from our hearts as an indicator of whether we are inwardly virtuous or not. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Christianity is a religion of the Spirit. It is what is going on inside that is the truest indicator of what we are.

Clearly, a righteous spirit will produce good fruit, so this virtue orientation is in no way divorced from what we do. It is simply the priority. James 2 makes it clear that “faith without works is dead” (Jas. 2:26). So there is no righteous heart-orientation that does not result in righteous action. Paul agrees. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:23-24). If we are right on the inside, these virtues will flow into our lives on the outside.

The Highest Good (summum bonum)
The ancient Mediterranean philosophers were similarly virtue based in their approach to ethics. Aristotle in the 300s BC looked to happiness (eudaimonia) as the greatest good toward which we should aspire. He distinguished forms of happiness on three levels: that of pleasure, that of a good citizen, and that of contemplation. He considered the satisfaction of contemplation to be the highest.

Aristotle believed that our quest for happiness shaped everything we did. When we sought pleasure, we did so with the goal of happiness or fulfillment. Happiness was human flourishing, being what we were supposed to be. A life of eudaimonia was a life well lived.

Plato before Aristotle identified four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice. Wisdom was the virtue of our heads. Courage was the virtue of our chests. Self-control was the virtue of our abdomen. And justice was when all of them were working together in proper concert.

As Christians, we would should not locate the greatest good in ourselves but in God. In the previous entry, we mentioned the Westminster Confession. “What is the proper end of humanity?” “To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” This statement suggests that the proper path to eudaimonia is in a life oriented around God.

We should not, however, think of goodness as a thing. When 1 John 4:8 says that God is love, it does not mean that God is composed of love atoms. It is a figurative statement, a metonymy. A metonymy is when something is so associated with something else that we can refer to the one by the other. “Tom is generosity.” “Michael Jordan is basketball.” When the Bible says God is love, it is saying that God’s actions in the world are so typified by love and that love is so aptly described in God’s interaction with the world that we can say “God is love.” To try to say more is to overread what the passage is saying.

Love of God is thus the highest good, with love of humanity entailed within it. Good is an adjective. It is a word that describes intentions and actions that are loving.

Rights and Wrongs
In Romans 14:14, Paul says, “Nothing is unclean in itself, except to the one who considers it unclean.” He is thinking especially of whether a person should eat food that has been sacrificed to an idol. However, it gives us one perspective on the relationship between intention and action.

One could argue that actions in the world--as acts, not in terms of intentions or consequences--are in themselves morally neutral. It is the intentionality that surrounds an action that makes the adjectives good or evil appropriate. A tsunami or tornado is not evil, even though they may cause great death. But they did not intend to do anyone harm. Similarly, if I am cleaning my roof and accidentally knock off a shingle that kills you, I have not committed murder.

David Hume’s “fact-value” problem thus does not matter to us as Christians. God has revealed to us the value of love as the highest good. There may very well be a detachment between facts and values, between what happens and the significance of what happens. But God has revealed to us the valuation to lay over our observations of events in the world.

This is a quite different approach to ethics than those that heavily focus on types of activities themselves, act-based ethics. As I mentioned at the beginning, it is all too easy for our religion to shift from intentionality to acts. Acts are easy to see and measure, while intentions are often clouded. In Philippians 3:6 Paul can say that he was blameless at keeping the Jewish Law as a Pharisee because, from the perspective of some Pharisees, they had quantified, concretized, and externalized law-keeping to where one could actually keep the Law perfectly. [2]

Ethics that focus on language of absolutes fall in the category of act-based ethics. Despite his use of the categories of virtue, Plato in the early 300s BC was an absolutist who believed certain rights and wrongs were intrinsically right and wrong regardless of intention or circumstance. He was also a realist when it came to right and wrong, for he believed good was a thing that existed apart from the gods. It was a standard by which even the gods were to be measured.

Immanuel Kant in the late 1700s was also an absolutist in ethics. If something was wrong, it was always wrong regardless of the circumstances. He called this the “categorical imperative.” If something was an imperative, a “must,” a true ethical command, then it applied categorically, in all circumstances.

This is not the way that the New Testament generally treats ethics. For one thing, values compete with each other. If a leader of Jericho comes to my door and asks if I am hiding Israelite spies, do I tell the truth and say they are hiding on my roof or do I save their lives and lie? The Bible never critiques Rahab for lying but rather considers her works an example of righteousness (cf. Jas. 2:25).

The normal scope of biblical ethics is rather what we might call universal values with exceptions or universal principles. Moral absolutism does not allow for exceptions by definition. However, it has more to do with Western cultural assumptions than with biblical presuppositions. For example, Paul and Peter both instruct Christians to submit to and obey secular authority (Rom. 13:1; 1 Pet. 2:13). However, it is clear from Acts 4:19 that this is not an absolute. When submitting to earthly authority conflicts with submission to divine authority, exceptions must be made.

That is not to say that there are not rough equivalents to absolutes in Christian ethics, even if such language is foreign to the Bible, an example of Western philosophy imposed on Scripture. The command to love God and the command to love one’s neighbor are both absolutes in the sense that there is never an exception to these commands. However, even to look at them as commands–rather than the delight of one’s heart–is to subtly switch from a virtue-based ethic to an act-based one.

Paul’s position on food sacrificed to idols is even a relativist position by definition. Whether it is right or wrong depends on one’s personal convictions. What Wesleyans call “convictions” are actually examples of individual relativism. However, they must be located within a broader ethical framework of universal values.

There can be actions that are right or wrong depending on the culture as well. Paul is not in any way opposed to Jews keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, but he does not require it of Gentile believers (Col. 2:16). This would be an example of cultural relativism. Paul says, “To the Jews I became like a Jew that I might win Jews… to those not under the Law I became as one not under the Law… that I might win those not under the Law” (1 Cor. 9:20-21). Again, these instances of cultural relativism must be placed within the broader universal ethical framework of loving God and loving neighbor.

It seems impossible for universal principles to anticipate all possible situations. This is the Pharisaic problem. They had the principle of Sabbath, but what constitutes work? Who decides how to define what the boundaries in time of the day are? Are there exceptions to the Sabbath rule? Jesus in Luke 14:5 indicates that you should pull your ox out of a ditch even on the Sabbath. Similarly, Jesus does not argue about whether his disciples violated the Sabbath by picking grain in Mark 2:23-28. He indicates rather that the rule had exceptions.

Applying moral principles almost always involves what one ethicist called “improvisations.” [3] It seems you can never anticipate every possible situation in which a principle might be applied. It is thus no wonder that people gravitate toward absolutism. It requires as little thought as it is likely to play out in oppressive and truly unloving ways. It is not, however, God’s way much beyond the fundamentals of loving God and neighbor. [4]

To say that Christianity is oriented around universal rights and wrongs that will sometimes have exceptions is to believe in definite right and wrong. It is a fallacy of false alternative to say, either you believe in absolutes or you do not believe in right and wrong. This is absurd. There are at least three positions on the moral spectrum in between absolutism and moral nihilism: universal principles, relativism, and moral scepticism. I have given clear biblical examples above of the first two, the first of which I have argued is the normal operating scope of biblical ethics.

Greater Good
The act-based approach to ethics that we have been discussing is called “duty-based ethics” or “deontological ethics.” There is also another approach to act-based ethics called “consequential ethics” or “utilitarianism.” Every day we make utilitarian decisions. “Will my family get greater pleasure from Arbys or McDonalds?” There is thus nothing intrinsically wrong with utiliarian considerations.

Nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with “egoist” ethics. If utilitarian ethics asks what action will bring about the greatest good (or pleasure) to the greatest number, egoist ethics asks what action will bring about the greatest good (or pleasure) to me. There is nothing wrong with asking, “Will I be happier eating strawberry shortcake or watermelon?”

The problem with such ethics comes into play when they come into conflict with more crucial values, especially universal values. In such cases, “the end does not justify the means.” The pleasure I might get from “getting rid of” my neighbor cannot outweigh the value that my neighbor is created in God’s image and that Christ commands me to love my enemy.

It is thus only when I am free of moral duty that I can bring consequences to bear on an ethical decision. For example, the consequences of an abortion in my life cannot be used as an argument for its allowance if abortion violates an absolute moral duty not to murder the innocent. [5] If it is a moral imperative not to kill innocent individuals while bombing a city like Dresden or Hiroshema, then the consequence of expediting an end to war and saving a greater number of lives cannot be invoked. [6]

Nevertheless, the question of consequences is often in play when a moral principle is universal but not absolute. Similarly, although the New Testament focuses primarily on intentional sin, we can unintentionally wrong someone. This is also sin, even if sin for which God does not consider us as morally culpable. When we unintentionally wrong someone, we have sinned in terms of the consequences to others. Repentance is still appropriate, and the blood of Christ still atones for it (cf. Heb. 9:7).

There are also areas where we wrong others in negligence. These sins are somewhere between intentional and unintentional sin. If we drive without sleep and end up killing someone, we still bear some moral culpability. John Wesley called such sins, “sins of surprise.”

How then should we live? We should give our full allegiance to God without exception. We should commit to love our neighbor and enemy, without exception. These are the two great absolutes.

Within these general moral values are other principles that play them out generally. We cannot love our spouse and have an affair. We cannot love our neighbors and whimsically steal from them, let alone kill them. These broad, universal principles will play out in various ways in specific situations. Also, if we love our neighbor, we will be concerned about the consequences of our actions on them. 

Sexual Ethics
In a follow-up next week, I want to address sexual ethics.

[1] Our righteousness in Luther tends to be more of a “legal fiction,” even though Luther certainly believed that our lives should become more literally righteous too.

[2] This was not the only Pharisaic perspective. The School of Hillel in particular seemed more focused on intentionality. However, for some it would seem that the intentionality that mattered most was the intention to keep the Law perfectly in a concrete sense.

[3] Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.

[4] Admittedly, it is difficult to find an exception to the command not commit adultery.

[5] I worded this in an individual way to try to keep the illustration simple. If we were having the full discussion, we would want to address several additional questions. Is abortion an absolute moral imperative or one to which exceptions can be made, such as rape or incest? Under what circumstances? Is there a difference between saving the life of a mother in a way that results in the child’s death and causing the child’s death to save the life of the mother?

[6] My intention is not to take a position here but to demonstrate the interplay between duties and consequences.

ET25: Many issues are a matter of individual or corporate conscience.

This is the final ethics and theology entry in a series called theology in bullet points that I began on March 7, 2014. I will post one more overall table of contents and be done. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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Many issues are a matter of individual or corporate conscience.

1. "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." [1] So goes the slogan. Most would readily agree with what it is saying.

If something is essential, then all Christians must affirm and practice it. That is the definition of an essential. There are probably some today who do not see much of anything as essential. But Christianity has no identity if there is nothing about it that is "it." To deny any essentials is to stand outside of Christianity in any meaningful sense.

Most would agree that love must pervade our relationships with each other. Perhaps there would be someone who does not agree, but they must argue with Jesus, Paul, James, and John to explain their new revelation. This theme seems too pervasive in the New Testament and church history to fight successfully.

The difficulty with this slogan, for most Christians, is not what it says. The difficulty is in distinguishing between what is essential and what is non-essential.

2. Christians disagreed on things even in the New Testament church. Some Christians believed non-Jews needed to convert fully to Judaism to be saved. Peter and James disagreed, although they were probably sympathetic. [2] Paul disagreed with James on eating meat offered to idols and how Jew and Gentile might eat together. James had a "stay away from the tainted meat at all costs" approach, and would only allow table fellowship under certain circumstances. Paul had a "don't ask" approach, and rejected all but sexual purity concerns about eating together.

So we often disagree on many things today as well, and Christians have repeatedly disagreed with each other throughout the centuries. The Novatians disagreed with the mainstream church on the forgiveness of priests who had caved in during persecution and split to form their own community. The Coptics disagreed over calling Nestorius a heretic for seeing Christ as roughly two persons.

In 1054, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church ostensibly split over the question of whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or just the Father. The Roman Catholic Church kicked Martin Luther out for his positions on purgatory, Scripture, and justification by faith. Luther and Zwingli could not unite as Protestants because of differing views of communion.

And ever since, Protestantism has split into tens of thousands of little groups with differing beliefs. Paul Tillich called it the "Protestant Principle." Because each individual is expected to form their beliefs on the basis of Scripture alone, you inevitably get almost as many different beliefs as you do individual Christians. This creates a dynamic where we should expect churches and denominations to split regularly because they disagree over what the Bible says.

Just this summer alone, I learned of a German Baptist group that split amicably over the use of the internet. This summer I also watched the United Methodist Church come very close to splitting over the question of ordaining practicing gay ministers.

3. Since Protestants have often claimed to settle all these disputes on the basis of the Bible, the evidence is quite definitive that this avenue has not worked very well at all. And it is easy to see why. There are three simple, very easy to understand reasons:

• Christians disagree on the meaning of individual verses because the same words can be taken in different ways. [3]
• It is possible to fit together the varied comments of the Bible in many different ways. Which verses are primary and "clear"? Which are secondary and "unclear"? How do they connect? [4]
• How do these words, which addressed numerous ancient audiences, play out in our contexts and situations, which are often different from theirs? [5]

The persistent ignorance of these dynamics leads Christian groups repeatedly and mindlessly to beat their chests about those who are or are not following the Bible. Yet they may be unaware of the traditions at work on their own understanding or the cultural dynamics that have led them to interpret and emphasize certain verses in certain ways. All of us as Christian readers are, at least to some extent, unaware of the way in which we read the Bible as a mirror for our own assumptions.

4. So what is essential? In a previous article, I discussed the difference between dogma, doctrine, and adiaphora. Dogma are those things that have been generally believed by Christians for the last 2000 years. Doctrines tend to be matters of specific denominations and church groups, points at which a Wesleyan might disagree with a Baptist. Adiaphora then refers to matters of individual conscience.

We can abstract three basic principles for "disputable issues" from Paul's treatment of meat sacrificed to idols in Romans 14. Mind you, James probably did not consider this a disputable issue, which is fundamental to our problem. Some think some issues are essential and others do not.

The three principles are:

• Let everyone be fully convinced before God in their own conscience (Rom. 14:5).
• Act toward others with love in a way that builds up their faith (Rom. 14:13).
• God knows the right answer, and an individual can be wrong about what they are convinced of (Rom. 14:22).

5. First, my conscience needs to be clear. Romans 14:23 gives us the best understanding of sin in the entire Bible. Sin is when I intentionally do something that conflicts with my complete commitment to God, a "willful transgression against a known law of God," as Wesley put it. [6] I need to act out of faith rather than trying to get away with something.

The problem here is that people can be wrongly convinced that their conscience is clear. Paul hints at this fact when he says, "Blessed are those who have no reason to condemn themselves because of what they approve" (Rom. 14:22). This is the third point. Sometimes there is a definite answer and the point under dispute is not really a disputable issue at all.

God knows. There is a human impulse to want to be able to know for sure now. We want to see the offender punished or kicked out of the church. We don't want someone to "pull the wool over our eyes." But God knows. God is not fooled. Some of us may need a little more faith that God will make sure the right thing is done.

Other individuals have a hyper-active conscience. They doubt everything and Romans 14:23 becomes a verse of terror: "Those who have doubts are condemned if they eat." This type of individual needs to know that Paul does not have passing thoughts in view here. Doubt in the New Testament is much more a matter of conflicting loyalty than passing thought.

6. So what is an essential? When there is a well-nigh universal understanding of Scripture on an issue, we are likely standing on an essential. Notice how I have worded the statement. Not some little group's understanding of the Bible, not my understanding of the Bible, not even the original meaning of the Bible, but an interpretation of the Bible that has shown staying power among God's people for the last two thousand years.

Can any of these be modified? As a Protestant, I would say that the Protestant Reformation suggests that the church can get off track. Always leave room for reformation based in reflection on Scripture.

Since we have a tendency to see things as essential that aren't, I would suggest practically that we treat as a disputable issue any issue where Christians of faith disagree. God will sort us out soon enough.

7. It is reasonable that Christians would form communities with "corporate convictions." That is to say, it makes perfect sense that Christians with the same perspective on a particular doctrine or issue should come together as a community. Those Christians that believe you should baptize a certain way are welcome to come together and baptize a certain way, being sure to love those who disagree with them. Those Christians who believe uninterpreted, unknown tongues are a blessing to practice in public worship are welcome to come together and practice uninterpreted tongues-speaking in public worship, being sure to love those who disagree with them. [7]

To think that all Christian churches should believe and worship exactly the same way--and then to think we can do it the New Testament way--simply reflects an ignorance of the nature of the Bible, the facts of church history, and the role of culture. This will never happen. It was not so even in the early church.

So it is fitting that there be churches and denominations who agree in their corporate conscience. Let them be fully convinced. Let them show love toward other groups and individuals. God knows the right answers.

8. Similarly, there will inevitably be matters of individual conscience. We used to call these items matters of personal conviction. You believe you can drink moderately. I believe I should abstain completely. You believe you can watch certain movies. I believe I should not. You have no problem celebrating Halloween. I do not.

Since we usually cannot know another person's true motives, Jesus tells us not to judge our fellow Christian on such matters (Matt. 7:1). God knows the heart. God knows who's right. Love is the essential of all essentials, taking precedence over ideas and specific actions.

As an individual Christian, it is my conscience that I must worry about most. Is my heart right with God? Can I truly do this in good conscience? Can I glorify God and Christ and do this? Am I simply saying my conscience is clear when, deep down, I know I am simply trying to justify something I shouldn't do?

And all of us must love those who disagree with us. We should "agree to disagree" far more often than we do. Most of the splits in history, arguably, have been as much about broken relationships as they have been differing ideas. We can love each other and disagree.

Paul is also concerned that one person's freedom not hurt another person's faith. Just because my conscience is clear doesn't mean I should exercise my rights or freedom. It's not about me, in the end. If my freedom hurts another person's faith, then I should not exercise it. We before me. I am third, after God and others.

9. God knows. Sometimes an issue isn't truly debatable. I can be fully convinced wrongly. Blessed is the person who does not condemn him or herself because they think their conscience is clear but it really is not.

Here endeth the series.

[1] The quote comes from Rupertus Meldenius in the 1600s.

[2] The wording of Galatians 2:3--Titus was not "compelled" or forced to be circumcised. The most natural way to take the expression is that James and Peter preferred for him to be circumcised.

[3] Here it is important to point out that even scholars regularly disagree on the meaning of individual verses. This is in part do to the fact that we lack sufficient evidence to know the meaning of many statements. That is, the meaning is regularly under-determined.

[4] So James does not end with a footnote that says, "For those of you reading Paul right now, here's how what I'm saying fits with him." And Romans does not come with a footnote that says, "For those of you reading James right now, here's how what I'm saying fits with him." Whether we like it or not, we are forced to connect these books together, outside of the biblical text.

[5] The impulse to say, "These words mean the same thing in all times in all places" demonstrates a lack of knowledge of how the meaning of words and actions is determined by the context in which those words and actions take place. Reading the Bible in context is a cross-cultural experience, like visiting Africa or China.

[6] You can find references to "sin properly so called" in Wesley's sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation" and you can find this definition of sin in a letter he wrote in 1772 to a Mrs. Elizabeth Bennis.

[7] Someone might say, "Uninterpreted tongues contradicts what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14." But who was Paul writing to? He was writing to a specific church at a specific time and place with a specific purpose. Could it not be that a group of Christians today--a different world in the sense that there are many, many different churches in any city that you might attend--might all feel edified by watching others speak in tongues even if they didn't know what they are saying? And, similarly, might it not be that it would be more edifying for some churches today not to have tongues spoken at all in worship, interpreted or not?

ET24: We must work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

This is the twenty-fourth post on Christian ethics in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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We must work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

1. Christian ethics are grounded on two key moral principles--the love of God and the love of others. These two principles are grounded in God's fundamental disposition toward his creation--God is love. We are therefore to follow his example and love both our neighbors and our enemies. We are to have a healthy sense of ourselves, since we are a reflection of God, created in the image of God.

The Ten Commandments arguably expand these two fundamental principles into other areas of life. If we love our neighbor, we will not steal her stuff, cheat with his spouse, or murder her. We will not falsely accuse him or lie in court so that she suffers consequences for something she did not do.

If we love God as God, we will recognize that we can allow nothing in our lives to conflict with his authority. We will honor him in everything we do. We will respect other authorities too as a reflection of his authority.

2. But these are very general principles. They do not cover all the specific situations in which you might find yourself. The best way to understand the oral traditions of the Pharisees is to see them as trying to specify how the Law might play itself out in almost every conceivable situation.

But it is impossible to anticipate every possible situation. Wisdom is being able to discern what to do in specific situations given the heart of God. But to try to anticipate and spell out everything beforehand is bound to lead to misfires and even actions that ultimately contradict the heart of God.

In the modern age, the rapid invention of new technologies and new situations that the world has never seen before has made the necessity for wisdom even more urgent. There was no such thing as cloning in biblical times. A person's life could not be preserved on a life support system. There was no weapon that could destroy the earth, nor were there inventions that could generate enough carbon dioxide to increase the temperature of the whole planet.

In short, the Bible does not answer all our specific ethical questions. Indeed, it is impossible that it or any "tradition of the elders" would. When the Pharisees pretended to determine how far you could walk on the Sabbath before you had worked, they were going beyond the Sabbath command. Scripture simply does not address this question.

Some Christians develop similar traditions and pretend that they are just listening to Scripture. A person once told me that, as a child, playing on a playground was my work on the Sabbath and that therefore the playground was closed for the Sabbath. Interesting application of Scripture. But Scripture itself says nothing about whether a child should play on the Sabbath. Nor does the Bible directly address the majority of specific ethical situations we will face in our lives.

3. Another factor is that the books of the Bible were first written to people who have been dead for two to three thousand years. The books say so themselves. 1 Corinthians says it was written to a group of people who lived at Corinth. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, "Hear, O Israel." Revelation was written to the churches of Asia Minor at the end of the first century.

To be sure, Scripture is for us even though it was not written to us. What we have done in this series on Christian ethics is to try to discern what the big principles of Scripture are and to re-present them in a way that helps us address the issues of our day. We are always on safest ground when we discern the big principles and the overall kingdom trajectory. Where is God taking history? Otherwise we run the risk of hearing the letter rather than the Spirit of Scripture.

Paul wrestled with this tendency toward the letter over the Spirit. "The letter kills," he said (2 Cor. 3:6). In ethics, "doing what they did" isn't always doing what they did. Why? Because the meaning of actions is a function of what those actions signify at a particular time and place. For a wife to cover her head today in the manner of 1 Corinthians 11 then is for her to do something that is meaningless in most twenty-first century contexts. A hair veil had a meaning in Paul's Corinth. But veiling one's head today would more suggest that you are a Muslim--not the same meaning!

It is when we focus on individual verses over the big principles that we are most likely to end up "killing" with the letter of Scripture or perhaps just being bizarre. On the level of individual verses, we are most likely to hit context-specific teaching in the Bible. It is on the level of individual verses that we often hit unclear instruction, because we lack sufficient information to fully determine what the verse was saying.

Opposition to women in ministry largely centers on the interpretation of a single verse, 1 Timothy 2:12. Yet this is a single verse surrounded with ambiguous teaching (2:15) in a book whose precise context is unclear. This is exactly the sort of situation where the letter kills. Rather than go with the kingdom principle of "in Christ there is not male and female" (Gal. 3:28) and rather than use wisdom in relation to our current context (where full equality of status between the sexes is important for mission), some groups think to follow the letter of a single verse and in the end both hinder the gospel and put obstacles in the way of the Holy Spirit.

4. Paul did give the Philippians a general principle for our situation that reaches across time to us today. He told the Philippians, "In my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (2:12). Paul could not be in Philippi to spell out every detail of their Christian life. And even Paul did not have all the answers, even if God inspired him to write a good portion of the New Testament. The Philippians would have to work out the rest together "with fear and trembling."

And the word "you" here is plural. We have to work out the details of our Christian journey as individuals as well, seeking God's guidance in prayer and reflection on the Scriptures. But we are on much safer ground when we work out the details of our pilgrimage together, in communities of faith.

True, communities of faith have believed and taught some bizarre things over the years. The "Pharisee principle," which wants to spell out for everyone in all situations exactly what they must do, is an ever present danger. Churches do best to stick to the big principles and leave the rest to individual conscience.

Nevertheless, there is wisdom in numbers. There is wisdom to be found in groups of Christians working through issues together. The Holy Spirit is in each one of us, but we are even more likely to hear the Holy Spirit in communities. We will get it wrong, which is why we should never mistake the decisions of denominations and local churches for the Church universal. Even more shocking is the fact that we will get it wrong sometimes when we are most ardently convinced that we are right. Grace must therefore permeate our ethical considerations.

5. It has often been suggested that John Wesley's method for working out a sense of God's will for his day involved a "quadrilateral" of sorts: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Scripture was clearly first for Wesley, as it must be for us. I hope our journey through Christian ethics has demonstrated "Scripture first" or prima scriptura. We have derived the big principles from Scripture.

What is tradition but the Church universal reflecting on Scripture through the eyes of the Holy Spirit? We do not have to reinvent the doctrinal and ethical wheels in each generation. The Spirit has already helped unpack the significance of Scripture among the "communion of saints." Jesus is the final Word. The New Testament gives authoritative witness to that final Word, unpacking his significance for the last days. Then God has used the Church, especially in its first centuries, to clarify some of the important details as well.

Experience and reason are simply the tools that re-contextualize the gospel for new contexts and situations. Experience reflects a knowledge of our own cultures and subcultures. Experience tells us how the principles play out at our moment of history. Experience might also include the wisdom of local bodies of Christ. My denomination, the elders of my local church, reflect a body of wisdom in relation to our time and place. They have a spiritual common sense that reflects Scripture in dialog with contemporary experience.

Reason is an aspect of the world God has created. We are forced to use it with every interpretation we make of the Bible. We are forced to use it in any decision we make. God is not irrational, although we might say he is supra-rational. Sometimes his understanding goes well beyond any reason we can make. But his reasonings make sense in the vast scheme of things.

6. So after we have studied Scripture and we understand the big principles, we must wrestle together to make it to the Day of Salvation, "working out our salvation with fear and trembling." We will often disagree, which is why we must show each other grace. But God will receive us if we are truly doing all to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31), doing everything we do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (Col. 3:17).

Praise be to God, who walks with us and talks with us along life's narrow way!

ET25: Many issues are a matter of individual or corporate conscience.