One of the most suspenseful parts of Corrie Ten Boom's memoir "The Hiding Place" had nothing to do with Corrie's being interned in a concentration camp. You know going in that she, her sister and her father are arrested for hiding Jews. But she tells of the very different way her sister-in-law acted while saving Jews. Corrie felt that lying to the Nazis was justifiable. After all, she was already using forged ration cards to get food for the people she was hiding. But her sister-in-law drew the line at lying when asked a direct question. So when Nazi troops showed up at her brother's house to look for Jews and asked his wife where they were, she told them. "They are under the table." They lifted the tablecloth on the heavy dining room table but no one was crouched beneath it. Then the sister-in-law began to laugh. Apparently thinking she was unhinged, they left in disgust. But the woman had told the truth. There were Jews hiding under the table…if one looked under the rug under the table and found the trapdoor the fugitives had used to get out of sight. God knows what the woman would have said had the Nazis been more specific.
Our sermon suggestion slip asks, "Why do Christians have different moralities?" First off, let's grant that believers usually pick and choose among which of the different laws in the Bible they will and will not obey. Part of this is that we all find things in scripture we do not like or agree with. These either get ignored or explained away. For instance, the Bible condemns charging interest. Our whole economy is based on it and I am unaware of any church that condemns it. Jesus condemned divorce with little or no exceptions. No-fault divorce is the law of the land. Very few churches forbid the marriage of divorced people. In the Roman Catholic church one must first get an annulment from church authorities which states that the previous marriage did not legally exist. Henry VIII never divorced; he annulled.
And there have been more egregious examples of people engineering workarounds for Biblical rules, especially when it comes to violence. You'll be interested to know that the church never executed heretics. After securing their confession, the church turned them over to civil authorities to carry out the sentence, mirroring what the religious leaders of Jesus' day did by turning him over to the Romans. Plausible deniability is as old as politics.
Some of this is just sinfulness, us wanting to do what we shouldn't. Or not do what we should. But some of this is practicality. As A.J. Jacobs found in his book "The Year of Living Biblically," no one--not fundamentalist Christians, nor Orthodox Jews, nor the Amish, nor any other group--manages to keep every rule in the Bible. In Romans, Paul points out that it is impossible. Which is why our salvation does not depend on our keeping the law perfectly but upon our faith in God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean we can act immorally. That's like thinking that as long you keep your prescription for your asthma inhaler filled, you can go back to smoking.
Jesus boiled down our ethical priorities to two: we must love God with everything we are and have, and we must love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Everything else in the Bible hangs on this. Or as N.T. Wright translates Matthew, every other ethical rule in the Bible "is a footnote." Mark records that Jesus said that no commandment is more important than these two.
Looking at it that way, one can see how Corrie and her family felt they could break laws and deceive authorities. The primacy of the commandment to love their neighbors overrode other Biblical rules about obeying civil authorities and telling the truth. When one finds oneself in a situation where the honest or lawful thing to do will result in harm and injustice, the loving thing to do instead is to protect innocent people from evil authorities. After World War II, nobody agreed with the defense low-level Nazis gave for contributing to the deaths of 6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews in the camps; namely that they were "only following orders." In fact, the U.S. military code recognizes the existence of illegal orders and soldiers are not to carry them out, nor are they to be punished for refusing to carry them out.
But not all ethical quandaries in Christianity are that easy to clear up. Sometimes when 2 ethical demands clash, it is difficult to decide which has top priority. Jesus told us to turn the cheek should someone strike us on our other one. Many peace churches like Quakers, Mennonites and the Amish feel that by this Jesus forbade his followers from retaliating against physical force or using physical force on others. But what if the person being physically beaten or harmed is someone other than me? Is it Christian to observe someone beating up another person and if he doesn't stop when told, to not use force to pull him off whoever is being beaten? Is that loving? What if the aggressor has a weapon and is threatening to kill his victim. Would it be permissible for a Christian to shoot the violent person? Can one use deadly force on one person to protect another? Is that loving to all concerned? And what if the Christian is a cop?
This is the stuff of true ethical dilemmas. It's not a dilemma if you simply want to beat someone up and know Jesus says you shouldn't. It's a dilemma when you don't know how to honor both the command to love and the command to not act violently. It is when a situation brings 2 Biblical principles into conflict that we find Christians sincerely differing on morality.
Jonathon Haidt, a moral psychologist, who wrote "The Righteous Mind," has uncovered 6 elements of morality: the care and compassion vs. harm axis, the fairness and justice vs. cheating axis, the liberty vs. oppression axis, the loyalty vs. betrayal axis, the authority vs. subversion axis, and the sanctity and purity vs. degradation axis. And when they conflict, people find themselves pulled in different directions. Should a poor person steal medicine to save a life? Here care and compassion are in direct conflict with fairness and justice. What about a violent revolution against an oppressive government? Here the values of liberty, authority and doing no harm are up against each other.
What believers have to do is weigh each element and prioritize. Hippocrates began his oath for physicians with "First, do no harm." Haidt found that tops everyone's list: care and compassion usually come first. Then come fairness or justice. The rest vary greatly. Loyalty is very important in groups but so is liberty, especially to oppressed groups or individuals. Authority is very important to some as is sanctity, but some rate them both very low. In fact, Haidt found that the difference between liberals and conservatives is how they rank these 6 moral values. For both sides care and compassion come first but liberals rank it much higher than any of the other values. Compassion for liberals is followed by fairness and liberty while the other 3--loyalty, authority and sanctity-- are ranked much lower. Conservatives also rank compassion first but the other 5 values are closely clustered and not far behind compassion. Conservative's values, Haidt found to his surprise--he is a liberal Jew and an atheist--are more balanced.
To make things more complicated, some values are viewed differently by the two sides. Fairness for the liberal means equality, mixed with compassion. For conservatives, fairness primarily means proportionality. So, say, when dividing up resources, for liberals, fairness means everyone gets an equal portion but for conservatives fairness means taking into account what each person contributed when determining how much each gets.
But it's the difference in ranking that makes prioritizing some values easier for liberals and more difficult for conservatives. It explains why highly moral people on different sides make different judgments on the same issue. It also explains why people on both sides have such a hard time understanding each other's values. To liberals, when faced with an ethical dilemma, the most compassionate attitude or action is far and away the correct course. For conservatives, compassion comes first but other values must be considered as well. And this is one big reason why liberal and conservative Christians often make divergent moral decisions.
So what was Jesus? Like both sides, compassion came first. If he saw someone sick or suffering, he didn't wait till the Sabbath was over but healed the person right away. He incurred ritual impurity by touching lepers and other unclean individuals. He even healed the slave of a Roman officer. He fed the hungry people who came to hear him.
On the issue of justice, he sees Jews, Samaritans, and foreigners as equal in that they all are in need of God's love and forgiveness. Their standing with God is primarily affected by their acceptance of God's grace. Notorious sinners who repent come before righteous people who don't in God's kingdom. As to proportionality, those who put in more effort in using their gifts for God are better rewarded. But that doesn't translate directly into being rich or poor. The poor widow who donates the only 2 cents she has is more commendable than rich folks giving larger sums but a smaller percentage. It also means that God favors more fortunate people when they help those so unfortunate that they can't even repay them.
Liberty is important to Jesus but not in in political sense. It is freedom from the slavery of sin that Jesus grants. And by healing those banished from the worshiping community by their diseases, Jesus freed these pariahs from their internal exile. But Jesus showed himself to be in harmony with the prophets in denouncing those who oppressed, exploited and neglected the poor.
Loyalty to God and to himself is very important to Jesus. As he said, you cannot serve 2 masters. And your primary commitment should be to God. Otherwise when there is a conflict of interest, you can't be counted on to stick up for God's way.
We see this with Peter. He denies knowing Jesus three times in the courtyard of the High Priest while Christ is being tried. The only reason is cowardice. But after his resurrection, Jesus three times asks Peter if he loves him. Three times Peter answers yes and three times Jesus tells him to feed his flock. Reconciled, Peter becomes a fearless apostle and dies a martyr.
Jesus supports the authority of Scripture but always with an emphasis on the spirit of the law rather than its letter. Understanding that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, frees you from an unreasoning slavery to the rules of the Sabbath when you come upon someone in need. And, of course, Jesus spoke on his own authority and expected that to be sufficient in resolving moral questions. As God Incarnate, his word is law. Which is the ultimate loyalty test for those who claim to follow him.
When it comes to sanctity and purity, Jesus again goes to the heart. The purity that counts is that of the heart. It is evil in our hearts that defiles us, not acts of ritual pollution. Thus he can touch lepers, menstruating women and the dead in order to heal and raise them. The only thing that keeps him from going to a Gentile's house is that the Roman officer believes that Jesus can command his slave's healing from a distance. As for sexual purity, Jesus holds a high view of marriage with faithfulness practiced within it and chastity outside of it. But he when speaking to the Samaritan woman he doesn't denounce her checkered marital history and he does not condemn the woman caught in adultery though he tells her to go and sin no more.
Jesus upholds all 6 moral elements like a conservative but when there is a conflict, compassion and mercy triumph over other considerations in every case except that of his own authority. Which is crucial because it is his authority as the Son of God that allows him to forgive sins and set aside restrictions which in specific instances create a barrier between God and people. Sin is the only real barrier between us and our creator and the repentant are always forgiven and granted a new life in the Kingdom of God.
Today's Christians face moral questions both old and new. In some cases we have Jesus' explicit commands; in others we must rely on the Spirit he sent to dwell within the hearts of all who trust him. But often, as Haidt found in his research, we go with our gut and then rationalize our moral stance after the fact.
We also are adept at looking for evidence and arguments which confirms our position. We seize upon 1 positive piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Can I believe or do that?" with a "yes!" Or we unearth 1 negative piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Must I believe or do that?" with a "no!"
The good news is that as social creatures we can be persuaded to change our outlook by the arguments of those who we respect or care about. And so, lacking Jesus' authority, we should, through listening and discussion within the body of Christ, work towards a consensus on these issues. But love for God and compassion for others, whether neighbors or enemies, comes first. It really does go back to those two commandments. Everything else hangs on them and no other commandment is greater than they. And Jesus said we would be known to the world as his disciples by our love for one another. So when Christians do disagree on some non-essential moral rule, even if it seems somewhat important, we need to be able to say to one another, "I really disagree with you on that, but I still love you as a brother or sister in Christ and you are a vital part of his body." The true test of love is loving those who disagree with us. It's not easy. If it were, Jesus' command to love each other would not be considered such a moral milestone.
Let us close with 2 quotations. Peter, who knew what it was to screw up big time, wrote in his first letter, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." Or as St. Augustine said about Christians, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty and in all things love."
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