How to Use the Bible in Christian Ethics

We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of the order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it will lead to evasions of the ‘plain’ sense of the Bible’s teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian theological construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible’s silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 200

Christians are convinced that they ought to hold to moral convictions and that these convictions ought to be rooted in Scripture, which we take to be the word of God. However, given this pair of seemingly simple and compatible convictions, there is much confusion about how exactly the Bible should be deployed in ethics and ethical conversation. I think there are two main confusions.

First, Christians are not too sure what to do with ethical prescriptions that seem context bound, out of date, and to the periphery of activities ethics should be focused on – examples of Israel’s food and ceremonial laws, and Paul’s instructions to slave owners spring to mind.

Second, we’re sometimes not sure how strongly to hold moral convictions which the Bible doesn’t speak to. At various times, in various Christian traditions, Christians have held strong moral convictions about issues as diverse as birth control, economic distributive justice, abortion, stem-cell research, the necessity of war, the necssity of pacifism, loving and monogamous homosexual relationships, euthanasia, pornography, racism, democracy and the Harry Potter books. What all these issues have in common is a lack of any cut-and-dry correspondence to a moral prescription of the Bible – a ‘Do not…’ or an ’Always..’ or a ’Blessed is he who…’

The above remarks from O’Donovan suggest a Christian stance towards the Bible which can address these two confusions. It holds that all that the Bible has to say about ethics is not contained in sentences that begin with ‘Do not…’ or ‘Always…’ or ‘Blessed is he who…’. It holds that the Bible points to a coherent plan, a consistent order, a ‘comprehensive moral viewpoint’ which is far deeper and richer than a couple of prescriptions lumped together in a heap. Through it’s story about God and Israel, and about the death and resurrection of God in Jesus, and it’s proclamation of the Good News for all creation, O’Donovan suggests there is a presentation of a certain ethical orientation. An orientation which is more like a precise, beautiful and big house, then like a pile of bricks.

To the Christian who thinks ethics is a matter of dropping proof-texts, O’Donovan says the Christian ethical viewpoint is far more compelling, fluid and complex then you might think, but warns that if you take this approach seriously you may feel the comfort of knee-jerk conservatism and ‘plain’ intuition fading around you.

To those who, often in reaction to a Christianity of this first bent, refrain from making strong Christian moral claims about some of the complexities of modern life listed above, instead invoking the silence of the Bible as a divine ‘Go no further’, O’Donovan dares them to glimpse the full architectural sketch of the Bible and reconsider whether there aren’t many important issues which can be spoken to coherently and sensibly from Scripture.

What do you think of this approach to (Christian) ethics? What could this ‘sketch’ be? Do you think this is what most people think when they think of religious or Christian ethics?

Ethics and Reality – Part 1: David Hume’s Critique

In this post and the next I’ll be discussing ethics and how it is related to reality. The question I want to pose and offer some thoughts on is: in what sense can our ethics be derived from observing, living in, thinking about, and feeling our way through the reality we inhabit? In ethics, this is usually termed the question of ‘moral realism’, and attracts related questions such as: are there objective moral facts? Are these moral facts universal or contingent? Is certain knowledge in ethics possible? If so, how is it acquired?

Addressing this issue is a good place to begin in thinking about ethics, since what answer you reach on this abstract question will shape how you proceed in the normative and concrete arena as you actually decide upon and judge specific acts. So someone who held that ethics and reality were strongly linked could consistently prescribe moral laws, hold these to be universal, and believe they are justified through reference to a natural or moral order. Someone who held that there is no clear or necessary connection between reality and ethics could consistently hold to a more relativist ethics or an ethics based on personal taste, goals or pleasure, or insist that it is necessary for humans to construct ethics for mutual benefit. I’ll being by addressing this latter kind.

The Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume introduced a famous distinction into ethics, insisting that an ‘is’ is not and ‘ought’. That is, there is no logical connection between statements which describe the world – the world ‘is’ this way – and statements which recommend or command a certain kind of action – you ‘ought’ to do this. For example, there is no logical connection between someone telling me that there is delicious coffee in Newtown, and their telling me that I ought to go purchase some. Hume felt that something was going unsaid here, and there was no clean correlation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements. He states:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.  – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), III.I.i

Hume had Christian and Greek ethics in his sights. Since Aristotle, much of ethics has been was influenced by attempting to derive what the natural function of a thing is, and then to ascribe excellence (or virtue) to that thing if it executed its function well. So to judge whether a human being was virtuous, one needed to engage in the prior task of description in order to ascertain what the natural purpose of a human being was, and then to judge whether this particular human being was executing his natural function. Just as a good hammer is one which is able to do some good hammering, a good human is the one which is able to do some good human-ing. This argument may sound odd or obvious, but it is still frequently appealed to in normative ethical discussions. ‘A study of human biology shows you that human beings were built for heterosexuality, therefore homosexuality is unnatural and wrong’, or ‘Proper activity for young ladies is to get married, contribute to the community and respect their elders, therefore those that don’t are witches and witchcraft is wrong’ (that last one might be drawing a bit of a long bow, but you get the picture).

Christian ethics was influenced by this Aristotelian model in the early church, and it added to it the existence of a God and the existence of a moral order. Hence, most contemporary Christian ethics begins with a description of God, an insistence that a moral order has been placed in creation by the Creator, and normative statements derived from and justified by this.

Hume’s critique stands as a challenge to this whole approach to ethics which seeks to derive any moral truth from a description of the natural or supra-natural world. He maintained that there is a world of difference between saying that something is real about the world, and this necessarily leading us to do something as a result. In the next post, I’ll outline an alternative account of reality and ethics.