- Foundations of Christian Ethics: New Creation
- Foundations of Christian Ethics: The Cross
- Foundations of Christian Ethics: The Church Community
Most modern Western people tend to think of ethics in a very individualistic manner. They consider the primary ethical question to be, “What should I do?” The same can be said of most modern Western Christians. They consider the primary ethical question to be, “What does God want me to do?” The Church may be there to offer advice and to help them answer this question, but ultimately ethics has to do with how individuals live their lives.
There is certainly an individual aspect to ethics and to ethical responsibility. However, if Christians think of ethics primarily in an individualistic manner, they are not thinking of ethics in a genuinely biblical, Christian way. Biblically, the Church is not merely a collection of individuals, each of whom are seeking to ethically live out their personal relationship with God. Rather, biblically, the Church Community itself is central and foundational to a proper understanding of Christian ethics.
The Church and Christian Identity
Every genuine Christian has a personal relationship with God. However, this “personal” relationship should not be understood in an individualistic sense. Nowhere does the New Testament teach that a person can become a Christian by praying a private prayer and asking Jesus into their heart. This interior decision to place faith in Jesus and to follow Him as His disciple is necessary to be a genuine Christian, but by itself it is incomplete. According to the New Testament, a person becomes a Christian by repenting of their former way of life, believing in Jesus, and being baptized into the Church community, the body of Christ. Jesus is not the Savior of individuals, who then subsequently decide to join the Church. Rather, Jesus is the Savior of God’s covenant people, the Church, and individuals partake of this salvation only by being grafted into this covenant people.
Thus, the Church is not merely a religious institution that exists to help nurture individuals in their individual relationships with God. Rather, the Church community, as a corporate entity, is the mystical body of Christ, the firstfruits of God’s New Creation. The community of disciples of Jesus Christ is a political community that, as a corporate entity, is tasked with visibly embodying the Kingdom of God. As a political community, the Church stands in authority over its members, and must discipline its members if they visibly turn from the path of repentance and Christian discipleship.
Christians must understand that their salvation is inherently tied to being a member of the Church. They must find their primary political and national identity in being members of God’s covenant people, the Church. And they must consider their ethical responsibility as inherently being about their participation in the community of Jesus’s disciples, the Church. The purpose of the lives of individual Christians is not to grow in an individual relationship with God; the purpose of the lives of individual Christians is to work to build up the Church.
So many Christians think that their primary ethical responsibility is to transform society by changing the laws of worldly governments. If something is immoral, then Christians should try to make it illegal. This is the completely wrong focus. Instead, if something is immoral, then Christians should focus on making it forbidden in the Church. If the Church can then, through its social and political engagement, influence the surrounding culture to also believe it is immoral, great. If not, that is only to be expected.
Christian faith does not tell us how to be good American citizens or how to make the United States of America have good laws. Rather, the Christian faith tells us how to be good citizens of heaven and how to be good participants in God’s Kingdom. It tells us how to be good members of the Church. If we do this faithfully, we will be a positive influence on American society and government. But this is not our primary task. The Church’s primary task is to be a society that operates according to the nature of God’s Kingdom and God’s New Creation. In the midst of a Fallen world, this means that the Church must also be a community of the Cross, willing to embrace suffering and to hold its members accountable to walking the way of the cross.
A Communal Ethic
“No one has ever seen God,” writes the apostle John, “But if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). Since Jesus’s command that we love our enemies seems to be His most distinctive ethical command, it may seem puzzling why John in his epistle focuses exclusively on love for our fellow Christians. Why not instead speak of an abstract love for human beings in general?
John certainly does not deny or contradict Jesus’s command to love all human beings, including our enemies. However, it is fitting that John gives special attention in particular to Christians’ love for one another. This is because Christian ethics does not consist of abstract rules for individual human beings interacting with other human beings. Rather, Christian ethics has to do with the Church, as a corporate entity, embodying a new way of life. It is as the Christian community visibly embodies God’s love in its inner workings that it visibly becomes the body of Christ to the world. And it is only in this way that the world can see the otherwise invisible God, and know Him.
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus told His disciples, “No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for My sake and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundredfold in the present age–houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields, along with persecutions–and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30). Though this saying of Jesus has sometimes been abused by “prosperity gospel” teachers to claim that being a Christian will make you wealthy, the rest of Jesus’s teachings, as well as His promise of persecutions here, make this interpretation impossible. No, what Jesus is talking about here is the fact that becoming a Christian means being part of the family of God, a family who shares whatever they have with one another.
We see this embodied in the books of Acts, which describes how “The multitude of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they owned” (Acts 4:32). This is the Christian answer to social and economic injustice. In spite of its diversity, the Church is to be a society, a family, a body that visibly and concretely embodies God’s love in its social and economic relations. By doing this, it provides a model to the world of what it means to live in a genuinely human way.
Of course, the Church community’s ethical life is not merely internally focused. There is an external element as well, as the Church is called to love and serve those outside its boundaries. The Church community is to show hospitality to those outside its boundaries, even to those who may never accept the invitation to become part of the community. In its relations with outsiders, the Church embodies a radically different politics than the world’s politics. For example, while the nations of this world honor the soldiers who have killed the enemies of their nation, the Church honors the martyrs who have been willing to be killed for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Kingdom.
The primary question of Christian ethics is not, “What should I do?” The primary question of Christian ethics is, “What kind of people are we becoming?” How are we, the Church, as a community, living up to our calling to show the world who Jesus is and what God’s Kingdom is like?
A Church-Centered Ethic
Of course, Christians do not merely live as members of the Church community in an isolated enclave. They also live as participants in a wider community or society which frequently has values which contradict the values of the Kingdom of God. During much of their daily lives, Christians must navigate an often treacherous path through cultures and institutions that present them with spiritual dangers, difficulties, and temptations. If they are to do this faithfully, they must face these difficulties not as isolated believers but as faithful members of the Church, grounded in a community that supports them in living faithfully as followers of Jesus.
Individual Christians need the Church community to be there to tell them the truth as they live every day in a world of lies. They need the Church community to be there to hold them accountable, even to discipline them if necessary, as they struggle with giving in to the temptations the world constantly offers them. They need the Church community to be there to support them and provide for them if their faithfulness to Jesus brings about hardship and suffering at the hands of the world. As individual Christians devote their lives to building up the body of Christ, the body of Christ acts to sustain its members in living lives of holiness and faithfulness in the midst of a godless world. This is the task of Christian ethics.