Evangelical Ethics

Issues Facing the Church Today, 4th ed.

John Jefferson Davis

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629952192
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Evangelical Ethics is recognized as an authoritative Christian treatment of contemporary ethical issues. This revised and updated fourth edition adds a chapter on slavery and its legacy in the US.

1

DIMENSIONS OF DECISION MAKING

“In some of this research,” noted Dr. Robert Foote of Cornell, “I am reminded of a story where the pilot came on and said, ‘This is your captain speaking. We are flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet and the speed of 700 miles an hour. We have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that we are lost. The good news is that we are making excellent time.’ ”

This story, told by Professor Foote in testimony on in vitro fertilization before the federal Ethics Advisory Board, expresses in a humorous way the very serious dilemma facing modern man at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Technologically we are making “excellent time”; morally we at times appear to be lost.

Developments in modern medical technology have been outstripping our ability to understand adequately their long-range ethical ramifications. Does in vitro fertilization represent a welcome solution to the problem of infertility, or does it raise the specter of the further dehumanization of marriage and human sexuality? If the technology is available to parents for the preconception selection of the gender of their children, is it morally legitimate to use such methods? Under what conditions, if any, could sterilization be a legitimate contraceptive choice for the Christian?

Evangelical Christians are challenged to formulate their positions on what are literally matters of life and death. Is it ever morally justifiable to abort an unborn child because of anticipated birth defects? Under what conditions can artificial life-support systems be discontinued in cases of terminal illness? In today’s society, can capital punishment be applied in a truly nondiscriminatory way? Could a Christian ever be legitimately involved in a violent revolution? Do modern nuclear weapons make the traditional arguments for a just war obsolete? These are some of the pressing issues that will be examined in this volume in the light of Scripture, human reason, and the empirical data of medicine, law, and the social sciences.

Cases and Issues

The focus in this work is on specific issues and cases that are likely to confront the pastor and Christian lay person today, rather than on a general discussion of moral virtues and dispositions¹ or the history of Christian ethics.² Although the latter considerations are important for a comprehensive Christian ethical stance, they are outside the immediate scope of this book.

Since the time of the Reformation, the subject of moral casuistry (the study of specific “cases”) has become less fashionable in Protestant circles. That in part represents an understandable reaction to abuses associated with practices of the medieval church, such as penance, priestly confession, the subtleties of scholastic theology and canon law, and the later excesses of Jesuitical speculation.

As the noted evangelical church historian Geoffrey Bromiley has observed, however, the principle of casuistry should not be thrown out with the abuse. “The commands of God have to be worked out in the stuff of daily life. . . . Some guidance must be offered even if in the last resort the Christian must form his own judgment and bear responsibility for his own act.”³

Although Christ condemned the casuistry of the scribes and Pharisees, which perverted the law of God through human speculation, he in no way minimized the role of specific obedience to the commandments of God, but made such specific obedience a test of the genuineness of the disciple’s love (John 14:21). Though obedience to the law of God can never be the basis for earning one’s salvation, nevertheless the clear teaching of the apostle Paul is that the law in and of itself is holy, just, and good (Rom. 7:12). Genuine Christian love motivates the believer to fulfill the requirements of the moral law (Rom. 13:10).

John Calvin taught that the moral law plays a positive role in the believer’s life. The law is the instrument for learning more thoroughly the nature of God’s will and becoming confirmed in the understanding of it.⁴

In the post-Reformation period, notable English Puritan pastors and theologians recognized the need to provide believers with moral guidance in specific cases of conscience. The works of William Perkins (Decisions of Certain Cases [Latin, 1603]), William Ames (De Conscientia [Amsterdam, 1630]), and Richard Baxter (Christian Directory [1673]) are prime examples.⁵ Given the highly complex and rapidly changing conditions of life in the twenty-first century, it is both appropriate and necessary to recover the best elements in this tradition of Protestant pastoral and moral theology.

Biblical Authority

The teachings of Scripture are the final court of appeal for ethics. Human reason, church tradition, and the natural and social sciences may aid moral reflection, but divine revelation, found in the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, constitutes the “bottom line” of the decision-making process.⁶ Informed ethical reflection will carefully weigh the various words of men, both past and present, but the Word of God must cast the deciding vote. Evangelicals believe that the canonical Scriptures are the very Word of God, the only infallible and inerrant rule of faith and practice, and consequently are the highest authority for both doctrine and morals.

The Bible functions normatively in evangelical ethics through its specific commands and precepts, general principles, various precedents, and overall worldview. Many of the specific commandments of Scripture (e.g., “Do not commit adultery”) are directly translatable into our present context.⁷ General biblical principles, such as the sacredness of human life made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–28), have crucial implications for modern ethical issues not addressed explicitly in Scripture, such as in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering. Old Testament practices such as tithing, while not specifically commanded in the New Testament, can function as a precedent as the people of God seek to fulfill their stewardship obligations in the present age. By teaching foundational truths concerning the nature of God, man, good and evil, and the meaning and destiny of human life, the Bible provides a basic worldview within which the various data of the human sciences can be understood.⁸ It has been said that “good facts make good ethics,” but these “facts” must be seen within the proper framework if their true ethical significance is to be understood.

The understanding of Christian morals being advocated here exemplifies the prescriptive and deontological (Greek: deon, that which is obligatory) tradition in the history of ethics.⁹ According to this school of thought, Christian ethics is to be not merely descriptive of human behavior, but prescriptive in the sense of discerning the will of God in concrete situations, and the specific duties that follow from it. Evangelical ethics is concerned not with personal preferences and feelings, but with obligations that command the conscience.

There has been a widespread tendency in modern biblical scholarship to minimize the prescriptive element in New Testament ethics in favor of generalized appeals to Christian “faith” and “love” apart from the specifics of law. As Rudolf Schnackenburg has pointed out, however, “Jesus was not concerned only with interior dispositions, but wanted his demands to be interpreted as real commandments that are to be converted into action.”¹⁰ W. D. Davies has noted that in the mind of the apostle Paul, the exalted Lord was never divorced from Jesus the rabbi, and the Holy Spirit was never divorced from the historic teachings of Jesus.¹¹ Likewise in 1 John there is constant appeal to the commandments of the Lord, and frequent echoes of them.¹² The love of God shed abroad in the heart of the believer is indeed the dynamic motivation of Christian behavior, but this love demonstrates itself in harmony with, and not apart from, the specific commands and precepts of Holy Scripture.

Empirical and Deliberative Elements

Harmon Smith and Louis Hodges have written that there are two poles between which all Christian decision making must be done: “the reality of God on the one hand and the concrete, contingent situation of the actor on the other.”¹³ Biblical authority represents the “revelational-normative” dimension of Christian ethics; human reason, applying the biblical norms to the concrete situation in light of the specific data at hand, represents the “empirical-deliberative” dimension. Good principles and good facts are both necessary for sound decision making.

In the classic language of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the “whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (1.6; emphasis added).¹⁴ In this formulation human reason has a legitimate role in extending the general principles of Scripture to analogous circumstances not explicitly addressed in the canonical texts.

Cocaine abuse, for example, while not explicitly addressed in the Bible, is certainly inconsistent with the teaching that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and is not to be abused (1 Cor. 6:19–20). The principles of medical ethics that the physician is to “do no harm” and is always to treat the patient as an end and never as a means only¹⁵—so crucial in the treatment of comatose or incompetent subjects—are essentially applications of the spirit of the Golden Rule to the new challenges of modern medicine. This use of reason in evangelical ethics is similar to the deliberations of a civil judge who, being faced with entirely new circumstances in a pending case, attempts to apply existing law in the light of precedents and all the relevant data in order to serve the cause of justice.

While human reason plays an essential role in evangelical ethics, that role is not an autonomous one, independent of the authority of Scripture. Human reason, being impaired by sin, is not to serve as a separate norm as over against Scripture, but rather as the servant of divine revelation in the application of biblical truth.¹⁶ Information from the social sciences, for example, may be relevant to discussions of homosexuality, but the evangelical ethicist will, in the words of J. Robertson McQuilken, maintain “a jealous commitment to the Bible first and last as the originating and controlling source of ideas about man and his relationships.”¹⁷ The Christian ethicist will seek all the facts relevant to the matter at hand, but will recognize the need to interpret those facts with a mind renewed by the Holy Spirit, and within a framework of meaning controlled by the teachings of Holy Scripture.¹⁸

Cases of Conflicting Obligation

In a sinful world, believers may occasionally find themselves confronted with conflicting ethical obligations. In the early church Peter and the other apostles faced conflicting demands for obedience, from the governing authorities and from God (Acts 5:27–29). After Rahab the harlot received the Israelite spies, she was met with a choice between telling the truth and preserving life (Josh. 2). Corrie Ten Boom, when hiding Jews in her ho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Dimensions of Decision Making
• 2. Contraception
• 3. Reproductive Technologies
• 4. Divorce and Remarriage
• 5. Homosexuality
• 6. Abortion
• 7. Termination of Treatment, Infanticide, and Euthanasia
• 8. Capital Punishment
• 9. Civil Disobedience and Revolution
• 10. War and Peace
• 11. Environmental Ethics: History, Issues, Theology
• 12. The Genetic Revolution
• 13. Slavery, Race, and Racism in America
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture