What is Christian ethics?

Question 12000

Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make this year falls under it. What you do with your money, how you speak about an absent colleague, what you accept at work, how you vote, how you treat your body: all of it belongs here.

The subject has a reputation for being either a list of prohibitions or a fog of good intentions. It is neither. What Scripture gives us is a foundation, a standard, a motive and a power, and once those four are in place the practical questions become far more manageable than they look.

Christian ethics begins with God’s character

Everything here rests on who God is. Right and wrong are not arbitrary decrees that could have gone the other way, nor are they a standard existing above God to which he conforms. They flow from his nature. He is holy, so holiness is required. He is truthful, so lying is wrong. He is faithful, so covenant-breaking is a serious matter.

That is why the repeated refrain of Leviticus is: be holy, for I am holy. The obligation is grounded in a person rather than in a principle. Christian ethics is therefore not a philosophy of the good that happens to be held by Christians. It is the outworking of the character of the God who made us and to whom we answer.

This also settles the question of why anyone should care. If morality is a human construction, then it is negotiable and the strong will do the negotiating. If it flows from the character of the Creator, then it holds whether or not anyone agrees, and every person will one day give account.

The standard: Scripture, not instinct

If ethics comes from God’s character, we need him to tell us what that character requires, and he has. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. That last phrase is a substantial claim.

This does not mean Scripture addresses every question directly. It says nothing about cryptocurrency or organ donation. What it supplies is principles sufficient to reason from, which is a different and more useful thing than an exhaustive index. Christian ethics involves genuine thought rather than simply looking things up.

It also means our instincts are not the standard. Conscience is a genuine gift and a real witness, as Romans 2 says of those who show the work of the law written on their hearts, but conscience can be poorly informed and it can be hardened. It needs training by Scripture rather than trusting on its own. See my answer on the conscience.

Law, grace and the age we live in

Here is where Christian ethics needs some care, and where a good deal of confusion arises. The believer today is not under the law of Moses. That law was given to Israel as a national covenant, and Paul says plainly that we are not under law but under grace. Attempts to reimpose the Mosaic code, or to select the parts we like from it, run into trouble quickly.

Yet the moral requirements of the law are not abolished. Nine of the ten commandments are restated in the New Testament for believers, the exception being the sabbath, and the New Testament letters are full of instruction about how to behave. What has changed is the framework, not the character of God from which the requirements flow.

So the believer’s rule of life is what has sometimes been called the law of Christ: the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, applied by the Spirit to a person who has already been accepted. That is why Christian ethics can never be a system of earning. You are not obeying in order to be received. You are obeying because you have been.

The motive: love, not fear

Asked to summarise the whole thing, Jesus gave two commands: love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. On these two, he said, depend all the Law and the Prophets. Paul says something similar, that love is the fulfilling of the law.

The word is agape, which is not an emotion to be worked up but a settled commitment to the good of another. That is important, because a motive based on feeling would collapse in the first difficult week. Christian ethics runs on a love that keeps acting when the feeling has gone.

This does not reduce ethics to sincerity, as though anything done with warm intentions were acceptable. Love has content, given by the commands. Jesus said if you love me you will keep my commandments, tying the two together so that neither can be used against the other.

The power: the Spirit, not willpower

Any system of ethics that stops at telling people what to do has left out the part they most need. Everyone knows more than they manage. Romans 7 describes the misery of the person who sees the good and cannot reach it, and no amount of moral instruction fixes that.

What Christianity adds is the Holy Spirit indwelling the believer and producing what Galatians calls fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Notice that these are grown rather than manufactured. Christian ethics is therefore less like following a manual and more like tending a garden, though it involves effort in both cases.

Romans 12:2 speaks of being transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God. The renewed mind is what makes moral discernment possible, and it is renewed by Scripture, prayer and the ordinary life of a congregation over years rather than by a single decision.

Three frameworks, and where they fit

Moral philosophy usually offers three approaches. Duty-based ethics asks what the rule requires. Consequence-based ethics asks what produces the best outcome. Virtue ethics asks what sort of person I am becoming. Each captures something real, and each on its own goes wrong.

Scripture uses all three. It gives commands, so duty is real. It appeals to consequences, warning what will follow from folly. And it is deeply concerned with character, since the fruit of the Spirit is a description of a person rather than of a set of actions. Christian ethics holds them together under the authority of God rather than choosing one and elevating it.

Where they conflict, the command governs. Consequences cannot be calculated reliably by creatures who cannot see tomorrow, which is precisely why we are given instruction. I take that further in my answers on how we make moral decisions and on situational ethics.

Where the church usually goes wrong

Two failures recur, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is legalism, in which the list grows longer than Scripture’s, the additions harden into tests of fellowship, and people end up policing hemlines and hairstyles while ignoring pride and unkindness. Jesus reserved his sharpest words for exactly this, and it is remarkable how comfortable it feels from the inside.

The second is a slackness that treats grace as though it made behaviour irrelevant. Paul anticipated the argument and dismissed it flatly: are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. A Christian ethics that never asks anything of anybody has misunderstood what forgiveness is for.

The remedy for both is the same, which is to keep the gospel and the commands in their proper order rather than choosing between them. Grace comes first and produces obedience. Obedience does not produce grace. Get that sequence wrong in either direction and everything downstream of it goes wrong too.

So, now what?

Take one decision you are currently avoiding and put it through the questions rather than waiting for the discomfort to pass, which it will not. What does Scripture say directly or by principle? What would love for God and for the actual people involved require? What sort of person will this choice make me over the next ten years or so?

And keep the order right. Christian ethics is what follows the gospel, never what qualifies you for it. If you are trying to be good enough for God, stop, and start with what Jesus has already done. Which of those two are you actually living on at the moment? It is a question worth asking slowly, because most of us answer it correctly in theory and incorrectly in practice, and Christian ethics only becomes real at the point where the two are made to agree.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, ESV)