Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12011 Charging interest has a long and awkward history in Christian ethics. For centuries the church treated it as sin outright, and Christians who lent at interest could find themselves excluded from communion. Today most believers hold a mortgage, a pension and a savings account without a flicker of conscience. Something has clearly shifted,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12010 Biblical marriage is not a religious variation on a general human institution. It is the institution, given by God before there were nations, laws, courts or churches, and every later arrangement is a departure from it or an approximation to it. That is a bold claim, so let me show you where it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12009 White lies are so woven into ordinary life that most of us have never stopped to examine them. “You look wonderful in that.” “The meal was lovely.” “I am fine, thanks.” Nobody is harmed, everyone feels better, and the social machinery keeps turning. That is the theory, at any rate. The question for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12008 The sin of lying looks like the easiest ethical question in the Bible. God says do not lie, so do not lie. Case closed. Then somebody asks about the Hebrew midwives, or about hiding a family from a death squad, and the simple answer starts to wobble. I want to take both parts…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12007 Biblical self-defence stops being an abstract question the moment you hear glass breaking downstairs at two in the morning. I have been asked about this by fathers, by women living alone, by shopkeepers who have been robbed twice. It is not a seminar topic for them, and it should not be treated as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12006 Just war thinking has been the settled position of most Christians for something like sixteen centuries, and yet I find that very few believers could tell you what it actually claims. War is one of the most painful realities in human history, and the Christian conscience has never been comfortable with it. Nor…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12005 Capital punishment is one of those questions where sincere believers land in different places, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else. Nobody should be treated as a heretic for wrestling with it. But this is not a question Scripture leaves untouched, and my concern is that we listen…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12004 Christians and tattoos is a subject that produces a good deal of confident assertion and rather little careful reading. One verse gets quoted, the conversation stops, and a young believer with a cross on his forearm is left feeling that he has done something shameful. I think we can do better than that….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12003 Few subjects generate more heat and less light among British believers than Christians and alcohol. Some congregations treat total abstinence as a settled biblical command. Others treat drinking as so unremarkable that they never mention it at all. Both are avoiding what Scripture actually says, which is more careful than either position and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12002 Situational ethics is the view that no act is right or wrong in itself, and that the loving thing in the particular circumstances is the only real moral rule. It was set out most influentially by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s, and although hardly anyone uses the label now, the idea has quietly…