Unlike the ethical systems developed by men, Christian ethics does not rest on arbitrary rules but instead upon a strong foundation of absolutes. It is only by understanding this primary fact that we are able to comprehend both the seriousness and the uniqueness of our system of ethics, inasmuch as it establishes for us the concept of absolute right and wrong. No other system gives us this solid a base from which to operate.
Beginning in this section we shall commence a discussion of the five points that constitute our basis for Christian ethics. In the process of examining these points it is hoped that the reader will see not only how firm is his Christian foundation, but also that he may begin to see how bankrupt are all human systems. While our specific aim is to instill in the Christian a fuller understanding of his own system of ethics, truth — having the natural quality of light — will lead us also to report on and to refute other popular philosophical systems in today’s culture.
As with the world and everything in it, our starting place is God. Our ethics rests ultimately and fundamentally upon God Himself and upon His divine character. As Leander Keyser once wrote, “Christian ethics goes back to God as the ultimate ground and source of morality.”1
Because of who God is, we cannot separate that which is good from that which is pleasing to God. God is the source of all that is good, and that includes our standards for ethical behavior. Behind God there is no “higher good,” as though God Himself were subject to some abstract concept of righteousness, nor is there any good outside of that which conforms to His goodness. He is the ultimate source of true ethics and morality, and as such He is the starting place for all our Christian conduct. Since the Christian believes in a God in whom all goodness is intrinsically fixed, he seeks to conform his life to God’s likeness.
When we say that the Christian believes that God exists, we mean something significantly different from what many modern people mean when they make that statement. The Christian believes in a God who is really there, a God who exists as an objective reality — not simply one who exists as a mere postulate. A postulate is something that is assumed to be true even when there is no proof that it is true; it is simply something assumed as a basis for reasoning. Modern theology, for instance, often tells man that God cannot be proved, that He must be accepted purely on faith, and it therefore reduces God to nothing more than a postulate.
The Christian’s faith in God, however, unlike the faith of modern man, is a rational faith. When modern man says that he believes in God and yet says that God cannot be proved, he is accepting the idea of God as a faith-assumption. He has no rational basis for his belief in God, but he merely chooses to assume, against all the evidence, that God is. The Christian’s faith is instead grounded in reality. He believes in God, not because he chooses to believe in Him on the basis of a faith-assumption, but because he knows God is really there; the evidences for His existence are overwhelming.
It sometimes comes as a surprise to many Christians to be told that God can be proved. A number of us regrettably have surrendered valuable ground to the modern skeptics by refusing to defend our belief in God from a rational standpoint. This has been due largely to our erroneous ideas about the word “proof.” Having recognized that we cannot take a skeptic to a given place and allow him to see God with his own eyes, we somehow have concluded that God must lie beyond the realm of objective validity and must be accepted only on the basis of unsubstantiated faith.
The fact is there is overwhelming evidence pointing to the reality of God’s existence. While it is not our purpose in this treatise to examine these evidences in detail, it is hoped that we may encourage Christians who have been confused on this point to pursue further study. (An excellent online site devoted to Christian apologetics is www.DoesGodExist.org where one can find a wealth of information and many free books and video- and audiotapes.) God can be proved as adequately as anything can be, and we must not ignore the evidence or minimize the strength of our faith position.
Of course, even with all the evidence we may muster, many people will still reject God or will remain skeptical. This frequently results from an individual’s demanding absolute proof of God’s existence, as though existing evidences are not enough. It is true that God cannot be proved absolutely — but then neither can anything else. One cannot present absolute proof about anything, not even well-established scientific facts. These things may be proved with certainty, but not with absoluteness. As Blaise Pascal once said, “Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow, and that we shall die?”2 These notions are accepted as fact, and reasonably so, but they cannot be proved in the sense of absolute proof. But they are not, as God often is, rejected on that account. It is interesting to wonder with Trueblood why so many people “demand of religious truth a level of certainty which is not demanded of scientific truth.”3
On the opposite side of the issue, one may occasionally encounter a Christian who believes there are no objective proofs that there is a God, or who at least feels that objective proof is non-essential to true faith. Sometimes these people will even criticize the efforts of other Christians who are engaged in discussing the physical and scientific evidences of God’s existence. The one who does so is often well-meaning, insisting that God must be accepted on faith and that any objective support for his belief minimizes the purity of that faith. But it is important to distinguish between blind faith (a faith-assumption) and faith based on reality. If we look at the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans we may recall the arguments St. Paul used against the unrighteous men who rejected God. St. Paul says that they are without excuse because God’s existence can be known — objectively and rationally known — because God has revealed Himself in His creation (Romans 1:19). Even “His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). God can be proved, and God expects us to believe in Him because He is there. If we believe simply as a matter of choice without knowing whether what we believe is indeed true, then our faith is no different from that of men who accept the idea of God as a mere postulate. True faith is not believing in what cannot be proved; true faith is believing in what we know to be true.
Nor does Scripture ask us to believe in God or in Christ as a matter of personal choice, but on the basis of revealed fact. If we look at St. Paul’s discourse in I Corinthians 15:12-19 we can see clearly that his faith was based on something more than postulated notions. “And if Christ is not risen,” he says, “then our preaching is vain and your faith is also vain.” The word “vain” means empty, but we may just as well substitute the words “meaningless” or “worthless.” If Christ is not risen, says St. Paul, as an objective reality, then all of Christianity is just a bunch of nonsense. It is in the reality of Christ’s resurrection that we have hope of life beyond the grave, and if Christ is not really risen then that hope is dead. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable” (I Corinthians 15:19). But St. Paul immediately states in the following verse that the fact is Christ has risen — bodily, objectively — and it is in this fact (not in that mystical notion) that we are to place our faith.
As Christians, therefore, we believe that God exists as an objective reality. But beyond the fact of His actual existence we also believe that He exists as a personal God who possesses a moral character. He is not simply some kind of omnipresent force acting in and through nature, but He is personal — that is, He exists as a rational, intelligent Being who possesses divine characteristics of personhood, including such concepts as love, justice, righteousness, and holiness.
Modern man generally thinks of God (if he thinks of God at all) in an almost pantheistic sense, seeing God as a mystical, impersonal force operating in the universe. This is one reason why Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism have gained such wide followings in the West in recent decades. Both the Eastern religions and modern Western theology have dispensed with the idea of God as “the old man in the sky” and instead perceive God rather as some sort of mystical force permeating all existence. Such a view of God is not anomalous to the idea of the Force represented in the popular motion picture Star Wars. The term “god” is never used in reference to this indefinable Force, but all implications are that this concept mirrors roughly the idea of God in much contemporary religious thought in both East and West today.
While it is true that many “Christian” denominations today still use the familiar words and phrases that are traditional with Christianity when referring to God, we must realize that by these terms they often mean things entirely different from the traditional concepts. The use of such deceptive terminology likely has been resorted to in an effort to keep the “uninitiated” parishoners from leaving the church, offering them familiar Christian words but altering their meanings to the degree that for all intents and purposes the words lose their meanings altogether. Using the word “God,” for instance, gives the connotation of acceptance of the historic Christian theological position of God and His nature, but by this term many modern Christians often mean only some vague notion about a superior being or force or even only some acknowledgment of an “infinity.” But when God is thus perceived He has ceased to be God; He is merely a force — impersonal, beyond good and evil, and without any kind of moral character. By this definition God can at best be perceived as only the light or positive side of an infinite force, similar to the light side of the Force in Star Wars or to the Yin in Oriental religion. But because in these systems there exists also an equal opposing force (the Yang or the dark side), there is therefore no basis for establishing right and wrong except on the basis of total equality in which right would also equal non-right. When God is reduced to an impersonal force, with an equal and opposing opposite force His counterpart, there is no rational basis for choosing good over evil or right over wrong; good and evil are equal in these systems.
Quite the opposite is true of the Christian’s God, because the Christian’s God is a personal God — that is, He possesses personhood and has a personality. Unlike a force, which is beyond good and evil, the Christian’s God is a lover of righteousness. As a Person, the Christian’s God also possesses a moral character whose attributes are holiness and love (I Peter 1:15, 16; I John 4:8; I John 1:5). In I John 1:5 we see not only God’s holy character reflected in St. John’s use of the word “light,” but in it also we see the fact that our God is a God who desires to be known, One who by His very nature reveals Himself to mankind. He is not a God who hides in shadow and darkness and who cannot be known; He does not withdraw Himself from the scene, like the Deist’s God. Instead the Christian’s God is self-revealing in that which He has created, and His will is that His creation should honor Him and be like Him.
As was stated earlier, what we know of goodness and righteousness is known because our God is a good and righteous God. There is no good that exists apart from Him, for in Him is the source of all that is good. He is not subject to a higher good than Himself, but He is the ultimate source of goodness. This view is strikingly different from most pagan ideas about God. Even the pagan religions that pay homage to personal gods (such as the religions of ancient Greece and Rome and modern-day pagan movements such as Wicca) do not approximate the Christian understanding of God because, being subject to a law or power above themselves, these gods are finite. The Christian’s God is both personal and infinite, for there is nothing higher than God Himself.
Also unlike the pagan gods, the Christian God is true to Himself and does not behave capriciously. Whereas we often read of the pagan gods acting on whim or impulse or even making errors of judgment, we read of the Christian God that “I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6); He is “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8); and that with Him “there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17).
Finally, the Christian’s concept of God is fuller even than the Islamic concept, for though Islamic theology recognizes the personhood and, nominally, the infinity of God, it fails to attribute to Him the fullness of His divine characteristic of love. The Islamic God may be a lover of justice, but He knows little of love and mercy and compassion. These qualities are essential to a full understanding of God, because Scripture teaches us that God is love in His very being. He is infinite, He is personal, and He has a divine character in which holiness and love are intrinsically fixed.
To begin without this fundamental base for our choice of ethics is to leave us utterly directionless and, ultimately, meaningless. It is only on the basis that God exists as an infinite, personal God who possesses characteristics of holiness and love that we are able to determine values. If we attempt to establish values outside of God we may draw up some kind of arbitrary “values” of a sort, but they cannot be values that are absolute and transcendent or that possess value for their own sake. In the final analysis, such values would ultimately be meaningless themselves.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the great existential philosopher, understood the significance of a universe without God. Sartre recognized that without God there can be no absolutes. Although he was an atheist, Sartre comprehended where his atheism led him: to a universe without transcendent values where anything is possible. “Everything is possible if God does not exist,” Sartre said, “and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”4 In Sartre’s philosophy a person has to make his decisions on the basis of what is meaningful to himself, since nothing outside himself matters. In his system a person cannot determine right and wrong on the basis of objective truth, because without God truth — which is an absolute — is destroyed. “The existentialist ... thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it.”5
The same holds true for the so-called Christian existentialists who accept the concept of God in some form of subjective sense because it is meaningful to them, or who equate the term “God” with some mystical, indefinable, impersonal force. When God as a personal, objective reality is destroyed, all absolute truths are destroyed with Him. Therefore those who claim to be Christians yet deny God as He is have no more basis for their system of determining right and wrong than does the professed atheist. The Christian existentialist’s ethics, as well as his religion, becomes meaningless.
If we deny God as He really is, we are left with only three possible ways of choosing ethical “values”:
Without God, then, man is left on his own to determine right from wrong — an exceedingly difficult task since he has no basis for determining whether right and wrong actually exist — and he may do so only in one of the three ways just described. None of these choices gives any transcendent meaning to rightness and wrongness, nor would any guarantee that what is right and wrong today will still be right and wrong tomorrow. One has only to look at the example of Red China to see that without God there can be no certainties or absolutes — only questions without answers. The ultimate end of such a system carried to its logical conclusion is chaos and meaninglessness, for without absolutes one would have to conclude that Hitler was not wrong in murdering six million Jews — he was merely authenticating himself.
The Christian should recognize that he is truly blessed in having a firm starting place from which to build his ethics. God is, and He exists as an infinite and all-knowing, transcendent Person, a lover of right and a hater of wrong. With Him there exist values that go beyond the realm of space and time, values that are true for everyone and for all eternity, values that remain unchanged regardless what the popular majority or the ruling elite may decide. As Francis Schaeffer has summed it up: “There is no Law behind God, because the furthest thing back is God. The moral absolutes rest upon God’s character. The creation as He originally made it conformed to His character. The moral commands He has given to men are an expression of His character. Man as created in His image are to live by choice on the basis of what God is. The standards of morality are determined by what conforms to His character, while those things which do not conform are immoral.”6 “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:26, 27).
To the Christian, man is valuable. He is valuable because he stands apart from all other creation in having been created in the very image of God Himself, as these two verses from the creation story describe. Man did not come about by chance but was formed out of divine purpose by an infinite, personal God who possesses characteristics of holiness and love. Being formed in His image, man is therefore seen to be a personal being, like his Creator, possessing a moral consciousness.
Such a high and noble view of man differs dramatically from the views derived from human philosophy. In most human systems man has simply come upon the scene through some sort of cosmic accident, and he finds himself here without meaning and without purpose, existing merely as a form of higher animal. But such a concept of man throws man into a moral and philosophical dilemma, because he recognizes himself as somehow distinct from the rest of creation yet without a sufficient explanation for his uniqueness.
In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer draws two diagrams that portray the differences between this human view of man and the Christian view. (Scheaffer’s discussions of the human vs. Christian views of man are so beautifully expressed that this authors feels he could do little to improve upon them, and he readily acknowledges his debt to Schaeffer’s work in this discussion.) In the Christian view Schaeffer first writes the word “God” across the top of the page, and on either side beneath this he writes the words “personal” and “infinite,” referring to God’s characteristics of being. Beneath the word “infinite” he draws a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm he puts man, animals, plants, and machines, indicating that because all these things are finite (as opposed to God’s being infinite) man dwells on the same side of the chasm as all other creation in relation to his finiteness. Man, just as all the rest of creation, is separated from God by a chasm in the realm of infinity. But beneath the word “personal” we do not have to place man on the same side of the chasm as animals, plants, and machines, because in the realm of personality man resides on the same side as God. This is so because God has created man as a personal being, and in this respect man is different from the other animals, from plants, and from machines.7
1. Christian ethics rests on God and His character
In any of these three systems (and there are no others) our “values” and our “absolutes” are not absolute at all but are entirely relative. Existential values are values that are meaningful to the individual; they vary from individual to individual and even vary during the lifetime of a given individual. Such are not values that are chosen on the basis of what is intrinsically good but are merely choices and acts of the will by which an individual decides to “authenticate” himself. Values established by a vote of a fifty-one percent majority may remain absolute only so long as the majority holds them; they may be reversed subsequently as social mores change. Values established by a ruling elite (as in Nazi Germany or Communist China) may remain absolute only so long as that elite retains power or only so long as it thinks consistently.
2. Christian ethics rests on the nature of man
GOD
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Personal Man Chasm ====== Animals Plants Machines |
Infinite ====== Chasm Man Animals Plants Machines |
If we turn to the second of Schaeffer’s diagrams, which typifies man’s own view of himself, instead of the word “God” we find only the word “Infinity,” and beneath that word is a chasm separating infinity from all that is finite — man, animals, plants, and machines.8
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Infinity ======== Chasm Man Animals Plants Machines |
There is no personal side to infinity, because whatever is there is impersonal, whether it is called a force or a god or whatever. In this view man is pictured as being equal in all respects to animals, plants, and machines; in other words, man is equal to non-man. (This concept is expressed succinctly in the popular PETA slogan, “A rat is a dog is a pig is a boy.”) In this view, while man equals non-man in every other respect, he exists distinct from the rest of creation in respect to his personality, though no one knows why or what purpose this side to man serves.
One of the biggest problems secular man has to face concerns how man, who is a personal being, could have evolved out of an impersonal universe. No one has yet presented even a remote idea how an impersonal beginning plus time plus chance can give rise to personality. Once God is eliminated from the scene we are left with nothing but impersonality; yet here man stands an anomaly, the personal amidst the impersonal world from which he sprang.
In order to illustrate the kind of problem that we encounter when we start from an impersonal beginning, we return again to an analogy used by Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer takes us to a high vantage point in the Alps where we are able to look down on three parallel mountain ranges with two valleys lying between them. One of the valleys contains a lake, but the other valley is dry. As we watch, we suddenly see this dry lake begin to fill with water — a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in the Alps. As we watch the water level rise in the new lake, we may begin to wonder about the water’s source. If we go down and measure the water level and find that the level of the new lake is the same as that of the former lake, we then could conclude that the water in the new lake could have come from the first valley. But if we find the water level in the new lake to be twenty feet higher than the water in the first one, then we could no longer assume that the water came from the first valley; we would have to start looking for another source.9
Schaeffer points out that personality is like that. Personality cannot grow out of impersonality, just as a lake cannot rise above its source. Impersonality as a source for the personal is insufficient. Therefore, the impersonal plus time plus chance cannot explain the rise of personality in man.
This represents modern man’s greatest dilemma. If man rules out the personal beginning (which he does if he rules out the personal God), then he is left with no way of explaining the rise of his own distinctiveness and uniqueness in the universe. Some have attempted to resort to mysticism in an effort to explain personality, but whether one accepts the mysticism of Eastern religions or the mysticism of liberal Western theology or even the philosophical mysticism of the metaphysical thinkers, one eventually ends up at the same starting place: the impersonal plus time plus chance. Man is then left with only two possibilities: He must conclude either that personality is merely an illusion, or he must take a non-rational “leap of faith.”
The kind of leap of faith we mean here is that which was effectively demonstrated by the British philosopher Sir Julian Huxley. Although Huxley was an atheist, he admitted that man functions better in the universe if he acts as though there is a God. It is better for man, he said, to “make believe” than to try to get by in the real world. What such a position amounts to is admitting that it is impossible for man to function in the reality of the truth of what is. In order to live and act, man must believe a lie and must assume, against all reason, that a lie is true. Huxley’s answer — though pragmatically sound — actually spells the death of man.
Schaeffer again illustrates how this is so. He asks us to imagine a universe that is made up of only liquids and solids with no free gases. We see a fish swimming through this universe, to which he is fully conformed, when suddenly — by blind chance — this fish develops lungs. Now a fish with lungs in a universe without gases can no longer function as a fish. Would it then be higher or lower in its new condition with lungs? Obviously it would be lower, for it would drown.10
But in the same way, if man has been kicked up by blind chance out of that which is impersonal, than all the things that make him man — “hope of purpose and significance, love, notions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication”11 — are all unfulfillable in the universe that exists and are therefore meaningless. In such a case is man to be viewed as higher or lower than if he had remained impersonal? As Schaeffer points out, man would in such a case be the lowest creature on the scale, because even the “green moss on the rock is higher than he, for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists,”12 but man cannot. In order for man to be fulfilled, according to Huxley, he has to believe in a universe that does not exist, a universe that is not true to reality. Such an alteration of reality is not demanded of any other life form than man, because man, with his personality in an impersonal universe, is just like a fish with lungs in a universe without free gases. Such a system as Huxley’s is obviously not true to reality and comes nowhere near helping us resolve our dilemma.
In an effort to circumvent these difficulties, some scientists and philosophers in recent years have attempted to redefine personality in genetic terms. This has given rise to the idea that our universe, and man included, operates in a totally determined system. This means that everything, including man’s moral actions, are caused by factors within the system; in man’s case that would mean his actions and behavior are caused by his chemical and genetic makeup — representing a sort of atheistic “predestination.” Whereas we may credit the determinists with at least recognizing that man is a personal being (though absent any explanation as to why or how), they essentially deny personality entirely, at least as it has been generally understood. Instead they redefine personality as some kind of genetic manipulation of the gene host (man). In this view man is seen not as a creature that has fallen from heroic proportions, nor even as a creature that has courageously dragged himself up out of the slime; he is simply there, because that’s what his genes determined for him.
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One of the most concise descriptions of the tenets and implications of deterministic thought appeared in a Time magazine article on August 1, 1977. Many of the points that the deterministic system stands for were admittedly startling and disturbing, according to the article’s author. The article stated that in deterministic thought, “Conflict between parents and children is biologically inevitable. Children are born deceitful. All human acts — even saving a stranger from drowning or donating a million dollars to the poor — may be ultimately selfish. Morality and justice, far from being the triumphant product of human progress, evolved from man’s past, and are securely rooted in the genes.”13 The article goes on to state that "Some sociobiologists go so far as to say that there may be human genes for such behavior as conformism, homosexuality and spite. Carried to an extreme, sociobiology holds that all forms of life exist solely to serve the purpose of the DNA, the coded master molecule that determines the nature of all organisms and is the stuff of genes.”14 |
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The article also quotes British ethologist Richard Dawkins, a pioneer in sociobiology and an adherent to genetic determinism. Dawkins describes our genes as swarming “in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.... [W]e are their survival machines.”15 Such a view reduces man to nothing more than an armored troop carrier, designed and built to protect the genes which control us from within. There is no room for free will, nor for any meaning to life beyond the preservation of DNA. But such an explanation for our existence merely begs the question. If man exists to preserve DNA, what rationale can be given to DNA’s preservation? This system neither correctly defines personality nor provides man with any meaningful reason for existence. It is only death and nothingness with man ultimately finding himself equal to non-man — no higher than, and in fact lower than, a machine, for a machine at least possesses an essence for a higher being than itself.
If determinism is true then the pursuit of ethics is futile because right and wrong cannot exist. Man merely does what he is programmed to do. The artist who photographed the cover of the issue of Time in which the above article appeared correctly understood the logical implications of sociobiology’s deterministic mindset. He photographed a man and a woman apparently dancing — but without touching — while being controlled by a puppeteer’s strings. Man is pictured as not in control of his own life but subject to conforming to the dictates of his genetic makeup. He is not responsible for his own actions and is therefore not a moral being. To quote Dr. Robert Plomin of the University of Colorado’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics, “If behavioral genetics teaches us anything it teaches us that the personality differences we see in people are real; they aren’t moral or psychological deficits; they have a physical basis, and all of us — parents, teachers and society in general — should learn to be more accepting and respectful of them”16 (emphasis added). The implication of Plomin’s statement is that a dishonest individual is not dishonest because he suffers a moral deficit, but his dishonesty has a purely physical basis. By the same token we might conclude that a rapist, a murderer, or an adulterer do not engage in these behaviors because they lack a certain moral character but because of the physical makeup of their genes.
This system represents nothing less than the death of humanity for it provides no place for man to exist as man. To say that man is not responsible is to say that he is something less than human. But this has to be the logical conclusion of determinism. Francis Schaeffer tells of hearing George Wald, a chemistry professor from Harvard University, sum up the logical implications of deterministic thought. In a lecture given in Acapulco, Mexico, Wald
expressed with great force the modern concept that all things, including man, are merely the product of chance. After he had stressed over and over again that all things, beginning from the molecule and ending with man, are only the product of chance, he said, ‘Four hundred years ago there was a collection of molecules named Shakespeare which produced Hamlet.’ According to these theories, that is all that man can be. Man beginning with his proud, proud humanism, tried to make himself autonomous, but rather than becoming great, he had found himself ending up as only a collection of molecules — nothing more.17
When we subscribe to such a system what can be our view of man? Can we truly look at a fellow human being and see him as a noble creature endowed with a divine essence or even possessing intrinsic value? In such a system man is simply another organism of no higher nobility or purpose than a slug. This writer is reminded of an occasion his wife related to him when she was a medical student. She had become concerned over the type of physicians her colleagues were becoming due to her having heard one of her fellow students refer to a patient suffering from a rare disease as “an interesting problem to challenge my intellect.” To this young doctor, who adhered to a purely evolutionary view of man, this patient meant nothing more to him than that. He had no real concern for the patient as a person, nor did he view her as possessing any inherent value for her own sake; his only interest in her lay in the fact that she provided him a unique opportunity to match wits with a particularly troublesome disease. (It is interesting to consider whether this young doctor is now among many physicians who, after treating their patients with no higher respect than a virus, wonder why it is that physicians no longer have the respect of the general populace.)
Christianity is the only system that gives us a logical and rational reason to maintain a high view of man, and it is the only system that offers us a reasonable way out of our dilemma. Christianity can explain personality in man because, unlike the two lakes in the Alpine valleys, its source is sufficient. God is a personal God, and He has created man in His image. Therefore, the Christian takes a very high view of man and sees him as a creature of immense value and worth.
This is not presumptuous of us. Unfortunately some Christians feel that we must diminish man’s significance for fear of detracting from the greatness and glory of God. But while it is true that man can be led to think more highly of himself than he ought, it is also true that Scripture paints a very high view of man. Psalm 8:4, 5, for example, states: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou has made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor” (ERV). Though some translations substitute the word “angels” for “God,” the actual Hebrew is very emphatic in stating that man is created just a little lower than God and is crowned with glory and honor. This passage clearly exemplifies a high view of man yet still expounds on the greatness and excellence of God. What it teaches us is that man is valuable and that there isn’t an infinite gulf between man and God, because man has been made in God’s image — he dwells on the same side of the chasm as God because both are personal beings.
Now we must recognize that both the concept of determinism and the concept of free will are faith commitments. There probably is no way to verify purely objectively whether man’s actions are predetermined by his genetic makeup or whether his actions are governed by his own free initiative. But we ought not on that account ignore in which direction the evidences point. We are not obliged to choose or believe in either determinism or free will as a matter of preference; we are to choose to believe in one or the other because it is true of reality and of the universe that really exists. We are to use our ability to reason as we look into the two systems with an eye for truth. In doing so we may objectively discover that the biblical view offers a rational, believable explanation for man’s nature; determinism does not. In a deterministic system there cannot even be communication, for communication presupposes free will and the free expression of ideas; yet the fact that we do communicate in itself invalidates the system. Reason will show us which system is true and which is false.
This ability to reason is itself a further evidence of our having been made in God’s image. Some Christians limit their understanding of man’s having been made in God’s image to the fact that man, unlike the animals, has been given an immortal soul. But there is more to it than that. Also unlike the animals, man has the ability to reason and think intelligently and to make moral choices. It is in this way too that man reflects the image of his Creator.
Having been made thus man is called upon to use his reasoning abilities in the service of his God. He is not to bypass the mind and reach out into the unknown void on unsupported faith as the modern theologians claim. His faith is not to be unsubstantiated faith based on personal choice, but it is to be based on the reality of what is. Neither is he to set his mind aside and rely only on some sort of charismatic experience as some religious groups insist. These groups often view man as a dichotomy, a being possessing a body that is evil, a soul that is good, and a mind that is suspect. To these groups the experience is the fundamental criterion for understanding truth, and experience rather than reason is to be relied on in determining religious truth. Some groups even go so far as to criticize asking questions on the basis that questioning represents an immature faith. To these people belief is everything.
But both the liberal theological approach and the charismatic approach to the question of the mind in religion are in error. As we have shown already, if modern theology’s basic premises are correct, then man is like a fish with lungs: He has personality and rationality, neither of which he needs in a universe that is otherwise entirely impersonal and irrational, and both of which render man utterly unfulfillable. In this system man not only does not need personality, but he does not need religion either, because it too would be meaningless in a world without God. In the thinking of the more conservative denominations who nonetheless divide man into parts, we lose the unity of God’s creation. God created man as a whole being, and it is with the whole being that man is to serve God. Colossians 3:17 says, “And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,” and in light of that the Christian should realize that this includes the whole person — body, soul, and mind. As we hope to see in the further course of this study, Christianity does not consist in keeping oneself from a certain number of religious taboos, but it requires the bringing of oneself entirely under the lordship of Christ.
In summary, we see that man, in the Christian view, is valuable. He is a unified being. He is made in the image of his Creator. He is like the animals and the rest of creation in the realm of his finiteness, but in the realm of personality he transcends the rest of creation because he has intellect, rationality, discernment, verbal communication, and the ability to make moral choices. That is why Jesus told His followers, “Of how much more value is man than a sheep?” (Matthew 12:12) and, “You are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31). Man is a noble creature, made just a little lower than God and crowned with glory and honor. So the Christian sees his fellow man as high, but fallen; the modern man must ultimately see his fellow man as low, meaningless, valueless, absurd. In order to find which view is true we have but to ask which system answers the questions about life. Which is more reasonable? Does Christianity or contemporary philosophy speak to what really exists? If a person has no belief in God whatever yet is asked to answer honestly which system hypothetically offers the more reasonable explanation for man and the universe, he would have to admit that it is the Christian system. This system we must choose, then, not as a matter of personal preference, but because it is true.
As the Christian approaches his ethical dealings with his fellow man he must maintain this high, biblical view of man. We cannot bless God and curse men, says St. James, because man is made in the image of God, he bears His likeness, and he possesses a part of His divine personality (James 3:9). This is significant in our ethical system, because we make most of our moral and ethical choices when we choose our view of man.
3. Christian ethics rests on Scripture
Since the Christian’s God is an infinite, personal God who possesses characteristics of holiness and love and who likewise possesses intellect, and since this God has created man in His own image, in His likeness, so that man too is personal, rational, and in possession of a moral consciousness, it is therefore not unreasonable to accept the fact that God has communicated to man and conveyed to him His divine will. We find evidence of communication within the Godhead even before the foundation of the universe (cf. Genesis 1:26, John 1:1-3), God communicating with Himself in rational terms. We also recognize that man is endowed with the ability to communicate with his fellow man in rational terms, this being possible because man is made in the image of the higher Communicator. Since, therefore, both man and God are capable of horizontal communication, and seeing as God (the higher) has created man (the lower) to bear His image in this respect, it should not surprise us or appear unreasonable to discover that there is also a vertical communication between the Creator and the created. Furthermore, if God has communicated with man, it is also not unreasonable that He should communicate propositionally — that is, that He should communicate in such a manner that truth and error can be known — and that He should communicate in a similar manner to that which man uses to communicate with man. We find evidence of just such vertical communication in Acts 26:14 where St. Paul says that the risen Christ spoke to him “in the Hebrew language.” This was no mystical language or vague feeling that St. Paul experience, but it was real, intelligent, verbal communication. And it is thus through such verbal, rational, and intelligent communication that God has let His will be known to mankind.
Though God has spoken to mankind in many ways (through the Patriarchs and Prophets, for example), His communication has been accomplished principally through Scripture. And just as God has done with Himself in creating a universe that bears the image of its Creator so that He may be objectively verified through what can be seen and known, He has done likewise with Scripture. He has made His will known and has expressed it in such a way that it may be objectively verified. This He has done by making Scripture a unity with what is, speaking of the universe and history in terms that can be verified through what can be seen and known. He did not simply give man a “theological textbook,” as other religions claim to possess, but He set His Word solidly in the truth of what is. He reveals theology, but He reveals it in the context of the universe and human history. In so doing He has left His Word open to examination, for when it speaks of the universe or history it must be found to speak truly of those things. If Scripture were found to be unreliable in its references to history or to the universe as we know it to be, then it also would be highly suspect in its reference to theological concepts. (We might compare, for instance, the holy writings of other world religions and note that when they speak of history or the universe, they often speak not as things really are. The Rig-Veda of the Hindus, to cite but one example, speaks of the universe having come about as a result of a cosmic sacrifice, the universe formerly having been a cosmic cow that was dismembered to produce the mountains, rivers, earth, and all living creatures. When the Bible speaks of the universe it speaks of it in terms of how it really is.)
When God speaks, therefore, He speaks truth not only about Himself but also about the physical universe as well. What He reveals about man, the universe, and history may be subjected to objective evaluation and found to be true. As a result, when He speaks about Himself He may be believed, and He may be believed on the basis of our own rational examination of what He has spoken in other areas. In learning for ourselves the truth that God has spoken about the external world, we may then acknowledge that what He has spoken concerning Himself is also true.
We must realize, however, that while God has spoken truly about the universe and about Himself, He has not spoken exhaustively. This poses a problem for some people who feel that if God were to speak truly about something He must also speak the whole truth and reveal everything that can be known. This writer well remembers having discussions with a gentleman in Alabama who, though on the verge of believing, nevertheless chose to remain a skeptic because Scripture did not answer every conceivable question he could ask. We are not talking here about questions that deal with salvation or justification or Christian living or even questions that pertain to the universe itself, but questions that deal with pure speculation and that have no real bearing on a person’s belief — questions that God simply has chosen not to answer. But because God has chosen not to reveal everything about Himself does not mean that what He has revealed is less than true. One could stand before an audience and give an autobiographical sketch of his life, but whether he speaks for ten minutes or ten hours he could never reveal everything about himself to his hearers — nor would there be any need for him to do so. But his audience could not assume as a result of his limited revelation that what he has spoken about himself is not true. One could only assume that he spoke falsely if the information he gave about things that can be verified proved false. It is the same with God’s revelation. What He has spoken regarding the things that can be verified can be observed to be true; therefore, what He has spoken regarding Himself and His will also may be accepted as true on that basis.
In Scripture, then, God has communicated His mind, character, and will to mankind. We must therefore recognize the authority of His Word, for through it He gives us truth. As a result, we must put the Word over our own personal experience. Whether the experience be the irrational faith-assumption of the modern theologian or the subjective, emotional experience of the charismatic or even the true, wholesome experience of the faithful Christian, the experience must not take precedence over the Word. The Christian cannot say, “This is in my experience, therefore it must be in the Word,” but rather, “This is in the Word, therefore I must make it a part of my experience.” Experience alone will validate nothing and will give us no basis for establishing truth in any area, whether we are speaking of science, religion, or ethics. Our experience (or our action or our belief) is itself valid only when it is sanctioned by revealed truth. It must first be found to be consistent with the Word, and only then may it be made a part of our experience. Christian ethics means carrying into life the logical implications. This is what it means to conform to the will of God.
It is often difficult for those of us who hold to the authority of Scripture to understand how many people who claim to be Christians can openly admit that the Scripture is subject to question. The attitude that Scripture is merely a product of man and that it therefore cannot be relied upon as an authoritative means of directing one’s life is an attitude that has become prevalent within the church today, especially among the young. Because of its pervasive influence, we would do well to try to understand how this attitude has come about.
To do so it will first be necessary for us to engage in a bit of a history lesson and trace the development of thought over the last 200 years. Once we begin to see the dramatic change that has occurred in man’s basic way of thinking about and of perceiving truth, we will be better able both to understand and to work with modern man.
Throughout most of human history people generally have thought in terms of a straight line. On one end of the line is a thesis or proposition, and on the other end is the opposite of this thesis — the antithesis. Usually referred to as antithetical thinking, this method of reasoning has allowed mankind to develop a consciousness about the concepts of truth and error. For instance, if we state as our thesis that God exists, the opposite of that statement — that God does not exist — stands as its antithesis. If we accept the thesis as true, then its antithesis is false. Therefore if we accept as true the statement that God exists, in antithetical thought we acknowledge that the statement that God does not exists must be false. This, of course, is the way most conservative Christians still think today.
However, if we go back to the early part of the nineteenth century we will find that a drastic change took place in the way people perceive truth. This change was brought about principally through the work of the philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel originated the idea that man should stop thinking in terms of a straight line with a thesis and an antithesis at opposite ends, but instead should think in terms of a triangle. On either end of the base of the triangle the traditional thesis and antithesis stand opposing each other; but their relationship and meaning are changed due to the fact that through their interrelation man supposedly works out a synthesis between the two.
Hegel’s position was that inherent in every thesis is its antithesis, so that in fact there is no such thing as a perfect thesis or an absolute. If one states a given thesis (according to Hegel) one may discover a contradiction within the thesis that incorporates a part of its own antithesis. Hegel believed that man, through the process of reason, could and would eventually reach a synthesis between the original thesis and its antithesis. That synthesis, in the long run of things, would in time set itself up as its own thesis with its own antithesis, and so another synthesis would later be reached, ad infinitum. As an illustration, we might take again that our thesis that God exists and its antithesis which states that God does not exist. In antithetical thought we would have to say that if one statement is true the other must be false. In Hegelian thought (which is called dialectic thought) we would say that both statements are both true and false. The idea would be for man to reason out a synthesis between them. Some do this by claiming that God exists for them because that provides purpose to their lives, but they do not mean by this any concept of God existing in any real, absolute sense.
Another example, which is very often observable in much religious thinking today, might be the thesis that Christianity is true. In antithetical thought if we say that Christianity is true means that all other religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, etc. — are false. But because most people today think in terms of synthesis rather than in terms of thesis-antithesis, the idea is now prevalent that Christianity is true, but so are all other world religions — although they, like Christianity, also contain elements of untruth inherent in them as well. In this system of dialectic thought the conventional concepts of truth go out the window. No longer can we recognize right and wrong in terms of absolutes. Everything becomes relativized, and truth can only be known in the flow of history, in man’s synthesis of right and wrong.
Taking up Hegel’s principle of dialectic thought and applying it to the realm of religion was a man who became known as the father of existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was the first to propose the idea of the “Leap of Faith” which many modern Christians accept today. Operating on the basis of Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard came to the conclusion that there is no way to establish a synthesis of his beliefs through the process of reason, so he advocated taking a leap of faith. In so doing he separated rationality and logic from faith, rendering them mutually exclusive. Thereafter the modern stream of thought came to accept the idea that reason and rationality have nothing whatever to do with religion and that in the realm of religion faith alone holds sway.
Kierkegaard and those who followed him taught that whenever man wants to deal with things that relate to man’s humanity — such as love, hope, and meaning to life — he must abandon his reason and take a gigantic, non-rational leap of faith. But the kind of faith Kierkegaard advocated is not to be confused with the kind of faith described in Scripture.
The difference between the two kinds of faith may best be seen by using yet another of Francis Schaeffer’s illustrations. This illustration again takes us to the Alps where we find ourselves among a small party of mountain climbers ascending a very high peak. As we are wending our way toward the top of the mountain a fog suddenly moves in, shutting off our visibility and bringing with it freezing weather. The guide tells us that we will all freeze to death if we remain where we are, so he keeps us moving along in the fog until we become hopelessly lost. After a time one of the members of the group says to the guide, “Suppose I dropped from this cliff and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?” The guide tells the man that in such a case he might just survive until the morning and therefore would live; but the guide stresses that he has no knowledge whether there is in fact a ledge beneath the cliff. Regardless, and with no firsthand knowledge whether there might be a ledge beneath him, this man steps off the edge of the mountain and drops into the fog. This would be an example of a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. It is a faith divorced from knowledge, a faith unsupported by reason.
But let us suppose that after we had wandered on the mountain for a time we heard a voice come out of the fog, and that voice said to us, “You can’t see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang a drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning.”18
After hearing that voice we might not lie down and drop into the fog immediately, but we would try to verify whether the speaker really is who he says he is and really knows what he’s talking about. We would most likely pose several questions to him, questions to which we knew the answers, in order to ascertain whether he is speaking truthfully about his knowledge of the mountain. But if the speaker answers all our questions satisfactorily, giving evidence that he must be who he says he is, then we might indeed lie down and drop into the fog. This is the kind of faith the Christian possesses. It is a faith with substance, a faith based on knowledge, evidence, and reason. His faith in God and in Scripture is not a blind faith, but is a faith that has withstood the test of examination and inquiry. It is supported faith.
When a person accepts the kind of faith Kierkegaard and modern theologians talk about, then he may believe whatever he chooses because he is believing in something without any supporting evidence. Thus when a modern man says he believes in God, he may mean only that he accepts some vague notion about God; he may even be, like Sir Julian Huxley, one who admits that from a rational viewpoint the idea of God is ridiculous, but who chooses to “believe” in God because he can operate better if he assumes God exists. Similarly, when a modern man says he believes in Jesus he may mean, as Kierkegaard did, that though the actual body of Jesus may have rotted in the tomb, he will believe in the Resurrection because it is meaningful to him. Thus when contemporary theologians speak of Christ’s Resurrection they are not referring to an actual event in history but to some inner mystical experience in their own lives. As Kierkegaard said, “The Jesus of history may be known, but the Christ from God cannot be known, he can only be believed.”19 Thus many modern men accept “God” and “Christ” and “Scripture,” but only in the existential sense, only on the basis of a leap of faith that is unsupported by what they know to be true. Consequently, since their acceptance of God or His Word is contingent upon the meaningfulness it may possess for themselves individually, they are at liberty to accept or reject any portions thereof on the same basis. They may accept, say, the sentiments of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” because it contain some existential meaning; but they may also reject other portions of Scripture because those portions are not personally meaningful. Many, for instance, reject the command that forbids adultery because sex is meaningful to them. And so, by this method, they are at liberty to pick and choose. If all that is believed is believed simply as a matter of faith, why should they not do so?
But the real Christian does not say we are to believe in Scripture because it is true for us, but because it is true. If one accepts religious precepts on the basis of what is meaningful to the individual, then all objective truth is lost; everything becomes subjectively based. Yet this is the nature of the trend we may observe in the world. There has been a great shift, largely due to the rise of dialectic thought and the decline of antithetical thought, from universal to existential “values,” from objective reality to subjective “reality,” from absolute truth to relativistic “truth.” But truth, if it is not absolute, is no truth at all. If the existential or dialectic views are true, truth ceases to exist and there can be, as a result, no basis for the pursuit of ethics or morals.
The Christian maintains his pursuit of ethics and morals because he believes there is truth and that truth has been communicated to man through Scripture. He lives by faith, but it is a supported faith. Through his faith in God’s revealed Word he recognizes that he may know truth in absolute terms. He may know that what he believes is true because it is found in the Word, and that Word is true because it is objectively verifiable. He does not accept the Word on blind faith but on supported faith.
To accept Scripture on less is to accept it on less than it demands of itself. Scripture nowhere asks to be accepted on faith alone. For instance, when St. Paul was asked whether Jesus was raised from the dead he did not say, as so many would today, “It doesn’t mater. He is risen in my heart, and that is meaningful to me”; instead he said, “There are nearly five hundred witnesses still living among us. Go ask them whether Jesus was raised from the dead!” (cf. I Corinthians 15:6) St. Paul did not ask his listeners to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection because such a belief would be meaningful to them in some existential sense; he asked them to accept or reject the Resurrection on the basis of whether or not it was true. If it was not true, St. Paul confessed, then “we are of all men the most pitiable” (I Corinthians 15:9).
The Christian must accept Scripture in the whole man, and that includes his reason. Though modern man says religion is separated from reason, Scripture says that it is not. As Schaeffer has put it, “As the twentieth-century mentality would understand the concept of religion, the Bible is a non-religious book.”20 He says that because the Bible does not ask to be accepted on the basis of a belief in the void; it asks to be accepted because it is true.
4. Christian ethics rests on a total world- and life-view
Jean-Paul Sartre, the noted existential philosopher, expressed the idea that “existence precedes essence.” What he meant by this was that he viewed the universe and mankind as material that exists but without any purpose or meaning, and that it is from our existence that we must try to discover the essence or meaning to our being. Because Sartre maintained this perception of existence, he recognized that with this world-view objectivity is meaningless as a means to determine human essence; ergo, he could state that “subjectivity must be the starting place.”21
To illustrate his idea, Sartre drew an analogy using a paper cutter. A paper cutter, he maintained, is an object with essence, and that essence preceded its existence because before it was formed man first perceived the concept of a paper cutter in order to fulfill a certain need. A paper cutter, Sartre insisted, could hardly be produced by a man who does not know what it could be used for, so that if we see a paper cutter we recognize it as an object in which its essence preceded its actual existence.22
But Sartre believed that with man such was not the case. Though he understood that if one first conceives of God as the Creator, then man could be viewed as one in whom essence would precede existence. But Sartre rejected the idea of God and consequently found himself in a universe without a prior essence and without any purpose or function or meaning whatever. If man or the world is to have any meaning at all, Sartre maintained, it must come from existence and must therefore be determined subjectively. “Atheistic existentialism,” he said,
...states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.23Man’s meaning cannot be determined by any objective consideration, according to this view, but can only be arrived at from within the man himself. Thus “he himself will have made what he will be.”24
If Sartre’s basic presupposition is true — that God does not exist — then what he says is true, for if there is no God there truly is no meaning to man’s existence and he is truly nothing. But in such a case Sartre’s insistence that man “has greater dignity than a stone or table”25 is based on nothing and is therefore unverifiable, because a stone or table at least can be fulfilled in the universe that exists whereas man cannot.
For all his noble-sounding words about man’s responsibilities, Sartre cannot hold to a high view of man for in his system man has no meaning. In his own words Sartre maintained that “man is a useless passion.”26 In such a perception of reality Sartre’s position that man must determine meaning from within himself comes down to meaninglessness, since without objectivity there is nothing by which to judge our own concept of meaning.
Karl Jaspers, a German existentialist, was aware of this fact, and so he taught that one must wait for some non-rational “final experience” to find some hope of meaning to life. But Jaspers cannot tell us what this final experience might be, because it is existential and purely subjective: it is non-rational, non-logical, and therefore non-communicable. Even people who claim to have had such experiences cannot communicate them to others. Thus to them the universe remains objectively meaningless, its only notion of “meaning” coming as a result of some kind of personal experience that is essentially a leap in the dark — much the same as Kierkegaard’s “religious” leap of faith.
Existential meaning (if we may continue to use that word) is based solely on subjectivity. This implies, as Sartre said, that in the first place man chooses and makes himself what he is, and in the second place that he cannot transcend his own human subjectivity. In his moral actions, therefore, he must choose for himself subjectively, since there are no such things as objective truths — no external rights and wrongs.
It should be clear to any rational thinking person that such a system, if put into practice, would result in moral chaos. Sartre attempted to defend the responsibilities of his position by stating that when a man chooses for himself he also chooses for all of mankind. In other words, if a man chooses to live and act in a certain way, he is saying in effect that he would wish that all mankind would live and act similarly. But although such a sentiment is noble in appearance, it hasn’t the strength to prevent chaos because the cry that logically arises from such a position is, “Who is to say how mankind should live and act? Without some transcendent values, what meaning do my choices have for my fellow man if he too chooses his own actions?”
Sartre admits that one’s personal choices are meaningless in saying that “To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time that value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”27 Elsewhere he states, “One may choose anything if it is on the grounds of free involvement.”28 But if what we choose is good and has value only because we choose it on the basis of free initiative, then even the words “goodness” and “value” have no objective meaning whatever, but mean only what we choose them to mean. Sartre admits this in stating that “value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.”29 Thus cruelty may be good because we choose it; promiscuity may be good because we choose it. Good and evil are of equal “value,” simply because they are what we choose. All choices are ultimately meaningless for, even as Sartre himself said, no finite point has any meaning without an infinite reference point, and in his system all infinite reference points are destroyed with the rejection of the one Infinite, God.
This is, of course, the anguish of which Sartre and his existential colleagues so often speak. In knowing that one chooses not only for himself but also for all mankind, he cannot escape the feeling of his deep responsibility. Since “everything is permissible if God does not exist,” then “as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”30 Sartre says that this is the anguish that Kierkegaard called the anguish of Abraham when the angel came and told Abraham to sacrifice his son. As the existentialist sees it, “If it really were an angel who has come and said, ‘You are Abraham, you shall sacrifice your son,’ everything would be all right. But everyone must first wonder, ‘Is it really an angel, and am I really Abraham? What proof do I have?’”31 In the existential mind there is no proof. Man must simply choose what seems the right path to him, not on the basis of what is true, but on the basis of what has meaning to him.
In a circumstance in which a moral choice is demanded, the existentialist finds absolutely no basis for determining his course of action. As Sartre again says, “if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.”32 Though somehow out of all this Sartre insisted that he was not a pessimist but held to an “optimistic toughness,” his long-time friend and protégée, Simone de Bauvoir, saw perhaps more honestly the logical conclusion of his position. Existentialism, she said, “encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost.”33
The Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard and Barth must likewise make their moral and ethical choices in the same manner (and with the same forlornness), for their God is not an objective God who exists, but is one that they validate only through their subjectivity. On the bottom line both the atheist existentialist and the Christian existentialist see no rational meaning to the world at all, nor any rational meaning for life and humanity. Whatever meaning they decide for life comes only out of their own subjectivity, and their ethical systems develop out of this view of things — this world-view — into equally meaningless guides for behavior.
In truth, Sartre’s basic statement is exactly reverse to what can be observed in the universe. Rather than existence without meaning we see that essence precedes existence in everything, for everything is part of a plan, everything fits into a preconceived design and making. The Christian sees meaning to everything that exists because everything works in a system of order instead of chaos and chance. He perceives man as made in God’s image, and he sees the world and all that exists as part of His handiwork. Indeed, his world-view reflects the statement of St. Paul in Colossians 1:16, 17: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.” The Christian recognizes that as a result there are universal, religious, moral, and ethical truths that are transcendent truths which exist as absolutes, and that the God who created everything is an infinite, personal God who is a lover of righteousness. He created all things with a divine purpose, and hence essence precedes existence.
This view is clearly that taught in Scripture. Romans 12:1, 2, for instance, shows us that our essence is to prove the will of God and to know and do what is good, acceptable, and perfect. I Peter 1:16 shows us that God desires that His special creation be as He is, holy. There is essence before existence. St. Matthew 7:15-20 and St. Luke 6:44 likewise teach essence before existence, because it is not up to a tree to determine its own essence; rather it produces fruit that is of its essence. Similarly, man is ordained to produce fruit that is of his essence, and the false man may be proved by the fact that his fruit is of another source than the divine essence bestowed upon him.
What makes the dramatic difference between these two concepts of man and the universe — the existential as opposed to the Christian concepts — is the basic, overall world- and life-view. One system begins with God, and consequently it sees all things in a proper perspective and understands meaning and value. The other begins without God and with empty, shallow human philosophy. Ultimately these are our only two choices, and everything else in life proceeds logically from this starting place.
If we could somehow cut a man in half and dissect him to see how he works ethically and morally, we might find his cross-section to resemble the following diagram:
In the center rests his world-view. The question mark is where the world-view ought to be because it represents the fact that man has a choice. For the question mark man may substitute either God or human philosophy. There are no alternatives, and he must decide. It is impossible to remain indifferent, for in not choosing man makes a choice. As Trueblood has said, “The man who says that he will not decide whether to let the weeds of his garden go to seed is really deluding himself, for he has already decided.”34
This world-view, then (or “life-view” as some choose to call it), is that which resides at the center of all our thoughts and perceptions, and it constitutes the kind of grid through which we see the world and everything in it. Whatever is at our center will determine what our values will be — or, perhaps more accurately put, will determine whether we recognize values at all. What we hold to be of value will in turn determine our attitudes, and our attitudes will determine our behavior — all of this providing, of course, that we live consistently with our world-view. We see, then, that a person’s ethics is in fact an internal affair and ought not to be construed as some kind of external code of do’s and don’t’s. Although our ethics effects and is evidenced in our behavior, it actually rests further back at the source of all our values.
We already have seen what kind of world-view a person has when he begins without God. Without God “everything is permissible,” says Sartre, and on that point he is totally correct. Without God we have no basis for determining values. If we accept the existential view of man, however much we may decorate that view with noble words and statements, we ultimately must conclude that man is nothing, and even the meaning he attempts to give to himself has no real and transcendent value.
But when a person begins with the infinite, personal God who established transcendent values and who has communicated these values to man whom He made to be like Him and to glorify Him in his existence, then our world-view is radically different from that of the existentialist. Our values are real values with real meaning, and these in turn give us meaningful attitudes and behaviors that are consistent with the nature of our created being.
We see then that our ethics comes from the center, our world-view (God), and progresses outward to our behavior and not vice versa. As an example of how this works we might consider the Christian’s view of sex outside of marriage. If we concern ourselves only with the point of behavior, then we understand only that we have an arbitrary law that says the Christian is not permitted to engage in sex with someone who is not his marriage partner. There need not be an understanding as to why such activity is forbidden, but all that is needed is a simple adherence to this external rule. But if we understand first that God is a righteous God who is true to Himself and in whom the concepts of fidelity and unity have some absolute meaning, then we can thus perceive how chastity would itself have value, since chastity reflects the holiness of God. Therefore, if we hold chastity to be of value, then that will directly influence our sexual attitudes, which will cause us to view sex outside of marriage as opposing our sense of value. This attitude regarding the true value and meaning of sex in its rightful place will in turn determine our behavior. Our behavior, then, is determined by the internal value; it is not forced to conform to an external standard imposed upon it from outside. This understanding of our ethics can have a tremendous effect on our motivation, for we begin to view behavior from a completely different perspective. We change from the view that perceives sex outside of marriage as something of value that is denied to us, to the view that chastity is itself something of great value. This is a dramatic change from a negative to a positive view of our ethics.
Too often when we approach ethics and morality, the Christian is prone to concern himself foremost with the point of behavior. But as we have just seen, instead we should be concerned with right and wrong at the point of the source of our values. This is in fact the ethic that Jesus taught and died to uphold. As Henry has pointed out, “To Jesus of Nazareth above all Christian ethics owes the emphasis that sin is primarily thought or disposition, and that the sins of the flesh are but the working-out of the wicked inner life....”35 Our primary concern, therefore, is with the source of our values: our world-view. If our base is philosophy, then our “values” will be relative and, ultimately, meaningless. If our base is God, then our values are real values based on an infinite, personal, loving, holy source.
When the central point of focus is placed upon the externals of behavior, generally we allow our ethics to dissolve into some form of legalistic system of justification by works. Henry points out that frequently Fundamentalist ethics “emphasizes external adherence to a few arbitrary customs and external abstinence from a few arbitrarily prohibited things,” and that “one cannot escape the impression that his main interest is in his code.... [One’s] impression is that the Fundamentalist is more concerned with his code than with the vast spiritual issues in life — love, kindness, patience, tolerance, pride, self-righteousness, bitterness, or humility.”36
If our ethics is thus perceived and we concern ourselves solely with the externals of behavior without first considering the why’s and wherefore’s regarding the types of behavior we approve or condemn, then we will be guilty of losing our primary center of focus. This was exactly the problem the Pharisees exhibited in Christ’s time and against which He preached. Concerned only with behavior, the Pharisees had lost the proper attitudes and had corrupted their sense of values. Consequently their lives had ceased to have God at the center — their code had taken precedence over God Himself. Their problem grew to the point that they became not so much lovers of righteousness as lovers of self-righteousness. They held stringently to the behavioral aspects of the Law but had lost the moral intent of the Law.
It is true that the Old Law did lay much more emphasis on the point of behavior than does the New, but the essence of both Laws is the same. The laws of behavior in the laws of sacrifice and ceremony are now gone, but the moral law of God remains unchanged. The Old Testament built a base for the New Testament; the New Testament is a continuation of the Old. The will of God, introduced in a few basic principles under the Old Law, now has been made manifest in its fullness in the life and work of Jesus Christ (cf. St. Luke 24:25-27; Galatians 3:24; Hebrews 9 and 10).
This unity of Scripture must be properly understood and upheld for us to be able to learn from Scripture the more complete will of the One who gave it. Otherwise we run the risk of falling into the one of two extremes of biblical interpretation. On the one hand we may become one who fails to distinguish any significant progression between the Old and New Laws and who views the commands of the Old Law — both moral and ceremonial — to be binding to this day, failing to realize that the law of ceremony and ritual was nailed to the Cross (Colossians 2:14). On the other extreme we may become one who feels the Old Law has nothing whatever to say to us except perhaps in the realm of history. Those who hold the latter view are prone to see the Old Testament as utterly valueless as far as helping us determine moral choices today.
But the Old Law had a divine purpose, and that was to lead mankind to the New Law of Christ. Although the Old Law placed emphasis on behavior while the New places it on the source, both reveal the same moral law of God and therefore both are valuable when taken in their proper contexts. The Old brings us to the New, taking us progressively from the external law of the Decalogue, to the shift of emphasis upon the inner man found in the teachings of the prophets, finally to the fullness of the Law as manifested in Jesus Christ. This New Law, rather than being an external one, is to be written upon our hearts, as the Hebrew writer said in Hebrews 10:16b: “I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them.” Our Christian ethics rests not upon a system of behavioral rules, but upon a total world-view with God at the center.
5. Christian ethics rests on the Atonement
James Denney has written, “The new life springs out of a sense of debt to Christ. The regenerating power of forgiveness depends upon its cause.”37 The death of Christ is the foundation upon which Christian ethics is built. Our ethics grows out of a grasp of what the Atonement means. Our choice of an ethical life is based upon the regenerative power of the Cross.
In order to maintain a proper understanding of this sense of debt we owe to Christ, it is imperative that we recognize the difference between two essential theological concepts — justification and sanctification. Too often we are inclined to equate the two and are led to view the Christian life either as that which is lived in order to establish a relationship with God or, at the other extreme, as that which is the automatic consequence of the new birth and which requires nothing on our part beyond belief in the redemptive work of Christ.
Properly understood, however, the concepts of justification and sanctification, while inseparable, are not to be equated. Justification is God’s gift of pardon which was accomplished by means of the work of Christ on the Cross. It is only in Christ that we may find justification, and that comes through grace as a gift of God — it may not be bought or earned (cf. Ephesians 2:8, 9). Once justification has occurred through Christ, God no longer holds our sins against us but wipes the slate clean, so to speak, in order that sanctification may then proceed. This sanctification is the new life we are given as a result of our justification. One does not occur without the other, but we must remember which comes first. As Rudnick has said, “God changes people for the better because He forgives them, but not vice versa. Sanctification is a result, not a cause, of justification.”38
Thus viewed we may see that while our justification occurs once and for all time, our sanctification is a moment-by-moment process. It begins at the point of our justification but must continue throughout our Christian lives. And it is in response to the new birth that the new life owes its debt to Christ, and it is this debt of love and appreciation for Christ’s work that compels us to dedicate to Christ our ethical behavior.
Above all things, the Christian must avoid the temptation to view his renewed relationship to Christ in justification as a “final experience.” Schaeffer points out that regarding justification
many Christians who are perfectly orthodox in doctrine look back upon their justification as though it were the end of all, at least until death comes. It is not so. Birth is essential to life but the parent is not glad only for the birth of his child. He is thankful for the living child that grows up.... So it is with becoming a Christian. In one way you can say that the new birth is everything; in another way you can say that really it is very little. It is everything, because it is indispensable to begin with, but it is little in comparison with the living existential relationship. The legal circle of justification does not end statically; it opens to me a living person-to-person communication, with the God who exists.39
We might draw an analogy regarding the ethical response that results from the new birth by looking at the actual birth of a child. Once a child has come into the world it is certainly true that it has entered into a new relationship with its parents. But it is also true that it has received that relationship in a new life which it gives evidence of possessing. If a child is born and then ceases to give evidence that it is alive and growing, then it has died. So long as it is alive it gives evidence of life and growth. And so it is with the Christian. Once born anew in the waters of baptism he does not thereafter cease to function, but rather he produces evidence of continued growth in Christ. Otherwise, like an actual child, he ceases to grow and dies.
This is what sanctification is all about, a continual growing process in the Savior. And as the Christian grows in Christ, he also grows in ethical maturity. It is precisely because of this fact — that ethical growth is an expected process in Christian living — that static, legalistic codes which are established arbitrarily as a means of testing one’s faithfulness to Christ fail to serve the beauty of the law of Christ and cause Christian ethical maturity to stagnate and die. Henry points out that “Christian morality is not just a negative abstinence. It is a positive virtue flowing out from the regenerated core of the person. Sanctification is not a mere abstinence, it is the Lordship of Christ and the rule of the Spirit.”40
The rule of the Spirit being made possible through the work of Christ, the Christian owes a debt therefore to the Atonement not only for the forgiveness of his sins but also for the new life itself. It is in response to this new life that we live ethical lives. The Christian cannot say, “Because I have lived an ethical life I have good standing with my God,” but rather, “Through the life and work of Christ, God has reached down to me and I will therefore live an ethical life for Him.” The difference in motivation between these two positions is tremendous. An ethical life is not maintained for the purpose of attempting to establish a relationship with God (such would be futile and would end in despair), but rather because of our relationship with God we choose to live ethical lives. The fact that we may choose this ethical life does not prompt us to permissiveness because there is a strong constraint through our indebtedness to Christ. “Christ has done all for me,” says the Christian, “therefore I choose freely to do this for Him.”
Because the motivation for Christian ethics is what it is, Christian ethics is sometimes called a “therefore” ethic. It is the result of a relationship that is built on the ground of the Atonement, and it constitutes works resulting from that relationship.
As we saw in our dissection of man’s ethical workings, the external acts of behavior are — or should be — the product and result of internal attitudes and values which grow out of our central world-view. In the Christian’s case this world-view is founded upon God and upon God’s redemptive work through His Son on the Cross of Calvary. The motivation of the Christian ethical life is therefore not from without — i.e., not from some external legal code impressed upon him — but comes from the law that God has written on his heart. The ethical life therefore results from what God has done for man.
Romans 12:1, 2 expresses this motivation in Christian ethics as beautifully as any other single passage in the New Testament: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Here we have a perfect example of the internal law from God affecting our external behavior. “I beseech you,” says St. Paul, “to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” This represents the external evidences or actions. The way this is to be accomplished, says St. Paul, is by being “transformed by the renewing of your mind” — that is, by allowing the internal man to be transformed by the will of God. The important words in this passage are “therefore,” “by the mercies of God,” and “living sacrifice.”
The word “therefore” in 12:1 has antecedents throughout the epistle. St. Paul’s epistle follows a very logical pattern leading to this great statement on the basis of our ethical values. Its earliest antecedent is found in 1:18. Because the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and the wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth, therefore we ought to present our own bodies as a living sacrifice unto God, demonstrating in our lives the evidence of the God who exists and demonstrating also the personal relationship we enjoy in Him. John Murray defines God’s wrath as “the holy revulsion of God’s being against that which is the contradiction of His holiness.”41 We who enjoy a personal relationship with God ought never so to act as to bring revulsion to our Father by behaving in a manner that is in contradiction to His divine holiness. Our lives are to be in harmony with His, that we may prove what is His good and acceptable and perfect will.
Its next antecedent can be found in 3:21-24. Here St. Paul shows that now (in contrast with the past) the righteousness of God has been manifested, not through the Law, but through the Son, just as the Law and the prophets bore witness. Although the righteousness of God has always been manifested, there is under the New Law a momentous change in respect of this manifestation. It is not openly visible through God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who is “the moral law incarnate”42 as Von Haering expressed it. All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, but through the Son we are justified by grace as a gift, and that redemption is that of which Christ is the very embodiment. Therefore we ought so to live, says St. Paul.
We may also look to 5:8 and an antecedent to 12:1, 2, where St. Paul states that all this work was accomplished while we were yet sinners. It is therefore clear that our ethics cannot be an attempt to accomplish a relationship with God, for He began re-establishing our relationship long before we became conscious of its necessity. The work was done on God’s part alone, not only without our assistance but also while we were yet in rebellion against Him. Since He has reached down to us to draw us to Himself, even while we rebelled, we ought therefore to live our lives for Him.
Our passage also refers back to 8:31-39. In this beautiful passage St. Paul expresses the infinite and unsurpassing love that God has demonstrated to man through His Son. Seeing that absolutely nothing can separate us from so great a love, we are therefore constrained to love Him and live for Him, presenting our bodies a living sacrifice to His glory.
Finally, Romans 12:1, 2 looks back to the verses immediately preceding in 11:32-36. Here we learn that God has consigned all men to disobedience that He might have mercy upon all. How unsearchable are His riches and how inscrutable His ways! And who has known the mind of God that he has been His counselor? Who has given Him a gift that he might be repaid? (How can we seek a relationship on the basis of our ethical goodness?) “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.” Therefore, by the mercies of God, present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship.
This sacrifice is in no wise a propitiatory sacrifice, for if it were it would mean that Christ’s sacrifice was not enough. Rather, ours is a thank offering, a sacrifice offered in response to (not in the place of or in addition to) the Atonement.
This understanding of the true nature of Christ’s work on the Cross smacks right in the face of much contemporary religious thought which insists upon works as a means of establishing a proper relationship with God. We must see that we are saved by grace through faith, and that this salvation is received as “the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8, 9). But in understanding this we also must discern the correct place of works in our lives.
The confusion over this issue goes back many centuries. During the Middle Ages the Roman church in the West developed a soteriological system of justification by works that was completely contrary to Jesus’ teachings. The New Testament bears clear witness to the fact that Jesus “expressed His opposition to a religion of works, a religion which can open an account with God and seek to obtain salvation by merit.”43 Against this Roman doctrine the Reformers were to protest most vehemently. These early Reformers, for the most part, seemed to have a correct understanding of the proper relationship between grace and works in a Christian’s life, realizing that salvation is a gift of God and that in response to that gift the Christian offers up good works as a thank offering. But over time some teachers began to conclude that since justification is by grace, works have no bearing on a Christian’s relationship to God whatever. These people taught (as many in the West still do) that once one is saved through grace nothing else matters. Adherents to this concept believe that salvation is a static thing, and while they admit that good works are commendable, they insist that these works bear no connection to our standing with God. Of course, what these people fail to realize is that a living faith is a faith that gives evidence of its life through works, just as St. James said in his epistle (3:17-24).
While this battle between the two concepts of justification was raging, there arose yet a third position among some religious thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West who attempted to establish a happy medium between these two extremes. Rather than accepting the false doctrine of justification by works or the equally erroneous extreme of justification by grace alone with works bearing no relationship to one’s faith at all, these people attempted to meld the two ideas. They came up with the doctrine that justification is accomplished through a system of grace plus works. Simply put, what this doctrine said was that grace takes us part of the way home, but we must rely on our own good works to see us through to the journey’s end. To some this idea came to mean that justification (the removing of sin through baptism) is accomplished by grace, but sanctification (the re-establishment of a correct relationship with God) is contingent on our own good works; in other words, God saves us by forgiving our past sins, but we must then produce good works to show ourselves worthy of Him so He will accept us into heaven by and by.
But in truth neither the two heretical extremes nor the attempt at a middle ground offers us a clear picture of the biblical doctrine of justification and sanctification, and none gives the proper motivation for our Christian ethics. Our justification is through the work of Christ — not through our own efforts. We are saved by His blood, which we contact in the waters of Holy Baptism. As a result we are given, freely and unmeritedly, the new life. This new life — which we as a race needed desperately, even more than breath itself, but which we could not attain on our own regardless how hard we tried — is given as a free gift, and it therefore compels us to respond by offering God all our selves, including our ethical lives. We therefore produce good works in thankful response to the gift He has given us. These works are evidence of a faith that is vital and alive. Works, then, are the natural consequence of faith.
Those who attempt to appeal to St. Paul in defense of their position that works play no part in man’s relationship to God have an inadequate understanding of the Apostle’s religion. As Herman Ridderbos, a renowned authority on the life and teaching of St. Paul, has said, “That man is justified without the works of the law does not for a moment prevent him [Paul] from vigorously demanding good works as the fruit of the new life and giving all kinds of prescriptions, commandments, advice for these good works.”44
St. Paul, in fact, is preeminent among the New Testament writers in demonstrating the “therefore” quality of the religious life. He clearly recognized that the true Christian demonstrates certain qualities and works in his life, and that these demonstrations result from what God in Christ has done for him. The Ephesian letter stands as a prime example of this expectation. When we read 2:8, 9 we cannot stop there and expect to have received St. Paul’s full teaching on justification and sanctification in a nutshell. Springing from this realization in these two verses are all manner of evidences that are to be manifested in the Christian life. We have but to note the passages following which begin with the words “therefore” or “for this reason.” If we were to precede each of these sections with the idea taught in 2:8, 9, then we could see easily how St. Paul’s life and teaching flow directly out of and in response to the Atonement which was made possible through Christ.
Because we have been saved by grace, says St. Paul, you Gentiles should remember that though you were once far off you are now made near by the blood of Christ, and that as a result of His work the walls of partition have been brought down and we all have been reconciled to God in one Body (2:11-18). Because of God’s grace you who were once strangers and foreigners are now fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household (2:19-22). Because of God’s grace I, Paul, am a prisoner of Christ and have become a minister to the Gentiles (3:1-12), but because of God’s grace you should not lose heart at my tribulations (3:13). Because of God’s grace I bow my knees to the Father (3:14-21). Because of God’s grace I beseech you to have a walk worthy of the calling you have received, walking in love, humility, gentleness, and patience (4:1-3). Because of God’s grace you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk but should put on the new man which was created according to God in righteousness and holiness (4:17-24). Because of God’s grace you ought to put away lying, unjustifiable anger, stealing, corrupt speech, bitterness, wrath, clamor, and malice, and maintain in their stead kindness, tenderness, and forgiveness (4:25-32). Because of God’s grace you are to be followers of God as dear children and walk in love, putting away fornication and covetousness (5:1-6). Because of God’s grace you are not again to be partakers of darkness as you once were but are to prove what is acceptable to the Lord (5:7-13). Because of God’s grace awake, you who sleep, and rise from the dead that Christ may give you light, and walk no longer as fools but as wise men, giving thanks always to God and submitting to one another in the fear of God (5:17-21). Because of God’s grace let wives be subject to their husbands and let husbands love their wives, and so let all our social relationships be held in honor (5:22-6:9). And because of God’s grace take up the whole armor of God that you may stand (6:10-20). Everything you do, says St. Paul, do in response to and as a result of the grace you have received from God through Christ, and thereby glorify God in your bodies, for this is the explanation of your life and of your Christian conduct.
Christian ethics, then, is not to be perceived as a system of ethics that decides right and wrong on the basis of what will do the most good for the greatest number of people, because it is not humanistically based. Rather it compels us to do that which will please Christ, for we are debtors to Him. He is to be the central focus of our lives, and it is His way we are to seek above all others (Matthew 6:33).
Perhaps the greatest temptation a Christian has to face in this life is the temptation to take his world-view from the age in which he lives. We are easily drawn away from a concept of ethics that is Christocentric toward a system that puts man at the center. But if we conform to contemporary thought we lose our Christianity, for if we conform we become relativists and subjectivists and existentialists. When once we accept the idea that there are not always absolutes, we have abandoned our entire platform of existence in the field of Christian ethics.
St. Paul warns us not to be conformed to this world, but rather to be transformed by the renewing concept of the mind. The reality that man is made in the image of God should be brought to mind to give us our world-view; then we begin to grasp a real concept of the Atonement, “that we may know and approve the will of God.” Sartre said that if God didn’t exist anything would be permissible. But right is right because God does exist and has a divine moral character, and that is the law of the universe.
Our debt, therefore, is to Christ, and the love of Christ constrains our behavior because we are convinced that since He has died for all, all have died (II Corinthians 5:14). Our ethics therefore springs from the Atonement. The love of Christ constrains us because we are convinced that He has died for each one of us vicariously the death we ourselves deserved. What constrains us in our ethical lives is not so much our love for Him — it is something much greater: it is His love for us. Christ stood in our stead; therefore when He died we all died from the curse of the Law. Therefore we who died live no longer for ourselves but for Him. We all died in Christ’s death, but just as He rose from the dead so too are we risen with Him. The old things have passed away and the new has come. And with the new comes also a new vision and a new perception of the world and everything it holds. To the Christian, whose old man died with Christ to be raised a new creation in Him, he is to view the world, as Schaeffer eloquently expresses it, as though he had “already died, been to heaven, and come back again as risen.”45 And this perception, like life itself, is a growing, maturing intity. “The Christian who is maturing in his relationship with God,” remarks Henry, “finds that he constantly sees the world with new eyes.”46
If we turn back to II Corinthians 5 and continue reading in verses 14 through 21 we see this concept borne out. Because of Christ’s regenerative work, St. Paul says, we no longer regard others from a human point of view. Our entire world-view has been altered drastically. All things take on a new meaning — indeed, all thing now have meaning — and all this is from God “who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.... For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Through the Atonement all this has been made possible — the new person, the forgiveness, the relationship with God, the new world-view — in order that, of all things, we might become the righteousness of God! We are so to live as to manifest in our own selves the righteousness of God by reflecting His character, proving what is that “good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
We live ethically as a result of the Atonement. It is not that we are compelled because of what Christ will do or is doing for our lives, but we are compelled because of what He has already done in reconciling us to God. And we live righteous lives with His help, as we learn from St. John 5. In Him we will produce fruit — not in order that we may abide in Him (nor can we abide in Him and fail to produce fruit) — and apart from Him we can do nothing. Our ethics springs from Him and from His regenerative work in the Atonement, and this is the basis of our Christian ethics.
In summary, we see that our ethics indeed rests not on arbitrary rules but on a strong foundation. That foundation includes, first, the infinite, personal God who possesses a character of holiness and love; man, whom God has made in His image (i.e., man is personal and possesses a moral consciousness) and to whom He has given an essence prior to his existence here on earth; the Word of God, which is found in the Holy Scriptures and which God has communicated to man propositionally in order to reveal to man who He is and what is His will for mankind; a total world- and life-view that encompasses all the above and directly determines our values, attitudes, and behavior; and finally the Atonement, in which God has reconciled fallen man to Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ, demonstrating thereby the love that now constrains us as His children to live ethical lives before Him. With this foundation we are able to recognize absolute, transcendent values, which include right and wrong, and with it we are able to approach every situation life may have to offer us. It is on this basis that we make our moral and ethical decisions and seek to be pleasing to Him who loves us.
Copyright © 1983 & 2005 by Oswin Craton. All rights reserved.