Christian Personal Ethics ¹

Kenneth S. Kantzer

   What most Americans want, so poll after poll reveals, and therefore, what they are motivated to seek, is first, good health and second, a good secure job.² There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these goals. If we are honest, most of us would readily confess we should like to have good health and a good secure job with a dependable income. Yet all of us know that not everybody is going to enjoy either good health or a secure job. Anyone who makes these his ultimate goal in life is headed for frustration and discouragement.

   One of the most observable facts of life, moreover, is that those who make personal happiness their goal do not find it.³ The happiest people are those who do not seek happiness but, rather, are unhappy with the world as it is, and so choose to become change agents in the world to make the world a better place to live.⁴

   Nowhere in the Bible is the Biblical way of life presented in sharper contrast with the way of life typical of most Americans than in the second chapter of Paul's epistle to the Philippians: "Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God did not consider this a matter of grasping things for himself but instead chose to forego his divine prerogatives and give himself in service to others."⁵

   This profound Biblical truth, characteristically enough, is embedded in a solid theological lesson about the deity of Christ,

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the purpose of the incarnation, the atonement and the plan of God for humankind.⁶ This is no accident. Biblical ethics is based, solidly and irremovably, on Christian theology. To destroy one is to destroy the other.⁷

   This is the major lesson to be learned from the late nineteenth century movement we call "Liberalism." Its fundamental error lay in its rejection of supernatural Biblical doctrine. Liberalism was so enamored of Christian ethics that it sought to retain Biblical ethics intact without its foundation in Christian doctrine.⁸ Needless to say, it didn't work. The malaise of institutions dominated by this radical perversion of Biblical Christianity proved devastating even when it was not fatal.⁹

   We must begin our discussion of Biblical personal ethics therefore, by establishing it firmly on its proper foundation of Biblical doctrine. This task has not been made easier by the vast neglect of personal ethics among Biblical scholars of the last generation.¹⁰ For the most part, their quite justifiable concern for social ethics took them out into the world where they rarely found it necessary to tap back into the Biblical roots. Literally, their ethical agenda as theologians was set by the social and political movements of the culture around them.¹¹ The realm of personal ethics was largely left in the hands of fundamentalist and evangelical scholars. And for the past two generations now, evangelical scholars have, all too often, not done their homework in serious exegesis of the Biblical material relating to the personal Christian life.¹² For the most part the energy of conservative scholars has been consumed by apologetics and foundational theology,¹³ and they have relegated personal ethics to popular expositions which concentrate on exhortation rather than on solid Biblical exegesis.¹⁴

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   Even so, I hesitate to fault them. They were endeavoring, with limited resources, to stand in the gap. Yet in the final analysis, sound doctrine without its necessary complement of personal ethics, is as unbiblical as its Liberal alternative of ethics without doctrine.¹⁵

   To itemize all the Biblical doctrines that form the foundation of Christian ethics would necessitate a complete systematic theology. We dare only mention, and outline in briefest fashion, some of the most crucial doctrines undergirding a truly Biblical ethics.¹⁶

   In each case, I have tried to formulate the statement so that Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley and Menno Simons could have signed it with full approval.¹⁷

Some Doctrinal Foundations of Biblical Ethics

   1. The God of the Bible is a holy, loving, sovereign, personal being. He is our Lord. As our Lord, he demands and has a right to demand of us, our gratitude, love, worship, and the ultimate commitment of our soul.¹⁸ In fact, if he were not holy, loving and sovereign, it would be morally wrong for us to make such a commitment to him.¹⁹

   2. God created man and woman in his own image²⁰ with a physical earthly body and an immaterial immortal soul²¹ — a being of infinite value.²² He created Adam and Eve free, capable of choosing between right and wrong;²³ and he holds all human beings ultimately responsible for their choices.²⁴

   The human conscience represents a part of the original endowment of human kind. It involves a code of what is right and wrong and a self-judging function (often referred to as the

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conscience "prick") to indicate whether or not we have acted according to our own standard. The human conscience is not the immediate work of the Holy Spirit, but a psychological device that is an inherent part of our nature as a moral being made in the image of God.²⁵

   Sin warped the conscience code and almost destroyed it.²⁶ But all normal human beings know that some things are right and wrong and are never able completely to erase the code God intended them to have.²⁷ The code is structured by our earliest training, usually from our parents. It becomes our own as we appropriate it for ourselves; and, ideally, it should be instructed according to the Word of God.²⁸

   The conscience prick can be dulled or sharpened. There is, in reality, no such thing as too sharp or too keen a conscience. The "overly conscientious" person is not the person who obeys his conscience too faithfully, but rather the person with a misinformed conscience code so that he thinks he ought to do things that, as a matter of fact, he really ought not to do.²⁹ Or it is a conscience without forgiveness when we go wrong. A conscience at peace is only attainted when we accept by faith God's full and free forgiveness and rest in it. There is no true peace of soul unless we have found this freedom from guilt within our own conscience.³⁰

   Needless to say, though the voice of conscience is not necessarily the voice of the Holy Spirit, it may become the vehicle for the Holy Spirit by which he convicts of sin, exhorts to good, warns of evil, drives us to repentance and faith, and comforts the soul.³¹

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   3. Man chose to rebel against God and fell into sin. Most sin is due to pride and selfishness, but all sin is rebellion against God or, in Biblical terminology, unbelief. Sin is unbelief in the sense that it always represents a lack of commitment of oneself to God's lordship. It is always some form of idolatry in its broadest sense — namely a choosing to please ourselves rather than a committing of ourselves to God or a committing of ourselves to anything or anyone other than God.

   The fall of our first parents brought moral depravity upon the whole human race.³² It is total in the sense that it pervades the entire human personality — intellect, will and emotions. No aspect of the human psyche remains pure and uncorrupted by the fall.³³ Accordingly, humankind is now incapable of achieving its own ultimate good. Left to himself, man is morally helpless.³⁴ Moreover, his depravity has so corrupted his moral sense that he often prefers the bad and does not like what is good. His natural inclinations, therefore, are no reliable guide to what is really right or wrong or what is good or bad for him.³⁵

   4. Out of love for fallen man, God chose to become incarnate in the God-man, Jesus Christ, who by his life and death made adequate provision for all man's moral needs. He bore on himself the penalty that man deserves and brings to man God's full and free forgiveness on the simple condition of faith or repentance and personal commitment to Christ.³⁶ Our Lord then sent the Holy Spirit into the world and into his church to apply these benefits to those who turn in trust to him.³⁷ If, therefore, man does not achieve his highest good, it is not at all because Christ's provision is insufficient. On the contrary it is because of his own wickedness and unwillingness to turn to the Savior for forgiveness and victory over sin.³⁸

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   [I have specially tried to word this paragraph so that any good Wesleyan as well as good Calvinist will find my language acceptable even if not entirely in accord with his preference.]³⁹

   5. The Bible is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. Its first purpose is to lead us to know Jesus Christ as our divine Lord and Savior, and thus to find salvation from sin.⁴⁰ Its second purpose is to provide instruction for the Christian life of the believer who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.⁴¹ The Bible must not be conceived of, however, as a divine rule book in which God places us under his thumb and commands us to do his bidding. What we call the "law" of God is much better understood in most cases as the Torah or instruction of God for the living of our Christian life. It provides a divine "pre-interpretation" of all that is best for mankind.⁴²

   The Bible, of course, is not organized as a code of rules, but rather traces the history of God's special dealings with the entire human race and, particularly, with his people of both the older and the newer Testament.⁴³ There we can find his instructions, spelled out in the concrete historical situations of life.⁴⁴ In securing the instruction of Scripture, however, we must always be careful, on whatever topic we are seeking to understand God's guidance, that we have all the teaching of Scripture and not just partial aspects of it.⁴⁵ The Bible provides the broadest possible moral axioms, general principles, sub-principles, sub-sub-principles and many specific applications — all of which together represent our necessary and adequate instruction for the living of life on planet earth and the development of Christian character.⁴⁶

   6. The crux of Christian Biblical ethics is love applied. In Scripture, love is set forth both as a norm or standard for what is

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truly love, and as a motivation — that is, the love for God and men that motivates the believer to do the act which is the act of love. As a norm, love is primarily intellectual. As motivation, it is primarily emotional and voluntary. These functions of the soul, however, cannot be separated. All are intertwined and simultaneously involved in any moral act.⁴⁷

   Our Lord sums up the whole of the teaching of the Scripture in a two-fold law of love: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."⁴⁸

   In Scripture, therefore, love is a sacrificial desire to give oneself to another, and to bring good to the other; and a true Biblical love is always an instructed love.⁴⁹

   In the course of church history, this Christian ethic, based on instructed love, has suffered from constant twisting and warping in almost every possible direction. It would be impossible within the limits of this paper even merely to enumerate the devious ways in which humans have sought out alternatives to the Biblical ethics. We dare list only some of the most common of these perversions or misinterpretations of Christ's love ethics.⁵⁰ Some of these alternatives, it should be noted, are fatal to the good life. That is, they so severely warp the basic love ethic of the Bible that they have really moved outside the realm of what can rightly be called "Christian."⁵¹ Others are essentially Christian in their outlook on life, but fail to incorporate the power and beauty of the simple Biblical pattern of a love ethic that combines norm and motivation.⁵²

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Misinterpretations of Christ's Love Ethics

   1. Pietism: With a long history in the Christian church, pietism becomes the special danger of those who take the Christian religion seriously. Its essence is to make religious practices or one's own Christian experience the central focus. In the Bible, the focus of the life of faith is always upon God, his Christ, our love for the triune God, and in a secondary sense, our neighbor defined as anyone in need.⁵³

   Of course, it is important to have a right experience and to engage in the right practices. But when our focus is turned aside to our own experience with Christ, or to our faith, or worse yet to our religious practices, we have just to that extent lost the driving force of the Christian gospel. It is not our experience that saves us. Strictly speaking, it is not even faith in Christ that saves us; it is Christ and Christ alone who saves us.⁵⁴

   2. Deweyism: John Dewey was the most influential educator the United States has ever produced. He taught that man is essentially good or neutral and, therefore, it is appropriate to give a child what he wishes so as to avoid psychoses. This is contrary to our experience and certainly to the teaching of Scripture. The child is not neutral or good, but shares with the human race a bent toward evil. It is easier for a child to be selfish than for him or her to be unselfish. It is easier for a child in a tight scrape to lie than to tell the truth. And while it is true that discipline may create psychoses, lawlessness and selfishness must also be guarded against.⁵⁵

   Even worse was a second error taught by Dewey: the goal of human development and of all education is conformity or adjustment to the society around us. Dewey believed that this is the way to teach democracy.⁵⁶ The same philosophy lies behind the

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widely read and widely followed book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.⁵⁷

   In actuality a Christian in ordinary human society ought to have tension. His ultimate goal is not relief from tension but Christlikeness. Jesus Christ experienced many tensions in his earthly human existence, and sometimes this is necessary for us likewise. Christians need to be prepared to function effectively in a society that is evil. This preparation comes best neither by filling into the society around us, nor by following our own inclinations and desires. Christ didn't. We need, rather, to learn self discipline and how, on occasion, to resist or even confront those around us and then to forgive and forget.⁵⁸

   3. Legalism: The term legalism can be used in two quite different ways. In the book of Galatians the Apostle Paul refers to a doctrine of salvation by obedience to law. The term is often used to describe this fatal denial of the gospel. I am using it here to describe a way of living the Christian life by rigorous obedience to rules.⁵⁹

   But rules divorced from love lead to hardness and to an inability to live up to the very rules one recognizes with one's mind. Christian ethics or Biblical ethics is neither anti-nomianism which does away with all law or legalism which conceives of the Christian life as obedience to a set of rules.⁶⁰

   As we noted earlier, Biblical love is both norm and motivation. It is theoretically possible to follow rigorously a norm of love — the rules or instruction of the whole Bible — but to do so completely without motivating love. The love of Christ urges us on to a successful Christian life and to the daily living of a life of instructed discerning love. The Levite, travelling along the road

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to Jericho, knew the Old Testament. As a Levite, it is reasonable to assume that he knew in detail the laws of the Old Testament including the law of love embedded in it. His trouble was not that he lacked the Biblical norm of love. Indeed, he prided himself on his Torah. His lack was the actual experience of love in his heart for the wounded Jew lying along the road. Scripture instructs us as to what true love is. But the motivation to do those things that represent enlightened love should not be the motivation of legal obedience but the motivation of experiential love towards a personal God and towards personal human beings for whom we actually do have true love.⁶¹

   4. Antinomianism: Antinomianism is often supported by a misunderstood quotation from Augustine: "Love God and do as you please". The idea is that, if we love God then we should do exactly what we wish to do and we shall automatically do right.⁶²

   If we were both omniscient and possessed of a permanent character of complete love, this would be an excellent rule to follow in all cases. But it is never a completely adequate rule for finite, sinful human beings. Our love is never perfect. We often find ourselves loving the wrong things. Moreover, God never intended us to live our lives wholly apart from his instruction. Even Adam lived in the light of his immediate and perfect communion with God. And so we need instruction to enable us to know what really is the act of love.

   The basic truth in Antinomianism, of course, is that we do not succeed in the Christian life merely by doing right acts. God could have secured perfect obedience to all his laws simply by creating us as automata who, by nature, could not do otherwise. God preferred to create free persons who would develop a moral

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character of discerning love. The Bible's happy medium between legalism and antinomianism is instructed holy love.⁶³

   5. Mysticism or Direct Immediate Revelation: Certainly the Holy Spirit has promised to guide us. God may, if he chooses, provide this guidance through miraculous special revelation on a continuous basis. But he has never promised to do so; and, therefore, we may not claim this from him. He has, however, promised to guide us through Scripture. Therefore, we must know what the Scripture teaches, and we must know the whole of that which it teaches about every ethical matter we face. The better we know the Scripture and the more rigorously we apply it to the details of life, the greater can be our degree of sanctification.⁶⁴

   6. Pharisaism: By Pharisaism I mean the selection of particular applications of love and choosing to live one's life on the basis of them. The Pharisees of Christ's day, of course, were also legalists, who trusted in their good works for salvation. Here I refer to their practice of evaluating the quality of life by certain favorite virtues. Christ rebukes the Pharisees for following their own ethical traditions. He objects to these traditions just because they circumvent the Biblical ethics, that is, the divine instruction that we ought to follow.⁶⁵

   When we today select particular applications of love or particular virtues that we specially prize, we almost invariably choose those in which we ourselves do best. When we judge ourselves on this basis, we naturally find that we do well on our favorite virtues, and thus fall into pride and self-righteousness. By contrast, we judge all others as not doing too well on our favorite rules. No doubt if we chose their favorite rules, they would do

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better; but on our rules they do not do so well. As a result, our attitude towards others becomes condescending and judgmental and our own spiritual pride increases.⁶⁶

   But the worst effect of this situation comes from weighing our own life solely on the basis of our favorite virtues. We thus cannot come to grips with the whole of Biblical teaching. Sin is unrecognized, and unrecognized sin remains unconfessed and unconfessed sin remains unforgiven sin and, therefore, sin that is never overcome.⁶⁷ By contrast, God's way of taking care of sin involves the following steps: First, self searching and self judgment (1 Cor. 11:31 f.); Second, confession of sin (1 John 1:9); Third, repentance from sin (2 Cor. 7:8-11); Fourth, restitution where this is possible (Matthew 6); And, finally, fifth, belief in God's promise of forgiveness with a resultant reinstatement into God's fellowship and favor and service (Psalm 51).⁶⁸

   Note that God's forgiveness depends upon our honest judging of the sins in our own lives. God does not forgive Pharisees for they do not recognize their soul's sin and, therefore, do not apply to him for forgiveness. God forgives the publican because he sees his need and turns to God.⁶⁹

   7. Conventional Morality: Pressure from the group of which we are a part more often than not determines our conduct. We follow the crowd. The great danger from determining what we do by the crowd around us is that we do not live in a Christian world. Hence, when Christians get away from the protection of their Christian home or of their local church group, they need to live by principle and not by pressure. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say their love needs to be guided by instruction from Scripture.⁷⁰

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   It is especially easy for us to fall into the lordship of man instead of the sole lordship of Christ because, when we were children, we were commanded, even commanded by Scripture, to obey our parents.

   This is proper.⁷¹ So long as our ideas of right and wrong are determined by our parents, however, we remain ethically immature. It is, therefore, the duty of parents and those who instruct the young to lead them on to maturity. This necessitates instructing children in what is right and wrong according to Holy Scripture and gradually weaning them so they do not permanently either decide what is right or wrong on the basis of a parent's "say-so" or do what is right merely out of love for parents. This weaning process must begin very early, for if the child's faith has not become independent of his parents by the time he leaves his parental home, he will find he has no faith adequate for life.⁷²

   No human being, even the best of parents, is good enough or safe enough for the mature Christian to trust as the ultimate guide for his life. He must find his guidance personally from God not man. No one but God has the right to bind a Christian's conscience.⁷³

   Yet the Christian does not live out his life in isolation with God. He has been bonded by God into a community of love — the church. The Holy Spirit works upon each believer through his participation in this body. Guidance is to be sought in mutual dependence upon each other. The body life of the church is an important source of our daily strength as Christians and is a primary instrument of God's guidance. Yet the ultimate standard by which all other sources of truth and strength are to be tested is the Word of the living God, and it alone can bind our conscience

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   It is true that the Apostle says we are to obey our government "for conscience sake" (Romans 13:5). But that is only because and to the degree that God has bidden us obey our governments.⁷⁴ The only infallible guide by which to set our conscience is the teaching of the whole of Scripture. It becomes the instrument by which the Holy Spirit communicates to us the will of our Lord for our lives.

   This does not mean that we never modify our actions to suit others. Oftentimes we compromise our actions to fit the prejudices, even the very thoroughly mistaken prejudices, of those around us. It is right that we should do so. But we are never to compromise our principles. We are never to decide what is right and wrong on the basis of the lordship of any but the one true holy loving sovereign God who has revealed himself in Holy Scripture.⁷⁵

   8. The Imitation of Christ: This motivation for ethics can be traced back through Thomas á Kempis to the early church. It received great impetus from the famous novel by Charles Sheldon entitled In His Steps.⁷⁶ Moreover, according to the New Testament, we are commanded to be like Christ. This is the ultimate goal of the Christian life.⁷⁷ Yet the Scriptural command to be like Christ is to be like him in loving and sacrificial service to others. It does not mean that our daily life is to be lived out in conscious imitation of the things that he did. Rather all our action, like all of his, is to be motivated by pure love to God and to our fellow human beings.⁷⁸ The Christian life is not a life of imitation. At root, rather, it is a genuine personal life, our own life, but a life lived, like Christ's, in loving service for others.⁷⁹

   Of course, we would always be better off if, as a matter of fact, we did follow Christ. Yet our lot falls in different places; and

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what we are to do is not the thing that was necessarily the loving act in first-century Palestine, but the loving act as we face our world today. Even so, the pattern of Christ still stands as the only perfect life that we have seen on planet earth and, therefore, is our best guide as to what a human life should be like when it is actually lived out in a wicked world.⁸⁰

   9. Self-esteem: In recent years, particularly, self-esteem has been held up as a major goal in the Christian life.⁸¹ Of course, there is a significant piece of truth in this. We are not encouraged by Scripture to think that we are worth nothing, but just the reverse. We are of infinite value in God's sight. Moreover, we are to be appropriately concerned (not anxious) about our own situation.⁸² As Christians we are to seek to grow in our own character. On the other hand, we find our true worth not in concentrating upon building up our own self-esteem but in living out a useful life in ministry for others and in the service of God. Our value, as we perceive it, comes indirectly out of a conscious commitment, not to ourselves, but to others.⁸³

   All of these perversions of Christian ethics represent a denial of the freedom of the Christian. The believer, committed to Christ, is bound in his conscience to no man and no society. He is bound only to the Lord himself. It is the Lordship of Christ that we wish at all times to keep pre-eminent in the Christian life. What the Lordship of Christ requires is love to God and love to neighbor, properly instructed by the Holy Scripture as the Spirit of God applies it to our hearts and minds.⁸⁴

   The Christian life begins with the new birth. The new birth itself provides a new governing disposition that makes the sinner

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capable of loving God and in loving God also to love his fellow human beings.⁸⁵

   It is structured by love — love in Scripture providing both norm and motivation. As motivation, human love stems from a relationship of gratitude to the Creator who is the ultimate source of my being⁸⁶ and has become, through Christ's incarnation and atonement, my redeemer and deliverer from sin.⁸⁷ Thus, love is the response of a grateful heart to God for all that he is and has done in our behalf.

   The Christian life grows as a struggle against sin with absolute and final victory never complete in this life, although a measure of victory is always present even during our lifetime here below if we are truly a son or daughter of God. That is, justification is on condition of faith alone; but there is no such thing as a justified sinner standing alone, justified but without any sanctification.⁸⁸

   Christian growth is nourished by what might be called spirituality or our relationship to God. The Christian life flows out of this relationship to God. It is from this relationship that the Christian receives his power to live ethically. God is the source of our spiritual life, our sanctification, our guidance and our blessing.⁸⁹

   The Christian life is instructed by the Word of God that provides us needed warnings, awareness of resources for motivation and guidance so as to enable us to live useful and productive lives in the service of God and of man.⁹⁰ The Christian life is experienced by our worship of God, in deeds of loving kindness to those around us and in our witness by life and by word to the community beyond us. No Christian is free from responsibility to

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share the gospel with others. His own calling may take him to special areas of service only indirectly related to evangelism. But he can never free himself altogether from the great commission to preach the gospel and to instruct his fellow believers in the church.⁹¹ His contact with the world brings him into social outreach, but I shall leave this in the capable hands of my friends, Bill and Ruth Bently and Jo Brown.⁹²

   The Christian life grows and matures in community. The primary communities for the nourishment of believers are the family and the church. Believers disciple each other, instruct, and encourage and warn fellow believers in the faith so that together they may grow into Christlikeness.⁹³

   Finally, the goal of the Christian life is goodness. It is not the doing of right things, for God could have created automata that would always have done perfectly, exactly what was according to his will. Rather, the goal God has set for each believer is the production of a kind of person who will always choose to do what is right. It is not the doing of the right, however, but the perfect moral character or the Christlikeness of character that represents the goal.

   Perhaps this is as good a point as any to digress for a moment on the matter of psychological counseling. Half a century ago, evangelicals looked upon psychological counseling as an unbiblical alternative to pastoral ministry. Frequently today, psychological counseling is regarded as a spiritual ministry — at best, a complement to pastoral ministry and, sometimes, a substitute for it. Indeed, it is hard to draw a clear line between spiritual counseling and psychological counseling. Most Christian psychologists soon find themselves functioning as spiritual counselors

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and as instructors in the Word of God, either directly, or at times, indirectly and even subconsciously.⁹⁴

   The difference between the two is the goal of each. The psychological counselor seeks to enable a person to function effectively as a human being — that is, to see things realistically as they are and not to create illusions. The patient needs to be able to make decisions on the basis of what the real world is like, and this often means he must get rid of excessive guilt or false guilt. The goal of the psychological counselor is to enable his patient to function "normally" as a "well" person in society.⁹⁵

   By contrast, Christian or "spiritual" counseling is concerned about our relationship to God and morality, about how we can make decisions about right and wrong, what are the resources for making these decisions and what is the goal of the Christian life. On the basis of this division, we can get help from a psychological counselor who may not even be a Christian. We generally seek spiritual counseling from someone we trust as a mature Christian — that is, one who knows the Bible, knows Christ, knows what the Christian resources are, and has proved that he is able to put them into practice in his own life.⁹⁶

   Of course, the two areas and the two goals become thoroughly intertwined. Each tends to do in part the work of the other. The temptation of the psychologist is to become a spiritual advisor and the temptation of the spiritual advisor is to become a psychologist. This is unfortunate because each is trained to do very different things.

Common Objections to Christian Ethics

   1. Asceticism: The charge is that Christianity is too other-worldly and repudiates the healthy, robust normal life that is

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appropriate for modern living. This objection usually comes as a reaction against a warped view of Christianity. Actually, in its basic ethic Christianity is almost the antithesis of asceticism. Asceticism is interested in the self. It seeks to repress certain aspects of the life of the individual, namely, his desires (whatever they may be) in order to foster and strengthen an inner self. Asceticism represents a denial of one part of the human whole in order to build up another part of it.⁹⁷

   Christianity, by contrast, does not focus on the self at all. It does not ask, "How can I build up my own inner self," but rather it asks, "How can I be of greatest service to God and to my fellow human beings." Biblical Christianity may actually require us to forego certain pleasures and joys in this life. But it doesn't deny them for selfish reasons to build up one's own inner soul. Rather, it sets them aside only when they obstruct our progress towards the overall goal to serve God and our fellow human beings. The Christian life is always other centered rather than self centered.

   As a matter of fact, Christianity is not opposed to enjoyment or to the proper use and care of the human body or to the nourishment of the soul. God made us as whole human beings and created in us an aesthetic nature that needs to be nourished by music and art. He gave us physical bodies that we are commanded in Scripture to take care of and to use appropriately. A Christian does not deny that these things are good or desirable or hold an appropriate place in the Christian life. In order to gain certain other goals, the Christian may forego them for a time. Yet he does so knowing that God will not let him ultimately suffer loss.⁹⁸

   When the divine Son of God completed his ministry to save humanity, his heavenly Father restored to him the glory that was

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his before the foundations of the world. So it is with every believer. God will never permit his child, ultimately, to suffer loss in view of a ministry and service to God and fellow human beings.⁹⁹

   2. The second objection is that Christian Biblical ethics is a defeatist ethics. It sets up a very lofty ethical goal, but considers human kind so depraved as to be incapable of achieving any ultimate good. This debased view of man actually weakens us, so it is said. Nothing succeeds like success and nothing helps man more than confidence in himself and in his own ability to succeed.

   By contrast, our Christian faith holds that self-confidence is false confidence. Man can be psychologically helped by grit and determination, but these are not adequate. In God the Christian possesses a help to enable him to do what he can't do in himself. The Christian is ultimately optimistic; and this encourages him even while he is realistic about his own powers. So, Martin Luther declares, "God and I are a majority." By depending on the Holy Spirit, the Christian gets a true success confidence. But it is success confidence, not self-confidence. Like the greater ferocity of the pack of wolves as opposed to the cowardice of the lone wolf, so the Christian gains confidence and moral strength as he works hand in hand with God to battle against sin and the rampant evil in the world.¹⁰⁰

   3. Christian ethics, so it is also alleged, are too idealistic. That is, Christian ethics requires us to act in love and to turn the other cheek. Law is built on the opposite of this. It is based on justice, not on love and forgiveness. Society would be destroyed if we took Christian ethics seriously.

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   But this forgets that many Biblical principles are impossible or impractical for the natural man, but not for the supernatural, Spirit filled man or woman to whom God gives the resources and the strength to live according to these extraordinary demands.¹⁰¹

   We must remember, also, the role of the civil government.¹⁰² Maintaining justice is not a private, but a public duty. A private individual does not take personal vengeance into his own hands, but ought to forgive and forgive and forgive again. Yet in a just society the apparent disadvantage of a Christian will often be set aright by the just law that requires each man to receive his due. We may not force a person to pay his bills. But we can take the issue to the church if the debtor is a believer; and if he refuses to respond to this, then we may treat him as an unbeliever. In short, we must distinguish personal ethics from social and political ethics.¹⁰³

   A careful application of hermeneutical principles quickly solves many problems. We must analyze Christian teaching to discover what it really means in its context. The Bible often speaks in hyperbole and is not intended to be taken literally or woodenly. Many Biblical commands, superficially silly, when understood in their context are not so, but form a coherent whole with other Biblical instructions. Each troublesome passage must be carefully examined and interpreted in the light of the whole of Biblical teaching.¹⁰⁴

   4. A fourth objection against Christian ethics is that they depend on the supernatural. This is the frequent objection of many contemporary thinkers. Sometimes, as with Lenin, the father of Russian communism, this only means that Christians depend on God, and since there is no God, this is a false dependence. Religion tells people who get in trouble to pray. They would be

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more effective were they to depend on themselves  — for example, join a labor union. Of course, the real issue is whether or not there is a God who can hear and answer prayer.¹⁰⁵

   Sometimes, however, the objection runs deeper: dependence on the supernatural makes men weaker. The evidence, however, is on the other side. It is worthy of note that Roepke, the Swiss economist, wishes to revive Christian ethics in order to preserve the Western economic system. The objection is valid only if reliance on the supernatural makes us morally lethargic. But the Christian knows he is responsible for acting and will be judged by God accordingly. The non-supernaturalist may legitimately hold: "This is my own business, to do or not to do as I wish." Accordingly, suicide in pagan Roman times was considered the personal affair of the individual. The Christian, however, knows that nothing is entirely his own business. He must face the sovereign Judge of the universe who holds him to account and will one day punish him for wrong doing. By the mere fact that he does believe in the supernatural, therefore, the Christian has an added incentive, and a very powerful incentive, to lead him to do what is right.¹⁰⁶

   5. Christian ethics are often alleged to be contradictory. For example, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" flatly contradicts the personal love ethics of the Bible. But, in one case we have a law that applies to civil government, and in the other case we have a law for the individual. Each case of contradiction must be examined in context on its own merit.¹⁰⁷

   6. Christian ethics, it is said, originated in an ancient and alien culture and were intended for an agricultural society. hence they are not applicable to us today. What, for example, do

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Christian ethics tell us about slum clearance? (the forcible eviction of slum dwellers or squatters and demolition of property) Or about atomic warfare? The Christian recognizes that the Bible does not deal directly with every moral issue that arises in modern industrial society. Yet the Bible never provided a complete code covering all situations in the ancient world to which it first came. Biblical ethics is not an ethics of codified law, but a love ethics. The Bible does not give us precise directions for every conceivable situation. But it does give us principles and many life applications to guide us. And so long as human nature remains the same and we continue to act it out in our lives in a rational world, these Biblical applications are relevant to guide us to an instructed life of love to all.¹⁰⁸

   7. Finally, it is alleged that Christian ethics are divisive and undemocratic. All absolutes, so the charge goes, but especially absolute religions, lead necessarily to intolerant and undemocratic social relationships.

   The piece of truth in this charge is that some truths are important. The fallacy in this objection is the assumption that Christian ethics lead to divisive and undemocratic attitudes. Christian ethics is in actuality a love ethics. It must be conceded that some Christians have failed to see this or, at least, have failed to practice it. Bible believing Christians do believe in truth — absolute truth. And it is their earnest prayer and heart's desire that all men should accept Christianity as true and act on it. Yet they have universally repudiated the use of force to support their faith. Religious convictions are of such a sort that only if they are offered freely from the heart are they of any value. Hence the Christian rejects force and is limited to moral persuasion to lead another to become Christian. On the contrary, Christian theology

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gives the only truly rational ground for democracy. Its stress upon the worth of the individual and the value of human personality makes democracy worthwhile. And the doctrine of human depravity explains why it is better not to trust our God-given rights to another. The best human being to protect anyone's rights is that person himself. Christian doctrine recognizes this, and democracy puts it into practice.¹⁰⁹

   Moreover, we must never confuse toleration with indifference. The Christian can never be indifferent to a single issue upon which the welfare of a soul hangs. For example, he is not indifferent to rejection of Christ. He wishes to do all he can to persuade others to turn to Christ. Yet he may very well be, and indeed ought to be tolerant. He is willing to die for the freedom of any person to deny Christianity, but he will also die for the privilege of witnessing to anyone why that person ought to become a Christian.¹¹⁰

   It is also important to distinguish between a disciplined membership in a voluntary association, working for a specific goal such as a church, and toleration for the rights of others in an involuntary society such as a national government. Even in the Old Testament, alien residents who were not a part of the Jewish community of faith were to be treated fairly and honestly and allowed their independence. Aliens were to be treated as equals alongside the Israelites (Leviticus 19:34). The Christian believes in the purity of the church and in its right to control its own affairs including its right, as a voluntary society, to discipline its membership. The Christian also believes with even greater commitment in the freedom of religion including the right to propagate one's faith in the larger involuntary society.

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   Many ethical issues deeply troubling our world we have not even touched on in this paper. Definition of the family; divorce and remarriage; the right of a woman to abort a so-called "unwanted" fetus; the alleged right to select the sex of one's children and then discard, sell, or freeze embryos; same-sex marriage and all sorts of sexual issues; euthanasia; genetic engineering; these are but a few from an almost infinitely long list that could be adduced. Evangelicals are deeply troubled over these issues — some because they are not sure where the right answer lies; others because of the devastating consequences that flow to human society by the flagrant violation of what they believe to be God's holy instruction given to us for our good.¹¹¹

   It is my sincere hope and earnest prayer that what we have covered will provide a framework to help all of us to see the direction in which we ought to go. The key to every ethical dilemma must be found in our personal relation to God through Jesus, our divine Lord and Savior. All else flows from this. Because Jesus Christ is divine, he has full right to govern our lives. Because he is our Lord, we ought to receive gladly the instruction he has given to us for our good. And because he is both Creator God and our Savior, we love him, worship him, obey him, and commit our lives wholly to him.¹¹²

   A great and, in truth, a very surprising danger is the threat to both the doctrine and the way of life in our churches caused by their very success in the last few years. Generally speaking, evangelical churches are growing. Our evangelical seminaries are overflowing, and even our colleges, in spite of the tremendous additional financial burden they lay on the parents of our youth, are now showing increased enrollment. Certainly the evangelical churches in other parts of the world are growing — in Africa, South and Central America, China, Korea and east India.¹¹³

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   But this very growth creates, even in our soundly evangelical churches, the threat of a new Constantinian lapse in faith and in life. When large numbers of people are brought into the church faster than they can be assimilated, inevitably they bring their worldly thinking and worldly standards of life in with them. And this can prove disastrous. As D.L. Moody once said: "A ship belongs in the sea, but woe betide the ship when the sea comes into it." So the church belongs in this world, but the result is spiritual disaster when the world enters the church. Of course, in one sense, we want the world to come into the church. That is only to say that we believe in evangelism.¹¹⁴

   The tragedy is that in America, we have not been able in any adequate manner to transmit our doctrine and way of life to our children.¹¹⁵ Far less are we capable of instructing and assimilating those who are entering the church in such large numbers. From what we learn from abroad, Christians in other areas where the church is growing with even far greater rapidity than here are experiencing the same problem.¹¹⁶

   In summary our God has called us to live and witness in a civilization whose intellectual leadership is, at best, quite indifferent to the cause of the gospel and, at worst, stands in open opposition to an evangelical faith and an evangelical way of life. If we do not already find ourselves in a post-Christian era, the intellectual leadership of our world, evidenced in our government, in our great universities and in the great cultural centers of our day, is rapidly moving in that direction.

   Meanwhile God calls us, his believing people, to stand in the gap. He calls us to be faithful. And we must obediently respond by witnessing, through life and word, to our Lord Jesus Christ, and

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to his gospel and to the way of life appropriate for the faithful people of God.

   Long ago, the prophet Jeremiah warned the people of his wayward and unbelieving generation: "This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: ... obey me and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in all the ways I command you, that it may go well with you. But they did not listen or pay attention; instead they followed the stubborn inclination of their evil hearts. They went backward and not forward" (Jeremiah 7:21-24).¹¹⁷

   To our witness let us add earnest prayer to God for a mighty outpouring of his gracious Spirit in our day, so that our generation may not "refuse to listen or pay attention"; but, rather, may hear and heed the Word of the living God for our day. 

Response || Table of Contents

1. This topic was assigned, and I interpreted it to exclude social ethics as well as basic philosophical presuppositions of christian ethics. Of course, treatment of personal ethics that avoids social ethics altogether is impossible; and by seeking to keep the topics separated, no doubt I have biased the discussion too much in the direction of an individualistic ethics. A truly Christian personal ethics cannot be individualistic. Man was not intended to live alone.

2. So poll after poll in Good Housekeeping and similar family magazines.

3. This is often referred to as the fundamental paradox of any hedonistic ethical system. See the classical text on ethics by John S. MacKenzie, Manual of Ethics (4th ed. New York: Noble and Noble, c. 1925), pp.67-71.

4. Lenin, speaking for Communism, declared: "The point is not to understand the world but to change it." After all, communism is a Christian heresy.

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5. Phil. 2:5-11; my own translation based on the analysis of this text in C.F.D. Moule, "Further Reflections on Philippians 2:5-11" in Apostolic History and the Gospel, ed. F.F. Bruce, W.W. Gasque and R.P. Martin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970). The point is not that the Christian life is a life lived in imitation of Jesus Christ, the perfect example, but that, like God, we too are to live lives of self giving sacrifice for others.

6. Christian ethics is based on the principle that love is mightier than fear or a desire for personal gain. We love God, and therefore seek to serve him and our fellow humans because he first loved us and gave himself for us (1 John 4).

7. To deny the deity of Christ or his substitutionary atonement is necessarily to eliminate the supreme motive for the Christian provided in the gospel. In the Old Testament God promised to do whatever was necessary to save man (Gen. 3:16 & 17 expanded further by the sacrificial system). In the New Testament fulfillment, God in Christ has done all that is necessary to save us. Our response in both the Old and New Testaments is by faith to accept his love and then, in turn, to love him and to serve him.

8. No single work has brought this into such sharp focus as J.G. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1923).

9. It took two centuries for Liberalism to penetrate the church sufficiently for this result to become evident. All along its beautiful ethics has floated on false capital — the theological truth of Biblical Christianity and the ethical system in the Bible that is based on that theology. In our generation the religious moral bankruptcy of Liberalism is not patent. 

10. In the older systematics, personal as well as social ethics were often discussed under the heading of the Ten Commandments. In the latter half of this century, social ethics has flourished but personal ethics has been neglected. Probably the most influential American writer on this subject was Reinhold Niebuhr. See his Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1932): and Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vols. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1945). The two most helpful works on personal ethics written from a consistently evangelical position were those by Carl F.H. Henry, Christian Personal Ethics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1957) and Robertson McQuilkin, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics (Tyndale House: Wheaton, Illinois, 1989).

11. For example, the ethical agenda of Liberal Christian scholars could scarcely be distinguished from that of the extreme left wing of the major political parties or the secular humanists.

12. Since the First World War, evangelical scholarship in America has either been pushed out or withdrawn from the center of serious scholarship. The effect of this on all areas of theology is all too apparent. Fortunately this tendency has begun to reverse itself in the last quarter of the century. Westminster Seminary was, undoubtedly, the most notable exception to the trend.

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13. Among the most notable authors of the post World War II period were Van Til, Clark, Buswell, Chafer, Stonehouse, Ramm, Henry and Carnell. All published primary works in apologetics and foundational theology. Only two (Buswell and Chafer) wrote systematic theologies although a number of popular summaries of doctrine appeared. In the Biblical area Archer, Harrison and Guthrie produced excellent defences of conservative positions on introduction problems. The working principle of evangelical theologians seemed to be: Why present an agenda for Christian ethics to those who have rejected the foundational theology on which any valid ethics must be built? However, Cornelius Van Til prepared an unpublished text for his class in Christian theistic ethics; and Carl Henry published two major volumes in the area of ethics — Christian Personal Ethics and The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1947).

14. Fundamentalists and evangelicals, in fact produced quite a flood of ethical material but almost all on a very popular level. Carl F.H. Henry's early volume, The Uneasy Conscience was the first lonely voice raised by a recent evangelical in a serious scholarly defense of social ethics and much the same can be said for his Christian Personal Ethics.

15. All evangelical theologians have insisted upon the interdependence and absolute necessity of both theology and ethics for any view that purports to be remotely Biblical. There is, almost, only a relative logical priority for the theological foundation. Any complete systematics must include ethics. A concentration on theory rather than practice created the impression, both within and without evangelicalism, that Christianity, as understood by evangelicals, was primarily a matter of right ideas (orthodoxy) and not right living (orthopraxis). Nothing could be farther from the Biblical revelation. 

16. To discuss Christian personal ethics without the theological foundation would, however well meant, warp Biblical ethics beyond recognition. A full-orbed Biblical theology is the necessary foundation for Biblical ethics. 

17. This is possible, of course, because, though each of these thinkers stands as a symbol of a major division of historical Christianity, they are, in spite of their differences, all evangelicals. And it is this evangelical faith that unites them that also serves as the foundation for their ethics — however differently they may have worked it out.

18. This is the point of Romans one: even from the natural revelation, we ought to have recognized God as deity and as our infinitely powerful creator — the one to whom we are ultimately responsible. Our sin lies in our unwillingness to recognize him for who he is. And this failure to recognized the sovereign, holy, creator God leads irresistible to the moral chaos that characterizes man without God. 

19. The point is often made and never more powerfully than by Paul Tillich: An ultimate commitment to anyone or anything that is not ultimate is idolatry. See his Dynamics of Faith (ed. Ruth N. Anshen. New York: Harper, 1956).

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20. The essential meaning of the Genesis passage is that both man and woman — and both in the same sense and in the same degree — are created like God and, thus, unique among beings whose home is planet earth. To find this image in the maleness and femaleness of the human species, as Karl Barth does is to go beyond what is clearly stated, although the point that every member of the human race is mutually interdependent is certainly implied by the passage. Church Dogmatics 3:1:41.2 (G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, eds. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 192-198. The social likeness of humankind to the triune God and the economic likeness of man as the under lord of the planet may also be implied. Man is given the right to establish order and govern the resources of the planet including other forms of life. The New Testament teaching on the image does not reflect a new and different image but a re-creation of the original image destroyed in the fall. Yet the image was not totally effaced because of sin. Murder is wrong because man is created in the image of God, thus bearing unique value. And it is wrong to murder any human because all still bear the traces and, therefore, the value of this divine image.

21. Humanity is both of the earth, physical, and like God, spirit. We know so little of what matter is essentially and of what spirit is (except that it is not material), that it is even more difficult to understand the unity of the two in a human soul — an embodied spirit. Of course, we know our bodies reflect light, have weight, can be measured, and otherwise are accessible to the five senses. Here we come face to face with vast areas of ignorance on our part. Yet Scripture is unequivocally clear that we have a body and an immaterial part joined mysteriously in each member of our race.

22. The infinite value of each human person is conveyed not only by the unique God-likeness of man and woman as created but is most unambiguously set forth in the value of the human soul to God — a value so great that it led to his incarnation and his redemption of human kind at infinite cost. 

23. That Adam and Eve were created free with the power to choose between good and evil is not only implied in the Genesis account but is the only alternative to a complete determinism that makes God ultimately responsible for evil. 

24. The freedom of fallen man has proved to be a highly controversial matter in Christian theology. Luther and the Reformers, of course, held that sinful man is bound by his sin and, therefore, not free. Many recent followers of the Reformers have made the distinction between psychological freedom and moral ability (See A.H. Strong, Systematic Theology [3 vols. Valley Forge, PA: The Judson Press, 1907], 509-510). Psychological freedom refers to the capacity of the mind to make choices; moral freedom refers to the moral ability of man to make right choices. Man is free to choose to fly to Arcturus, psychologically speaking; but he lacks the ability really to get himself there. According to his analysis humans are not psychologically determined, but their freedom is not accompanied by a moral ability to do the good. 

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25. The conscience is a part of our "natural" make up — natural in a two-fold sense. It is natural in that it is part of the created order and, therefore, reflects the truth. It is also natural in the secondary sense of what is normal to fallen man. Note Calvin's double use of "natural" in the Institutes. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Ed. John T. McNeill. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960] II. i. 11 and the note on I. ii.2). The Holy Spirit may use the conscience, but the work of the Spirit must be distinguished from the function of the conscience.

26. The conscience code is not an infallible guide to right and wrong. It was destroyed as an adequate guide for life by the fall of man into sin and his rebellion against God and the good; but it has never been effaced.

27. Romans 2:14f. describes the fallen conscience of man as still valid to show man that he is a sinner when the Holy Spirit opens his mind to read the conscience code rightly and guides the conscience prick to honesty.

28. The building of the conscience code (each person's list of rights and wrongs) and the strengthening of the prick (conscience proper) do not begin with each person from scratch. We inherit a code, and the prick is innate. Yet both are educable. The code is ideally to be set according to the Word of God. The prick is to be nourished by careful obedience and dependence on the Holy Spirit's power. 

29. The code can also be developed in a wrong way: by all cultural influences that shape our education, the most important of which influences in early years are usually our parents. We then judge our own conduct according to this fallible and ever-changing standard of our personal code. Much of what is often called "false guilt" is the result of our judging ourselves as having done wrong because our conscience code has reversed its categories and indicates an action to be wrong when it is really right. 

30. Sometimes we fail to repent of our wrong and do not receive God's forgiveness. True repentance receives and accepts by faith God's full and free forgiveness. Then alone can we rightly and with a clear conscience forgive ourselves. It is possible to obtain relief from a guilty conscience either by twisting our code so we no longer hold a thing to be wrong or by dulling and hardening our consciences so that we are no longer bothered by our wrong conduct. These are wrong ways of dealing with a bad conscience. The right way is to create a code that is set according to the standard of Scripture and then to repent where we have violated it, ask for God's forgiveness for Christ's sake and accept his forgiveness. This is the right and Biblical way to true peace of soul. The wrong way usually merely pushes our violation of the code into our sub-conscious where it smolders and, all too often, eventually works its way up into our consciousness in all sorts of strange, and seemingly irrational activity.

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31. True conviction of sin (See John 16:8-11) occurs when the Holy Spirit brings vividly into our consciousness our violation of a code although sometimes the code may actually remain in the unconscious (John 8:9). The Spirit also exhorts us to find the good and do it, warns against acting contrary to what our conscience condemns (2 Cor. 4:2), urges us to repent and believe so as to take care of problems of conscience (Heb. 9:14), and comforts us when we have really done right (and especially when this has brought us into trouble [Acts 24:10]). A splendid book discussing the Christian conscience from a thoroughly evangelical viewpoint is that by O. Hallesby, Conscience (Trans. C.J. Carsen, 4th ed. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1944).

32. Strict Calvinists teach that Adam's sin brought depravity and guilt to all the race by his one act. They base this primarily on Romans 5:12. Some, like the Federalists, hold that all humans were represented in Adam; and when he fell, they fell because they were all represented in Adam as their head. Others teach that all men were really present in Adam and actively and directly participated in his act. See Hienrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics Set out and Illustrated from the Sources (Rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, Trans: G.T. Thomson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), especially pages 330-336. Wesleyans usually teach that all men have followed Adam's bad example, and this has brought depravity and guilt upon all. Wesley, himself, and perhaps also Calvin (See John Murray, The Imputation of Adam's Sin [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1959]) hold that man inherited Adam's depravity then acted accordingly to become guilty. It is my own view that the original Reformers (Luther and Calvin) held none of these explanations as to how Adam's sin brought depravity and guilt on the race. What all evangelicals agree on is that all men have become sinners (depraved and guilty), either in part or wholly, as a result of Adam's sin. 

33. Total depravity has frequently become identified in popular speech to mean that every act of man is wholly evil. This is not the teaching of the Bible. As Augustine argued long ago, every evil is really dependent on a good and is always a perversion of a good. Likewise humans are not totally bad in the sense of the worst possible. Rather some are worse than others. Evangelicals agree that the whole human person is pervaded by sin (although they do not always designate these aspects by the terms intellect, emotions and will).

34. Man is totally unable on his own, apart from the gracious moving of the Holy Spirit, to initiate action that will eventually lead to salvation. If God simply does nothing, man will remain lost. That does not necessarily mean that every act of man is evil. Some are good, at least in a relative sense, although Augustine argues (followed by the Reformers) that every act of man, however good, is also tinged with some aspect of selfishness and thus is never wholly pure but always in part sinful.

35. See the discussion above on the fallen conscience.

36. This is the gospel (See, for example, 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 and Galatians 2:16 et passim). 

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37. This is the application of the gospel — the subjective side of redemption made possible by the work of Christ, the objective side of redemption. The Holy Spirit works in the human heart to create conviction of sin, true repentance, saving faith, the new life in Christ, sanctification (or regeneration in the vocabulary of the Reformers), and ultimately perfection in Christ and glorification.

38. Man is saved because of the work of Christ and if he believes; he is lost because he is a sinner and because he has rejected God and his grace (Romans 1 & 2).

39. Evangelicalism is not the whole of Christianity nor even all of what many who are evangelical hold to be important aspects of Christianity. It is the central core of Biblical Christianity, and it is this central core that represents the common element in traditional Lutheranism, The Reformed churches, Anglicanism (including Wesleyans), Anabaptist Christianity (the Menno Simons branch), and Pentecostal Christianity. Evangelicals focus on the Gospel and what is essential to the integrity of the Gospel. No true Calvinist considers Wesleyan theology a consistent system of theology and vice versa. Yet a Calvinist may consider that Wesley adheres faithfully to the gospel and to those doctrines that are essential to its integrity even though they are convinced that he holds other positions quite inconsistent with the integrity of the gospel. Wesleyans, perforce, would return the compliment. In this statement, I have not tried to form a doctrine that would be acceptable to Wesleyans and Calvinists so much as I have tried to form what I believe is Biblical teaching (which both Calvinists and Wesleyans believe) in such a way that both could agree to the statement even though each might prefer a slightly different wording. Whether or not I have succeeded is for convinced Wesleyans and convinced Calvinists to say. 

40. 2 Timothy 3:14 and 15: That this is the first purpose of the Scripture, most evangelicals, following both Luther and Calvin, agree.

41. I have omitted the second purpose of the law according to the enumeration of Luther and followed by Calvin. Calvin, picking up on a suggestion from Melancthon, calls this second instructional purpose the third and most important use of the law (Institutes II, viiff. and IV, xx. 15). Luther did not list it. He was dreadfully fearful that this use of the law might lead the Christian back into legalism. Of course, he was right. It is an ever present danger to one who uses the Scripture in this role. Yet not to use the law as a guide for a Christian presents its own danger — antinomianism. A proper use of the law, viewed not as a way to earn salvation but as a way to please God, to serve him effectively and to lead a useful life in service to others, is surely the role envisaged for it by Scripture itself (Psalm 19, 119, 2 Tim. 3:16 and 17 and many other passages scattered throughout the Bible). Luther himself constantly appeals to the Bible in this role in his treatises and in his commentaries. He sees the Bible as a book of instruction for the Christian in living out his life on earth, but it must be used properly and never as a way to make ourselves right with God. His warning against legalism needs to be taken to heart by all who recognize this (second or third) use of the law of God. Many evangelicals who hold clearly to the gospel of grace alone through faith alone for justification, slip into a legalistic use of the Bible for sanctification and the living of the Christian life. See the invaluable discussion of Luther's view in Julius Koestlin, The Theology of Luther in its Historical Development and Inner Harmony (Trans. Charles E. Hay. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1897), II, 495-502. 

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42. The Hebrew word "Torah" basically means instruction and carries quite a different connotation from our ordinary use of "law" in English. Torah is not so much a law to which obedience is required with the threat of a penalty for failure to obey, but it is the instruction of a loving father who knows what is best and does not want his child to miss out on the best. It is still true, of course, that it is the instruction of our heavenly Father; and there are penalties and disciplines for failure to abide by his instruction. To see Torah merely as law, however, is to miss its primary thrust and thus to jeopardize the delight in the "law" of God characteristic of the Psalmist in the Old Testament and of the delight and reverence for the "law" found in the New Testament — in Paul, for example, as seen in Romans 2 and elsewhere. Paul also has another view of the law which "kills." To understand Paul's theology this complex aspect of the law must be kept clear.

43. The Biblical revelation as history (and the gospel as history) represents a significant and valuable way to interpret the Bible. See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). To interpret the gospel as history need not demand an acceptance of all the implications Hans Frei draws from this methodology.

44. The use of Biblical narratives in drawing out doctrine (or ethics) requires a delicately nuanced hermeneutic. Broadly speaking, an act spelled out in the Biblical text may illustrate a universal good, a universal bad, a right act (or bad act) for the specific instance portrayed, or the significance of the act for our knowledge of right and wrong may be left completely unindicated by the Biblical text. Only context enables us to interpret it rightly and apply it for ourselves. We know on the basis of the Bible's own claims for itself, that all the Bible is profitable for our instruction; but what precisely any particular Biblical narrative conveys to us as its instruction only a careful analysis of each passage in its immediate context and in the context of the whole Bible will enable us to see.

45. Most heresies have rested on the teaching of single verses interpreted apart from the broader teaching of the whole of Scripture. We do not really have Biblical teaching on any point of doctrine or ethics until we have the whole of what the Bible says on that point. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the Biblical teaching as to the grounds for divorce. Some passages could be interpreted to mean there are no legitimate grounds for divorce (e.g. Luke 16:18). Matthew teaches that marital unfaithfulness is an exception (Matthew 5:32). 1 Corinthians 7 may well add another exception. Only when we pull together all relevant passages of Scripture and see how each part fits in with all other parts, do we have the full guidance of God on this matter.

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46. The Reformation principle of the perspicuity and adequacy of Scripture must be carefully stated in Reformation terms or it will be seen to be obviously false. Every believer by the illumination and discerning work of the Holy Spirit, as he is obedient to God and lays himself open to public and private instruction in the Word, can understand Scripture so that he can receive the gospel, be saved and find all he really needs to live now. The point is, the believer needs to know for himself what Scripture says. He must not ultimately allow other human authorities to determine the will of God for him no matter how dependent he may be on their instruction (and we are all dependent on the instruction of the church) and how grateful he is to others and to the church for their guidance and instruction in the faith.

47. In the great commandment cited by our Lord (see below), the focus is on the norm as standard. Here is how we know what is, as a matter of fact, good and right. In the great love chapter of the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 13) the focus is on love as motivation. Both are necessary and thoroughly intertwined in our experience. The Levite on the road to Jericho had the former, but not the latter. He knew his Old Testament very well. What he lacked was love in his heart for the injured Jew to motivate him to do what he knew to be right. Soren Kierkegaard has a beautiful passage on this parable in his For Self-Examination (Trans. Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford Press, 1941), 64-66.

48. Matthew 22:37-40.

49. Love is essentially other directed and, therefore, is different from esteem. Because of the common elements in love and esteem — the recognition of high value and the caring concern both include — many argue that we should love ourselves. The Scripture, too, recognizes this similarity in its command to love others as we love ourselves. The other-directedness of Biblical love, however, distinguishes it from self-esteem.  

50. A Biblical love ethic as we have outlined it involves a standard based ultimately on a God of infinite holiness and infinite love who has given himself utterly to each human so that each one owes his or her all to God. It also means that the highest motive of man is an ultimate commitment of love to his God of holy-love. Although the Bible does not deny that humans are powerfully motivated by desire for power or sex or possessions or fear and, indeed, with proper bounds, ought to be, it still holds that love is a more powerful and better motive than any of these. But, if it is an ultimate commitment, it must be a holy love to a God of holy love. 

51. An example is the "situation ethics" of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics: the New Morality [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966]) which purports to be an ethics of pure love, but leaves human-kind with no objective standard of what is truly love.

52. An example is the love ethic that sees love merely as a standard of loving acts — the kind against which Soren Kierkegaard fought so desperately. Another Christian perversion would be an ethic that sees love as wholly directed towards God and loving acts for fellow humans as motivated only by love for God. The motivation to mission work is often wrongly parodied as such. The missionary doesn't love those to whom he or she is bringing the gospel, but does love God. Such missionary work is not very successful because even the most ignorant savage knows when he is loved for himself and when he is just a pawn — being used by others. I have known such missionaries; but, needless to say, they are not the typical missionary and never make a good missionary. 

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53. The important distinction needing to be made is that between piety and pietism. Most of the so-called "pietists" I have met are in themselves pious and, according to their own light, they exalt piety and repudiate pietism. The sinful human heart of all of us including the best Christians, tends inevitably to slip into pietism — our focus shifts to our piety rather than to the God towards whom we experience a divinely approved piety. The charge of pietism is often the derogatory put-down by non-pious folk against those who are pious — and, unfortunately, there is usually a trace of pietism in the most pious to suggest that the charge may have some validity.

54. Real pietism, as opposed to genuine piety, represents in some ways the antipodes of a Biblical love ethic. The highest motivation is not love to another, but a regard for self and the build-up of one's own pious relationship with God. 

55. For Dewey's religious philosophy and, in particular, his ethics, see John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics (Rev. ed. New York: H. Holt, c 1932). Also see the thoughtful criticism of his views in J.O. Buswell, The Philosophies of F.R. Tennant and John Dewey (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). 

56. See his Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1916).

57. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936. Carnegie's popular influence has been immense — including his penetration of evangelical thought and evangelical ministry.

58. Carnegie tells us the way to get ahead — even how to get ahead in the cause of Christ. While Carnegie accepts many important Christian principles, his philosophy of life is, at root, quite opposed to the Christian ethic that requires humans to be consumed by a love that is even willing to confront and to suffer the consequences of a pure love. Any truly Christian ethics must be prepared to suffer ultimate defeat in this world (so, in reality, it is not quite ultimate) in loving one's enemies.

59. The practical and worldly ethics of Ben Franklin represents such a legalism. Virtue is attained by obedience to rules, and we grow morally by vigorous devotion to the rules of right and wrong. See Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Selections from His Other Writing (Ed. Herbert W. Schneider, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952).

60. These, of course, are the true antipodes — each straying from a Biblical ethics in an opposite direction. Within the evangelical framework, Lutheranism has always had to guard itself from slipping into antinomianism; Calvinism (and Puritanism), from slipping into legalism. Original Lutherans and original Calvinists (their faithful followers in each case) avoided both extremes, but each has continually had to guard against its own special "slippery slope."

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61. The ostensible point of our Lord's teaching was to answer the question: "Who is my neighbor?" The good Samaritan models that answer — anyone in need. For a Samaritan, a Jew in need is my neighbor (and by analogy, for a Jew, even a Samaritan). The Levite also illustrates the necessity for love as motivation. As a fellow Jew, the Levite knew the injured Jew was his neighbor; but he lacked the necessary love. 

62. "Love God and do what you will?" — Aurelius Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Vol. VII in A Select Library of the Nicean and Post-Nicean Fathers [Ed. Philip Schaff, Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1956], vii 8). But this must be understood in the context in which Augustine placed it. 

63. For an interesting and valuable discussion of the role of law in the Christian life, see Interpretation, Vol. XLIII, No. 3 (July, 1989).

64. The Bible, it is important to remember, is not a ledger of codified laws. It is a book of life. It contains universal laws, but more frequently it provides applications of the universal law of love worked out in individual lives or group experiences living in a particular context. These must be interpreted in the light of the cultural setting in which they are found and applied to the cultural setting in which we are functioning. Faithfulness to the Bible does not always involve our doing just what the Bible requires in its own setting but rather the taking of what it says and applying it honestly and faithfully to our own situation today. It doesn't always tell us in so many words what we are to do now, but it tells us, with divine infallibility, what we need to know in order to be faithful to God in our day.

   In addition, we dare not settle on any one passage of the Bible as the whole of divine instruction on any one topic. The Bible includes very broad principles, sub-principles, and sub-sub-principles and their applications. If we are to follow the divine guidance offered to us in the inerrant rule of faith and practice, we need to be guided by the whole of Scripture. This is why we are not to search the Bible desperately when we are in trouble, but to grow in Christian understanding and character as we daily and continuously study the whole of Scripture throughout the whole of our lives. Only in this way does the whole of divine revealed wisdom become available for our daily guidance and Christian growth.

65. Many Christians who repudiate Pharisaism in the first sense, practice a kind of Pharisaism in the second sense. Christian schools, for example, may inadvertently teach a kind of Pharisaism by setting up prohibitions demanded of all students. The solution, of course, is not to discard all rules, but to teach that these are at best house rules or family rules, appropriate as samples of Christian love and specially suited to the close living conditions of a resident school. The worst alternative would be to teach that not doing certain things represents the most important and central core of a truly Christian life. 

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66. The selection of "favorite rules" varies greatly in Christendom and in evangelical circles. The practice of using alcoholic beverages, for example, varies greatly from Lutheran evangelicals to Southern Baptists. For many years northern evangelicals in the U.S. would engage in mixed bathing but often outlawed smoking. Southern evangelicals reversed these favorites; they would smoke but not tolerate mixed bathing. 

67. This was the fatal error of the Pharisees of the New Testament. Unfortunately it represents a tendency inherent in all Christians. To reconstruct our standard by which we judge ourselves is a constant temptation for it frees us from any sense of guilt and discomfort — but with the disastrous results noted.

68. The fifth and final step of faith is the acceptance of our acceptance; and without this, there is no peace of mind or soul.

69. Thus we find the sternest rebukes of our Lord against spiritual pride. It also explains the corresponding exhortations to humility. We must be humble enough to admit we are wrong when we really are wrong. The willingness humbly to admit our wrong is the first and necessary step to righting a wrong. And, in one sense, it is the first step in coming to the gospel.

70. This is the danger of overprotecting a child. The duty of a parent is to shelter a child and protect him or her from danger. But it is also the duty of a parent to prepare their children so that at the appropriate time they will be able to live in the world apart from the parents constant protection. This weaning process is a necessary and crucial part of parental rearing. The hot-house analogy is valid only because in the long run that is the way to produce the sturdiest plants. Yet part of our hot-house start is to prepare the plant for transplanting. The child, too, must be transplanted if he or she is to eventually take their place in the world as a strong witness for Christ. They need to be prepared for transplanting.

71. Humans, by creation, are social beings. We are commanded to obey our parents, but also all those in authority. The Christian life is not inconsiderate of the wishes or demands of others. The Christian preeminently is to sacrifice for others — to go the extra mile. Nevertheless, the final standard for the Christian is not peer pressure, but what is right according to the standard revealed by God. We must obey God rather than man. 

72. The conflict between parental obedience and child independence is as old as our first parents, and a proper balance between these polarities is the greatest problem a conscientious parent faces. It is probably the most important decision parents make in their child rearing. Unfortunately the balance is never the same — even for two children in the same family. 

73. Parental spiritual and moral nourishment of the young is commanded in Scripture and is a very necessary role in parenting. But equally necessary and equally a part of this parenting is to rear a child so he becomes independent of the parent and dependent upon God. Ultimate dependence on God alone is the key to freedom from slavery to all human lords.

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74. Much has been made of the difference between the Lutheran so-called unqualified obedience to governmental authority and the Calvinistic or Reformed insistence upon the right to disobey and even engage in armed resistance to government. I do not find this radical difference between the two major reformers. When Luther's view is based not on a few statements taken out of context and drawn from the perspective of his entire corpus of relative teaching on this point, the differences reduce to near zero. Both Luther and Calvin argued that obedience to government should be complete except when the government insists that we act contrary to God's word. Otherwise, both insisted that the private Christian is to obey his government. On the other hand, rulers who have been placed in authority have a duty to confront evil and will be judged by God if they fail in this duty. They alone have the right in certain restricted situations to engage in armed rebellion against "higher" authorities. 

75. Evangelicals have always made a sharp distinction between compromising principle and compromising action. We are never to determine right and wrong from the pressures of others. Our principles are ultimately to be drawn only from the word of God. Although our fellow humans may instruct us, and we should learn from them gratefully, yet our actions are constantly determined in the light of the wishes or even prejudices of those around us. The one is determined on the sole Lordship of God. The other is determined by our loving sacrificial concern for others The problem arises when to obey God requires that we hurt others. In such a case, we must obey God and trust that God, who knows best, sometimes knows that humans grow best through their hurts.

76. Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935).

77. Phil. 2:5 ff. and elsewhere. The Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to be holy even as God is holy. The Apostle Paul even calls us to be imitators of himself. Our ultimate goal is to be conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).

78. So the great commandment in Matthew 23:35-42. Unfortunately such a pure love is not attained in this life. As Augustine points out, our love for God is always impure — at best, tainted by love of self. 

79. In spite of the clear Scriptural insistence that our ultimate goal is to be like Christ, Scripture is surprisingly reticent about calling us to do as Christ did. Even the Philippians 2 passage does not so much call us to do specific things that Christ did, but like him, to do all we do, not out of a spirit of grabbing for ourselves all we can get, but out of a spirit of self-sacrificial love for others — like Christ.

80. In short, we are always to act in sacrificial love, but true sacrificial love is different for each person.

81. See especially Robert Schuller, Self Esteem (Waco, TX: Word, 1982).

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82. Scripture, particularly the teaching of our Lord, is full of such teaching: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?" — Mark 8:30; He who does not "provide for his own . . . is worse than an infidel" — 1 Timothy 5:8.

83. The Scriptural statements supporting self esteem must be balanced by the far greater emphasis on living for others. The apostle wrote: "Those things that were gain for me I counted as loss" (Philippians 3:7). Scripture recognizes our infinite worth to God and encourages us to act accordingly. Yet the direct exhortations of Scripture are almost exclusively, to deny ourselves (i.e. be unselfish) and to give ourselves sacrificially to the service of God and our fellow humans. 

84. This does not mean that the Christian life is one of isolation from society nor especially that it is freedom from dependence upon fellow believers and the church. Our instruction in the Scripture comes necessarily through the church, and we grow as we mutually depend on one another. Christian growth is not growth in isolation but growth together with other Christians in mutual dependence upon each other. This is the danger in the otherwise beautiful and moving story of the Christian life set forth in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 

85. New birth is a figurative term and is not always used by evangelicals to mean the same thing. In the vocabulary of the older Calvinists (See Calvin, Institutes, III/2 f.) regeneration meant rejuvenation and was roughly equivalent to sanctification. Regeneration began with the first movement of the Spirit to enable an unbeliever to believe and continued throughout life. For many contemporary evangelicals, new birth refers to the moment of true faith in Christ when a person first becomes a child of God. 

86. Romans 1:18-21 teaches that the natural revelation manifested the Creator God to whom we owe everything and who, therefore, deserves our gratitude and is to be given the appropriate glory.

87. "The love of Christ constrains us . . . " — 2 Corinthians 5:14-15. 

88. Christian growth represents a difficult topic over which evangelicals are far from agreement. They agree that we are justified on condition of a right kind of faith and not on condition of our good works. Faith itself is an act of the whole soul to place one's trust for forgiveness of sin and everlasting life in the divine-human Christ and his finished work on our behalf. Evangelicals are also agreed that true and saving faith will result in good works, but it is the faith not the good works that represents the condition for the gift of our salvation. Evangelicals are not agreed on whether one can have true faith without accepting the Lordship of Jesus Christ over one's life, the most appropriate ways to nourish the Christian life, whether sanctification comes as a crisis or a process, the degree of sanctification attained in this life, and whether and under what conditions spiritual life can be lost completely. The phrase "faith alone" has given rise to much misunderstanding and needs to be carefully guarded. When stated properly, however, it is thoroughly Biblical and touches the very heart of the gospel.

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89. It is very important for the understanding of Christian personal ethics that Christianity be perceived not just as a system of truth including ethics. Christianity does not provide merely an ethical system or even a divine revelation of the do's and don'ts of the Christian life. Christianity is also subjectively an appropriation of the divine truth made possible, not just deistically through the truth, but by the Spirit of God working immediately on the human soul. He works to enable us to believe, and enter into mutual personal fellowship with God, and He transforms the weak and sinful human heart to enable it to do good and to be "metamorphosed" (Romans 12:1 & 2) finally into the perfect character of Christ. 

90. Christians are instructed through many channels; principally through the church. The Bible is the final and only infallible standard by which we determine the Christian life.

91. Such a division of labor is recognized clearly in the New Testament. Some are called to be evangelists and are given the gift of evangelism. Others are called to be "helpers" and are given the gift of being a "people helper" (See Gary Collins, How to be a People Helper [Santa Ana, Calif.: Vision House, 1956]). Yet the universal command to be witnesses and to proclaim the gospel falls alike on every Christian. No Christian should feel guilty merely because he has not led so many to Christ as the great evangelists, but every Christian ought to feel guilty if he does not, in appropriate ways, bear witness by life and by word to the good news of the gospel. The Protestant Reformation stressed and evangelicals have supported the high values of all legitimate vocations. So also ministry is not a duty for some professionals but the privilege and duty of every believer.

92. See below, pages 299ff. and 257ff.

93. The Bible knows no such thing as a Christian who is nourished and grows in isolation. Christians are members of a body, and each part is indispensable to every other part and to the whole (1 Corinthians 12:12-31).

94. The problem of this overlap of duties becomes serious when the pastor finds counseling more to his liking and allows his spiritual (and sometimes psychological) counseling to encroach upon his pastoral and administrative and preaching duties. His special training and his special expertise usually lie in these latter areas. The problem becomes particularly pernicious when he moves into psychological counseling for which he was never professionally prepared. A similar danger, mutatis mutandis attends the professional counselor. 

95. C.S. Lewis has a helpful section on this distinction in his Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1957).

96. The overlap between the two disciplines and the integral way in which each penetrates the other make the choice between a non-Christian psychological counselor and a mature Christian spiritual counselor much more difficult. This emphasizes the need for mature committed Christians to enter the field of psychological counseling. Ideally such a counselor ought to be available in every community. 

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97. Asceticism is the opposite of hedonism but it is still egoistic. It misses completely the motivating center of Christian ethics.

98. A much abused Scripture verse is 1 Timothy 4:8 in the King James Version. "Bodily exercise profits little." The little profit is by contrast with the eternal advancement of the soul. Yet it does profit. Actually Biblical Christianity sets high value on the body. We are not be slaves to our body's needs, and the body is not our highest value, yet the body was created by God; we are to care for our bodies; they are so valuable that Christ died to redeem our bodies as well as our souls. The first Psalm stresses the happiness of the person who is in a right relationship with God. The Bible recognizes that happiness is largely a by-product of the person who does not set happiness as the ultimate good. But there is no least hint in the Bible that happiness is wrong. Nor is pleasure wrong, though pleasures of the world are often wrong because they do not really bring true and lasting pleasure but moral and spiritual disaster.

99. Philippians 2:5 ff. puts this in right perspective. Christ did not sacrifice himself to gain his glorious reward. He sacrificed himself for others; but the Father glorified him for what he had done. So it is with each obedient child of God.

100. The analogy is not altogether happy, but it illustrates that the Christian is realistic. He knows that what he can't do in his own strength, he can do with the resources God places at his disposal and as part of the larger body — the supernatural body of Christ's church — and this strengthens him.

101. This is explicitly taught in many passages of Scripture: We are without strength, but God . . . . Romans 5:6-8; David knew his own weakness, but his confidence was in the arm of Jehovah (1 Samuel 17); et passim.

102. Romans 13 provides the necessary counterbalance to a Christian's failure to insist on his own rights. The task of government is to protect the innocent from those who would selfishly prey on others. It is important to note that Romans 13 follows immediately the conclusion to chapter 12 that repudiates all personal vengeance. 

103. The Christian is not to take the law into his own hands. Anarchy is not the solution for injustice. The Christian is to work with others for justice in his land. Wrongs against others and against himself, he will seek to redress not by personal vengeance but through public law and public justice. The Christian is not always to yield to abuse. He is to turn the other cheek when insulted, but he may also take the injury caused by a fellow believer to the church or a body of other Christians for arbitration and justice. Likewise, if his brother refuses to do this, he may then appeal to the public courts to secure his rights just as he may normally do with unbelievers. Yet the Christian is slow to respond in kind and should be willing to suffer without instant retaliation. 

104. For example, if we are compelled to go one mile, go two (Matthew 5:41). This onerous duty is cited to illustrate that we should support our government willingly and not shirk our duty. To turn the other cheek warns against personal vengeance — not that it is always the right thing to do when we are harmed. On the other hand, the admonition to forgive seventy times seven means that we are always to forgive and never to set a limit to it — so long as we believe there has been sincere repentance for the wrong.

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105. Christian ethics openly and frankly presumes the existence of a personal active God immanent in the universe as well as transcendent.

106. See Roepke Two Essays, edited with an introduction by Johannes Overbeck (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). 

107. In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord refers to several Old Testament verses and warns against the application his opponents were making of them. These verses were intended as civil rules for the conduct of society, and some Jewish leaders were interpreting them as guides for personal conduct. Many actions right for a society are wrong for the individual. The right to condemn property for the public domain and capital punishment are merely two examples.

108. The question as to whether personal and political ethics are to be judged by the same standard is legitimate. Emil Brunner (Justice and the Social Order, Trans. Mary Hottinger, New York: Harper, 1945) argues that the individual is to be guided by love but the state by justice. One is uncalculating and self-giving; the other is calculating and gives just what is due. If the two perspectives are to be brought together in holy love, it can only be as we view justice as love for the whole of being. Society gives to all and to all equally; all the good that each can take — but this carries us beyond the bounds of this paper. 

109. A Christian can, of course, live a life of love, faithful to God and to his fellow creatures, in almost any kind of government. The Bible does not command democracy. And no democracy is perfect. In fact, a truly democratic government can well be most oppressive — as, for instance, the near pure democracy of free Athenians who put Socrates to death. Even democracy can be no better than the moral quality of the citizens who make up that democracy. The strong monarchy of Frederick the Great or Peter the Great or the limited monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I, was far better than the democracy of Robespierre and the First Republic. Yet human nature being what it is, democracy is, to put it awkwardly, the least bad of all bad forms of human government. 

110. Christian emphasis on evangelism is usually misunderstood by non-Christians. If it is truly Christian evangelism, it is motivated not by a desire for power or control over another, but by love for the other with whom the Christian wishes to share the best thing in life. 

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111. The current issue of abortion is an excellent example. Evangelicals are unanimous in their condemnation of liberal abortion as a violation of the sixth commandment. They are disagreed as to the possibility of exceptions — some would have none, others would allow abortions to safeguard serious risk to the life of the mother, others would add rape and some would go even further. Again they are disagreed as to when abortions should be permitted by law. Some would insist that no abortions should be permitted and all should be prohibited by law and punished. Others point out that not everything that is right should be translated into law and its violation punished. Accordingly some evangelicals think all abortions are wrong but abortions to save a mother's life should not incur legal punishment or penalties. Similarly many evangelicals argue that in some cases abortions that are wrong, should still not be punished. My own view is that abortion is wrong except to save a mother from serious risk to her life, but we should not force a raped woman to bear her child on the grounds that we do not force anyone to sacrifice for the good of another. There is no clear-cut evangelical consensus on some of these points.

112. A short paper on Christian personal ethics cannot hope to cover any aspect of the subject thoroughly. I have chosen to concentrate on those points on which Scripture lays most stress and, at the same time, are most frequently overlooked. I have also tried to draw clear distinctions between evangelical views of personal ethics and those views commonly accepted by our society or by non-evangelicals.

113. While the nominal Christian church in America has remained static for the last generation, evangelical churches have certainly grown, as Gallop reminds us in his frequent polls. How thoroughly has this growth penetrated into the lives and morals of evangelical Christians? The evidence seems to be that evangelical churches are growing larger in numbers, but its Christianity is becoming thinner and thinner. Something of the same is true in other parts of the world. In the last decade or two, Christianity appears to be growing slightly over the planet as a whole. Evangelical faith, however, certainly seems to be growing significantly faster than the church as a whole — especially in Central and South America, in Africa south of the equator, and in the East Indies, Korea, and in China. See David B. Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford: OUP, 1982).

114. In one sense this lowering of the spiritual quality of a church by the addition of newly converted members is inevitable and even desirable. The New Testament does not contemplate long periods of delay while new members are held in probation without being admitted to the church. The three thousand saved on Pentecost were immediately admitted to full status as believers. The principle of believers-only-but-all-believers is thoroughly Biblical. Yet if a church is growing as it ought, this presents an immense problem of spiritual instruction and growth. If the church neglects this spiritual instruction or is incapable of facilitating the spiritual growth, the end result is disaster. Two New Testament principles are specially important for the protection of the church: (1) No novice should be given an office or role of leadership (1 Timothy 3:6) and (2) the church must exercise discipline — including the removal of membership from voluntarily inactive members and especially those who have lapsed morally (1 Cor. 5:2). Unfortunately few American churches today practice any form of church discipline, and almost none makes any requirement for remaining in the church beyond the mere wish to do so.

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115. In the U.S. the problem is a combination of the first amendment and the exclusive public support for the the public schools. All evangelicals stand solidly for adherence to the first amendment although, as with the general populace (and our Supreme Court), some interpret it more broadly than others. They are all committed to religious freedom not only for themselves but for others. They are also committed in principle to the constitutional amendment that prohibits the government from favoring a particular religious viewpoint. On the matter of government support for private education, they are quite divided. Some prefer no support for schools with a religious orientation. Others object to direct support but would prefer the government to assist the student and allow each one to choose the school he preferred whether public, private, secular, Roman Catholic or Protestant. The latter would follow the lines of the old G.I. education bill in effect after World War II. The dilemma facing evangelicals in the education of their children is simple. Free public schools consume most of the time and energy of growing children. Quality private schools, where religious instruction is possible, are so expensive that only the rich can afford them. The result is that Protestant children by and large attend public schools and thus are deprived of quality religious education. And from a Christian point of view, effective moral education must include religious and doctrinal content.

116. Sunday schools are declining and with the trend towards long weekend vacation and open Sundays, the churches are simply not educating their adult converts. Christian education of its constituency is, perhaps, the most serious problem facing the evangelical church today. It is a problem not unique to the U.S. or North America. Particularly in Africa south of the Sahara, where converts number in the millions, the church simply does not have the resources to educate its rapidly growing constituency.

117. Jeremiah 7:21-24. The warning of Jeremiah needs to be sounded loudly and clearly in our day. The increased numbers that on the surface sound so good may yet come back to haunt us. In spiritual matters depth is to be preferred over breadth. Most American churches opt for breadth and refuse to face the consequences of their increasing lack of depth.

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