What Christian Ethics Is

Ethics is the disciplined study of how human beings ought to live: what is good, what is right, what is owed, and what kind of person is worth becoming. The word comes from the Greek ethos, which meant custom or character, the settled way a person or a people lives. Its Latin twin is mos, plural mores, and Cicero tells us at the opening of his treatise On Fate that he coined the adjective moralis to give Latin a word for what the Greeks called ethics. So the two words, ethics and morality, began as translations of each other. Many writers now use them with a small difference that is worth keeping: morality is the practice, the actual way people live and judge, and ethics is the reflection on that practice, asking whether it is right and why.

Philosophers divide the field into parts, and the parts will appear in this track. Descriptive ethics reports what people in fact believe and do. Normative ethics asks what they ought to believe and do, and it is the main business of this track. Metaethics asks what moral words mean in the first place, what makes anything good, and how we could ever know it. Applied ethics takes the answers into particular fields, medicine, business, war, family. A Christian ethicist works in all four, but he works inside a frame the philosopher does not have to accept: that there is a God who made the world, who has spoken, and who has acted in Jesus Christ.

That frame changes three things at once. It changes the source, because the Christian believes the good has been shown and not merely discovered, which is the first claim Micah makes: He has shown you. It changes the standard, because the measure of goodness is the character of God himself. 'Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy' (Leviticus 19:2), a command Peter repeats to Gentile believers centuries later (1 Peter 1:16). And it changes the goal, because the aim of Christian ethics is not merely a just society or a calm conscience but a people made like Christ. The traditions name that goal differently. Catholic moral theology speaks of the vision of God as the end for which humans are made. Orthodox theology speaks of theosis, being made partakers of the divine nature, and the Greek Orthodox ethicist Stanley Harakas built his Toward Transfigured Life (1983) around that goal. Protestant writers more often speak of sanctification and of obedience springing from faith. They are describing the same mountain from different sides.

Here is the definition this track will work with. Christian ethics is the disciplined reflection of the church, under scripture, on how those who follow Jesus Christ should act and who they should become, for the glory of God and the good of their neighbour. Every phrase is doing work. Disciplined, because instinct is not enough. Of the church, because no Christian reasons alone. Under scripture, because the Bible is the authority the reasoning answers to, even where it must reason beyond what the Bible directly addresses. Those who follow Jesus, because Christian ethics is first an ethic for disciples, though it speaks to everyone. Act and become, because conduct and character are both in view. And the glory of God and the good of the neighbour, because those are the two great commandments, which lesson 3 takes up.

Notice, above all, that this is an ethic of discipleship. Jesus did not hand his followers a code and leave. He called them to himself: 'If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me' (Mark 8:34). And when he sent them out, the instruction was to make disciples, 'teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you' (Matthew 28:20). Ethics, on this account, is not a separate subject added to the faith for people who like hard questions. It is what following Jesus looks like when you have to decide what to do on a Tuesday. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing Discipleship in 1937 for a German church that had learned to separate belief from obedience, made the point unforgettable with his attack on cheap grace, grace that forgives without calling anyone to follow. His later, unfinished Ethics, assembled after his execution by his friend Eberhard Bethge and published in 1949, presses the same conviction: the Christian question is not first how I can be good, but what the will of God is in the reality of Christ.

Micah 6:8 is one of the most quoted verses in the Old Testament, and it is usually quoted alone, as a motto. Read in its place, it is something sharper. Micah came from Moresheth, a small town in the Judean lowlands, and prophesied in the days of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (Micah 1:1), in the second half of the eighth century BC. It was a time of prosperity for some and ruin for others. The powerful 'covet fields and seize them; they take away houses. They deprive a man of his home, a fellow man of his inheritance' (Micah 2:2). In a farming society, land was not an investment; it was life, and the inheritance of a family plot was guarded in the law precisely so that no Israelite family would be pushed off the land for good. Micah watched it happen.

Chapter 6 is staged as a court case. Scholars call the form a covenant lawsuit, from the Hebrew rib, a dispute or legal case, and the word appears in 6:2: 'For the LORD has a case against His people, and He will argue it against Israel.' The mountains and the foundations of the earth are summoned as witnesses, as heaven and earth were witnesses when the covenant was made (Deuteronomy 30:19). Then God speaks, and the first thing he does is not accuse but ask: 'My people, what have I done to you? Testify against Me how I have wearied you!' (6:3). He reminds them of the exodus, of Moses, Aaron and Miriam, of Balaam's curse turned to blessing, of the crossing from Shittim to Gilgal, 'so that you may acknowledge the righteousness of the LORD' (6:5). The case opens with grace.

The worshipper answers with a question, and his question is the heart of the passage: 'With what shall I come before the LORD when I bow before the God on high?' (6:6). Then he starts to bid. Burnt offerings. Year-old calves, which were costly. Thousands of rams. Ten thousand rivers of oil. And then, terribly: 'Shall I present my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' (6:7). Child sacrifice was not a figure of speech in Micah's century; 2 Kings 16:3 records that King Ahaz, under whom Micah prophesied, made his own son pass through the fire. The worshipper is willing to pay anything at all except the one thing God has asked for. That is the moral psychology of religious corruption, and it has not changed.

Then comes the answer. 'He has shown you, O man, what is good.' Not a new revelation, but a reminder; the law and the prophets had said it already (compare Deuteronomy 10:12-13). And it is addressed to O man, adam, the human being, which has led many interpreters to hear a claim reaching beyond Israel, though the immediate address is clearly to God's covenant people. Then three requirements. To act justly, to do mishpat, which is the justice a judge gives and a community keeps, the very thing Micah's leaders were selling for bribes (3:11). To love mercy, chesed, the steadfast covenant loyalty that God himself shows, here not merely to be done but to be loved. And to walk humbly with your God, a rare verb that means to walk carefully, modestly, attentively, in step with someone greater than you.

Three cautions about reading the verse. First, it is not an attack on worship as such. The prophets attack worship that has been cut loose from justice, but Micah does not abolish the altar, and Jesus, quoting the same tradition, told the Pharisees that they should have practised justice, mercy and faithfulness 'without neglecting the former' (Matthew 23:23). Second, it is not a summary that makes the rest of scripture unnecessary. It is a summary of what the rest of scripture already taught, and it means nothing to someone who does not know what justice and mercy require in particular cases. Third, it was heard. A century later, when Jeremiah was on trial for his life, some of the elders of the land remembered that Micah had prophesied the ruin of Jerusalem in the days of Hezekiah, and that Hezekiah had feared the LORD and sought his favour rather than kill the prophet (Jeremiah 26:18-19). A king once heard a prophet's ethical rebuke and repented. It is not hopeless to speak.

Look again at the order of Micah 6. God recounts what he has done (6:3-5) before he says what he requires (6:8). This is not an accident of one chapter. It is the grammar of biblical ethics, and theologians call it the relation of the indicative to the imperative: the indicative states what is true, the imperative states what must be done, and in scripture the imperative almost always rests on the indicative. The Ten Commandments begin, 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' (Exodus 20:2), and only then, you shall have no other gods. Israel was not freed because it obeyed; it was told to obey because it had been freed.

The New Testament letters are built the same way, and you can see it in their architecture. Romans spends eleven chapters on the gospel and then turns: 'Therefore I urge you, brothers, on account of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices' (Romans 12:1). Ephesians spends three chapters on what God has done in Christ and then says, 'As a prisoner in the Lord, then, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received' (Ephesians 4:1). Colossians 3 grounds its commands in a fact: 'Therefore, since you have been raised with Christ, strive for the things above' (Colossians 3:1), and it forbids lying not merely because lying is wrong but 'since you have taken off the old self with its practices' (3:9). The ethics is the doctrine lived; the doctrine is what makes the ethics possible.

Two failures follow when the two are pulled apart, and every church has suffered from both. The first is doctrine without ethics: a church that can recite its creed perfectly while its leaders take bribes, its members cheat their workers, and its pastors abuse their power. Micah's Jerusalem was that church, and James named its condition: 'faith by itself, if it does not result in action, is dead' (James 2:17). The second is ethics without doctrine, usually called moralism: a church that preaches good behaviour every week and never says why, or never says what God has done, so that the people hear only pressure. Moralism produces two kinds of people, the proud who think they are managing and the despairing who know they are not, and neither has heard the gospel.

Theologians have disagreed about how tightly to bind ethics to doctrine, and the disagreement is worth knowing. Karl Barth refused to treat ethics as a separate discipline at all, and in his Church Dogmatics he placed ethics inside each part of doctrine, so that the doctrine of God contains the command of God and the doctrine of creation contains the ethics of creation. Many Catholic moral theologians, by contrast, have treated moral theology as a distinct discipline with its own method, drawing heavily on reason and natural law, while still under the faith of the church. Most Protestant seminaries teach ethics as its own course, as this track does, for the practical reason that its questions need sustained attention. None of these arrangements denies the point of this section; they differ on where to put the furniture.

There is also a third kind of connection, and it is the one most often forgotten. Doctrine does not only motivate ethics; it shapes its content. What you believe about creation decides how you think about the body, about work and about the land. What you believe about sin decides how much you trust human institutions, including the church. What you believe about the last things decides whether you think the world can be perfected by political effort or must wait for God. The Systematic Theology track gave you the doctrines. This track will keep asking what difference each one makes, and it will notice when a moral position quietly depends on a doctrine its holder would not, if asked, defend.

Most people meet ethics as a dilemma. Should I tell my employer that my colleague is stealing? Should our church accept a gift from a politician? May a Christian nurse take part in this procedure? These are real questions and this track will spend much of its time on questions like them. But in 1971 the philosopher Edmund Pincoffs published an essay called Quandary Ethics, arguing that modern moral philosophy had come to treat the whole of ethics as the resolution of hard cases, and had forgotten the older question of what sort of person one should be. His point has been taken up by many Christian ethicists since, and it deserves a place at the start of a course like this.

The first question, what should I do, is the question of conduct. It looks at a decision, weighs the reasons, and reaches a judgment. It is the question a court asks, and a church council, and a conscience at night. The second question, who should I become, is the question of character. It looks at a life rather than a moment, and asks what habits, loves and dispositions a person is growing into. The two are bound together. The decisions you make form you, so that a person who tells small lies easily becomes, over years, a person to whom lying is natural. And the person you are shapes which decisions you even see. A man who has trained himself to notice the poor will meet moral questions in a market that another man walks through without seeing anything at all.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch made this second point with great force in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). She argued that the moral life is not chiefly a series of dramatic choices but goes on continually, in what we attend to and how we see other people, so that by the time a choice arrives most of the work has already been done. Scripture would agree, and it would add that seeing rightly is itself a gift of God. The Bible holds both questions together. The Ten Commandments are mostly about conduct: do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness. The Beatitudes are mostly about character: blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart. Jesus did not set them against each other; he deepened the commandments by tracing them back to the heart (Matthew 5:21-30), and the heart, in Hebrew thought, is the seat of the will and the mind as well as the feelings.

There is a third question that sits beneath both, and Christian ethics has always asked it: what is the good we are aiming at? Every decision aims at something, and every character is formed towards something. The Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647 opens by asking what the chief end of man is, and answers that it is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. Augustine, in the first book of his Confessions, says to God that he has made us for himself and our heart is restless until it rests in him. These are statements about the goal of human life, and they bear directly on ethics, because they mean that a choice which gets everything else right and turns a person away from God has failed at the one thing that mattered. The Hermeneutics track introduced Daniel Doriani's four aspects of application, duty, character, goals and discernment. You will notice that this track's opening questions are those aspects, applied not to a passage but to a life.

For students in the global south there is a further reason to hold the questions together. Many moral questions in your setting are not the questions Western textbooks put first. They arrive as pressures rather than dilemmas: the bribe expected at the checkpoint, the obligation to give a relative a job, the ethnic loyalty that decides who is appointed elder, the debt that cannot be repaid, the rival who has gone to the witch doctor. In these settings what usually decides the outcome is not clever reasoning in the moment but whether a person has already been formed, by teaching and example and prayer, into someone who does not take bribes. A track that taught only decision procedures would fail you. A track that taught only character would leave you without help when the hard case comes. This one will try to do both.

A student beginning Christian ethics often fears one of two things: that everything will turn out to be open, so that nothing can be said with confidence, or that everything has already been decided, so that ethics is simply learning the answers. Neither is true, and you should know from the start how this track will handle the difference.

Much is settled. Across the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, across the centuries and across the continents, Christians who hold the authority of scripture agree that murder is wrong, that adultery is wrong, that theft and false witness are wrong, that oppressing the poor, the widow and the foreigner is wrong, that taking a bribe to pervert justice is wrong, and that cruelty to the weak is wrong. These are not open questions waiting for a better argument, and this track will not pretend they are. Where a clear consensus exists, the lessons will say so plainly, and where a minority dissents, they will state the minority's view and arguments honestly and name who holds it, so that you are not ambushed by it later.

Some things are genuinely disputed among Christians who hold scripture's authority with equal seriousness. Whether a Christian may fight in a war. Whether the state may execute. How a Christian should think about markets and the redistribution of wealth. Some decisions at the end of life. The roles of men and women in the home and the church. How far creation care should shape policy. On questions like these, the lessons will give each position at the strength its own best defenders would accept, with their texts, and will not let the writer's view show by giving one side more room or the last word. You will be asked to reach your own judgment, and you will be equipped to understand the people who reach a different one.

There is a third category that needs naming, because it is painful. The church has sometimes been wrong, confidently and for a long time, and has defended its wrong from the Bible. Slavery in the Atlantic world was defended from scripture by many Christians, and opposed from scripture by others, until the defence collapsed. Apartheid in South Africa was given theological support by parts of the white Dutch Reformed Church, and in 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting in Ottawa, declared that support a heresy. In Rwanda in 1994, in one of the most Christian countries in Africa, church members killed fellow church members, and some church buildings became places of slaughter. These failures do not prove that Christian ethics is hopeless. They prove that it is necessary, and that it must be done with the humility Micah requires, by people who expect to be corrected.

So the method of this track is simple to state, though not easy to practise. Start from scripture, read carefully in its setting, as the Hermeneutics track taught. Ask what the whole Bible says, not only the verse that suits you. Listen to the church across the centuries and around the world, especially the parts of it you do not usually hear. Reason carefully about the case in front of you. Pay attention to the person you are becoming as well as the decision you are making. And when you reach a judgment, hold it in a way that can be tested by others. That is what Micah's three requirements look like when they are turned into a discipline: justice in the reasoning, love for the people the reasoning affects, and humility about the reasoner.

This track ends with a written moral case study of your own, worked from a real question in your church or community. You will build it a page at a time, and every lesson adds something. Take a notebook you can keep for months, and on the first page write: My casebook. Under it write today's date and Micah 6:8 in full.

On the next page, list three moral questions that are genuinely live where you are. They should be questions people in your church or town actually face, not questions from a textbook: something about money, work, family, land, leadership, the government, or the treatment of a group of people. Do not write anyone's name, and describe each situation so that no one could be identified from your notebook if it were lost. For each, write one sentence saying why it is hard: what pulls in different directions.

Now choose one of the three as your working case. It should be serious enough to matter and small enough that you can think it through, and it should be a question on which you do not already feel completely sure. Write it in two forms. First as a question of conduct: what should a Christian, or a church, do here? Then as a question of character: who would a Christian need to become to act well here, and what in this situation is forming people in the wrong direction?

Last, hold your case up to Micah 6:8 and write three short lines under it. Where is justice at stake, and for whom? Where is mercy, steadfast covenant kindness, called for, and towards whom? And where would humility before God change how the people involved, you included, are behaving? Keep these lines brief and honest. You are not answering the case yet. You are learning to see it, and the next four lessons will give you the tools to work it through.