Evangelicalism’s Ethical Equivocations
Some years ago, one of the greatest hurdles to ethical education in the church began to dawn on me. This insight came in bits and pieces, so that to recount that journey would be quite impossible. Long story short, the terms “We” and “The church” and “do” and even “force” have been thrown around in an equivocal manner for so long that they are both a result of the lack of Evangelical ethics and an obstacle to reclaiming it. A downward spiral in objective treatments of ethics in the church had been exponential long before progressivism took hold of our institutions. Let me first state the problem in a clear way and then offer some pointers to recovery.
Personal Pronouns without Specified Vocation
We should not be surprised to find a hollow ethical outlook among a culture that has reinvented the purpose of pronouns. Perhaps the church could have been more helpful if we had only known who “we” were in relation to that culture.
What do I mean by that?
Well, how many times have we heard statements such as this: “Should we be doing evangelism or politics or education?” But who exactly is “we” and what is this “doing” being spoken of? I have often wondered whether the same people asking this would ever think to barge into a morning discipleship meeting at the local coffee shop, in order to ask the same thing of a group of three Christian men who are known very well to be a police officer, a college professor, and a campus minister. There they are in their respective garb, ready to go to work—“really,” the question would begin, “should you three really be going off to do that as the church?”
I do not think that most would think to do that with respect to individual vocation. Most of the Christians who call into question this or that collective action of the church have made no distinctions whatsoever in the ways in which we have been called by God.
That is what is missing in our cultural pronouns, isn’t it? It is entirely subjective. People are inventing their own identities. But supposing that the same God who called them male and female from the beginning, also called pastors to preach about it from pulpits, fathers and mothers to exemplify it in homes, legislators and judges to protect that order against violence, and so forth. Now suppose that each of those stages were occupied by Christian actors?
In that case, “the church” would be “doing” according to a public philosophy, but each in a natural way that God has ordained. But does this mean that we are only to act as atomistic Christians? Not at all. The moment two or more have a similar calling (perhaps the exact same line of work), then what do we have but corporate action?
Along those same lines, I also doubt whether most of those same believers would deny that Christians have a right to vote in free elections, nor that Christian students ought to be expected to take classes in civics, economics, or history—or that Christian schools and homeschoolers would naturally teach such subjects. These are collective actions with social, or cultural, effect. Moreover, such “effect” will run contrary to the collective will of the enemies of Christ. But the moment all of this is allowed, what becomes of laments such as: “Yes, but surely we shouldn’t force our Christian morality on the world.”
Force? Christian morality?
I would only remind the Reformed at this point of their own confessional standards. Commandments like the sixth and the eighth, concerning the sanctity of life and property, are neither “Christian morality” in the parochial sense suggested by the challenge, nor a force alien to the task of civil government. These belong to moral law (e.g. God’s commandments over every human being) and these have a specifically civil law use (e.g. against which murder and theft are the alien force or violence).
I suppose someone may concede to all of this, but then still object: “Very well, but let the civil magistrate handle all of that—and besides, they have a Judge on the Last Day whose perfect justice ought to be sufficient.” In fact, the most celebrated “ethic” coming out of Reformed seminaries in our day, courtesy of Dr. VanDrunen, says this very thing.
A Straw Man, False Dilemma, and a Begging of the Question
Three more fallacies give strength to the original equivocations over the “we” that would “do.” The first is the straw man fallacy. In today’s “two kingdom” separation of church and state, the implication is that any cultural doing of “the church” must be a monolithic march forward that enforces the norms of the new creation upon the old. Hence the “us” versus “them” designation leaves no room for the gospel since our basic orientation toward them is force.
But as I have already indicated, when the moral law is its content and it is a legitimate civic matter (such as the defense of life or property) the only force that is being advocated is the ordinary force proper to the civil magistrate. Anyone who cannot tell the difference between “forcing someone to convert to Christ” (an impossibility) and “forcing” a violent perpetrator off of an innocent victim has frankly disqualified themselves from being taken seriously in such discussions.
That brings us to our last piece in the puzzle, so unnecessarily scattered by conversation-killing fallacies. Most people can agree that violence ought to be stopped by the civil magistrate, right? Unfortunately, this is where the Christian ethicist must bring correction and say two things: 1. No. 2. Now, go and preserve life, liberty, and property.
First, let me address that “No.”
No, “most people” sadly cannot agree on the task of the sword being to punish evil (Rom. 13:1-7) in that very specific way first set out by God in Genesis 9:5-6 and the Second Table of the Law (Ex. 20:12-17). Not only has liberty been called license and property called theft by the Marxist, but the church has bought it, hook, line, and sinker. And then what is life? The answer could not be gotten before the ship on “What is a woman?” began to sink as well. So, no, all cannot agree on these most basic things.
But since such attributes of man are prerequisites of civil society, and since all human beings are responsible to uphold them (e.g. Prov. 24:11-12, Mic. 6:8, Mat. 22:37-40), that second correction of basic Christian ethics follows. Following our “No,” there is a “Go.” The Christian must indeed teach and correct and advocate that the magistrate “force” the murderer to stop murdering, “force” the enslaver to cease from coercion, and “force” the thief to go back to working with his own hands. That a majority of a country’s population can be persuaded that such instances of violence are morally permissible does not alter God’s law one bit—you know, that same law where if you relax one jot or tittle, you would be called least in the kingdom (Mat. 5:19).
Circling back to today’s “2K” logic, we heartily agree that the tyrants of this world have an ultimate Judge and that our consideration of this truth is often cited in Scripture to affect a contentment in our lives today (e.g. 2 Thess. 1:5-10; 1 Pet. 2:19-23). But surely there is a false dilemma lurking where, in order to follow in Christ’s path of suffering, we search land and sea to fit our heads into any hangman’s noose that will have us.
When you are a martyr, you will know it well enough. But the notion that this excuses cowardice of free citizens in a land where the longstanding law has given opportunity for Christians to defend those who cannot defend themselves—this is to compare apples to oranges (so can we add false analogy to our growing pile of fallacies?).
We find it hard to shake the straw men, the false dilemmas, and the false analogies. We are intimidated by voices in the church—voices echoing in our own uninformed consciences—which caution us from going beyond what is written. Does it? Or from selling out the gospel? Would it? Or from trading gospel contentment under persecution for a crabby, contentious culture war. Must we?
In fact, we have begged all such questions. And so in short, our primal equivocation in ethics is our own use of the word ethics—our own dabbling in the subject. We are half-hearted on our best day. We want a Christian ethic in one side of our brain, but we are nervous to watch Christian action develop out of the other side. Away with such double-minded ethicists who would give us no ethic at all!
Toward a Renewed Christian Ethics
A list of practical steps is subject for another day. For now, let me just set forth a few principles that will be indispensable in getting any kind of recovery of ethical thinking underway.
1. Do not pit divine law against natural law. Take for example our phrase “Christian ethics” as a first test of our oversensitive sensibilities. If all we can do with this is begin by Presuppositionalists disallowing any extra-biblical concepts or language, and then those engaged in theological retrieval answering that extreme by being just as skittish about law in biblical revelation, then you can be sure we will still be poking each other’s eyes out in the same trenches in a decade. In the early portion of this article, I have already exemplified ways in which both can be discussed in an interrelated fashion.
2. Welcome back the dominion mandate. It actually didn’t go anywhere. It was still there, not only in Genesis 1:28 leaving us to wonder, but in Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:5-9, making plain that it continued even given Adam’s fall, and is being restored under Christ’s Lordship through the church.
3. Connect your doctrine of the imago Dei to a philosophy of localism. The image of God is irreducibly local. That does not mean that we may not—on occasion, and according to specified calling—have global effect, given realities such as the internet. However, in the main space of healthy lives, our moral activity is designed to lead and provide and protect and nurture our flesh-and-blood neighbors, rather than theoretical or idealized projections of community. Additionally, the principle of subsidiarity would remind us that organized human efforts are more efficient in the sphere as a whole when those efforts concentrate human action at the local level—the minds and hands of each image of God maximizing their own life, liberty, and property in proportion to their objective gifts and callings.
4. Get the gospel right for ethics. Here we avoid two more extremes. At one extreme, we reduce the scope of the gospel’s fruit in the same of protecting the gospel’s roots. This is the Reformed version of pietism. Either our determination to protect the exclusiveness of special grace forms an implicit (or explicit) denial of common grace; or else we hunker down in antinomian defenses of the doctrine of sola fide, when even Luther would have told us that this justification that is by faith alone does not produce a faith that remains alone. Add this to the traditional fundamentalist inability to see concentric circles that make for cobelligerents where greater doctrinal oneness is unnecessary to the ethical task, and what are you left with? You are left with a greater discredit to the gospel (our utter moral vacuousness) than you were originally worried about by “selling out the gospel” for a culture war.
More principles could easy be added. More should be. But this will give an indication of some basic non-negotiables for making a serious start at recovery.
