Pursuing Moral Faithfulness

Ethics and Christian Discipleship

Gary Tyra

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830897766
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christianity is in a state of moral crisis. Even though people make moral decisions every day, many Christians lack both the ability to evaluate these decisions and a community of discipleship to help inspire a morally faithful life. Compared to the people around them, there is often no discernible difference in how Christians go about making moral choices. As a biblical and practical theologian with three decades of pastoral experience, who has also spent years teaching ethics to undergraduates, Gary Tyra approaches the topic with the practical goal of facilitating moral formation and encouraging an "everyday" moral faithfulness. Tyra argues that Christians can have confidence in their Christ-centered, Spirit-enabled ability to discern and do the will of God in any moral situation. Moral faithfulness follows from a life of Christian discipleship. In an age of moral apathy and theological confusion, Pursuing Moral Faithfulness is a breath of fresh air and a sign of hope for the future.

Part One

GETTING
STARTED

Assessing Our Current Moral Faithfulness Quotient

1

Morality Matters

A User-Friendly Introduction to Christian Ethics

The Bible portrays God as an intrinsically moral being who cares greatly about how human beings created in his image relate to him, one another, themselves and the rest of creation. It’s for this reason that, for most Christians, morality matters!

And yet, the manner in which Christian scholars understand and explain this conviction can take different forms. For example, addressing a Christian audience on the topic of “the ethical challenge and the Christian,” theologian Stanley Grenz writes:

We are all ethicists. We all face ethical questions, and these questions are of grave importance. As Christians, we know why this is so: We live out our days in the presence of God. And this God has preferences. God desires that we live a certain way, while disapproving of other ways in which we might choose to live.

Although everyone lives “before God,” many people are either ignorant of or choose to ignore this situation. As Christians, in contrast, we readily acknowledge our standing before God. We know that we are responsible to a God who is holy. Not only can God have no part in sin, the God of the Bible must banish sinful creatures from his presence. Knowing this, we approach life as the serious matter that it is. How we live is important. Our choices and actions make a difference; they count for eternity! Therefore, we realize that seeking to live as ethical Christians is no small task.1

This is one way of understanding the significance of ethics for Christians.

However, the famous British literary critic, author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis also spoke to the importance of the moral choices all of us make but took a slightly different tack in doing so. Addressing himself to a secular rather than Christian audience, the renowned Oxford don wrote:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.2

According to Lewis, the powerful notion at the heart of Christian morality is that a person’s ethical decisions not only reflect his or her character but contribute to it as well. Our everyday moral choices relate to our character in both a correlative and causal manner. With every choice made we become creatures who are either more at peace with God, others and ourselves or less so.3 Further, though in a manner less explicit than Grenz, Lewis too hints at the idea that our moral choices possess an eschatological as well as existential significance. Our everyday ethical decisions matter greatly because, cumulatively, they determine not only the quality of our existence here and now but also where we will be most comfortable spending eternity!4

Ultimately both Grenz and Lewis provide support for the well-known aphorism: “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” Whichever approach you prefer—that of Grenz or Lewis—the bottom line is that for most Christians, morality matters (or at least it should).

Why this discussion of the importance of Christian ethics? The bulk of this chapter has to do with ethical theory. As indicated in the book’s introduction, the aim throughout Pursuing Moral Faithfulness is to inspire as well as inform. This requires that I do my best to present ethical theory in a way that doesn’t seem overly complicated on the one hand or inconsequential on the other. My goal in this first chapter is to introduce Christian ethics to my readers in such a way as to leave them enlightened yet eager for more. Having begun by presenting what was intended as a brief, motivational reflection on the importance of Christian morality, I want to continue by providing some simple yet hopefully interesting answers to several basic questions related to the study of it.

What Is Ethics?

Ethics, along with metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality), epistemology (the study of how we come by our knowledge of reality), logic (the study of correct or proper reasoning) and aesthetics (the study of the phenomenon of beauty), is a subdiscipline included in the larger intellectual discipline known as philosophy (the intellectual pursuit of wisdom or truth in its largest sense).5 This explains why ethics is sometimes referred to as “moral philosophy.”6

Speaking broadly, and from a philosophical rather than theological perspective at this point,7 ethics is essentially the study of the good life: how it’s conceived of and achieved.8 The most basic assumption behind this philosophical approach to the study of ethics is that the good life has a moral quality about it; it is achieved by becoming a good person.9 Indeed, going all the way back to the times of Plato and Aristotle (fifth and fourth centuries B.C., respectively), one way of thinking about ethics has been to ponder the crucial questions: What does it mean to be a good person? What virtues are required?10

And yet the study of ethics has come to involve more than simply the study of virtues or ways of being. The very idea that there’s such a thing as a good life lived by a good person implies that a distinction can be made between good and bad ways of behaving as well. Thus ethics is also thought of as “the science of determining right and wrong conduct for human beings.”11 This more behavior-oriented understanding of the study of ethics is discernible in the expanded description of this philosophical subdiscipline provided by ethicist Philip Hughes:

Ethics has to do with the way people behave. The term ethics is derived from a Greek word (ethos) meaning “custom”; its equivalent, morals, comes from a corresponding Latin word (mos) with the same meaning. The concern of ethics or morals, however, is not merely the behavior that is customary in society but rather the behavior that ought to be customary in society. Ethics is prescriptive, not simply descriptive. Its domain is that of duty and obligation, and it seeks to define the distinction between right and wrong, between justice and injustice, and between responsibility and irresponsibility. Because human conduct is all too seldom what it ought to be (as the annals of mankind amply attest), the study of ethics is a discipline of perennial importance.12

This expanded description is a helpful starting point for understanding the essence of ethics for several reasons. First, it indicates that the study of ethics is about human behavior (doing) as well as being. Second, it explains why the terms ethics and morals are used by most ethicists in an interchangeable, nearly synonymous manner.13 Third, it suggests that, while there’s such a discipline as descriptive ethics, there’s need for an approach to ethics that’s prescriptive or normative as well.14 Fourth, in support of a prescriptive approach to the study of ethics, this definition of the discipline makes the crucial point that at the heart of ethics is the assumption that there exists a moral “ought” that makes it possible to speak in terms of right and wrong, justice and injustice, responsibility and irresponsibility.15 Finally, it asserts that the study of ethics is an important endeavor precisely because of the negative personal and social consequences that accrue when the ideas of moral duty and obligation are ignored or neglected.

Pressing further, I want to underscore the importance of the idea that at the heart of ethics is a sense of ought having to do with both character and conduct. It seems that the deeply rooted sense that there are some ways of being and behaving that simply ought and ought not to occur is a phenomenon most people are familiar with.16 Here’s a reflective exercise that was used by Lewis Smedes to help his seminary students get in touch with their sense of moral ought:

Imagine that you’re riding a bus in the downtown region of a city. All the seats on the bus are filled when two young men in their late teens get on board. Looking around for two empty spaces, these late arrivers discover there aren’t any. But instead of standing and holding on to the handrails that are there for that purpose, they grab an elderly couple, yank them out of their seats, throw them to the floor and then plop into those spaces themselves, grinning at one another and smirking at the elderly couple afterward. What goes on in your mind as you watch this situation unfold?

Having employed this exercise myself over the years, I can attest to the fact that most persons engaging in it will acknowledge that just imagining such a scenario causes them to experience some rather strong visceral feelings of discomfort, indignation, perhaps even anger. The question is: Why? Why is nearly everyone’s reaction to this story negative in nature? Why does nearly everyone seem to possess the same conviction that under these circumstances the behavior of these two young men was simply wrong?

While the scenario depicted in this reflection exercise was concocted, my files are filled with real-life stories of humans behaving badly toward one another. For example, there’s the troubling story of a hit-and-run driver who covertly parked her car in her garage and waited patiently for two hours for the injured pedestrian still stuck in her windshield to die so she could then dispose of the body.17 More disturbing still is the horrible story of the gang rape of a West Palm Beach woman by ten local youths. In addition to physically and sexually brutalizing this Haitian immigrant, the gang felt it necessary to force this mother to perform oral sex on her own twelve-year-old son.18 As I write this, the distressing story du jour is about a frustrated father who, unable to get his six-week-old daughter to stop crying, put her in the freezer and then fell asleep. He awakened only when his wife returned home some time later. Clothed only in a diaper, the baby’s body temperature dropped to 84 degrees before she was finally retrieved from the freezer. She’s expected to survive, but the initial medical examination indicates that she also suffers from a broken arm and leg, as well as injury to the head.19

Stories like these are distressing not only because they depict disturbing conduct but also because they indicate a disconcerting lack of character as well. We just don’t want to believe that human beings are capable of such perverse, inhumane, bad ways of being and behaving.

At the same time, it’s also true that we occasionally hear reports of just the opposite: human heroism. These are the human interest stories we relish—depictions of courageous, altruistic behavior that make our hearts swell, bring tears to our eyes and make us proud of our species.

Again, the question is: Why? Why is it so common for people, when reflecting on either type of story, to experience some pretty strong feelings of either inspiration or disgust? It’s my contention that this visceral dynamic is illustrative of the fact that most of us possess a vigorous sense of moral ought—a deeply rooted sense that there are such things as appropriate and inappropriate ways of being and behaving. It makes us really sad (and/or angry) when we see or hear of human beings simply following their fallen instincts. We are rendered glad (and/or pleased) whenever we read or hear about someone doing just the opposite. This explains the perennial popularity of the novel or film where the story line portrays a protagonist acting heroically in the end or at the very least experiencing some sort of personal transformation toward becoming a “good” person.

All of this is important to the question: What is ethics? The most basic answer I’ve come across is this: Ultimately, ethics is abo...