If you were writing a treatise on ethics, how would you go about writing it? You would divide ethics into several categories—personal ethics, ethics at home, ethics in the workplace, and ethics in society, for example—and then write a chapter or two on each category. Since each category can be further divided into sub-categories (ethics in the workplace could be divided into how to treat co-workers, how to treat customers, and how to treat the boss), these divisions could form sections in a chapter. If you proceeded in this way, you might get something very much like a work written by Aristotle or Immanuel Kant, but you wouldn’t get the Scriptures.
Why is that? We could simply say that the Bible isn’t an ethical treatise. It does touch on ethical matters, but it is so much more than that. It is the history of God at work among His people as He saves them. Because He saves them from the consequences of their sins, He does have to deal with the difference between right and wrong. But because God is more interested in unfolding His story, He doesn’t address the topic of ethics as a systematic treatise.
In this way the Scriptures handle ethics much in the same way that parents do when they teach their children the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes parents lay down a handful of rules and give reasons for each of them. But that is rather rare—about as often as God gave the Ten Commandments. More frequently parents give their children a particular outlook on life, sometimes by passing on a favorite adage, other times by making a passing remark approving or disapproving a behavior, and still other times by choosing a particular pattern of behavior for themselves.
I think, for example, of my own upbringing. I can recall only one time when either of my parents made a big speech about illegal drug use. My dad had just served as a juror at a trial of a man who had messed up his life with narcotics. My dad didn’t divulge any of the particulars, but he did comment on the tragedy of the situation and said that he hoped that we would learn from other people’s mistakes. But despite hearing very little about the topic, I never considered using drugs. Why? The ethical system I learned from my parents didn’t come only from their explicit statements on a particular topic, but from their whole philosophy of life as revealed in several ways. In fact, I can go so far as to say that if my dad had never broached the subject, I would still know that my parents disapproved of illegal drugs. I saw it in the way that they honored and obeyed the laws of our country. I saw it in the way that they didn’t believe that life was meant to be a pursuit of one heady experience after another. They were responsible and content. They believed that hard work was a form of pleasure. Using narcotics would go against every aspect of that philosophy.
The school where I attended tried a different approach. On the one hand, we spent a week or two in ninth grade P.E. being warned about the effects of various drugs (including legal ones such as alcohol). On the other hand, this instruction was being given in the late 70’s when youth were still expected to experiment with substances legal and illegal and when parents and teachers were generally permissive about such things, if not indulging in them themselves. At best I would have gotten mixed signals from those at school: the main problem with drugs was their nasty side effects; as long as they could be minimized or if a new drug could be invented without them (such as Ecstasy claimed to be in the 90’s), it would be all right to use it.
The advantage of my parents’ approach is that they didn’t have to change their instruction every time a new drug was invented. They had conveyed a philosophy of life explicitly and implicitly, and I was able to extrapolate from it to new circumstances. And that is also the advantage of the way the Scriptures teach ethics. They don’t have to state explicitly what is right and wrong on every topic in order to have a coherent ethical framework that can be applied to all sorts of topics, even to issues that couldn’t have been envisioned in the day when the Scriptures were being written. Of course, that means that we have to be willing to pay close attention to the beliefs, values, and attitudes inculcated by the Scriptures if we want to understand fully its ethical system and apply it to today’s issues. It is harder work than simply picking up and reading a treatise by Aristotle or Kant, but it is more rewarding, too.
© 2010 James A. Kellerman
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