2 John 2. 18-22, Haggai 2. 1-9
When discussing religion, I quite often find myself arguing whether you have to be Christian to be good, or whether an atheist can be truly moral. On one level it’s very obviously a futile argument as there are plainly lots of people who profess no belief in God or in Christianity, or who positively deny that God can exist, who nevertheless live lives which by any normal standard (and we will return to the question of norm) are good; they are kind and generous, brave and fair, without needing to bring religion into their lives or their motivation.
And equally one does not need to look very far either now or into history, to find Christians whose views and behaviour seem to me to be very bad, and not merely incidentally so; so often they are bad because of their faith- excessive or perverted faith, in my eyes, but undeniably faith. If this is so then we have to ask whether being Christian makes any difference, and if so, is it a difference for the good? Is there anything special about Christian ethics?
To have a useful debate one must first agree that in comparing the ethics of Christianity (or religion generally) with wholly secular systems, we have to treat with the ideal. Many terrible things have been done in the name of Christ, and so they have in the name of overtly atheist philosophies but it would be as unfair to Marxism to suggest it inevitably led to totalitarian oppression as it would be to think Christianity necessarily led to the excesses of the Inquisition or Crusades. And penitent as we should be as Christians, we shouldn’t forget the great good that Christianity done-even considered in purely secular terms. Until only a hundred years ago, the vast majority of educational and medical foundations were Christian, and more fundamentally it is Christian philosophers who have shaped and defined the ethics which we consider normal.
Initially, reading the Gospel, there is sense in which virtue and a good life are important but really secondary considerations. The Gospel brings salvation, which will often be forgiveness of sins, and impliedly a new and morally good life. The threat of a final judgement presupposes that there is a good life that might be led (and rewarded) as there might be a bad one to be punished. Salvation and Judgement are the messages; ethics follow on. Jesus does not lay down an ethical code; his principle is the all embracing, but not very detailed, exhortation to love one’s neighbour because to do so is to love God.
The Sermon on the Mount is the primary text for Jesus teaching on ethics, and there is sense, especially in St Matthew, that Jesus is a second Moses, laying down a new law for the new people of God, but the new law is far from a code, even an elemental code like the Ten Commandments. The underlying message of the Sermon is the importance of integrity and honesty; hypocrisy is the fault most commonly criticised. There is an underlying assumption that human beings are good; evil leads them astray the world tempts them to be other than they really are, and with grace can be.
The basis for this idealism for humanity is the belief that we are created in God’s image; that we are ourselves part of creation, both created by God and empowered to carry on that creating ourselves. We have a function, and need therefore to be honest to ourselves and faithful to that function and purpose.
We believe too that the creative design is good; God creates the world and sees that it is good; he puts his first human beings in a paradise and when things go wrong, continues to promise them a Promised Land, and he’s still promising it, in the form of Eternal Life and the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a movement in history, a tide that goes back and forth but is irresistibly, albeit slowly, moving forward, because God loves his people whom he created.
It is St John’s contribution to this thinking to see, and say so apparently artlessly, that God does not merely love his creation and the people he has made to live in it, but God is himself love. The motivation behind creation, the driving force is a benign one. Right behaviour for mankind is to emulate this behaviour of God; loving God is the same as loving one another. Loving our neighbour is the central tenet of our ethics and it is the central purpose of our existence. To love our neighbour and express that love in action is to allow God to abide in and work through us.
I think there must be many who feel this without formulating in the terms of Christianity, or any formal religion. And I would say that those who do, come close to being Christian in all but name. If you feel that your purpose in life, the reason for your existence, is to express in your actions a creative love for the world and your fellow creatures, then without your necessarily being conscious of it, God has nevertheless entered your being and is working through you. It’s our challenge as confessed Christians to help such people with the structures, tradition and intellectual support of the church, but as often as not, we should first seek to learn from their example.
On the other hand, morality without this imperative of love behind it is a sterile affair. It is telling that in Richard Dawkins’ chapter in The God Delusion, on altruism, explaining it in evolutionary terms, he does not in fact describe true altruism. His analysis and explanation of apparently altruistic action is fascinating and convincing, but it explains itself away; his examples are only apparent altruism. Excessive generosity and disinterested action turn out to have rational-i.e. evolutionary explanations. They are not therefore truly altruistic. They are of course examples of what we would consider good behaviour, but there must be a hesitation is calling actions which are albeit, unconsciously and on a deep level self-interested, truly good. For that I think we need to look to identifying ourselves with the creative force of the whole world, and not just our species, let alone our race, and that is love, the ultimately selfless creative love of God. Amen.