Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Preface

PART 1 AWARENESS

1. What is ‘ethics’?

2. Deciding

3. Rules and codes

4. Rights

5. Values

6. Results

PART 2 UNAWARENESS

7. Desire

8. Systems of inclusion

9. ‘Flesh’

10. Complexity

11. Are the psychopaths right?

PART 3 JESUS VERSUS ETHICS

12. A Christ-powered planet

13. ‘Following’ Jesus

14. True ‘identity’

15. How the cross changes us

16. How resurrection changes us

17. Working with the Spirit

18. Communities in Christ

19. The ‘story arc’ of the Bible

20. Old Testament laws

PART 4 FIVE THINGS THAT MATTER

21. The character of God

22. Creation and ‘moral order’

23. Commands that reveal

24. A new future

25. Jesus-shaped community 168

26. A ‘unifi ed fi eld’ 173

27. Ethics secular and Christian

PART 5 LIVING OUR LIVES

28. Drunkenness and rage

29. Forgiving and reconciling

30. Virtues and vices

31. Freedom

32. Imitating Jesus

33. Obedience to God

34. Life in churches

35. Life outside churches

PART 6 LIFE-PACKAGES

36. Singleness

37. Marriage

38. Having children

39. Friendship

40. Sustainable care

41. Work

PART 7 SIX HOTSPOTS

42. Women

43. Sex

44. Homosexuality

45. Bioethics

46. Diversity

47. Imposing it

Afterword: dilemmas and discernment

Preface

Where I live, everyone has something to say about sport. When it comes to Grand Slam tennis, Test Cricket, Formula One, the Australian Football League or the World Cup, anyone can offer an opinion. Everybody has something to say. No one gets to pull rank, because everyone is already an expert.

The topic of this book is a bit like that. Everyone knows something about living. We all have to work out what to do next based on what we want, who we’re with, and some tussles about right and wrong (about ‘ethics’). We’re all in the business of living, so maybe everyone is an expert on the topic of this book.

Why then would I presume to write about a joined-up life and about how ethics works? I could try to point to my credentials. I’ll tell more of my story soon; but in brief, I’m an ordained Anglican minister from the ‘Reformed’ and ‘evangelical’ wing of that denomination. I work in a theological college in Sydney, Australia, and over the past ten years have tried to help budding pastors and people in churches to live well as Christians. They call this kind of thing ‘ethics’ (which, as I’ll go on to explain, is not really my favourite word for it).

But so what? If I were you, those ‘credentials’ would not particularly impress me. Plenty of ministers are just plain hard work. It might turn out that my own expertise is no greater than your own. You face situations where I’d be clueless, cowardly or wrong. Just by being human we’re all in the same boat. We impress ourselves when we do something properly. Yet our lives are often conflicted, fragmented and inconsistent. We find bad ways to be good and poor ways to do well. Mostly we just muddle along. ‘Being in the same boat’ doesn’t qualify me to write about how ethics works, and I certainly can’t claim to have cornered everything about good, bad and living well.

So I’ll state my goal up front. This book is about finding our best humanity in Jesus Christ. It’s about how to understand ethics as springing from Jesus. It seeks to show how identifying with Jesus Christ brings order and clarity to human life. In a world where everyone is an expert on right and wrong, this book tries to show how Jesus unifies the best of what you hear. He joins up messy lives.

You may have had ‘Jesus Christ’ attached to experiences and claims you want to forget. Something about Jesus (or his overeager people) has threatened your sense of who you are. But your worries would have surprised him. He thought he could set people free (Luke 4:18). He thought he could give people ‘rest’ (Matt. 11:28–30). He may still turn out to solve some of your life’s concerns.

My interest in ethics began with some confusion. I enjoyed Christianity’s message of grace – the open-handed kindness by which God accepts and loves people, including me, despite all my flaws and failures. But if grace was so important, why did Christians often seem anxious, guilty, work-obsessed or stern? I also loved Christianity’s ‘big picture’: that since prehistory, God has worked to introduce Jesus Christ, the human worth watching. But why did Christians often seem unclear about life’s details? I was young, and my perceptions might have been wrong. I can’t quite tell in hindsight. I was probably only seeing myself in those around me. I was certainly too harsh on people who were themselves still learners. I later found people discussing these confusions under the heading of ethics. I also discovered that this heading is misleading, because Jesus (and his followers) thought that a lot of what we call ‘ethics’ would not set us free, nor give us any rest.

This book is the result of my journey through those puzzles. You won’t find a history of ethics here (although you’ll find some historical moments). You won’t find answers to every ethical question (although there may be some). You won’t find many moments of arbitration about moral dilemmas (because I don’t think ethics primarily works that way). You won’t find a rigorous treatment of social ethics here – that is, of those issues where we worry about what laws and policies a government should enact and uphold. I think of this book as a reappraisal of our cluttered, tumultuous lives, and I’ll try to get you to see your life through a different lens:

• Part 1 considers some common ways of thinking about ethics (e.g. rules, rights, values and results).

• Part 2 considers some arenas we’re unaware of, but which have a huge impact on how we live.

• Part 3 shows how Jesus Christ becomes a better main category than ethics for determining who we are and what we do.

• Part 4 builds a ‘unified field’, shaped in response to Jesus Christ, by which we can orient ourselves to whatever is around us.

• Part 5 examines some means by which we approach the daily details of life within this overall orientation.

• Part 6 looks at some aspects of our life-package, or ‘vocation’, to see how they’re located within the ‘unified field’.

• Part 7 visits some areas of discussion that cause great disagreement between Christians and others, and tries to show why.

I hope to offer you some new thoughts and practices. There are other excellent introductions to Christian ethics, some of which I mention at the end of this preface. But I’ve borrowed the format of this book from another author, who in frustration makes a comment that fits my own experience: ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to introduce this subject.’ His method for handling his complex field was so clever that I copied it.

You don’t have to read this book linearly’ from left to right. Each part contains several self-contained chapters that address some specific aspect of Christian thinking about ethics and life. Each chapter will be peppered with references to other key chapters, such as the chapter on identity ‘in Christ’ (ch. 14), or to key concepts referenced to a specific page (e.g. gestalt, p. 72; or discernment, p. 312). You should feel free to dip into any chapter you like. (This method means I continually return to words and phrases from previous chapters. I apologize to linear readers who find that repetitive.) Some readers find it helpful to keep a finger in the contents while they read, to stay oriented within the bigger picture.

I considered starting every chapter with some statement like this: ‘It’s ridiculous to imagine that this subject can be addressed adequately in the space of this chapter . . .’ But the refrain became so monotonous that I’ll say it just once here. Every chapter of this book is ridiculous. I remind myself of a man driving a bus through a car park, sideswiping everything just to get to the other side. There are library shelves devoted to matters I barely touch upon.

I’m sorry for the inevitable deficiencies. But because I believe people need these topics drawn into one overview, I’ve aimed for short or middle-sized discussions of each area. I’ve tried to make each chapter digestible in a sitting or two, in the hope that they synthesize a bigger picture of life.

The book is not for professional thinkers about ethics, but I’ve tried to distil some of their best thoughts. I’ve not mentioned every relevant book or article though. Some footnotes will offer a little more detail to readers who like that. I’ll also list further readings at the ends of some chapters. These readings are eclectic, and some may be hard to find. Where an important work on ethics is absent, that’s not necessarily a condemnation of it. (I may not have read it.) The readings that do appear are my best guess as to what might offer some further help, and many point to other relevant readings. Of course, I don’t agree with everything they say. Asterisks show the level of the reading:

* – a short or light summary

** – of a style or at a depth similar to this book

*** – requires serious concentration

I pepper the text with references to the Bible, whose context I may not pause to discuss. You might occasionally stop and look up some of these in a modern translation of the Bible, to get a sense of what its authors said. Along the way, I’ll completely ignore several arguments among biblical scholars.

Some of these interest me, but most don’t; but you haven’t picked up this book for them. As much as I can get away with, I’ll tell you what I think and move on.

I have, due to a theological conviction and a social reality, assumed that the biblical literature offers a coherent ‘story’ of ethics. The theological conviction is that God somehow masterminded the activities of the separate biblical authors, which would lead us to expect some coherence, even if it’s complex. (I consider this complex coherence when I speak of the Bible’s ‘story arc’, ch. 19.) The social reality is that in the experience of Christian people the Bible comes at them as a whole. Its parts accumulate over time to create a moral vision.

I flit between several Bible translations. As I wrote, I checked them against original language texts. Sometimes I chose the one that seems closest; but the major translations are all quite good, so I usually just picked whatever sounded nicest in English. In this process, I so regularly chose the excellent Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) that it became my ‘default’. You’re reading the HCSB when the translation isn’t noted. (I’ve retained its odd capitalizations.)

There are so many people to thank that my intellectual debts are everywhere. I remind myself of another author, who said, ‘it may be more true to say I am the editor of this book than to say I am its author’. The wisdom and teaching of my doctoral supervisor, Professor Michael Banner (while he held the position of F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at King’s College, London), has helped me greatly. He has an extraordinary capacity to see beyond all the superficial chatter around him, and to bring past theological treasures to bear upon the present. In Australia, among many good and faithful teachers, I must name my first mentor in Christian ethics, Rev. Michael Hill. He so clearly understands that our relationships are not the white noise against which we conduct our lives, but the reasons for our lives. I remain deeply appreciative of Archbishop Peter Jensen’s expansive, Christ-centred theological tutelage, and of his persistence in encouraging me to develop my knowledge of ethics. (I wouldn’t have had the imagination to do so otherwise.) The writings of Professor Oliver O’Donovan (of the University of Edinburgh Divinity School) has also had a formative influence on me. I’ve borrowed liberally from all of them and from several others.

I think of this book as my way to bring some of their thoughts to a wider audience. I don’t want to embarrass them by aligning them too closely with it, though; its mistakes, oversimplifications and omissions are entirely mine.

I’ve been very dependent on research support provided by Des Smith, Lisa Watts and Andrew Ford. Several kind readers have worked through various drafts of this book: Tim Adeney, Matt Andrews, Josh Apieczonek, Sarah Balogh, Brian Brock, Chew Chern, Rick Creighton, Andrew Errington, Andrew Ford, Olivia Kwok and Lisa Watts. The text would have been incomprehensible without their invaluable and generous feedback. IVP’s Philip Duce has given warm and patient encouragement.

My wife, Mary-Anne, has been long-suffering and patient as always, and her intelligent and loving eye has enabled me to see this project, and myself, in a way I could never have seen alone. She’s helped me to join up my wobbly life. My children, Amy and Thomas, have given far more warm interest and encouragement than I could rightfully expect of any two teenagers. (Several pages of the book resulted from all the eggs Thomas cooked to keep me going.) Delightful people surround me.

I stress again that I say too little about every area. But the intention of this book is to offer a cumulative overview of ethics, as understood by a Christian. I’ll be glad if the book affects and enriches your ‘moral imagination’ (chs. 2,10), but I’ll be gladder if Jesus’ new way to be human becomes your own.

Andrew J. B. Cameron

Moore College, September 2010