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发帖数: 6791 | 1 The Relativity of Biblical Ethics
by Joe Edward Barnhart (1988)
It is an axiom among fundamentalists and evangelicals that theology is the
foundation of ethics and morality in North America culture. Without this
foundation, they fear, ethics would fragment into total relativism of
dissolve into whim, arbitrariness, and chaos. I would like to contest that
view by showing how some organized religions are parasitical to the body of
ethics and how the Bible itself exemplifies moral relativism.
Various theologians of the middle Ages raised the interesting questions of
whether right and wrong are whatever God decrees them to be. For example, if
God commanded "Thou shalt rape thrice daily," would it have been morally
right to carry out the command and wrong to disobey it? If divine decree is
not only the source but the ultimate criterion of right and wrong, is there
any basis for trusting the Supreme Being who concocts the meaning of right
and wrong? Indeed, were this putative Being to trick his creatures by
scrambling the consequences of commands and prohibitions, it would be
irrational to call Him evil; He is the Cosmic Existentialist who invents
right and wrong ex nihilo. If he should lie, deceive, order Joshua to
slaughter the Canaanites, or command rape, He could do all this and still
label Himself as perfectly good.
Apparently having second thoughts about a Supreme Being unrestrained by
moral principles, in the year of his death C. S. Lewis wrote: "The real
danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The
conclusion I dread is not 'so there's no God after all,' but 'So this is
what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'"[1] Only four months
before his death, Lewis wrote in a letter to an American philosopher that
there were dangers in judging God by moral standards. However, he maintained
that "believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in
mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshipping Him, is still
greater danger."[2] Lewis was responding specifically to the question of
Joshua's slaughter of the Canaanites by divine decree and Peter's striking
Ananias and Sapphira dead. Knowing that the evangelical doctrine of the
Bible's infallibility required him to approve of "the atrocities (and
treacheries) of Joshua," Lewis made this surprising concession: "The
ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of
the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the
doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two indeed, only
that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.[3]
In short, Lewis came close to saying that the Supreme Might must live up to
moral standards if he is to be regarded as God and not as some cosmic sadist
unworthy of worship.
In his letter to the philosopher, Lewis expresses the realization that he
could not wholly relativize and trivialize the concept of goodness for the
Supreme Being he envisioned:
To this some will reply "ah, but we are fallen and don't recognize good when
we see it." But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen at all that.
He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: "Why do ye not of
yourselves judge what is right?" -- "What fault hath my people found in me?"
And so on. Socrates' answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by
Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain
things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is
the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham's,
Paley's) leads to an absurdity. If "good" means "what God wills" then to say
"God is good" can mean only "God wills what he wills." Which is equally
true of you or me or Judas or Satan.[4]
Lewis was not always consistent in his attempt to find a foundation for
morality. In some of his earlier books he suggests that God's goodness is
incompatible with whatever happens, which, instead of giving theism any
advantage over atheism, does little more than make Cosmic Might the
personification of moral randomness, of relativism gone out of control.
Recently, I asked a fundamentalist author and apologist who had labeled
abortion as murder to tell me whether the killing of pregnant Canaanite
women by putative divine decree and Joshua's sword was murder. He replied
that the unborn babies killed by Joshua went straight to heaven -- which of
course does not answer the question of whether God committed murder or
whether God is above (or below) moral standards. The point here is not to
determine whether the fetus is a person but to call attention to the fact
that there is considerable moral and ethical relativism in theology and the
Bible. Consider this passage from Deuteronomy:
He whose testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off shall not
enter the assembly of the Lord.
No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth
generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord.
No Ammorite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the
tenth generation none belonging to them shall enter the assembly of the Lord
for ever. [Deut. 23:1-3 (RSV)]
Whatever the circumstances prompting these prohibitions, it is noteworthy
that fundamentalist and evangelical apologists find it necessary to call
upon their own version of situation ethics in order to make it clear that
not all moral injunctions in the Scriptures are moral absolutes. Evangelical
scholar G. T. Manley, in The New Bible Commentary, tries to justify the
morally inferior outlook found in Deuteronomy by noting that it belongs to "
the Mosaic age, and [is] quite different from that of the later monarchy."[5]
Unfortunately, to cast the biblical material in historical context (as
doubtless it should be) serves only to emphasize the historical relativism
of so-called biblical morality. Indeed, the very notion of a complete and
self-consistent biblical morality is problematic. The attempt by some
evangelicals to borrow the "progressive revelation" principle in order to
make the claim that the later revelation (i.e., the New Testament) stands on
a higher plane than the earlier revelation (the Old Testament) collapses
when one considers the rage against, and hatred of, most of the human race
exemplified in the Book of Revelation. And certainly the threat found in
Hebrews 6:4-6 -- which proclaims that God will never forgive a repentant
apostate -- is more, not less vicious than anything found in the Old
Testament. When theologians try to justify the vendetta that the Book of
Revelation describes in lurid detail, they demonstrate just how perverse the
human mind can sometimes become.
Those who believe that the Bible presents its readers moral absolutes have
failed to acknowledge the staggering diversity of its moral perspectives.
These differing perspectives are often grounded in the political and
evangelical experiences of the early Christian church. Professor Daniel
Fuller, noted evangelical scholar and former president of Fuller Seminary,
pointed out to me, for example, that the apostle Paul had three major
problems to face in the early Christian churches: (1) the wall separating
Jew and Gentile, (2) the wall separating male and female, and (3) the wall
separating slave from free citizen. According to Fuller, Paul, whose
theological interpretation of Christ's teachings formed the foundation of
the Church, felt that he had to make a practical decision to concentrate on
the problem of the ethnic and religious relationship between Judaism and
Christianity to the exclusion of the other two problems. Fuller's point is
that, while racism and sexism are in principle undermined by the Christian
gospel ("Love thy neighbor as thyself"), Paul was forced to leave to later
generations the application of this subversive Christian insight to the
problems of racism and sexism. For Paul, getting the church off the ground
was the key thing; to try to implement total Christian justice would have
scared most potential converts away. I take this to be an example of
situational ethics. Whether Paul utilized situation ethics in order to
advance the agape principle of 1 Corinthians 13 more effectively is a
question open for debate. As Morton Smith ably demonstrated in Free Inquiry
(Spring 1987) there is much in the Bible that contributed to the institution
of slavery and little that in actual practice moved against it. Even the
Golden Rule of the New Testament, because of its abstractness and
adaptability, has throughout history often failed to override the deep-
seated racial bigotry of the Book of Genesis.
The doctrine of election accepted by the Puritans did not incline them to
gentleness in their dealing with inferior races. The savage Negroes and the
savage Indians were accursed peoples whom it was quite proper to destroy and
enslave. "We know not when or how these Indians first became the
inhabitants of this mighty continent," says Cotton Mather, "yet we may guess
that probably the devil decoyed these miserable savages hither, in hope
that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come to destroy or
disturb this absolute empire over them."[6]
To be sure, the Bible gives conflicting messages regarding the assimilation
of strange peoples. Compare, for example, the books of Ruth and Ezra. the
moving and humanistic story of Ruth in the Old Testament is viewed by some
scholars as a moral challenge to the Deuteronomic injunction to bar Moabites
from the Lord's assembly. The book tells the story of an Israelite man who,
because of famine in Israel, chose to move to Moab, taking his wife Naomi
with him. The man died leaving Naomi with two sons, one of whom married Ruth
, a Moabite. In time, the two Israelite sons living in Moab died, leaving
Naomi with two widowed daughters-in-law. According to this tightly woven
story, when the famine in Israel passed and Naomi returned to her homeland,
Ruth the Moabitess moved with her, asserting, "Your people shall be my
people and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16 RSV).
The author of the Book of Ruth remarks again and again that Ruth was the
Moabitess; she even calls herself "a foreigner." Despite this Boaz (of
Bethlehem in Judah) takes Ruth for his wife. He marries her in part because
of the goodness she has shown for her mother-in-law, Naomi. Boaz declares
that "all my fellow townsmen know that you are a woman of worth" (3:11 RSV).
The story closes with a telling blow against racial bigotry: Ruth has a son,
Obed, who in time becomes the grandfather of none other than David himself.
So, the Moabitess is the great-grandmother of Israel's most beloved king.
The moral conclusion of the Book of Ezra is less savory. According to Ezra 9
and 10 the Israelite exiles returning from captivity had brought a curse on
themselves. God had sent a heavy rain to the land as punishment for their
sin of marrying foreign women and bringing them back to pollute the land of
Israel. Ezra's solution was simple. Those Israelite men who had foreign (
even Moabite) wives should demonstrate their faithfulness to God by putting
all these wives away. If the story of Ezra 10 reflects an actual historical
period, then we must believe that there was wholesale divorce in the land of
Israel during Ezra's time. Indeed, Ezra destroyed more than marriages. Upon
his command, and in the name of God, the men who had married foreign women
were forced to separate themselves from their children as well.
It is interesting to see how this kind of moral relativism is perpetuated by
evangelical commentaries. in The New Bible Commentary, evangelical scholar
J. Stafford Wright claims that Ezra's morality should be accorded the status
of a norm, the biblical story of Ruth merely an exception to the rule.[7]
This strange piece of gerrymandering becomes even more strange when set
against the background of the apostle Paul's instruction, which is the
opposite of Ezra's. Paul advises the Christian woman who is married to an
unbeliever to remain with him as long as he consents to the marriage. Paul
then says that the children will greatly benefit by the marriage being kept
intact. Ezra's justification for commanding divorce is that the mixed
marriage is a pollution or defilement. Paul's justification for advising
against divorce is twofold: to provide the Christian with opportunities in
marriage to spiritually redeem her or his spouse, and to prevent the
children from becoming "unclean" (1 Cor. 7:20).
Those who think that the Bible is above situation ethics might find the
following worth pondering. In 1 Corinthians 7:20-31, Paul appears to believe
that the end of the world is around the corner. In the context of that
conviction, the following advice is given: "Every one should remain in the
state in which he was called" (1 Cor. 7:20 RSV). Paul elaborates:
I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to
remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you
free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin....
Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that.
I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let
those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as
though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not
rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who
deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of
this world is passing away. [1 Cor. 7:26-31]
It turned out that Paul's judgement of the historical situation was in error
. The end was not around the corner, and his miscalculation made his
situational advice less than useful. Human miscalculation is one of the
weaknesses of situation ethics; but it is a weakness inherent in finite
human nature -- and it is finite human nature that pervades biblical thought.
My criticism, however, is not of situation ethics. Rather, I criticize those
theologians who tell people that biblical ethics advances moral absolutes.
In fact, so-called biblical ethics is situation ethics that often sets
itself up as immutable divine decree. The unfortunate consequence of this
tactic is that moral positions taken in te bible are denied the useful
process of criticism and refinement, a process that is essential if ethics
is to escape the brutalizing effects of dogmatism. |
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