Wesleyan philosophy 5a -- How should we live as individuals?

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Being versus Doing
The branch of philosophy that deals with the question of how we should live our lives is called “ethics.” Should I shoot my neighbor? What is the “Christian’s secret to a happy life”? What is the greatest good, the summum bonum? Ethics deals with the “should” questions, especially those that concern us as individuals.

Clearly, ethics is extremely relevant to life, especially to us as Christians. If there are areas of philosophy that sometimes seem less crucial, ethics is not one of them. Every day we make decisions of an ethical nature. “How should we then live?” is a core question of our Christian faith and, indeed, of any religion.

Approaches to ethics tend to focus more or less on either who we should be or what we should do, being and doing. The question of who we should be is a question of character. From a Wesleyan standpoint, our character has especially to do with our intentions, our attitudes, our motivations, and our choices. The Bible often refers to this dimension of who we are as our “heart.”

It is easy for us to divert from questions of character and virtue to questions of action. It is hard to see the heart. We can be fooled. Indeed, we can fool ourselves about our own character. In the words of one cartoon character, “I am such a good person.” It is much easier to see action. It is easier to know what a person did than who a person is.

For this reason, a focus on being easily deteriorates into a focus on doing. We become “legalistic,” where we are concerned primarily about rule-keeping rather than the reasons behind the rules. We love the rules for their own sake rather than for the purposes of rules.

On the other hand, we can also focus so much on some hypothetical sense of who we are that our actions become irrelevant. The extremes of Protestantism have sometimes run into this territory. Martin Luther famously said that we are “at the same time righteous and sinner, as long as we are always repenting.” This can be an inappropriate conclusion for someone who believes in “eternal security,” “once saved always saved.” They might conclude that it does not matter what a person does after they become a Christian. God looks at Christ’s life and not mine.

This is neither the ultimate direction that Luther or Calvin went nor is it what the Bible actually teaches. Protestants may believe that we are “saved by grace through faith” (Eph. 2:8). We only can get right with God by trusting in what God has done through Christ, not through our human efforts (Eph. 2:9). Nevertheless, all mainstream Protestants believe that real righteousness will follow to some extent or another. Wesleyans believe that God actually wants to make us literally holy, not just fictionally. [1]

Clearly, both who we are and what we do are important, and they flow naturally from one to the other. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reorients ethics from mere action to the heart that results in the action. It is important not to murder. It is important not to commit adultery. But Jesus indicates that these sins are committed in one’s heart long before one actually picks up a knife or goes into your neighbor’s house (Matt 5:21-30). The sins we do with our bodies happened in our minds beforehand.

Our orientation to doing can easily lead us to miss the primary point of Matthew 5. We might more or less stop at 5:17-19–all the commands of the Old Testament are still in force, even the least of them. But Jesus goes on in the chapter to demonstrate what it means to fulfill the Law, and his fulfillments undermine a doing approach to the Law. The Law says to keep your oaths. Jesus says not to make oaths. The Law says “an eye for an eye.” Jesus says nope.

What Jesus is doing in Matthew 5 is reorienting Law-keeping around the love commands. When asked how we should live, Jesus reduces the entire Law to do of its commandments: love God and love neighbor (Matt. 22:34-40). This is a “being” approach to ethics. The core value is to love. The right actions will naturally follow.

Biblical Virtue
The approach to ethics that focuses more on who we should be than what we should do is called “virtue based ethics.” Approaches to ethics that focus more on doing are called “act based ethics.” From both a biblical and a Wesleyan perspective, the heart of ethics is virtue based, resulting in actions characterized by love.

The core biblical ethic is love. As Jesus indicated to his opponents in Matthew 22, the heart of the Law is love. “You will love the LORD your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37). This plays itself out in our lives as love toward others. “You will love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39). Not only Jesus but Paul also says that this command sums up the Law (Rom. 13:9).

And if someone should want to wiggle out of the command by how they define their neighbor, Jesus gives no out. In Matthew 5:43-48, our enemies are included within the scope of those we must love. Similarly, the Parable of the Good Samaritan makes it clear that my neighbor is anyone who is in need, even if they come from a “hated” people group (Luke 10:29-37).

John Wesley and the Wesleyans who have followed have centered their ethic on love as well when they have been at their best. Like most traditions, we have at times become distracted with the minutia of doing. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath law? Can I go to a restaurant on Sunday? Can I watch television on Sunday? Should I even have a television or go to a movie?

At our best, however, we have focused our ethic on the love command. Wesley formulated Christian perfection in terms of “perfect love.” Similarly, entire sanctification in our tradition has predominantly been understood as an experience of the Spirit’s empowerment that enables us to fully love God and our neighbor.

While Wesley acknowledged that the Bible includes broader understandings of sin, he defined sin “properly so called” as a “willful transgression of a known law of God.” This focal understanding of sin is thoroughly in keeping with the New Testament. While the Old Testament includes a broader sense of sins committed in ignorance, both individual and corporate, the focus of sin in the New Testament is overwhelmingly on wrongdoing that is intentional.

According to James 4:17, a sin of omission is when a person knows the good that he or she should do but they do not do it, an intentional omission. In Romans 14:23, Paul describes a situation where whether an action is sin or not depends on whether a person thinks it is wrong to do or not. “Whatever is not of faith is sin.” In other words, sin is when you intentionally do something you know you should not do. These are sins of commission.

In both cases, sin is not “to miss the mark,” a common definition that has no basis in the New Testament. The definition is based on a number of word fallacies the chief of which is the idea that some meaning a word had in its history is determinative of what it means later. There is also the lexical fallacy which supposes there is some root meaning in play whenever a word is used.

No, sin in the New Testament is overwhelmingly a function of intentionality. Paul’s argument in Romans 14 is particularly insightful, for it points to a situation where two individuals could do exactly the same action and it be sin for one and not the other. The difference would be the intentionality of the actor. And the standard of intentionality is the extent to which it is or is not loving in its intention, where love toward others is seeking their true benefit.

Both the Old and New Testaments are heart-focused in their ethics. God famously tells the prophet Samuel that “A human looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Actions are a matter of outward appearance. Jesus similarly makes it clear that evil is something that comes from the inside out. It is not something that attaches to you by what you touch. “Out of the heart” flows all evil (Mark 7:21-23).

These observations indicate that the ethic of Scripture and of Wesleyanism are appropriately virtue-oriented, with actions flowing from our hearts as an indicator of whether we are inwardly virtuous or not. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Christianity is a religion of the Spirit. It is what is going on inside that is the truest indicator of what we are.

Clearly, a righteous spirit will produce good fruit, so this virtue orientation is in no way divorced from what we do. It is simply the priority. James 2 makes it clear that “faith without works is dead” (Jas. 2:26). So there is no righteous heart-orientation that does not result in righteous action. Paul agrees. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:23-24). If we are right on the inside, these virtues will flow into our lives on the outside.

The Highest Good (summum bonum)
The ancient Mediterranean philosophers were similarly virtue based in their approach to ethics. Aristotle in the 300s BC looked to happiness (eudaimonia) as the greatest good toward which we should aspire. He distinguished forms of happiness on three levels: that of pleasure, that of a good citizen, and that of contemplation. He considered the satisfaction of contemplation to be the highest.

Aristotle believed that our quest for happiness shaped everything we did. When we sought pleasure, we did so with the goal of happiness or fulfillment. Happiness was human flourishing, being what we were supposed to be. A life of eudaimonia was a life well lived.

Plato before Aristotle identified four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice. Wisdom was the virtue of our heads. Courage was the virtue of our chests. Self-control was the virtue of our abdomen. And justice was when all of them were working together in proper concert.

As Christians, we would should not locate the greatest good in ourselves but in God. In the previous entry, we mentioned the Westminster Confession. “What is the proper end of humanity?” “To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” This statement suggests that the proper path to eudaimonia is in a life oriented around God.

We should not, however, think of goodness as a thing. When 1 John 4:8 says that God is love, it does not mean that God is composed of love atoms. It is a figurative statement, a metonymy. A metonymy is when something is so associated with something else that we can refer to the one by the other. “Tom is generosity.” “Michael Jordan is basketball.” When the Bible says God is love, it is saying that God’s actions in the world are so typified by love and that love is so aptly described in God’s interaction with the world that we can say “God is love.” To try to say more is to overread what the passage is saying.

Love of God is thus the highest good, with love of humanity entailed within it. Good is an adjective. It is a word that describes intentions and actions that are loving.

Rights and Wrongs
In Romans 14:14, Paul says, “Nothing is unclean in itself, except to the one who considers it unclean.” He is thinking especially of whether a person should eat food that has been sacrificed to an idol. However, it gives us one perspective on the relationship between intention and action.

One could argue that actions in the world--as acts, not in terms of intentions or consequences--are in themselves morally neutral. It is the intentionality that surrounds an action that makes the adjectives good or evil appropriate. A tsunami or tornado is not evil, even though they may cause great death. But they did not intend to do anyone harm. Similarly, if I am cleaning my roof and accidentally knock off a shingle that kills you, I have not committed murder.

David Hume’s “fact-value” problem thus does not matter to us as Christians. God has revealed to us the value of love as the highest good. There may very well be a detachment between facts and values, between what happens and the significance of what happens. But God has revealed to us the valuation to lay over our observations of events in the world.

This is a quite different approach to ethics than those that heavily focus on types of activities themselves, act-based ethics. As I mentioned at the beginning, it is all too easy for our religion to shift from intentionality to acts. Acts are easy to see and measure, while intentions are often clouded. In Philippians 3:6 Paul can say that he was blameless at keeping the Jewish Law as a Pharisee because, from the perspective of some Pharisees, they had quantified, concretized, and externalized law-keeping to where one could actually keep the Law perfectly. [2]

Ethics that focus on language of absolutes fall in the category of act-based ethics. Despite his use of the categories of virtue, Plato in the early 300s BC was an absolutist who believed certain rights and wrongs were intrinsically right and wrong regardless of intention or circumstance. He was also a realist when it came to right and wrong, for he believed good was a thing that existed apart from the gods. It was a standard by which even the gods were to be measured.

Immanuel Kant in the late 1700s was also an absolutist in ethics. If something was wrong, it was always wrong regardless of the circumstances. He called this the “categorical imperative.” If something was an imperative, a “must,” a true ethical command, then it applied categorically, in all circumstances.

This is not the way that the New Testament generally treats ethics. For one thing, values compete with each other. If a leader of Jericho comes to my door and asks if I am hiding Israelite spies, do I tell the truth and say they are hiding on my roof or do I save their lives and lie? The Bible never critiques Rahab for lying but rather considers her works an example of righteousness (cf. Jas. 2:25).

The normal scope of biblical ethics is rather what we might call universal values with exceptions or universal principles. Moral absolutism does not allow for exceptions by definition. However, it has more to do with Western cultural assumptions than with biblical presuppositions. For example, Paul and Peter both instruct Christians to submit to and obey secular authority (Rom. 13:1; 1 Pet. 2:13). However, it is clear from Acts 4:19 that this is not an absolute. When submitting to earthly authority conflicts with submission to divine authority, exceptions must be made.

That is not to say that there are not rough equivalents to absolutes in Christian ethics, even if such language is foreign to the Bible, an example of Western philosophy imposed on Scripture. The command to love God and the command to love one’s neighbor are both absolutes in the sense that there is never an exception to these commands. However, even to look at them as commands–rather than the delight of one’s heart–is to subtly switch from a virtue-based ethic to an act-based one.

Paul’s position on food sacrificed to idols is even a relativist position by definition. Whether it is right or wrong depends on one’s personal convictions. What Wesleyans call “convictions” are actually examples of individual relativism. However, they must be located within a broader ethical framework of universal values.

There can be actions that are right or wrong depending on the culture as well. Paul is not in any way opposed to Jews keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, but he does not require it of Gentile believers (Col. 2:16). This would be an example of cultural relativism. Paul says, “To the Jews I became like a Jew that I might win Jews… to those not under the Law I became as one not under the Law… that I might win those not under the Law” (1 Cor. 9:20-21). Again, these instances of cultural relativism must be placed within the broader universal ethical framework of loving God and loving neighbor.

It seems impossible for universal principles to anticipate all possible situations. This is the Pharisaic problem. They had the principle of Sabbath, but what constitutes work? Who decides how to define what the boundaries in time of the day are? Are there exceptions to the Sabbath rule? Jesus in Luke 14:5 indicates that you should pull your ox out of a ditch even on the Sabbath. Similarly, Jesus does not argue about whether his disciples violated the Sabbath by picking grain in Mark 2:23-28. He indicates rather that the rule had exceptions.

Applying moral principles almost always involves what one ethicist called “improvisations.” [3] It seems you can never anticipate every possible situation in which a principle might be applied. It is thus no wonder that people gravitate toward absolutism. It requires as little thought as it is likely to play out in oppressive and truly unloving ways. It is not, however, God’s way much beyond the fundamentals of loving God and neighbor. [4]

To say that Christianity is oriented around universal rights and wrongs that will sometimes have exceptions is to believe in definite right and wrong. It is a fallacy of false alternative to say, either you believe in absolutes or you do not believe in right and wrong. This is absurd. There are at least three positions on the moral spectrum in between absolutism and moral nihilism: universal principles, relativism, and moral scepticism. I have given clear biblical examples above of the first two, the first of which I have argued is the normal operating scope of biblical ethics.

Greater Good
The act-based approach to ethics that we have been discussing is called “duty-based ethics” or “deontological ethics.” There is also another approach to act-based ethics called “consequential ethics” or “utilitarianism.” Every day we make utilitarian decisions. “Will my family get greater pleasure from Arbys or McDonalds?” There is thus nothing intrinsically wrong with utiliarian considerations.

Nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with “egoist” ethics. If utilitarian ethics asks what action will bring about the greatest good (or pleasure) to the greatest number, egoist ethics asks what action will bring about the greatest good (or pleasure) to me. There is nothing wrong with asking, “Will I be happier eating strawberry shortcake or watermelon?”

The problem with such ethics comes into play when they come into conflict with more crucial values, especially universal values. In such cases, “the end does not justify the means.” The pleasure I might get from “getting rid of” my neighbor cannot outweigh the value that my neighbor is created in God’s image and that Christ commands me to love my enemy.

It is thus only when I am free of moral duty that I can bring consequences to bear on an ethical decision. For example, the consequences of an abortion in my life cannot be used as an argument for its allowance if abortion violates an absolute moral duty not to murder the innocent. [5] If it is a moral imperative not to kill innocent individuals while bombing a city like Dresden or Hiroshema, then the consequence of expediting an end to war and saving a greater number of lives cannot be invoked. [6]

Nevertheless, the question of consequences is often in play when a moral principle is universal but not absolute. Similarly, although the New Testament focuses primarily on intentional sin, we can unintentionally wrong someone. This is also sin, even if sin for which God does not consider us as morally culpable. When we unintentionally wrong someone, we have sinned in terms of the consequences to others. Repentance is still appropriate, and the blood of Christ still atones for it (cf. Heb. 9:7).

There are also areas where we wrong others in negligence. These sins are somewhere between intentional and unintentional sin. If we drive without sleep and end up killing someone, we still bear some moral culpability. John Wesley called such sins, “sins of surprise.”

How then should we live? We should give our full allegiance to God without exception. We should commit to love our neighbor and enemy, without exception. These are the two great absolutes.

Within these general moral values are other principles that play them out generally. We cannot love our spouse and have an affair. We cannot love our neighbors and whimsically steal from them, let alone kill them. These broad, universal principles will play out in various ways in specific situations. Also, if we love our neighbor, we will be concerned about the consequences of our actions on them. 

Sexual Ethics
In a follow-up next week, I want to address sexual ethics.

[1] Our righteousness in Luther tends to be more of a “legal fiction,” even though Luther certainly believed that our lives should become more literally righteous too.

[2] This was not the only Pharisaic perspective. The School of Hillel in particular seemed more focused on intentionality. However, for some it would seem that the intentionality that mattered most was the intention to keep the Law perfectly in a concrete sense.

[3] Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.

[4] Admittedly, it is difficult to find an exception to the command not commit adultery.

[5] I worded this in an individual way to try to keep the illustration simple. If we were having the full discussion, we would want to address several additional questions. Is abortion an absolute moral imperative or one to which exceptions can be made, such as rape or incest? Under what circumstances? Is there a difference between saving the life of a mother in a way that results in the child’s death and causing the child’s death to save the life of the mother?

[6] My intention is not to take a position here but to demonstrate the interplay between duties and consequences.