Compassion and the
Ethical Calculus
The Bible teaches that ethical
values are objective and that obligations are something real, not just
figments of our subjectivity. We discover these through God's revelation
in nature, conscience, and particularly in Scripture, which is
a sufficient ethical guide. God expects us to learn our duty
from this revelation and to do that duty. In theological ethics,
the "normative perspective," particularly, tries to discern what
that duty is. Here we make distinctions between what
Scripture commands, forbids, permits, praises (see essay, Levels of Ethical Evaluation). It
is important for us to have clear ideas here, lest we command what
Scripture does not command, or permit what Scripture forbids. It is by
such reasoning that we discover and formulate the scope of the church's
ethical authority and of the Christian's liberty.
Thus ethics appears to be something
like a calculus. While mathematics works with numbers, and logic with the
values "true" and "false," ethics works with the
values "right and wrong," and through various ethical syllogisms
it determines what maxims and behavior fall under these categories.
There are, however, problems with
this sort of ethical calculation. First, it is hard to do. Not as hard, I
think, as the "hedonistic calculus" of Bentham
and Mill, which required virtual omniscience to reach conclusions. But
even in the Christian "calculus," there are exegetical and situational complications that often leave us unsure
as to the proper ethical conclusion.
The other major problem is the
relation of the "right," so calculated, to God's will. Surely,
we want to say, God's will is the ultimate standard of conduct. Yet God
justifies sinners, apart from
any good works on their part, simply for the sake of Jesus Christ. Thus a
person's relationship to God, his acceptance with God, has nothing to do
with what he has done or not done by way of obedience. Further, we learn
from Scripture that the very best works of the believer are still
inadequate by God's standards. The Reformed confessions teach that
even believers sin in every thought, word, and deed. So what good
does it do to perform "ethical calculations?" Whatever we do, it
will be sinful in God's sight. And God is the ultimate judge, the only judge
who really matters. So perhaps the conclusion is simply not to worry very
much about rightness and wrongness and, in
Luther's notorious phrase, to "sin boldly."
Yet there are other elements of
biblical doctrine that point in a different direction. For one thing,
Scripture makes clear that believers are holy before God and that they
are growing in personal holiness. Although we must continually confess
our sins to God, still in some way the indwelling spirit transforms us
into obedient servants. And those who are unrepentantly disobedient should
not be regarded as believers. If such profess Christ, they should be
placed under discipline. And the doctrine of rewards in Scripture also
presupposes that believers can do works which are genuinely good in some
degree. There are degrees of reward in heaven, and those degrees
are proportionate in some measure to the goodness or badness of
our works. Thus, although the ethical calculus is irrelevant
to justification, it is important as a measure of sanctification.
We may not "sin boldly." If we are bought with the blood of
Christ and transformed into new creatures by His resurrection, we
will want to obey his law. There is
But even granting these doctrinal
truths, we may find our ethical despair returning when we seek to
determine what in fact is right. For the biblical ethic is an ethic of
perfection. It calls us to do all righteousness, to avoid the slightest
sin, in thought, word, deed, or heart. It calls us to do all things
to God's glory, to spend every minute as God pleases, to "make
no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires," Rom. 13:14. It is hard even to know how to get started
on such a monumental project; and our failures are such that
discouragement is almost inevitable.
Therefore, we are often tempted to
take the law in a minimizing way. In my teaching, I myself have tried to
take the "sting" out of some apparently unworkable divine commands.
I've argued that the large mandates, like the cultural mandate and
the Great Commission, are given to the church as a whole, not to
each individual, although each individual must determine
what contribution he will make to the realization of these
large programs. I have also argued, for example, that some actions
in Scripture are praised but not commanded; so that in my
view Scripture commends the heroism of David's mighty men above
the call of duty and the absurd generosity of the poor widow who gave the
two mites, but does not strictly require all of us to do such things.
I've also written that God takes our
epistemological limitations into account. For many reasons, such as our
relative age and intelligence, our historical distance from the
New Testament, our inability to find competent teachers, etc., we may be
genuinely ignorant of God's requirements. And I have concluded that we
should not worry too much about this. God knows about these problems, and
he does not expect more from us than we can do. We may, of course, deceive
ourselves as to what we can and cannot do; but God always makes a fair
judgment.
I still think this sort of argument
can be defended at a practical level, but I have always been uneasy about
it as a general principle. For the ultimate standard of the
Christian life is the sacrifice of Christ. We are to love one another as
he loved us. Therefore, perhaps, our whole ethic ought to be based on
the extraordinary behavior of people
like David's mighty men and the generous widow. But how can that be done?
Certainly no finite person can maintain that pitch of heroism every
minute of his life. If that sort of heroism is our standard, then
we fall below it to such a discouraging degree that we may as well "sin
boldly." Reading the law of God that way seems to make it entirely
impractical.
So what do we do? Do we read the law
as a practical guide to progressive sanctification, assuming that its
requirements take our finitude, ignorance and
sinful dispositions into account? Or do we take the law as a transcript of
God's own infinite holiness, to which no human being save Christ can
make any approach? Well, somehow, we must do both.
Consider the Pharisees' form of
"minimizing" application. The Pharisees added to the law, or so
they thought; yet they assured their disciples that if they kept all the
clearly enumerated Pharisaic commands, God would be pleased. But
the Pharisaic catalogue of rights and wrongs minimized the demands
of God upon the heart, upon human lust and anger. And it
restricted the scope of human love: you must love your neighbor, but you
are free to hate your enemy. And of course, on such a
view, "neighbor" is a limited concept: it refers to fellow Jews
and sojourners, but not to Samaritans or Gentiles.
Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan
(and here I am indebted to a very fine sermon which Edmund P. Clowney recently preached on this text) is one of many
passages in Scripture which rebuke this kind of ethical calculus, the
Pharisaic casuistry. The "lawyer" who approaches Jesus seeks to
know who his neighbor is: how can the concept "neighbor" in the
phrase "love your neighbor" be restricted to make it
ethically manageable? Jesus does not answer the lawyer's question,
but rather tells a parable to show what it means to be a neighbor to someone else. "Neighbor" here
becomes a concept dependent on a personal decision. A Samaritan can decide to be a neighbor to a
wounded Jew. And to do that is ethically commendable. The important thing
is "compassion," Luke 10:33. Here the existential perspective
replaces the normative and presents us with a conclusion that would
certainly have been hard to reach by any ethical calculus; certainly it
would not have been the conclusion of any Pharisaic discussion of the
proper scope of "neighbor."
Here, Jesus' ethic seems to be more
an account of divine perfection than of a practical calculus. If we
generalized this principle, it would seem to indicate that there is no
limitation at all in the concept "neighbor," that we are
responsible to meet the needs of absolutely everyone, a principle both
ethically and metaphysically impossible. But I don't think Jesus' point is
to force that generalization upon us. That would be to
re-introduce the principle of calculus, but at a higher level, an
impractical level. Rather, what Jesus seems to be doing here,
considered in terms of ethical method, is to relativize
somehow the whole idea of a calculus. The Priest and the Levite doubtless had ways of justifying their
indifference to the suffering stranger. Jesus does not explicitly condemn
their calculations, or even their conclusions. But certainly he endorses
the Samaritan's conduct over and above theirs.
The conclusion I would draw is this.
The ethical calculus is not useless or to be despised. It is a legitimate
tool for determining obligations and areas of freedom. But it also has
its limitations. If we limit our conduct to what is strictly required, we may miss important opportunites to do God's work in the world. One who is
truly compassionate will want to
give assistance to another person, even at times when he might be
justified in doing otherwise, even at times when he isn't, strictly
speaking, required to.
There are Christians who exegete
Scripture in such a way as to determine "how much can I get away
with?" They see God's requirements as a sort of minimum, beyond which
they can do anything they like. The Pharisees' approach above is an
example of this. Another is the doctrine of adiaphora, which I
have criticized elsewhere. And one may be tempted to use my own "minimizing" devices, described
earlier, in this way. But Scripture rebukes this attitude in many ways. I Cor. 10:31, Rom. 14:23, Col.
3:17, 24, and many others indicate that every thought, word and deed
involves an ethical decision for or against God. In this sense there are
no adiaphora.
The "ethical heroism" commended in Scripture points in the
same direction.
So I would not discourage you from
trying to ascertain the precise scope of "neighbor" in the
phrase "love your neighbor as yourself." But beware of using
that exegesis as a kind of rationalization, so that you can avoid loving
anybody you're not "required" to love. That is the spirit of
autonomy. That is the antinomian spirit lurking
behind a pronomian facade. It fails to see that
the law itself, at one level, goes far beyond finite practicalities to the
perfection of Christ himself and of His Father. Our ethic is impoverished,
if that ideal plays no role in our decisions.
So I would say that the Good Samaritan was not strictly required to do everything that he did. It would not have been sinful for him to have done a bit less. But his action pleased God, and God expects us to model our lives upon that sort of perfection, not to ignore that ideal in a quest to justify ourselves. In this way, we will often find that the existential perspective supplements the normative. But in doing so, it doesn't contradict the law; rather, it points us to a deeper dimension of the law, beyond the immediate norms to the ultimate perfection in which those norms are grounded.