Jesus as the Ideal of Christian Ethics

Much of the fascination which Jesus Christ has held for scholars comes not simply from his supernatural works, nor from his supernatural teaching, but from his supernatural moral life. The conviction that he is the “personal revelation of the holiness of God” is a prime reason for the great number of Lives about him. He was more than the great Teacher of ethics. He was its great Liver.

Nowhere else does human history show the moral glory of the Divine in human life. Nowhere else has the world found such inspiration for moral earnestness. Christ stands behind what D. M. Ross has called “the singular moral heat” of the early Christians. “From Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ to Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps,” Hillyer Straton remarks, “Christian ethics has been centered in Jesus.” And the sweep of his moral influence does not stop with Christian writing. “The track of His footsteps is seen,” Pressense writes, “wherever there has been any real progress in good, in love, in right, in the moral elevation of men.” L. H. Marshall affirms that “beyond Jesus of Nazareth … the moral stature of humanity can never go” and that Jesus is “the last word on all the great issues of right and wrong.”

We are told that “his biography may be summed up in the words, ‘he went about doing good’ ”; that he lived “the only perfectly unselfish life ever seen on earth”; that the “grand outstanding characteristic of Christ’s work” was his “absolute submission to the will of God”; that the uniqueness of Christianity consists in “his utter realization of the immanence of God in this present life”; that he is “the moral law incarnate.… The law of the ‘good’ is in His person a reality.”

The Wonder Of Our World

The magnificent feature of Jesus Christ is that he not only proclaimed a superlative ethic, but he lived it out to the full. In common with the earlier Hebrew prophets he held a morally majestic view of God. He supplemented this view in his teaching. Granting the holiness of their living, the life of Jesus stands apart from them and from the whole of humanity as a brilliant lightning flash in the dark night. His pure walk is the wonder of our world of mixed motives and deeds. Alongside him, even the best of men must confess unholiness. Schleiermacher agrees that the “entire history of humanity” supplies no analogy for this one whose “whole conduct, … deeds, … addresses, have a supernatural character. He must be a divine ambassador.” Here the moral life is unveiled with no discordant note, with nothing that is less than ethically superlative.

Whatever may be said about him, whether as a teacher or as a redeemer, his sinlessness is unique in the stream of human life. Nowhere does history show a fountain of righteousness like the ethical pureness which ever lives in him. He presented the ideal of the kingdom not merely in word but in deed and fact. He is the word of truth and of goodness become flesh. What he taught he uncompromisingly exemplified. “The whole of the active work of Jesus,” Wendt writes, “was an exposition of His teaching through His own example.” In him the kingdom itself appeared on earth, in that “the perfect human life, the moral ideal for man, was perfectly realized.” “No miracle of Christ equals the miracle of His sinless life,” remarks H. R. Mackintosh, in a chapter devoted to the features which set apart “the one quite unspotted life that has been lived within our sinful race” as “solitary and incomparable.” Jesus Christ, even if more remains to be said, is the faultless exemplar of virtue, “a self-determining will, perfectly bent on perfect ends,” the lone exhibition of ethical excellence to be found in the history of the fallen race.

A Superb Moral Weapon

Christ’s moral perfection has given to Christian ethics one of its choicest weapons against speculative ethics. It sets Jesus not only against the champions of a moral naturalism, from Epicurus to Dewey and Sarte, but also against the most earnest idealistic moralists, from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Hegel and Fichte, or to Hocking, Brightman and Flewelling. Indeed, none of the founders of the other world religions binds his followers in such personal moral dependence. Whether one looks to Buddha or Confucius, to Laotze or to Mohammed, to Mary Baker Eddy or to Joseph Smith, he finds this ethical teaching to be higher than their own ethical living. In this they do not differ from the philosophers of ethics. The life of Jesus thus gives authoritative power to his ethical teaching, since his life accords to it an atmosphere of personal earnestness and realization.

The point is not that all other religious ethics and moral philosophy are the work of scoundrels. Man really does wrestle with moral claims in human experience. His very death marked Socrates as an ethical martyr. Plato is passionate in his call for social and individual justice. Kant gave a dramatic centrality to the moral life. But Jesus is not related to his teaching simply as Socrates and Plato and Kant were to theirs. His life was comprehensively “the example of His own words.” As MacLennan observes, “The life of Jesus differs from that of all other great teachers of religion and morality in that He lived out His teaching Himself to the full.… What Jesus taught He was.” And this fact of itself makes all the other religious and philosophical moralists seem tame and drab, if not ethically shabby, alongside Jesus Christ. Indeed they may be men or women whose teaching here and there strikes our fancy. They may even give us some significant insight. But they do not lay upon us the duty of following them. And if they did, we could not do so with good conscience. Where does the study of philosophy or of religion, we may well inquire with Hovey, “recall the name of any saint or sage whose temper was so sweet and just, so holy and pitiful as his? whose word was so luminous and penetrating and vivifying; whose endurance of wrong was so meek and heroic; whose work was so beneficent and God-like?” Where is even one other who has not been victim of the conditioned ideals of his own day? Who by his self-giving love and supreme virtue has challenged and placed on the defensive men of all ages, notions, temperaments, and stations of life? Where else is a flawless and imperishable pattern for behavior to be found, where else is one who stands in no need of ethical renewal from without? Christ did not simply venture to define the moral ideal. He manifests it. The private lives of the great secular moralists are relatively unknown even where their ethical works are well-known.

The Philosophers Are Sinners

How are we to account for the lack of dynamic in speculative ethics? The moral philosophers of antiquity and their modern successors ignore the tragic factor of sin in the life of man. How account for their relatively lower ethical claims? They formulate objective standards for morals and religion without any dependence on special Divine disclosure. And they assume that man can fulfill the will of God by works. They do not see that he needs special redemption. On every side they betray the pride of reason.

True as it may be for Socrates that the doctrines of providence, prayer and immortality were controlling principles in his philosophy, his conviction that he had “never deliberately wronged a single person” shows dim understanding of the law of love in practice. It also shows the classic moral philosophers were wrong when they said it is impossible to have knowledge of the good without acting upon it. One cannot think of Plato without recalling that he was not taken seriously as the philosopher-king he idealized in The Republic. Seneca, the lofty mirror of Stoic ethics, praised the poverty of those around him while he lived in luxury. He even wrote the shameful document in which Nero defended the treacherous murder of his own mother. The moral achievement even of the greatest ethical philosophers falls under the biblical verdict that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The Pattern Of Perfection

All the excellences of the best men are seen in Jesus, undiminished and unceasing. His spell over the science of ethics, therefore, is not simply that of an attractive, balanced, and deep personality. He does not simply command the respect due a sage. He presents the ideal not only in his teaching but in the flesh. He speaks to the moral dilemmas of life as One who, though sharing the temptations and the burdens of men, nevertheless is a true representation of the Divine nature. “For Christians, the true standard of life exists, not in the dream land of some ideal realm, but concretely embodied in a human life.” The Christian ideal is not left to abstraction, but is manifested in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the pattern of perfect living.

Even those who hesitate to make the highest religious claim for Jesus Christ, and whose philosophy leads them in quite other directions, have acknowledged his peerless character. The distinguished personalist, Edgar S. Brightman, said “in Jesus … the ideal of personality had its highest historical illustration.” Whoever has learned of Christ can be satisfied with no lesser ideal of humanity. And whoever disregards him will fruitlessly search for a superior ideal. Christ brought ethics at the summit and lived out its most exacting demands. David Smith said: “He is never worsted in the moral conflict,” but “passes through the daily ordeal stainless and blameless.” That is why the proud Greek, the noble Roman, the barbaric tribes of the early West, the heathen of the Orient and the modern pagan and sophisticate are halted in his presence. Here, indeed, is “God living a human life.”

Rationalistic Counterattack

It was to be expected that the life and ideals of Jesus would be assailed vigorously by rationalistic ethics. To admit that Jesus authoritatively forged and achieved the moral ideal is the death-blow of speculative morality. The anti-supernaturalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, later to emerge as a world cultural force in Communism, damned the moral attitudes and example of Jesus as obsolete. The bolder and more radical critics, such as Bruno Bauer, rewrote history in order to do away with Jesus Christ as a historical person, but the Nazarene could not be erased so easily.

The new spirit assails Jesus as a damaging example, attacking such virtues as humility, self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. It proposes to add modern ideals from contemporary science, art and socio-economic interests. The complaint of the American humanist is zealously worded by Harry Elmer Barnes and Edwin A. Burtt. Nels Ferre, a professing supernaturalist, attacks the moral purity of Christ, declaring that “sinlessness is a bloodless category, making an anemic saviour.” He charges Jesus with “unnecessary sharpness,” “moods of undue and exaggerated joy,” “impatience.” He was “almost neurotically self-concerned and invidious of others.”

Tribute From The Uncommitted

But moralists who would not allow themselves to be counted in the tradition of theological ethics have acknowledged the excellence of Jesus’ example. John Stuart Mill superficially reduced Christianity to the Golden Rule. Yet he said an unbeliever would find it difficult to locate a better example of the rule of virtue than that given by Jesus. His example of mercy, compassion and service admits no comparisons.… Even those who are loudest in their repudiation of Christian ethics have borrowed from it more than they know. “While they have been undervaluing the inner worth of Jesus Christ, they have actually been living on the virtue which came out of the hem of his garment.” One need only contrast modern to pre-Christian Naturalism to discern the debt contemporary Humanism owes to the coming of Christ into the world. Even Communism cannot escape his influence. The best elements in its concern for social justice are ultimately rooted in his example. Martineau has noted that Comte propounds as the single maxim which should guide the whole of Positivism the words “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Comte did not even know the source of these words. Yet he deliberately loosed his religion of humanity from the theological fetters of Christianity. But he could not escape the influence of Jesus Christ. So in eclectic outlooks which are openly hostile to Christianity there are unacknowledged debts to Jesus and the prophets who spoke of him.

The older attacks on Jesus’ life are fast disappearing. He is no longer accused of ill-temper or disrespect for human personality. Those protests stemmed from philosophies which tended to make human nature divine. Therefore they concealed the wrath of God. William Ellery Channing spoke for early Unitarianism of “his spotless purity, his moral perfection, his unrivalled goodness.” Jesus was “perfect, spotless in virtue, the representative and resplendent image of the moral goodness and rectitude of God.” His displeasure arose, as Karl Adam has put it, “from a wounded love of truth and honesty,” and he never surrendered moral control in manifesting it. “His anger is detached from all selfish interest; he is enraged against those who have had opportunity and yet remain opponents of the truth and of mercy,” writes George M. Stratton. And we may add that this is precisely the anger of the future judgment.

Preacher In The Red

MUSIC FOR THE MOOD

In a parish I served a number of years ago considerable tension had developed between the organist and the pastor. It reached its most glaring expression when, on a Sunday morning, I announced my resignation from the pulpit. I had hardly finished reading my resignation before the organist, with full organ, played the Doxology. The Rev. O. E. CLAUSON, pastor, Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Portland, Oregon.

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The Academic Snub

The current trend is simply to ignore Jesus Christ. There is not a single reference to Jesus Christ in Dewey and Tufts’ Ethics that has pointed significance for the subject. Visit the reserve or stack shelves in the specialized graduate libraries. Comb the indices for mention of Jesus in books on general ethics. One will find such references few and far between. When they do occur, it is often in company with others to whom he is arbitrarily levelled. The tendency is simply to overlook die historical Jesus with indifference, and to assume that no significant ethical system—indeed, no ethical system at all—can be associated with him.

Strangely enough, Christian scholarship of the past century has encouraged this nonchalance toward Jesus. It argued that we do not know enough about Jesus to justify any estimate of his character. The higher critical assault on the New Testament not only undermined confidence in the inherited picture of Jesus but also filled the gap it left in the records with highly fanciful reconstruction. The implication of a verdict like Wundt’s was all too plain: “With the exception of a few incidents in the narrative of the Passion, … the outward life of Jesus is a tissue of legends.” The inward life would be even more difficult to recover. The result of such doubt was well expressed by Warner Fite: “It would be not too much to say that for the part of the world called Christendom the life of Jesus is history’s greatest problem.” The next step is to separate the discussion of the Christian moral ideal from a necessary dependence on the historical Jesus.

Neglect Of The Historical

Modern theology, after having mistakenly “rescued” the “ethical Jesus” from the “biblical Jesus,” today sketches his example only in the most cautious and skeletal manner. The significance of Jesus Christ to the progressive revelation of the plan and character of God is placed “behind the historical.” A curtain intrudes between the life and teaching of the historical Jesus and the exact content of revelation. One of the marks of the current dialectical theology is that both the teaching and example of Jesus lose their central and authoritative significance for the ethical life.

Rudolf Bultmann denies that Jesus regarded himself as Messiah. He finds no essential relationship whatever between the Kingdom of God and the historical person of Jesus. Barth complains that “Jesus Christ … the Rabbi of Nazareth [is] historically so difficult to get information about, and when it is got, one whose activity is so easily a little commonplace alongside more than one other founder of a religion and even alongside many later representatives of His own ‘religion.’ ” So too Brunner treats the historical Christ. He locates Christ’s moral authority wholly outside history. The believer cannot learn the content of Christian behavior from the past, either from the Bible or the historical example of Jesus, but only in immediate revelation-encounter with God. Niebuhr rejects the conviction that the historical Jesus is the incarnation of absolute perfection. “The Christian believes that the ideal of love is real in the will and nature of God, even though he knows of no place in history where the ideal has been realized in its pure form.” Niebuhr never satisfactorily resolves the tension between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Christian faith in his writings. There is little light in the verdict that “the Jesus of history … created the Christ of faith in the life of the early church, and … his historic life is related to the transcendent Christ as a goal and ultimate symbol of a relation which prophetic religion sees between all life and history and the transcendent.”

All such reconstructions neglect the connection between Christian faith and morals and the conviction that the historical Jesus was the embodiment of absolute and sinless morality. Because of this confidence the followers of Christ find their moral example in him. Where else can they turn? Lecky noted that Christianity has been “the main source of moral development of Europe, and … has discharged this office not so much by the inculcation of a system of ethics, however pure, as by the assimilating and attractive influence of a perfect ideal. The moral progress of mankind can never cease to be distinctly and intensely Christian so long as it consists of a gradual approximation to the character of the Christian Founder.” …

A Biblical Motif

This connection between Jesus and Christian morality has not only been recognized across the centuries. It comes from the New Testament witness itself. It is inseparable, as Smyth observes, from the apostolic picture of the moral life. “The ethical example of Jesus as an object of faith was clearly and positively given in the apostolic witness to him, and it is a known and distinct Light in the Christian consciousness.” But that is not all. Jesus himself implied it—more, he explicitly taught it—to his earliest followers. Our Lord’s invitation “follow Me” implied a discipleship in the ethico-religious sense. He is “the Way” (Jn. 14:6). The Christian is to walk in him. Jesus consciously knew that he gave man the ideal pattern of behavior, or more accurately, that he fulfilled the requirements of true human morality in his own life.… The New Testament writers candidly confess themselves to be sinners. They are men who have fallen short of the moral ideal. Their hope is redemption. Yet again and again they set Jesus forth as the supreme moral ideal (Eph. 5:2, Heb. 12:3, 1 Pet. 2:21 ff.). Their verdict is that Jesus Christ is “holy, guileless, undefiled, separate from sinners, made higher than the heavens” (Heb. 7:26). He is Jesus Christ “the Righteous” (1 Jn. 2:1).

This portion of Christian Personal Ethics, published this month by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., is an abridgment of Chapter 17, without footnote references, and is reprinted by permission.

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