The Bible and the New Morality

In this panel three scholars discuss the new morality in the light of biblical ethics. They are: Dr. James Daane, director of the Pastoral Doctorate Program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and a minister of the Christian Reformed Church; Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, chairman of the Department of Church History at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and a minister of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; and Dr. Leon Morris, canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral (Anglican) in Melbourne, Australia, where he is also principal of Ridley College. Moderator of the discussion is Editor Carl F. H. Henry ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.This is one of a filmed series of thirteen half-hour panels prepared for public-service television presentation and for use by church and college discussion groups. The series, “God and Man in the Twentieth Century,” was produced by Educational Communication Association (P.O. Box 114, Indianapolis, Indiana 46204) under a Lilly Endowment grant.

Henry: Shouldn’t we expect morals or ethics to change, just as transportation does, so that what was good enough for our grandparents or godparents isn’t necessarily good enough for us? After all, is the old morality good just because it’s old? Or is the new morality rather immorality? And shouldn’t one’s moral decisions, after all, be one’s personal decisions?

Montgomery: I’m not very happy with this analogy between transportation and morality. It makes me think of the comparison between an elephant and a tube of toothpaste: neither one can ride a bicycle. It’s possible to compare any two things, but the question is, Is there any legitimate basis for the comparison? It looks to me as if in the New Testament the Christian morality is not a traditional morality. It’s set over against traditionalism. Jesus is constantly striking against the religious leaders of his day who obscured absolute truth through tradition. For him absolute truth is the most contemporaneous thing in the world, and therefore his morality is the most exciting kind of guidance for life.

Henry: That’s an important point, I think, that the New Testament morality is not simply a traditional morality.

Morris: I think we have to be very careful in talking about the new morality because the expression can be used in more ways than one. For some people the new morality is simply an out. They want an easy way in life, and they use the new morality as an excuse for letting down the floodgates and doing the things they want to do that deep down they know are wrong. But for other people the new morality is a very serious attempt to think through problems of ethics and to give to men of this day an approach which will be validly based. They think that the old traditional basing is quite in error. They would feel that traditionally the Bible stands as the standard, and they just don’t like that. Now this new morality poses the whole problem of where we find our standards. Are we to regard the Bible as simply giving us some nice thoughts of men of antiquity, or is it the very revelation of the living God himself?

Daane: I suspect that we can answer the question about change in morality by saying that moral responses change with the changing of the times. But the references, the objective moral standards, the Ten Commandments, if you will, by reference to which these acts are moral or immoral, do not change.

Henry: Well, let’s take a look at the new morality, or situational ethics, or existential ethics, as it’s sometimes called. We know that it rejects fixed moral principles and that it reduces everything, as it were, to love. As the Anglican Bishop John Robinson would say, in Honest to God, love and do as you please. After all, didn’t Jesus of Nazareth say that love is the new and great commandment?

Morris: Yes, but didn’t he also say that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it? It’s just too easy, in my judgment, to say that Jesus taught an ethic of love and then to put a full stop. He did teach love, but he also had a very high place for law. Take the Sermon on the Mount. You get a kind of refrain running through that: “You have heard that it was said to them of old time … but I say unto you.…” But all the time what Jesus does is to reinforce what had been said in old times. He never does away with it. For instance, he takes the commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and he doesn’t say, “Let’s do away with that and from now on anybody who wants to can commit adultery.” Rather, he says “Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery in his heart.” You see, he takes the law and says: This is a good commandment; it ought to be kept, but it ought to be taken further. I think you will find that right through the teaching of Jesus there runs this emphasis on righteousness, on justice, as well as on love. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should take love lightly, but we ought to keep these things in balance.

Henry: You think it’s an oversimplification to reduce the whole of biblical morality to love?

Morris: Oh, yes.

Montgomery: Yes, Jesus places a great deal of stress on the combination of love and the keeping of commandments. For example, he says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” There is quite a contrast between this and the vagueness of the so-called new morality or situational ethics. Canon Rhymes—and Joseph Fletcher maintains much the same position—holds that one acts simply in order to bring about maximum wholeness in the other person, or to bring about the greatest benefits for a group. This just begs the question. What is maximum wholeness? What is the greatest benefit? Psychoanalysis, it seems to me, has shown in the twentieth century that people are really not aware of the degree to which selfishness strikes them in their actions. You know, the statement is made that a psychiatrist and a coal miner have a good deal in common. The psychiatrist goes down deeper, stays down longer, and comes up dirtier. He comes up with more evidence of the selfishness that operates in human life. In order to deal with the problem of selfishness, it’s necessary to have external objective standards by which our selfishness can be brought into the light.

Henry: Well, are you saying that the new morality is pervaded by a certain vagueness? That love as the new morality states it is quite ambiguous and lacking in content and direction?

Montgomery: Yes, very definitely. Love is a motive. It doesn’t in itself define the nature of the obligations.

Daane: It seems to me that you can put the matter this way. The new morality runs into difficulty when it appeals to love and when it appeals to Jesus without any specific biblical context. You spoke of wholeness a moment ago. Many of these Christocentric theologians appeal to Jesus to find out what a whole, new man would do in this area of sex and they run into a dead-end street, because Jesus didn’t happen to get married or court girls. Right at this point the attempt to separate Jesus and love from the total situation of the Bible makes the new morality run into something highly abstract and even blank.

Henry: What do you mean by a Christocentric ethic in contrast to a biblical ethic?

Daane: Well, I mean the people that appeal not specifically to the Bible but to Jesus and to the fact that Jesus says you have to love. Now in the area of love you can’t look to Jesus and looking at him alone find out how you ought to court your girl, because he set no example at this point. That’s what I mean by determining an ethic in terms of Jesus alone, apart from the Bible.

Montgomery: Is there any Jesus apart from the Bible? What kind of Jesus are they talking about? This is what bothers me. It looks to me as if one either obtains one’s portrait of Jesus and his ethic from the primary documents or develops this out of one’s self. One spins a Jesus out of one’s own self, as the spider spins …

Daane: Well, particularly in the area of sex, because no one has spun it out for you.

Henry: The term Jesus or Christ becomes a philosophical abstraction rather than anything really identifiable in terms of the historical Jesus.

Daane: Well, he isn’t a norm, I would say, at this point. Jesus by himself apart from the biblical context cannot be taken for a norm in the area of sexuality simply because he did not get married and raise a family or so far as we know practice sexuality of any kind.

Henry: Now, the new morality rejects fixed moral principles and concentrates, as you know, on immediate relationships between persons, and it finds in love alone the only fixed content of morality. Well, how does Christian ethics, authentically Christian ethics, differ from this? What difference does it make by way of contrast if one makes a moral choice in the authentically biblical tradition?

Morris: The point we’ve already made is that Jesus insisted on justice, on righteousness, as well as on love. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” You can parallel this in all sorts of ways. He kept telling people that if they wanted to follow him they would have to take up their cross day by day and follow him. This stands for an attitude of following in the steps of Jesus, doing the things he would have people do. He kept insisting that people must do righteousness, do justice, as well as do love. I think we get the New Testament quite wrong if we omit that particular emphasis.

Montgomery: Yes, and he never allowed the situation to determine the ethical involvement. He didn’t maintain an attitude of ethical relativity. This is the main difficulty, as far as I can see, with the new morality, that it allows the situation to determine the ethical principles and thereby really leaves the situation without ethical principles. For example, take the differences in morality one encounters in various cultural situations. I presume that among cannibals it’s a basic ethical principle to clean your plate. But I doubt very much that Jesus would have appreciated this kind of approach.

Daane: It seems to me that the distinction between the biblical morality and the so-called new morality at this point is that in biblical thought love is defined for you in precepts, in commandments, in moral imperatives. The heart of Christianity, after all, is that God so loved the world that he gave his Son. So the revelation of the essence of Christianity is the love of God, which means that we have to be told what love is. Now, in the new morality you decide what love is in the heat of the moment, maybe in the back seat of the car, in the moment of uncontrolled or well-nigh uncontrolled passion.

Montgomery: Which isn’t easy.

Daane: And now the Bible comes to you and tells you that this is love and that is love, but it doesn’t let you decide in every given situation or in any given situation just what is an act of love or is not. Hence, from the biblical point of view homosexuality is ruled out as one possible expression of love.

Henry: Let’s take the given moral situation in modern times. As I recall, the Kinsey Report projects—and one always has certain doubts about the reliability of statistical samplings—but at any rate it projects that almost half of the American college women have sexual relationships before marriage. And the American Family Service says—I presume also on the basis of a projection from a statistical sampling—that one in five brides is now pregnant at the time of marriage. Now that brings to mind a passage that would bear on this from Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God. I quote: “Nothing can of itself be labeled as wrong. Sex relations before marriage or divorce may be wrong ninety-nine cases, or even one hundred cases, out of one hundred, but they are not intrinsically so, for the only intrinsic evil is lack of love.” Now, I submit that if Bishop Robinson’s abandonment of fixed moral principles is right, his figures are capable of a complete inversion so that premarital intercourse and divorce might be right on his presuppositions a hundred times out of a hundred rather than one out of a hundred. What about the consequences of an unprincipled morality?

Morris: I think that if you have that kind of morality you are shot to pieces. Once you admit the possibility of an exception you can no longer have a morality that’s worth having, because, human nature being what it is, every one of us believes that the exception applies in his own particular case. The rule is for somebody else, the exception is for me. And the dikes are unleashed and the floods come in. A moment ago Dr. Daane was talking about what might happen in the back of a car. If you’ve got two teen-age kids in the back of a car and they’ve got in their minds firmly the idea that there can be exceptions in this matter of sex morals …

Henry: Because they love each other so much.

Morris: Exactly. They see themselves as different from other people. Nobody ever had to put up with the difficulties we have to put up with. Nobody ever loved as we love. So that there is just nothing to hold them. But where they have a firm grasp on great principles of morality, then they can say immediately, “This is wrong,” and they know where they are. It seems to me that one great weakness in the new morality is that it fails to give clear guidance to people who need clear guidance.

Henry: It’s interesting that here in the District of Columbia a couple of years ago a student at one of the local universities killed a coed because he loved her so much. This was his report to the police—a very interesting story.

Daane: Now on the basis of the new morality this could not be judged bad. Right?

Henry: Well, in Bishop Robinson’s Christian Morals Today, a later publication, after the storm over his earlier work, the bishop backtracks a bit. He says in regard to premarital sex relationships that there is a bonding element between sex and marriage which is so firm that one might almost invariably say that premarital sex is wrong. My point is that if the bishop is here saying that in this one situation, premarital sex, there is an objective principle that controls sex in all situations and places, he has introduced the very sort of principle he said was illicit and illegitimate to begin with. You cannot have both a principled ethic and an unprincipled ethic jumbled side by side. You’ve got to have one or the other, and I don’t think you can play Bishop Robinson’s tune on Gabriel’s horn.

Morris: It’s difficult. In that book he is desperately trying, it would seem to me, to preserve something like the traditional code of morals. You remember that he says that every society must have its net—that some nets are finer than others but that the net has to be woven by society. People then are kept within reasonable bounds. But what he never does, it seems to me, is show why there should be a net and why a net should have its strands in such and such a place. In other words, we’re back at the point I was trying to make a little while ago: The new morality offers no clear guidance for people who have to make an agonizing decision. They are thrown back on their own resources. They may be the exception to the general rule; there is just no way for them to know what is right.

Montgomery: The biblical morality is frequently criticized for not taking into account exceptions, for being simplistic. But it seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. It’s the new morality that is simplistic in thinking that somehow, magically, out of such situations as the teen-agers in the car, you get solutions to problems like this.

Morris: It asks too much of people.

Montgomery: Right. The Christian morality fully recognizes the difficulty of moral decision. Frequently a Christian finds himself in a position in which he must decide that one moral principle must be violated in favor of other moral principles, but he never vindicates himself in this situation. He decides in terms of the lesser of evils or the greater of goods, and this drives him to the Cross to ask forgiveness for the human situation in which this kind of complication and ambiguity exists.

Henry: There is a difference between the exception that is recognized as wicked and sinful and needing repentance and forgiveness and an exception that is tolerated as presumably moral.

Daane: The exceptional ethical situation creates even for Christian morality an exceptional amount of difficulty. But in Christianity there are exceptions. It seems to me that it is very indicative of the new morality that the exceptions, the most-far-out ethical situations, best illustrate its character. It’s the son and mother who alone are left after a nuclear war who then are left with the task of repopulating the race. It’s the mother in a concentration camp who if she gets pregnant with another man can return to her family. These exceptional ethical situations are most indicative and illuminating for the nature of this new morality, which makes the exception the prime thing rather than, as in biblical morality, the reverse. And as to the question why the new morality is attractive …

Henry: What gives it its appeal today?

Daane: It seems to me it is attractive for two reasons. Some people find it an excuse for sexual license. But others find that they warm up to the idea that what is demanded is love, which is certainly true enough; even Christians believe this. It depends, however, upon how you define love. The new morality leaves love undefined; it seems to me that this is one of its basic weaknesses.

Montgomery: Yes. Some people think also that contemporary psychology gives reason for moving in the direction of the new morality. But those who take this view are very much deceived. Psychology has come to the conclusion in recent years that there must be a structure of principle within which the individual operates. Without the structure of principle, the individual gradually comes to the conclusion that no one cares. If one attempts to bring up a child without any structure of principle, the child will keep pressuring to see if anybody out there really loves him to the extent of providing an opportunity for him to move by principle. And this means that if the structures are left out, the child or the adult destroys himself trying to create principle from within.

Daane: Which means that nobody loves to be utterly alone in the universe.

Montgomery: Right. C. S. Lewis has pointed out in his Preface to Paradise Lost that Milton’s greatness came from the fact that he used his genius within a framework and that this is characteristic of great art and literature through the centuries. It’s also characteristic of great morality.

Henry: Well, now, the new morality is not for many people who live by it an articulate view of ethical decision. If the Bible is taken seriously and man is a sinner who needs to be redeemed, isn’t this vagabond morality what people naturally live by? What about the Gentile world that early Christianity faced? Look at the first chapter of Romans.

Morris: I think that’s a very important point, because there are a lot of people today who’ve got the idea that traditional Christianity gives a morality that is good for people who are half inclined to be good anyway. But that doesn’t work in a time like the present, when there is very much license and people are doing all sorts of things they ought not to do. But they overlook altogether the fact that Christianity was born into a world like that. Take, for instance, such a man as Seneca, a great and good philosopher. He went on record as saying that chastity is simply a proof of ugliness. Or again, he says that innocency is not rare; it’s non-existent. This kind of statement could be paralleled again and again from the classical authors of the first century. Into that world Christianity came with its uncompromising demand that people put away altogether what passed for sex ethics in their day. Lecky, the historian of European morals, maintains that chastity was the one new virtue that Christianity brought into the world. Now whether or not you believe the truth of that, the important thing is that Christianity came into a world where it was accepted unquestioningly that continence was an unreasonable demand to make on any man—with the women, of course, it was different.

Henry: Gentlemen, I think we have come—if you’ll excuse me, Dr. Morris—to just about the end of our panel. We have only enough time left for a closing summary statement by each of the panel members.

Daane: I would say that the new morality is in part a concession to the times. Yet one ought to be a bit careful here, remembering what we have just been saying. I notice that most of the professional advocates of the new morality are men who are well on in years. Secondly, I would say that the new morality has an appeal against an excessive amount of legalism found in the whole church tradition. But its great weakness is that it leaves the central thing it demands, namely love, undefined, and it’s up to each individual to define it as he wills. At that point it becomes dangerous.

Montgomery: Ours is a day when concern for social justice has come to the fore to an extent unparalleled in many generations of the past. It seems to me that this is a time of all times when an absolute ethic is a necessity. If we are concerned about people who are disenfranchised, people who are suffering from cultural prejudice, and the like, we had better have a very clean-cut standard of ethics, so that prejudicial attitudes toward these people cannot be justified under any circumstances. This the Christian faith provides. The Christian faith says that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free; we are all one in Jesus Christ. This kind of absolute claim stands regardless of the particular cultural situation.

Henry: Dr. Morris.

Morris: Two things. It seems to me that the new moralists pay insufficient attention to the fact that God has made a revelation of himself in Scripture and that this revelation carries with it great principles which stand back of moral conduct. And the other thing is that this same revelation brings before us the Spirit of God himself, who helps men be the kind of people they ought to be.

Henry: Nothing we have said on this panel is intended to lessen the importance of love. But we have emphasized that love gains its direction from the commandments of God. The Ten Commandments are still the divine standard by which the whole world will be judged. Jesus Christ came to fulfill, not to destroy, the law, and both the Bible and Jesus, its central figure, agree that a holy life is the only wise life, the only strong life, and the only truly happy life. Thank you, gentlemen, for an illuminating and thought-provoking discussion.

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