Law and the Spirit: Situation Ethics with a Difference

Time magazine’s feature article last Christmas on “The Evangelicals: New Empire of Faith” was thought-provoking. It spoke of the challenge and chance for evangelicals to help build faith and character in America again. Secularism and situation ethics had been a disappointment and failure. It quoted Illinois representative John Anderson as saying. “American democracy could collapse without a rebirth of the Founding Fathers’ belief in the ‘self-evident moral order of the universe’.” This makes sense.

Although evangelicalism today shows much movement, it yet lacks structure in order to make lasting impact. Truth is, there is little evangelical theology that could fill the opening void. Joseph Fletcher’s situation ethics has been a fad. It must have damaged countless lives, and perhaps—if we think of Watergate—a whole nation. But has it been replaced by a philosophy of moral absolutes?

Fletcher’s philosophy seems to have sunk into the fabric of our thinking. It succeeded because of the grain of truth inherent in its protest. Fletcher accused the Protestant Bible and the Roman Catholic Natural Law traditions of being too little flexible for the needs of individual persons and situations. In both traditions casuistry seemed highly artificial and a vain attempt to catch the spirit of life itself. In this Fletcher was right. He was wrong in doing away with the Decalogue and building an obviously atheist answer. Is there an alternative, taking into account moral absolutes and concern for the situation?

We have rarely looked back into the Protestant tradition of ethics. Luther fought the idea of the extraordinary Christian vocation as embodied in the monks and replaced it by the ideal of “domestic piety,” Christian life at home and on the job. He gave top priority to the Ten Commandments and expounded them in print some fifteen times during his life. For additional ethical guidance he pointed to paternal rule and to the demands that secular vocation made on a person. Calvin, stressing the instructive value of the Decalogue for the believer and teaching its positive deployment, still enhanced its prominence. For a long time Protestant ethics was Decalogue morality plus common sense. Its tone was set by the use of much Old Testament material, especially from wisdom literature. New Testament ethics were somewhat put on the side, and so were definitely all extraordinary vocations. No wonder it took Protestantism two hundred years to rediscover the task of foreign missions, which needs more than faith in one’s domestic calling, and three hundred years to see young women move again into full-time works of charity that reach beyond family and neighborhood. Fletcher’s situation ethics thrived on this predicament of Protestant ethics. But he merely replaced one extreme with another: rigid absolutes by absolute relativism.

The Bible puts the Ten Commandments together with the leadership of the Holy Spirit. A believer is guided by the Spirit within the framework of the Decalogue. It is always the spiritual poverty of human rationalism that insists on opting for one or the other: Scripture without Spirit or Spirit without Scripture. The formula for Christian ethics must surely be, Scripture and the Spirit.

We often seem to forget about the works of the Spirit. They include not only inspiration of Scripture and regeneration of the believer, as some admit, or speaking in tongues and healing of the sick, as others insist, but also the simple, regular leading of God’s sons and daughters (Romans 8:14). As Rudolf Schnackenburg, the Catholic exegete, puts it: “Biblical revelation intends the submission of human existence under God so that man no longer seeks his own way but listens to and obeys what God will say. All moral endeavour is brought into the dialogue with God, even more: under God’s guidance.” Or, as that famous biblical scholar of the first half of our century, Adolf Schlatter, said: “God’s Spirit is present in man and the force to move him, just as much as a sinful will.”

Guiding the Christian right through the obstacles that arise on his path, the Spirit of Christ will always remain in harmony with the book that speaks of Christ. Christ is the norm for the guidance of the Spirit. The Ten Commandments are like the safety rails on a motorway, protecting the driver from the abyss or uncertain ground to his right and left, and one is surely grateful for them. On the other hand no one would wish to drive his car, steering wheel locked, solely by means of those safety rails. What we need is inside-control.

The Ten Commandments are the framework of the good life, not the target. A frame by itself is still empty. It only defines the scene of action. It still needs to be filled. That is why Paul can say, “Love is the fulfillment of the Law” (Rom. 13). The Decalogue does not always tell us in a given situation which of good options to choose.

That is why the Holy Spirit steps into the picture. He teaches those who are willing to listen and to learn what God expects from them at that moment. His guidance will be the application of God’s written word in a new situation. Fletcher’s new morality abolished the law in favor of the situation. Biblical situation ethics is convinced that the Spirit will meet the righteous demands of the law (Rom 8:4). Law and the Spirit fit together: they are the word of the same God.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit will put the situation into the perspective of God’s Kingdom. The new morality remained a prisoner of the same old narrow yard as described by casuistry, and was all bound up by the contradictions in home and job. The Holy Spirit will again add vision to virtue, and lift up our horizons to include the greater calling: Christ’s commission to establish obedience of faith among all the nations.

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