Christian Ethics: A Short Companion

Table of Contents

Series Preface

Introduction

PART I: The Structure of the Christian Life

ONE: Three Models of Moral Reasoning

TWO: Human Nature and Sin

THREE: Grace as Power and Pardon

FOUR: Virtue and Vocation, Character and Calling

FIVE: The Church’s Authority to Teach

SIX: The Way of Life and the Way of Death

PART II: The Spirit of the Christian Life

SEVEN: Christian Love

EIGHT: Preference in Love

NINE: Love and God’s Commands

TEN: Marriage as Embodied Love

ELEVEN: Love and the Loves

Notes

Further Reading

Index

"Gilbert Meilaender’s characteristic clarity and grace make Christian Ethics a delightfully refreshing read. Meilaender’s elegance and sobriety manages what few writers about ethics can: he makes the spirit and structure of the Christian life sound like good news. This is a wonderful volume that every Christian would do well to read."

—Matthew Lee Anderson, assistant research professor of ethics and theology, Baylor University

There is nobody—believer or unbeliever—who doesn’t have important things to learn from the thought of Gilbert Meilaender. Although he writes as a Christian ethicist, anchored in the Lutheran tradition, he is a teacher of humanity. There is nothing narrowly ‘sectarian’ about his reflections and writings. The evidence for that is on display in each of the essays in this valuable collection. My advice to people of every faith (and none) is to read and learn.

—Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

Gilbert Meilaender is for me one of the fathers in the recovery of the field of truly Christian ethics. This book conveys his mastery of theological ethics in the tradition and of philosophical ethics from Aristotle to contemporary thinkers. Most importantly this lucid introduction to ethics ensconces ethics within the gospel, within life in the triune God, within discipleship in Christ by the Spirit, and within an understanding of human personhood in ­community—thus surpassing, though not ignoring, consequentialist, deontological, and virtue approaches. From this vantage point he equips us to engage with all the challenging ethical issues of our time.

—W. Ross Hastings, Sangwoo Youtong Chee Chair of Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia

In this volume Meilaender encapsulates key themes traversing his work for years. Drawing together paradox and faith in theology and human experience, Meilaender approaches a broad range of significant topics shaping Christian ethics that markedly unifies love and obedience as central to life in Christ. A vital read for those trying to understand Protestant ethics more deeply through the rich foundational and practical questions of a life transformed through faith, hope, and love.

—Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Mockler Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Meilaender serves us all by reminding us that Christian ethics is not self-improvement and virtue signaling. He discusses ethics vertically in light of the pardon and power of God’s grace, manifesting horizontally in love toward one’s neighbor. Individuals and congregations should study this insightful resource. I will be using it as an introductory college textbook.

—Scott Stiegemeyer, associate professor of theology and bioethics, Concordia University Irvine

Christian Ethics: A Short Companion

Copyright © 2024 by Gilbert Meilander

Published by B&H Academic

Brentwood, Tennessee

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4300-8749-6

Dewey Decimal Classification: 241

Subject Heading: CHRISTIAN LIFE \ RELIGIOUS \ CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Scripture quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.

Cover design by Emily Keafer Lambright. Cover illustration by J614/iStock.

In memory of my parents, with gratitude

Series Preface

In 1876, German Lutheran theologian Christoph Ernst Luthardt eloquently illustrated the relationship between theology and ethics. He wrote, God first loved us is the summary of Christian doctrine. We love Him is the summary of Christian morality. ¹ The wedding of theology and ethics was later embraced by generations of theologians and ethicists, such as Protestant titans Herman Bavinck and Carl F. H. Henry, ² who rightly understood the primacy of both theology and ethics in the Christian life. But at times in the recent history of the Protestant church, the study of ethics has been relegated to a mere application of theology and biblical studies rather than understood as a first-order discipline in rich partnership with the theological task.

The aim of the Christian ethic can be summed up in the words of Jesus in Matt 22:37–39. We, God’s people, are to love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart[s] and with all [our] soul[s] and with all [our] mind[s] . . . and to love [our] neighbor as [ourselves]. We hear echoes of this summation in the words of Luthardt, Bavinck, and Henry, each of whom spoke of how God’s people are to love him as the summary of Christian morality. Thus, Christian ethics is nothing less than a primary motivation for those seeking to be faithful to God in all of life and live in light of how he has revealed himself in Scripture. Ethics as discipleship is a key theme throughout Scripture and one the church must elevate as we seek God’s face in the academy, in our churches, and especially in our personal lives as transformed creatures made in the very image of God.

While Christian ethics is a core element of God’s revelation to his people about how they are to live as his followers, it is also a distinct philosophical discipline that must be studied in consideration of the rich history of moral thought seen throughout the life of the church and the wider society. Much of today’s discourse about Christian ethics tends to focus on the mere application of theological or philosophical principles, rather than understanding how these principles have been derived and refined over time in light of the massive metaphysical and epistemological shifts in the history of thought.

Given the recent tendency in wider evangelicalism at times to downplay the direct study of ethics in our curricula, in our church life, and in the task of discipleship, the Essentials in Christian Ethics series is designed to illuminate the richness of the Christian ethic, as well as how ethics is intricately woven into the whole of the Christian life. We have gathered renowned ethicists and leading figures in their fields of theological and philosophical inquiry who are passionate about proclaiming the biblical ethic to a world desperately in need of Christ.

The series is made up of short, introductory volumes spanning metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Each volume can be used independently as an introduction to the crucial elements of the Christian ethical tradition, including resources for further reading and key concepts for those seeking to dig deeper into the beauty of God’s revelation. They can also be used as supplements to a larger ethics curriculum, where a specialized volume could be used to augment a primary text or to give deeper insight into particular contemporary ethical debates.

As editors, we have longed for a series like this to be written by scholars who understand and apply the rich relationship of theology and ethics in their teaching, writings, and ministry. This series is designed to model for readers how the biblical ethic applies to every area of life both as a distinct theological and philosophical discipline in the context of the Christian moral tradition from a robust Protestant viewpoint. We pray this serves the wider academy, those training in our colleges and seminaries, and especially those seeking to employ the riches of Christian ethics in the context of the local church.

C. Ben Mitchell and Jason Thacker

Series Editors

Notes

¹ Christoph Ernst Luthardt, Apologetic Lectures on the Moral Truths of Christianity, trans. Sophia Taylor (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1876), 26.

² See Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics. ed. John Bolt, vol. 1, Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), §1:58; and Carl F. H. Henry, Christian Personal Ethics, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 486.

Introduction

There are surely many ways one might construct a short companion to Christian ethics, and there is no single right way to do it. In these few introductory paragraphs, I aim simply to outline the approach I will be taking.

When Christians think about how they are to live, they necessarily think of their lives always in relation to God. And that means the God whom we have come to know in Jesus—the God who orders human life in creation; the God from whom we have turned and to whom we need to find our way back; and the God who, never giving up on us, comes in search of us when we cannot find the way back. That simple threefold relation to God provides the central movements in the narrative that gives structure to the Christian life and shapes the spirit within which it is lived.

If we think of human beings as God’s creatures, we cannot suppose that we could or should determine entirely for ourselves the plan for our lives. Much as we love the freedom to choose for ourselves, and important as it often is to exercise such freedom, we are, after all, dependent beings. The Author of our being has authority over us. We never belong to anyone else, or to any human community, to the whole extent of our being. Hence, when we think about how we ought to live, we try to take seriously the ways in which the Creator has ordered human life, and we realize that freedom is not the sole truth about our nature. For that reason one of the things this book attempts is to think about how to structure our lives so that we follow what the psalmist calls the way of the righteous and are like trees planted by streams of water, whose leaf does not wither.

As the psalmist also knew, we often fail to be such people. The way of the righteous is not the only possibility; there is also the way of the wicked. And, however hard it may be for us sometimes to acknowledge this, it is precisely the independence we love that underlies our wrong turnings. Flying in the face of reality, we try to live as if our lives were entirely our own. To think about the Christian life, therefore, is also to think about how sin permeates and distorts our lives. Herbert Butterfield, who was a well-known British historian, once wrote that if we were to take the animosity present in the average church choir and give it a dimension over time by giving it a history, we would have an explanation for all the wars that have been fought in human history. Hence, to think about the Christian life is to think not only of ways in which the Creator has ordered our lives but also about our own tendency to disorder them.

This short companion invites us, therefore, to think about the structure of the Christian life—what we are to do and who we are to be; our sin and the grace of God that brings pardon and healing to sinful people; the meaning of a life that responds to the call of God and is lived within the church. When we think about the structure of the Christian life, these topics are almost unavoidable, and we consider them in Part One of the book.

Important as those topics are, none of them captures fully what we might call the inner spirit of Christian living, a spirit of love that