9. Situation Ethics
9
Situation Ethics
So I said to them, “Let any who have gold take it off.” So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.
Aaron, Exodus 32:24
I am satisfied that when the Almighty wants me to do, or not to do, a particular thing, he finds a way of letting me know it.
Abraham Lincoln
Because I could.
Bill Clinton
Forty years ago, during the dismal decade that Britain now recalls as the Swinging Sixties, a novel account of Christian behavior calling itself situation ethics went up like a rocket on both sides of the Atlantic. Situation ethics offered guidance about guidance; it affirmed that in determining how to act toward other people, one’s guiding star should be the maxim that “love trumps law.” According to situation ethics, the rules and restrictions that the Bible sets out as God-given are at best rules of thumb, generalizations that tell us what actions neighbor-love will require more often than not—but there will be justified exceptions, and we must always be on the lookout for them. Those who espoused situation ethics saw love as the whole of what God commands and the law of Moses, which with adjustments reflecting the move from Old to New Testament conditions is also the law of Christ, as a provisional pointer only. These rules should not be seen as divine mandates on how to fulfill the law of love, but rather as human footnotes, embodying the verdict of experience as to what love requires in most cases, yet not closing the door to other possibilities from time to time. Presenters of situation ethics commonly assumed that fulfilling the second table of the law (neighbor-love) was in and of itself fulfillment of the first table (honoring God); so the theory reinforced the de-Christianized drift of those times—the drift of which, arguably, it was itself a product.
It was not, then, a happy development; rather the reverse. In the secularized, self-indulgent sixties, which had already started swinging vigorously, this view of ethics encouraged people to think of love—Christian love!—as gratifying other people, from their infancy to their old age, by giving them whatever they said or showed that they wanted. It led people to make exceptions in their own favor, particularly in sexual matters. In various forms of sexual encounters, they were able to persuade themselves that they were acting lovingly, and break the rules accordingly. Thus situation ethics contributed to the emotional immaturity, behavioral immorality, and intellectual incoherence that have become the hallmark of the present era.
Situation ethics was a form of what was once known as utilitarianism and is now called consequentialism. This is the view that one discerns the right thing to do entirely by calculating consequences. If we choose the course that will lead to most good (pleasure, profit, privilege, progress, or whatever) and will do least harm, we have done what we should. Bible-believers, who take seriously God’s specifying what pleases him and what does not, have not found it hard to see the holes in this idea. They see that law and love belong together, that law is love’s eyes, that love for God and humankind is the law’s heart, and that the conjunction remains a nonnegotiable of Christianity. So Bible-believers have never welcomed situation ethics, and that is one reason why little is heard of it among evangelicals.
But situation ethics leaves us with the question, highlighted and sharpened up: How should Christians pick their way on a day-to-day basis through the bewildering complex of static and shifting circumstances, of personal, societal, and cultural pressures, of competing claims and rival options that surround us? We have spoken about this in general terms, but more, we think, needs to be said. Hence this chapter.
The Doctrine of Situations
There are three things that we need to understand about our life-situations. First, they are a field of God’s sovereignty. What does that mean? It means that the living God, who created the entire universe and actively upholds it in being (otherwise it would vanish away, and so would we as part of it), knows everything that has been and now is and foreknows everything that will be just because, in a way that totally passes our understanding, he plans and decides and controls everything that takes place. From inside (and we are all insiders at this point) the cosmos appears as a huge interlocking system of cause and effect, the working of which scientists can examine, map out, and within limits predict because the processes all operate with what appears as built-in regularity. But Christians know what science can never find out, namely, that all the processes of nature are willed and sustained directly by the Creator, every moment, down to the smallest detail, as also are the free-flowing thoughts that run through our minds, and the dreams that befuddle us while we sleep, and the self-determined, accountable decisions about what we will and will not do that we make in a steady stream throughout our waking hours. Let us say it clearly: all the regularities of nature, including the functioning of our own minds and bodies, are as they are because God wills and keeps them so. Nothing would be as it is—nothing, indeed, would exist at all—were it not for the active will of God.
Some time back J. I. learned that a teen was referring to him as “J.I.P., O.O.C.” Enquiry revealed that O.O.C meant “out of control,” and that this was intended as a compliment. J. I. did not know quite what to make of that, and since the idioms of teen talk change constantly, he imagines it is now a thing of the past anyway. But it made him recall an old hymn on walking with Jesus: “Take time to be holy, / Be calm in thy soul; / Each thought and each temper / Beneath his control.” And, beyond this, it brought to mind words from Psalm 139: “O LORD, you have searched me and known me! . . . You discern my thoughts from afar. . . . Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me” (vv. 1, 2, 4, 5). And he would not have it any other way. To be totally in the hand of God, not only in grace but also in providence, which is where he is, is where he wants to be. Carolyn concurs. And we hope all our readers are with us on this.
To affirm God’s sovereignty over everything around us, within us, happening to us, and issuing from us takes nothing from our certainty (which Scripture confirms) that all our thoughts, words, and deeds, including all our motives, purposes, attitudes, and reactions, are truly our own, not forced upon us from outside but coming out from within us, so that we are in truth responsible subjects, open to assessment both by other people and by our own consciences, and finally by God himself. Rather it adds to our certainty that, as our continued existence and all our living really involve God, so God really involves himself in an overruling way, somehow (just how, no creature can conceive), in all our circumstances, motives, actions, relationships, experiences, joys, pains, pleasures, griefs, and ventures, which form the situational reality of our daily lives. This rock-bottom fact is the launchpad from which true wisdom takes off in all its flights of thought.
Second, situations are a field of Satan’s endeavor. The first situation we meet in the Bible is in Eden, where the serpent tempted and deceived Eve, and through the disobedience that resulted ruined our race. The New Testament tells us that the serpent was the devil, the malevolent destroyer, whose name (Satan) means adversary, who is man’s permanent adversary because he is God’s permanent adversary, who is always laboring to thwart God’s plans and wreck his work, and whose attentions we shall be constantly receiving as long as we are in this world. In the New Testament, we learn about Satan as Christ’s adversary (Luke 4:1–13; Matt. 16:23; John 14:30), as the church’s adversary (1 Peter 5:8; Rev. 2:10; chap. 12), as each Christian’s adversary (Luke 22:31–32; Eph. 6:10–18), and as the world’s captor, keeping people from truth, faith, spiritual life, and personal well-being (Luke 13:16; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 2:2; 2 Tim. 2:26; 1 John 3:8; 5:19). In just about every life-situation, therefore, we must reckon with the fact that Satan is present to lead us astray, if he can. So we need always to remember Jesus’s words to the disciples who slept in Gethsemane: “Watch [stay alert and on guard] and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Matt. 26:41). The clause in the Lord’s Prayer, “lead us not into temptation,” undoubtedly refers to this need to be always on guard, as we shall see in a moment.
Third, situations are a field of personal responsibility. As we have tried to show in previous chapters, God calls us to live our lives in wisdom, and that means living in a thoughtful rather than a thoughtless manner. To do this successfully requires careful application of principles and discerning of priorities, careful balancing of short-term and long-term considerations, and within that frame, careful calculation in particular of the likely consequences relationally of different courses of action. Now we see that we need to test our reasoning, step-by-step, to make sure that Satan is not one way or another fooling us into letting the good be the enemy of the best, or into being imposed on by bad that he has dressed up as good, as happened so tragically to Eve in Eden. Deception, we must remember, is Satan’s regular ploy. Going over the various considerations in prayer to our heavenly Father and asking him to help us see which course of action will most effectively advance his glory and his kingdom will often lead us to true clarity of discernment and decision. Let it be burned into our consciences that the moment thoughtlessness enters in, Satan begins to score heavily, and we are immediately at risk. It is to be expected that he will have us on the mat very shortly.
Self-deception and Satanic Seduction
The principle that in every situation we are to seek the best among competing options, which involves following the rules of wisdom for judging between alternatives, has been fully covered already and need not be discussed again. But we need to say more about how sin in our heart and Satan in our ear constantly combine to allure us into making, over and over, the same basic mistake. J. I. once read on the back of a matchbox the following bit of wit: “Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize your mistake when you make it again.” Well, what we are to discuss now is an error into which Christians all too frequently slip. It is the mistake of inferring—from the fact that circumstances, which God providentially orders, make a particular line of action possible and from the fact that we are being urged to follow it—that it will be all right with God if we make this move. What we have here is really two mistakes for the price of one. The first is to be guided by circumstances without referring to God’s revealed truth. The second is to treat human urging as divine encouragement to act in a certain way, again without referring to revelation. The end product is wrong move after wrong move.
What happens is that two unhappy things combine in a kind of pincers movement that temporarily squeezes our conscience into silence. The first is deceiving thoughts that Satan injects directly into the mind. We see him doing this to Eve in the Eden story, as the serpent speaks to her; doing it again as he tempts Jesus during the forty days in the desert at the start of the Savior’s ministry; and doing it once more as he turns Paul’s thorn in the flesh (some form of disabling pain) into a reason for the apostle to feel hopelessness about his own future ministry, thus establishing it as “a messenger of Satan,” sent to prompt the despairing thoughts Satan wanted Paul to think. The second factor is the deceitful working of our own self-serving imagination which, driven by the pride that constantly seeks some form of personal distinction, tells us how responding to others’ urgings by doing what they want us to do will give us status, win us admiration, and so suffuse our egos with a glow of achievement. We see this in a classic biblical instance as we watch Aaron making the golden calf.
Aaron, Moses’s eloquent older brother and colleague, Israel’s first high priest, is a shadowy figure in the Bible story and was, we guess, an equally elusive person in real life: a supporter rather than a leader, one whose thoughts regularly reflected what the last person to talk to him had said rather than anchoring themselves in the firmness of abiding truth. We see him backing Moses both in the latter’s finest hour of God-honoring challenge to Pharaoh and at his low point of dishonoring God by his petulance at Meribah (Num. 20:6–13). We see him backing Miriam, their older sister, in her arrogant demand to share Moses’s leadership, which led to the temporary leprosy she suffered that Aaron begged Moses to ask God to heal (Numbers 12). And in the calf affair we first see Aaron acting as the people’s cat’s-paw (or should we say, stooge?), letting himself be dragooned into promoting idolatry when they said to him, “Up, make us gods” (Exod. 32:1), after which we hear him excusing himself to his brother in the lamest way imaginable—“I threw it [the people’s proffered gold] into the fire, and out came this calf” (v. 24)—as if the calf had constructed itself while Aaron’s back was turned! Pliability and undiscerning compliance with people who put pressure on him were clearly Aaron’s weaknesses, and they betrayed him into at least the following modes of what we may call misguidance, or (to use the usual word) misguidedness:
(1) Entertaining self-serving rather than God-serving motivation. Aaron’s heart, like everyone else’s, was infected with original sin, the essence of which (so Christian thinkers unanimously affirm) is pride. It has been said that there are four types of pride: pride of face, pride of race, price of place, and pride of grace, and the last is the worst. However that may be, Aaron’s defect was clearly pride of place: he wanted to retain respect for himself as second-in-command, and was prepared to give the people what they wanted, even if it was the wrong thing for them to want, rather than risk losing their respect by saying no.
(2) Embracing man-made rather than God-taught religion. Though Moses had not yet come down the mountain to announce the first and second tables of the Ten Commandments, from Israel’s history it should have been clear to Aaron (and, we are sure, actually was) that God is not to be demeaned by being worshipped in the form of an idol—even a bull-calf, a symbol of brute strength. However, to oblige the people Aaron pandered to their superstition rather than trying to correct it—and disgraced himself by coming up with an idol to order.
(3) Excusing himself with a self-justifying rather than self-humbling explanation. Pride in all its forms, particularly pride of place, makes it always difficult, and sometimes insuperably hard, for people to face themselves and admit that they are astray, or mistaken and wrong, or ignorant or naïve, or at fault and blameworthy, and they wriggle verbally in order to avoid having to do that. So here Aaron talks to his brother in a self-affirming rather than God-fearing way, as if the calf was somehow an unhappy accident for which he was not really responsible, and for which he could not really be blamed. (“You know the people, that they are set on evil” [v. 22].) No response from Moses to Aaron is recorded, and we may guess—even hope!—that at that moment he was too disgusted with Aaron to trust himself to say anything. Disgust would certainly have been appropriate; no one can quarrel with that!
What we see in Aaron is self-deception on the grand scale, a conscience “hardened” at least temporarily into insensitivity and moral dishonesty “by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:13), and pride warding off a sense of guilt by assuring Aaron’s heart that for him to have done what he did in his situation was all right and that everything was going to be all right for the future. Nothing explicit is said of Satan, but we may be sure that he was actively on the scene, now backing Aaron’s corrupt conscience after first encouraging Aaron’s lapse.
From this cautionary example of a malformed situational ethic leading to misguided behavior, we turn for contrast to a story of right reasoning about the situation resulting in a triumphantly right response to pressure, namely, Jesus’s temptation in the desert.
About the story, some things must be said at the outset as a basis for our treatment of it. First, it is Jesus’s own story, as told to the disciples. We would not know anything about it had it not come from his own lips. Second, Matthew and Luke narrate the second and third temptations in a different order. While the personal theological interests of each evangelist may explain his choice of order, we guess that Jesus told the story more than once, and on different occasions followed both orders himself. Third, the wording of all three temptations makes them appear as both personal and Messianic: relating, that is, both to the Savior’s person-to-person obedience to the Father as the divine Son that he eternally was and to his role and destiny as “the man born to be king” (Dorothy L. Sayers’s haunting phrase) in the salvific kingdom of God, where “Son of God” as a title meant Messiah. Satan cleverly frames each temptation so that it embraces both elements of Jesus’s identity inseparably. Fourth, Jesus’s story is an interpretation and as such leaves some questions open and unanswerable. Did the devil “come” to him visibly and “say” things to him audibly? Or was it that he found in his mind thoughts of what he might do and discerned their devilish source from their content, as we have to do in our own temptations? We assume the latter, but in fact nobody knows.
We take the temptations in Luke’s order, noting first that Luke ends his story by telling us that Satan “departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13): that is, “until the next opportunity came” (NLT). Temptation was a recurring reality in Jesus’s experience, as it is also in ours.
First temptation: the situation is hunger in the desert, and the Satanic suggestion is to relieve it by making loaves out of stones. Jesus’s kingdom could then be founded on supernaturally supplying bodily needs, according to this miraculous model. Jesus’s procedure was to discern the wrongness of this suggestion by reference to what he knew of his Father’s will and then to rebut it from Scripture—specifically, by affirming the text from which he was resolved to take his guidance on the point, Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man does not live by bread alone.”
Second temptation: the situation is an envisioning of all the world’s kingdoms together, and the suggestion is to receive them all from Satan’s hands at the price of worshipping him. (We take it that, quite apart from the fact that Satan is a liar and has no power to give what he promises, the suggestion is essentially of world conquest by godless means.) In the same way as before, Jesus discerns the wrongness of this suggestion for him as Son of God in both senses and cites the text from which he will draw his guidance—“It is the LORD your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve” (Deut. 6:13).
Third temptation: the situation is Jesus certainly in imagination, maybe in fact, standing on the pinnacle of the temple and being encouraged to throw himself down from there and get up unhurt from the flagstones more than a hundred feet below—in other words to establish an identity for himself, as man and Messiah, as a superhuman wonder-man, something like Batman, and to base his kingdom on his superhuman powers. This, too, Jesus sees as a distraction from his true calling, which was to bring in the spiritually authentic kingdom of God through spiritually authentic discipleship to himself as the God-sent Savior-King. Satan, observing that Jesus has hitherto looked to Scripture for his guidance, now quotes Scripture himself to support his suggestion: he misapplies a promise of the Father’s protection in time of trouble (Ps. 91:11–12) as if it were a divinely provided safety net for the Batman act. But Jesus trumps Satan’s ace and demolishes the temptation by counterquoting Deuteronomy 6:16: “You shall not put the LORD your God to the test.” That is: you shall not provoke the Father by trying him out, creating a situation that puts him on the spot as if he were your servant rather than you his.
In each of these temptations, Satan eggs Jesus on to break the bounds, and Jesus avoids being deceived in his heart and derailed in his ministry by keeping in mind what he knows already of the Father’s declared will. Thus, at the point where Adam and Eve fell, Jesus remained upright. Thoughtlessness such as theirs would have ruined him; thoughtfulness like his would have kept them from sin. Desire, by throttling thought, opens the door to deception. “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. . . . Desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin. . . . Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers” (James 1:14–16). Satan foments and exploits desire; that is how his deceiving is regularly done. Know his tactics, then, and do not let desire stop your thinking! It is through thoughtlessness, induced by desire, that we fall.
The mix of triumph and tragedy that was David’s career gives instructive confirmation of what we are saying. Spiritual triumph through difficult times is the first part of David’s story, and twice in particular David refused point-blank to conclude that he should do what he could do, just because he kept in mind what he knew of God’s revealed will. He knew that God had rejected King Saul and that he himself had been anointed to take Saul’s place; and he knew that Saul was chasing him with an armed force, seeking his life; so he was living as a fugitive, trying to keep out of Saul’s way. One day, however, when David and his men were hiding in the recesses of a cave, Saul entered that cave alone. David’s men said in effect: “This is God in action! He has given you the means of fulfilling his plan! Kill Saul now!” But David would not do it, because Saul was the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 24). Shortcuts that are immoral in their own right are never the will of God. Not long after, a virtual rerun of this incident took place (1 Samuel 26). David and Abishai found themselves standing over Saul’s sleeping body, surrounded by Saul’s army, also sleeping. Abishai whispered: “God has given your enemy into your hand this day”—let me kill him for you! But David again said no, for the same reason as before: “Who can put out his hand against the LORD’s anointed and be guiltless?” (vv. 8–9). So far, so good; David escaped the temptation to do what was in his power to do, because he remembered the boundaries God had set. Circumstances may indeed give us obvious opportunities to break God’s rules, but it is never God’s will that we should do that. In due course, Saul was killed in battle and David became king. He had practiced obedient restraint, and avoided self-deception, and God honored him for it.
But in the case of Bathsheba and Uriah (2 Samuel 11–12) it was a different story. This was a tragedy in which David did what he realized he could and might reasonably expect to get away with. Lust stifled thought, as lust always does, and blanketed conscience; David gave no thought to the fact that he was breaking God’s commandments, and, as we saw earlier, effectively broke the whole series from the sixth to the tenth before he was finished; he deceived himself by assuming that since he was king, what he was doing was all right, for this is how kings behave; and his conscience slept soundly until Nathan came a year later to wake it up. From then on, David’s career went downhill. It is a sad story, luridly revealing the misguidedness that self-satisfied self-deception can lead to, even in the best of men and women.
Situational Guidance
While the situation ethics of half a century ago ruined itself by opposing love to law, it rendered service as a reminder that our situation must always be our focus as we seek God’s guidance, whether in general terms (What should I be doing with my life? What sort of career should I plan and fit myself to follow? How should I prepare to be a change agent for God?) or under specific pressures (How should I handle this crisis? Should I propose marriage to this person? What ought I to do to repair this friendship?). Taking stock of the situation as a whole is the necessary first step. Let us round off this chapter by pulling together the threads of our discussion to point up the full series of steps that should be taken if we would be led to situational decisions that are wise and right.
First, survey the situation, collecting all the facts that we see our decision must take account of and being ready to collect more should subsequent developments make that necessary.
Second, separate the questions that the situation raises. We may feel our need of guidance on more than one issue in our situation, but guidance questions have to be worked through one at a time. As in algebra too many undefined qualities make it impossible to work out an equation, so it is in relation to God’s guidance of us in a particular situation. We may well need others’ help to sort out which uncertainty we should seek to resolve first.
Third, search the Scriptures with regard to the situation, looking for the principles and examples that apply. Here we may find help in consulting those who know the Bible better than we do.
Fourth, suspect yourself in relation to the situation. Over and above our built-in temperamental weaknesses that may make us too impulsive or too negative in assessing possible courses of action, Satan will constantly play on our pride, our fears, our greed, our anger, our inner hurts, our passion to conform and our unwillingness to stand out, our overall slackness and thoughtlessness as disciples, and any other quality that gives him a handle so as to lead us into foolish decisions. “Take counsel from at least two people whose relationship with God you respect, preferably those who are not your buddies.” Always be on the watch for Satan’s deployment of any of these devices for blinding us to our heavenly Father’s will.
Fifth, supplicate humbly about the situation. We should lay everything before God in as good order as we can manage, asking him to make us realistic, clearheaded, and purehearted in seeing how we are to glorify him. We should ask that when we think and decide rightly, he will give us inward peace to confirm to us that we are indeed on track. We may well find that clarity of insight increases slowly, as when mist rolls away, so that we can see the landscape which at first was hidden from us. Repeated spells of supplication will need to take place as we move toward a definite determination of God’s will for us.
Sixth, spend unhurried time in deciding how to handle the situation. Discerning and planning are processes that always take time, and second and third thoughts often exceed first thoughts in wisdom. The expectation that guidance will be given instantaneously, as soon as we ask for it, is unbiblical and superstitious. What is true is that God will make his will clear to us by the time we have to commit ourselves in decisive decisions; but that is something rather different.
Seventh, submit absolutely to God in relation to the situation and with it to all other situations. Throughout the process of discernment, make it clear to yourself and to him that it is his will and glory, and that alone, that you seek. Look to God to guide you by the rational means we have discussed, and do not expect him to guide you by inward impressions that go beyond your present knowledge; and if he does (as sometimes, when we are seeking guidance by rational means, he really does), check what you think he has given you with the respected nonbuddies to whom you appealed before, and only act on the impression when it has both their support and the inner-peace confirmation of which we spoke a moment ago.
Here then, you have the biblical situation ethic. The Good Shepherd loves and cares for his flock; the Father is faithful to all who look to him to guard and guide them; those who truly seek divine guidance in each situation as it arises will surely receive it. We who write believe ourselves to have verified that. We invite our readers now to discover it too.