Let me begin with this question: are ethics a social/cultural construct? Or to word it in a Christian way, is sin based on our cultures understanding of wrongdoing?
Let me explain.
Take stealing for example. Most of us would agree that if I were to take something that belonged to another person without permission, it is wrong. But what if we lived in the communal church of Acts. We read in scripture that they shared everything. Would it still be unethical if I were to go to my neighbor’s house and take his TV without asking him? We are supposed to be sharing everything.
Or what if my mom (who is extremely allergic to bees) gets stung by a bee and does not have her epipen with her. As she begins to swell up and is having a hard time breathing I suddenly see an epipen on the seat of a car. I decide to shatter the window to take the epipen and save my mom’s life. Was this unethical? I took what was not mine without getting permission.
Or take a different example. Most of us think that marriage should be between 2 people. Although we might enjoy watching Sister Wives, it makes us a little uncomfortable and some would say that it is wrong. But what about the cultures where this is completely acceptable and a normal way of life? Are the people in these cultures sinning by having multiple wives and having sexual relationships with multiple people? What about Solomon? He had tons of wives. Was Solomon living in sin because he had all of these wives?
I would argue that yes, culture affect ethics greatly. But don’t stop reading there. I am not saying that we should just do what our culture thinks is right. Because as a Christ follower, we believe that there is more to it than this. There are laws that are cultural, but there are also eternal laws.
Take the murder of the innocent for example. I cannot personally think of a culture that would accept murdering an innocent person as ethical. To me this would be an ethic that transcends culture.
But that of course brings up the question: how can we determine what ethics are merely culturally relevant, and what ethics are eternal?
Some would say that this is a discernment call that we all make. We must read what scripture says and ask the Spirit to guide us in knowing what applies to us. Others would say that this is done in community. We gather as a group of Christ followers to determine how to interpret scripture and find what applies to us and what is merely contextual.
While I agree with both of these ways of interpreting scripture, they both fall short. They both run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Because when we read scripture, however hard we try to be objective, we all bring our own beliefs into it. This is why the same Bible was used to argue both for and against slavery. What we need is a standard for interpretation, some type of guide that will tell us how to gauge these things. Some way to make sense of scripture without reading our own beliefs into. Some way to determine God’s eternal law from contextual ethics.
Fortunately Paul left us with such a standard in his letter to the Romans.
The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
Romans 13:9-10
Paul makes it simple by saying that all of the commandments can be summed up in simply loving one another. If I truly loved a person, I am not going to want to murder them. Because I truly love my wife, I do not want to cheat on her. The fact that I love my mother makes it so that I want to take that epipen and hopefully the person who owned it loves humanity and isn’t offended by it.
If you were to look into the apparently abstract Old Testament laws, you would see that they are not arbitrary but that God put them in place because he loved them. Some of them were for safety reasons, some of them were because he wanted to set them apart from the surrounding nations, which caused them to be noticed.
So to answer my original question, yes I do believe that some ethics are cultural. But I also believe that God has a divine law as well. What we must do is let love guide our discernment process.
This is not simple though. So I leave you with two questions that I am still pondering.
- How do we discern what love is? ie. some people would define one thing as loving while others would say it is not love.
- How do you decide between love for 2 people? If killing one person will save many, does the love for the many outweigh the love for the one?
Noah Starksen 