The Christian Moral Life. Timothy F. Sedgwick
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initially appear to give different answers to these questions. A Christian ethic must find some common answer.
A Life Given in Worship
At the most obvious level, what the different Christian pieties share in common is that each is founded or grounded in Jesus. As the word “Christ” or “Messiah” originally meant, for Christians Jesus is the one who brings in the kingdom of God, the one who brings reconciliation and redemption. As such, Jesus is the divine messenger and agent who brings his followers, his disciples, into a new life. However, understandings of Jesus are as different as the pieties themselves. To those in darkness Christ is the light. To the guilty Christ brings forgiveness. To those in bondage Christ gives freedom. To those divided Christ is the reconciler. To those oppressed Christ liberates. To the broken Christ brings peace. Jesus enlightens, forgives, gives freedom, brings justice. Regardless of the image, Jesus is the Christ because he effects new life. At the same time, however, as the different images suggest, this new life has been described in different ways. The four gospels themselves reflect such differences. Again, the challenge in developing an account of the Christian moral life is to describe the shape and central features of a life that Christians share in common.
The Ten Commandments offer an initial point of reference for seeing what is central to the Christian moral life.9 The Ten Commandments may serve as such a reference because they have been a central text for all Christians. They have provided the basic framework for Roman Catholic ethics — what Roman Catholics themselves call moral theology. In Protestant churches they have been equally important. In his catechisms, for example, Luther exhorted Christians to read the Ten Commandments daily. In Anglican churches the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed were displayed at the front of the church. For Anglicans, the Eucharist itself began with a reading of the entire Ten Commandments or the summary of the law.
The Ten Commandments indicate the first major feature of the Christian moral life. Moral commands are grounded religiously. As the summary of the law says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:30-31; Luke 10:27)10
The Hebrew people understood and shared this understanding of the nature and purpose of law. Central to Judaism is Torah, a Hebrew word used to designate the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, what for Christians is the Old Testament. Central to Judaism is giving thanks and delight in the Torah, that is, in the law. But the word law is misleading, at least to the extent that it narrowly focuses on acts as some means to an end. Instead, Torah more broadly means a way of life detailed in law. This way of life itself arises from the law as people seek to deepen their relationship with God.11
At the heart of the Torah is the story of the Exodus and the giving of the commandments to Moses as he leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the land of Canaan in order to form a new people. Exodus is preceded by Genesis, the telling of creation and the beginnings of the Hebrew people as wandering nomads, heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the other three books of the Torah (Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Exodus story is extended. At the heart of this story are the commandments and codes governing worship, daily rituals, and moral and civic matters. These laws, however, are inseparable from the larger story of the Hebrews’ relationship with God. The Ten Commandments are preceded by God simply declaring, “I am the Lord your God.” Relationship is given. And this relationship is the basis for life: “I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Deut. 5:6). The commands express how to acknowledge and honor this relationship.
The first of the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no other gods but me,” designates that there is a power and purpose that gives life. In this sense there can only be one god. The worship of other gods separates us from what alone gives life. For the Israelites other gods were most often nature gods, local or otherwise, that were believed to have power to insure fertility, prosperity, and security. For us, these gods are less likely to be personalized but named impersonally as sex, money, and power.
The second, third, and fourth commandments detail what it is to abide in relationship with God. We are not to “make any graven images and worship them.” We are not to “take the name of God in vain. “And we are to “keep holy the Sabbath.” The last six commandments specify what is correspondingly demanded in our relationships one to another. In this sense, the first four commandments are religious commands, and the last six commandments are moral commands. We are to honor our father and mother; murder no one; be faithful in marriage; and neither steal nor lie. These five commandments specify what is to be done in order for persons to be in communion with others by acknowledging and respecting them as persons. The Ten Commandments conclude with the command, “You shall not covet.” This last command is distinct in being directed to the heart rather than against a particular act. The command is that we not seek to secure ourselves, either in immediate pleasures or in power over others. Life instead is given in a covenant in which we honor and care for others.
Christian communities inevitably move from these general commands to more particular prescriptions. As commands move to specific judgments about what should be done, they reflect particular understandings from the culture and in this sense are relative to the culture. To command persons “to honor mother and father” is to express the ends of respect and care. To command sons, however, to take on their father’s profession unless released by the father’s permission is relative to a particular social and familial arrangement. To command persons to “do no murder” is to express the absolute value of all people. To command persons either to remove or not to remove a dying person from life support systems, such as a respirator, is a particular judgment on the nature of the human life we value.
What is most important in understanding Christian faith and life, however, is not the development of specific moral demands and the attempt to resolve moral questions; rather, the moral law must be placed in the larger context of our relationship with God — the focus of the first four of the Ten Commandments. The fourth commandment is itself the hinge on which turns the development of the life of faith. The life of faith develops because in the worship of God relationship with God is established and deepened.
As God rested on the seventh day of creation, the Israelites are commanded to rest and not to work on the last day of the week, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. This includes remembering and celebrating the history of their relationship with God in the reading of Torah. In rest and worship they are reminded of and brought to experience the blessing of life, which is not something they achieve but something created before them and given as the gift of life itself. As for our Jewish forebears, so for Christians, Sabbath celebrates that life is given in God. The symbolism, though, is different. For Christians, the celebration of the risen Lord ends Sabbath observances in a strict sense of rest on the seventh day of the week. Instead, Sunday celebrates the fact that life is given each day in the act of offering one’s life to God in thanksgiving.12 This is the life revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching, fulfilled in the Last Supper, in his passion and death, and confirmed in the resurrection. Sunday is thus the day of resurrection, the beginning of new life, “the eighth day,” the first day of new life celebrated as the first day of the week. This symbolism, centered on Sunday as the first day of the week, is largely unknown in contemporary Western culture but is reflected in the format of most calendars that begin the week with Sunday and not with Monday.
For both Jew and Christian the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath is a declaration of what is central to a holy life. In this fourth commandment the first three commandments are fulfilled: God is honored as all of life is placed in relationship to God. The life that is reconciled and redeemed is grounded in the nature of things and is not a matter of moral achievement. For this reason keeping the Sabbath is a matter of worship, again not as law but as the acknowledgment, enjoyment, and deepening of God’s presence in our lives. In turn, worship is the hinge that connects the first three commandments — to love God — to the last six commandments about loving the neighbor.
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