Foundation of Christian Moral Life 1

A Seminar Room, and a Question That Would Not Go Away

Mina was nineteen and in the second week of a philosophy module he had chosen because it sounded interesting. He was the only person in the room who had been to church that Sunday, though he did not know it yet.

The lecturer put a case to the group. A society, entirely self-contained, unanimously agrees to use a certain minority among them for medical experimentation. No one outside is harmed. The society is stable, prosperous, and content. Its members are sincere; they believe what they are doing is right.

"Is that society doing something wrong?" she asked. "And if you say yes—on what basis? Whose morality are you applying to a people who never agreed to it?"

A young woman near the front said that, of course, it was wrong; obviously, everyone could see that. The lecturer asked her, gently, to explain what "obviously" meant and whether she could give a reason that was not simply a restatement of her own strong feeling. She could not. She got annoyed, then thoughtful, then quiet.

Mina said nothing for the whole hour. What unsettled him was not the argument. It was that he realised he could not answer it either. He had always believed that some things were simply wrong. He had never once asked himself why, or what would happen to that belief if you pulled on it.

He went home and looked at the icon in the corner of his room and thought, 'I have been given the answer my whole life, and I have never learned how to say it.'

This chapter is for Mina.

What Is Actually at Issue

Strip away the abstractions and there are three questions here, which people constantly confuse with one another.

The first is about existence. Are there any moral truths — facts about right and wrong that hold independently of what people think? Or are moral statements merely expressions of feeling, preference, or social convention, the way "I dislike coriander" is?

The second is about knowledge. If moral truths exist, how do human beings come to know them? Through reason? Conscience? Revelation? Upbringing?

The third is about grounding. If moral truths exist, what makes them true? What is it about the universe that makes cruelty wrong in the way that it is wrong? A committed atheist may firmly believe that moral truths exist and are knowable and simply give a different account of their grounding. A Christian may believe in objective morality and freely admit that unbelievers often perceive it more clearly than believers do. Confusing these questions produces the two worst arguments in this whole area: the Christian who says "without God you cannot be good," which is false and insulting; and the sceptic who says "believers only behave well because they fear punishment," which is equally false and equally insulting.

Let me be as clear as I can. Atheists can be, and frequently are, morally admirable people — sometimes more so than churchgoers. Christians who deny these truths are contradicting their own doctrine of the image of God, which is not switched off by unbelief. The Christian claim is not about who behaves well. It is about what makes moral claims true and whether a purely material account of the universe can support the moral weight that all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, actually place on it.

The Witness of Scripture

Scripture does not argue for the existence of moral truth. It assumes it, in the way a book of navigation assumes the sea.

In the Old Testament, God's moral demands are presented as flowing from His own character. Israel is to be holy because the Lord is holy (Leviticus 19:2). The commandments are given not as an arbitrary code but as the terms of a covenant with a God who has already acted to save. Deuteronomy insists that this law is not remote or unknowable but near—in the mouth and in the heart (Deuteronomy 30:11–14).

Crucially, the Old Testament also holds nations outside Israel morally accountable. The prophets condemn Assyria, Babylon, Edom, Tyre, and Moab for atrocities, even though those nations never received the Law of Moses (Amos 1–2; Isaiah 13–23). This is only intelligible if the standard is universal. Abraham can even challenge God with the assumption that God Himself is answerable to justice: shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Genesis 18:25). The rhetorical question presumes that "right" is not simply whatever God feels like doing that day and that Abraham and God both know it.

The wisdom literature grounds moral knowledge in the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), and Micah compresses the whole prophetic demand into a single line: to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8, NIV).

In the New Testament, Christ deepens the moral law and locates its centre in the heart, as we have seen. St Paul makes the universalist claim explicit in Romans 1–2: even those without the written Law show its work written on their hearts, their conscience testifying (Romans 2:14–15). St James warns against a religion that produces no moral change (James 1:22–27). And St John identifies the source: "God is love" (1 John 4:8, NIV).

A caution about method. It is tempting, when defending a moral position, to reach for a single verse and treat it as a settled proof. This book will try never to do that, for a reason that is not merely academic: verses used as ammunition tend to be verses that have been removed from their context, and a text out of context can be made to say almost anything. Scripture is read in the Church, alongside the whole of Scripture, in the light of Christ. That is a slower method and a more honest one.

Christ: Goodness With a Face

Christian ethics does not begin with a theory of the good. It begins with a person who claimed to embody it.

When a man addressed Him as "good teacher", Christ replied with a question about why he called Him good, since no one is good except God alone (Mark 10:17–18). Interpreters have read this in different ways. Read in the light of the whole Gospel, it is not a denial of His own goodness but a challenge to the questioner about who exactly he thinks he is speaking to: if you have understood what you just said, you have understood more than you realise.

The decisive point is this. In Christ, the Christian claim that goodness is grounded in the nature of God stops being an abstraction and becomes something you could have watched. What does perfect goodness look like when it is in a room? It looks like a man who touched people with contagious skin disease when the law and common sense said not to; who spoke publicly with a woman of a despised people at a well in the middle of the day; who did not shame the crowd of would-be executioners but simply dismantled them with a sentence; who washed the feet of the man who would betray Him; who asked forgiveness for the men driving in the nails.

This matters for our question about moral truth in a specific way. Every ethical system needs some account of what a good human life looks like. Most give a description. Christianity gives a biography. And the biography contains something that no philosophical system generated on its own: the conviction that the weakest members of a society are not a burden on it but the measure of it.