Chapter 5: How Christians Make Difficult Decisions Part 1

Chapter 5: How Christians Make Difficult Decisions

Part 1

Sameh

Sameh is forty-one, a project manager for a mid-sized construction firm, and until three weeks ago he had never faced a moral question harder than whether to claim a lunch on expenses.

Going through old files for an unrelated audit, he found something he was not looking for. On a residential block his firm completed four years ago, a fire safety certification appears to have been signed off on the basis of an inspection that did not happen in the way the paperwork describes. He is not certain. He is not an engineer. The documents are ambiguous, and there are two plausible readings, one of which is a clerical mess and one of which is fraud. Ninety families live in that building.

He went to his line manager, Wagih, who is also his cousin, and who got him this job eleven years ago when Sameh had been out of work for seven months and his family was in trouble. Wagih went grey in the face, which told Sameh something. Then Wagih asked him for six months. He said the firm is negotiating a refinancing that will complete in the spring; that if this comes out now the firm collapses; that sixty-one people lose their jobs, including Sameh; that he will commission a proper independent inspection quietly in the meantime; and that if there is a real problem he will deal with it. He said this with tears in his eyes. He may even have meant it.

Sameh's wife was made redundant in January. They have a mortgage they can just about cover on one salary and a nine-year-old son with cerebral palsy whose therapy is not fully funded. If Sameh reports this and the firm folds, he is a forty-one-year-old man with a specialised CV and a reputation, in a small industry, as the person who destroyed his own employer.

He has not slept properly in three weeks. He has prayed about it and received, he says, nothing. He has not told his wife, which he knows is itself a piece of information.

What should he do, and how should he go about working it out?

What Is Actually at Issue

Most of this book concerns particular questions. This chapter concerns method, which is why it sits at the end of Part One and why every later chapter refers back to it.

Three things need distinguishing.

Some decisions are not hard at all, only unwelcome. A man knows perfectly well that he should not be messaging that colleague and is looking for a framework that will tell him it is complicated. A large proportion of apparent moral dilemmas are cases of a known answer being resisted, and the first diagnostic question is always whether you are genuinely uncertain or merely reluctant.

Some are hard because the facts are unclear. This is Sameh's position in part. He does not yet know whether he is looking at fraud. A great deal of moral agony is really factual ignorance wearing moral clothing, and the remedy is investigation rather than reflection.

Some are genuinely hard. Real duties conflict; every available option damages someone; the consequences are serious and unknowable. These exist, and pretending otherwise is one of the ways religious teaching loses the trust of adults.

What Christian ethics offers is not an algorithm that outputs answers. It offers a way of seeing, a set of questions, some tools with a long track record, a community to reason with, and the assurance that you are not being examined by an adversary. That last point matters more than it sounds. Many people make worse decisions than they would otherwise because they are terrified of getting it wrong, and terror is not a good condition for judgement.

The Witness of Scripture

Scripture does not supply a decision procedure, and any book claiming it does is misrepresenting it. What it supplies is richer and less convenient.

Law. The commandments give firm boundaries: certain things are simply excluded. This is the deontological register, and Scripture uses it without embarrassment.

Wisdom. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes deal with the enormous territory the law does not cover — when to speak, whom to trust, how to handle money, when to keep silent. Wisdom literature assumes that most of life requires judgement rather than rule-following, and that judgement is a skill acquired over time. Proverbs commends seeking many advisers (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22), a piece of advice that would have saved a great many disasters.

Narrative. The Bible teaches ethics mainly through stories of people deciding, often badly, and it is remarkably unwilling to tidy them up. The Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh to save infants and are commended (Exodus 1:15–21). Rahab lies to protect the spies and is named in the genealogy of Christ and in Hebrews 11. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac remains disturbing after three thousand years of commentary. Chapter 27 takes up the question these raise about truth-telling; here they establish only that Scripture is not naive about hard cases.

Prophecy. The prophets attack the use of religious observance as cover for injustice, which is the specific temptation of religious people making decisions. Micah's summary — to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8) — is not a decision procedure but it is a test any decision must pass.

Epistle. The apostolic letters reason morally in front of the reader. Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8–10 work through a disputed question — food offered to idols — and the reasoning is worth studying as a model: Paul establishes the underlying truth, distinguishes the objective question from the question of conscience, weighs the effect on others, and lands on a principle about not damaging a weaker brother. And in Romans 3:8 he records and rejects a slander against his own teaching: that Christians say we may do evil so that good may result. That verse is the New Testament's clearest refusal of pure consequentialism.

Christ: Judgement Rather Than Formula

Christ was repeatedly presented with moral test cases and He almost never answered in the terms offered.

Asked whether it was lawful to pay the imperial tax (Mark 12:13–17), a question designed so that either answer would destroy Him, He asked to see a coin and reframed the whole matter. Asked to arbitrate an inheritance dispute (Luke 12:13–15), He refused the role and addressed the greed underneath. Asked who counts as a neighbour (Luke 10:25–37), He told a story that answered a different and better question: not who qualifies but who behaved like a neighbour. Confronted with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11), He neither denied the law nor applied it as demanded, but addressed the accusers' own position and then spoke to the woman without either condemning or excusing her.

Two lessons follow for method.

The question as posed is often the wrong question. Sameh has framed his as: do I report now or wait six months? Those may not be the only two options, and one of the most useful things a wise adviser does is refuse the binary.

Judgement is not the enemy of principle. Christ's flexibility about the Sabbath was not a relaxation of the law but an insistence on its purpose: the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). He repeatedly asked what a commandment was for, and that question is the third step of the method below.

The Early Church

The Fathers were pastors dealing with real cases, and their moral reasoning is mostly found in letters and canons rather than treatises.

St Basil's canonical letters to Amphilochius are the best surviving example. Basil sets out penances for various sins, and what is striking is the constant weighing: the same act attracts different treatment depending on whether it was deliberate or accidental, whether the person came forward voluntarily, whether they were under compulsion, their age, and their circumstances. He states repeatedly that the canons are guidance for the physician of souls and that the bishop must judge the individual. This is the Orthodox approach in embryo: firm principle, individual application.

The persecutions forced the sharpest version of the question this chapter is about. Under Diocletian, Christians were required to perform a small act — offer a pinch of incense, or hand over the Scriptures — with enormous consequences for refusal. On any calculation of outcomes, the incense was cheap and the cost of refusal was catastrophic: death, and often the destitution of one's family. The martyrs refused anyway, and the Coptic Church dates its calendar from that refusal.

This is the historical proof that the Christian tradition contains genuine moral absolutes. If everything could be traded against consequences, the martyrs were fools. The Church has never regarded them as fools.

Equally important is what happened afterwards. Large numbers did comply, and the Church then had to decide what to do with the lapsi. The Novatianist and Donatist rigorists said they were finished. The Church rejected that and readmitted them through repentance, with penance proportioned to what they had done and the pressure they had been under. Both halves of this matter: the act was genuinely wrong, and the person was not thrown away.

St Augustine produced the fullest early treatment of one hard case, arguing in two works that lying is never permissible, even to save a life. The position has been contested by other Christians ever since, and Chapter 27 examines it. It illustrates a permanent feature of the tradition: on some questions, serious Christians reasoning carefully have reached different conclusions and have remained in communion.

The Coptic Orthodox Understanding

The Orthodox East, including the Coptic Church, never developed the systematic casuistry that Western Christianity produced. There is no Orthodox equivalent of the great manuals of moral theology with their classifications of cases.

This is a genuine strength and a genuine weakness, and honesty requires naming both.

The strength is that it resists legalism. The Orthodox instinct is that a moral question involves a whole person in a particular situation before God, and that the case cannot be abstracted from the person without distortion. Hence the centrality of the father of confession, who applies oikonomia — the pastoral discretion by which the Church, without altering its teaching, adapts its application to what a particular soul can bear. Oikonomia is not a loophole and not a private licence to set the rules aside; it is exercised by the Church through those it has authorised, in the direction of healing, and it presupposes that the standard is real. Its counterpart is akriveia, strict application, which is equally proper where strictness will heal.

The weakness is that a tradition without developed analytical tools has less to offer someone who needs a specific answer at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Orthodox writers addressing modern bioethics and business ethics have in practice borrowed heavily from Catholic moral analysis — double effect, the taxonomy of cooperation, the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means — and there is no shame in this. The tools were developed by Christians reasoning carefully, and truth does not become less true for having a Latin address.

The Coptic approach, then, in practice: firm about what is forbidden, unsystematic about the rest, insistent that decisions be made in consultation rather than alone, and always oriented towards what will actually heal this person. Pope Shenouda III consistently taught that a Christian facing a serious decision should not rely on private inspiration alone, and directed people to Scripture, the Church's teaching, and a spiritual guide together; I summarise rather than quote.