The Bible has nothing relevant to say to non-Christians about ethics – or does it? asks ANDREW CAMERON

The great nineteenth century English Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, was once asked to defend the Bible against various charges. “Defend the Bible?” he retorted, “I’d rather defend a lion! The Bible doesn’t need defending. It can defend itself.”

Yet Christians are called upon to mount a case for the validity of the Bible for today’s watching world.

Once upon a time, ‘the good book’ was an unambiguously fond reference to the Christian Bible. But today, to call the Bible ‘the good book’ is generally to be sardonic or even sarcastic. Usually, we are being invited to sneer along with the speaker or writer of the phrase, for we are meant to understand that the Bible is a no-good book. It teaches gender differentiation. It has been used to justify wars, slavery and racism. It endorses authority, and asks for obedience. It opposes liberal sexual practice.

In an attempt to diminish its influence over the West, some have even described it as ‘hate literature’, by which they mean that actually, the so-called ‘good book’ has always been bad.

Is the biblical ethic unique?

People do seem to discover true and right things without the Bible. Those who compare religions point out, for example, that something like the ‘Golden Rule’, “Do to others as you would have them do to you”, is found in every religion. Perhaps the Bible is not needed for ethics in any unique sense.

For Thomas Aquinas, we are surrounded by various kinds of law. We often think of ‘law’ as an oppressive thing, but for Aquinas, ‘law’ included friendly and helpful instruction from someone who wants us to prosper.

One such law surrounding us is natural law where human minds have been made capable to comprehend our ‘corner’ of God’s ordered universe. Humans can thus recognise, understand and participate in their nature and purpose.

But Aquinas’ work clearly teaches that people need God’s Spirit and his Word if they are to properly understand the natural law. While Aquinas’ teaching is sometimes distorted – the main stress being laid upon unaided human participation in natural law with the necessary action of God’s Spirit and Word being ignored – his account helps us to see how the Bible is ‘unique’ for ethics.

It is not ‘unique’ in the sense that people must read the Bible before making a true ethical deduction. People sometimes discover their part in God’s eternal law (even if they don’t call it that). But if Aquinas is right, then the Bible offers a unique way of seeing what surrounds us. In the Bible, God reveals the order of things, effectively ‘decoding’ the tangled complexities of life in the world.

Is the biblical ethic unitary or fragmented?

Everybody agrees that the Bible has many human authors. Surely it follows that these various authors have different views on right and wrong, and that the overall ethical message of the Bible is diverse or even fragmented. Those who believe that one divine author inspired the work of the several human authors must work to show how the Bible’s ethic is unitary, not fragmented.

Of course there is a diversity of material in the Bible, but I want to suggest that all this material contributes to a theme that unites the whole Bible. We have a clue when the Apostle Paul says that “Christ is the end of the law.” (Romans 10:4) Something about Jesus unites his teaching with that of the Old Testament and ‘finishes’ the law’. Something about Jesus might even explain the other material in the Bible.

Archbishop Peter Jensen has recently written on this ‘something’ in The Revelation of God. He finds it to be the gospel – the great news that through the sacrificial death, resurrection and ascension of his Son, God has declared Jesus to be the Lord. The Lord Jesus has done everything necessary for sinful people to receive God’s gracious favour and complete acceptance, both now and eternally. People receive this gracious favour simply by trusting the Lord of this gospel, Jesus Christ, who will faithfully bring God’s promises to completion.

But how can this ‘gospel’ account for all the different material in the Bible?

The gospel is certainly said in different ways throughout the Bible, depending upon when it is said and upon what kind of biblical literature we are examining.
For example, in the Old Testament the gospel is seen in the re-establishment of a Kingdom of God, who gathers a new people after humanity’s revolt against God in Genesis 3. A series of covenants, where God promises to commit himself to the people he has generously adopted, culminates in a ‘new covenant’ where Jesus Christ is Lord. The Bible is the record of God’s covenant promises to his people. As such, every corner of it reflects or points to or expounds the gospel, even if Christ’s supreme place in that gospel only becomes clear in the Bible’s later pages. Hence all the parts of the Bible are unified.

What, then, of the complaint that if God has done everything necessary, what basis for ethics remains? Paul anticipates this question after an extended discussion of the gospel. He twice poses the complaint as a rhetorical question: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (Romans 6:1). “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15).

The stunning news of God’s free and gracious favour unmasks a common human assumption about Christian ethics. People assume that the only possible motivation to do right is in order to gain God’s favour and avoid his displeasure. It therefore follows that to remove this motivation removes any reason to ‘be good’. That is, to say that God freely gives forgiveness and acceptance to sinners removes, it is thought, their only motivation for doing good. If people have been freed from God’s condemnation, they will run about doing evil as it pleases them.

But in the logic of the gospel, the reverse is actually the case. People are somehow freed to discover new and interesting ways of living. Paul speaks of a kind of ‘conduct’ which is ‘in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.’ The gospel can shape who we are, and what we do.

To conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of this gospel, then, would include the same kind of commitment to justice, the same intention to love, the same operation of mercy and forgiveness in broken relationships, the same openness to the inclusion of others, and the same commitment to life. Unsurprisingly, we see all of these and more in the various commands and exhortations of Scripture.

But surely such a conclusion brings with it the frank admission that the ethic of the gospel is of no use to a watching world, since in the Bible’s account of this watching world, it is ‘watching’ precisely because it refuses to submit to Christ or to accept his gospel with faith and repentance. Can the Bible assist societies’ ethics in any way?

Is the Bible of any use for the watching world?

Christians certainly show a tendency to think that it is not. In mounting arguments in the public forum, Christians are almost entirely reliant upon empirical and sociological data, and upon arguments that predict the outcomes of various proposals and practices. There may certainly be a place for such argumentation. But a lack of confidence in the place of the Bible has conspired with clumsy or self-interested examples of its use to ensure that it is rarely mentioned by Christians outside of their church communities.

But consider what has called those communities together in the first place. Professor Oliver O’Donovan (Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford) has comprehensively shown that, historically speaking, the gospel-ethic of church communities has decisively shaped the world. The church’s way of being a community has ‘rubbed off’ on the West.

The Bible has given us the modern liberal order, through its influence on people over millennia. The Church and churches of God’s Son are political entities which have four features of liberal order: the freedom of liberal order; the merciful judgements of liberal order; the natural right of liberal order; and the liberal order’s freedom of speech.

Churches exhibited these features to surrounding communities, and tyrants and monarchs were forced (sometimes kicking and screaming) also to give such good things to the communities they governed. The best practice of Christ’s church brings with it the best possibilities for the best kind of liberal order. Where Christ rules his people justly and mercifully by his freedom-giving Word, human societies cannot help but follow.

It is possible to overstate O’Donovan’s thesis by ignoring the many embarrassing lapses by leaders and members of flawed church communities that litter history. But those lapses do not invalidate his thesis, since the Lord uses the same gospel by which he forms churches also to call churches to repentance.

Can the Bible offer any concrete guidance?

I seem only to have shown how the Bible has an indirect effect on the watching world. Can it offer more concrete guidance? Are its gospel-principles enough to translate into practices? And, is it so far distant from us in time and culture that it can say little to modern capitalist, post-industrial societies?

Christianity can offer ‘relational thinking’ to the watching world. Despite its deep dependence on the ethics of the gospel, such thinking will be entirely accessible and interesting to many people, regardless of their religious persuasion. This is already being been done quite extensively in the works of Australian Christian ethicist Michael Hill in his book, The How and Why of Love, and through UK corporate and government theorist Michael Schluter, who runs the Relationships Foundation.

Sometimes, it is true, biblical ethics are contrary to practices and proposals in our society. This has been true for different issues in every age. On the Christian account of social reality, life between the Church and the watching world sometimes occasions deep clashes between them. So when the Romans sought peace by viewing gladiatorial blood sports, this occasioned frequent and energetic appeal to the Bible to show Romans the bankruptcy of their practice, and to call them (by means of the gospel) to the real and lasting peace of the gospel.

Defend the Bible? I’d rather defend a lion! The Bible doesn’t need defending. It can defend itself – I agree with Spurgeon, although this might seem difficult after the rather long defence of the Bible I have just mounted.

I have argued that the biblical ethic is unique, unitary, socially useful and quite practical. Unique to the Bible is its particular ‘decoding’ of moral experiences and moral order. The unitary theme of the Bible, the gospel, brings intelligibility to the diversity of its ethical material. The biblical ethic is so useful to the watching world that modern liberal order emerged from it, and the Bible’s ethic is so practical that it can offer something like ‘relational thinking’ while also being able to confront various social practices.

When Spurgeon said that the Bible can ‘defend itself’, he obviously meant that it has to be read. I have certainly found that the more I read the Bible in the company of a community who love the gospel and its Lord, the less worried I am about the Bible and the more gratifying and clear do I find its message to be. I suspect that many have also found something like this.

Perhaps this matter of reading contains the real answer to the question I posed at the start of this article.

The Bible certainly remains a good book for the watching world. But the watching world is less and less aware of the powerful good news that lies within its pages. This is partly due to the understandable reaction of people who, gripped by their own concerns, find the first call of the gospel to cut across them unpleasantly. But perhaps it is also partly due to us, who have allowed their reaction to silence our use of the Bible and to embarrass us about its gospel.

But the Bible, its gospel, and its gospel-ethic doesn’t belong finally to the Church. It is the property of God, who calls people to himself through it. The Church is serving the world, not itself, when it refers to the Bible, because through the Bible’s gospel comes the chance for people to decode difficulties and conundrums within their politics, their working relationships, their close relationships and even within themselves. We show it to them in the way that one beggar offers another beggar food.

So rather than sidelining the Bible in our debates with a watching world, my hope is that we become adept at outlining its arguments, explaining its gospel trajectory, and laying before people the dream for humanity that God has recorded, through human authors, within its pages.