In my last post I introduced a fascinating debate occurring on the center right about strategies of public engagement given a perceived change in the standing of Christianity in American society. At the center of this debate are a series of questions about the status of the sustained relevance of Christianity: (1) does society have a negative view of Christianity; (2) what does being a Christian really mean; (3) What are Christian moral views; (4) Is Christian morality expressly repudiated in today’s society and (5) will subscribing to Christian moral views necessarily bring negative consequences in today’s so called negative world?
I began by addressing the first two questions, noting how society’s view of Christianity depends upon the type of Christianity it experiences. Pure Christianity “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” creates an attractive ekklesia marked by spiritual fruit “against which there is no law.” A combative Christianity focused on “enemies” and aligned with outside interests in the “fight,” becomes an unattractive Christianity marked by works of the flesh. The proof of the pudding comes through dozens of studies providing empirical evidence for these divergent outcomes.
The remaining three questions focus on biblical values and the reception of those values in modern society. And like society’s view of Christianity, these questions yield markedly different answers depending upon what we mean by Christianity.
A Personal Story
Some years ago, an employee at my former job transitioned to a transgender female. Apparently, this was the first such public transitioning in our agency so several of our east coast leadership came to assist, seeing it as a teachable moment for the agency. Although they had ultimate control of the day, I provided the opening remarks and hosted the meeting.
The staff knew something was up. We had not conveyed the intent of the meeting, but every seat in the windowless conference room was filled with people standing and spilling out into the hallway. It was the biggest crowd we’d ever seen with many of the 500 or so staff and contractors in attendance or watching remotely. There was a buzz in the air with a palpable sense of expectation.
It was an honor and privilege to lead this meeting. I advocated for acceptance, insisted we were our “brother’s keeper” and what happened to any one of us mattered to all of us. I spoke about the privilege of serving one another through a posture of generosity, kindness, inclusion, and empathy. Such statements were easy to say as all of them were part of a core values talk I routinely gave.
The fallout from our meeting was overwhelming. Many came up to us in the days and weeks following to thank us, saying they had never been so proud to be part of an organization. Many knew I was a Christ-follower. It was one of the more significant days of my life.
I was recounting this event with a friend I’ve known since college. Our conversations often turn towards cultural issues so it wasn’t surprising when the topic of transgenderism came up. As I shared, my friend listened. But the more he listened, the more he became seriously troubled. What I saw as an easy decision, he saw as a difficult one. While I viewed it as a posture of love, he viewed it as an abandonment of truth. Whereas I imagined a reflectance of Jesus, he imagined the accommodation of sin.
The Discord in Biblical Values
An alumnus of River Valley High School in Marion County, Ohio recently told students, in a high school graduation speech to “choose a spouse” and when they do, “I also strongly suggest to make sure to choose biblical principles, you know a male with a female and female with a male.”
Gordon Conwell’s Ruth Melkonian-Hoover sees biblical values through a different lens: “there is an urgent need for evangelicals—leaders and laity alike—to fully apprehend the “moral components of the immigration issue—honoring the Biblical values of ‘welcoming the stranger,’ keeping the families together, considering the justice implications of migration nationally and globally, and acknowledging the conditions in other societies that lead to immigration in the first place,” as has been done before.”
The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod views “Upholding biblical values” as a quartet of beliefs: the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman, the sanctity of human life, constraining sexual activity within confines of marriage, and the exclusivity of males for the role of pastor and the exercise of authority in the church.”
Compassion, a Christian child advocacy ministry, lists generosity, courage, love, respect, hope and peace as their understanding of biblical values. Such values emanate from those who are Christian as defined by “someone whose behavior and heart reflects Jesus Christ.”
Awake America Ministries, “a trusted source for Biblical insight on Capitol Hill and issues that affect churches and believers across the nation,” puts out a Quick Reference Guide to Voting Biblical Values. Their view of biblical values, given that “the vote of every Christian should be based on the principles of Scripture,” is eight-fold: Life is a sacred gift from God, Marriage is between one man and one woman, personal identity – who God created and intended us to be, stewardship – God owns everything and we are to responsibly manage his possessions, work is honorable and noble and it is our purpose – even before the original sin; role of government, individual rights and responsibility, great commission.
Reconciling the Discord
Like ships passing in the night, “Biblical values” mean different things to different people. To that Ohio alumnus, it meant a short list of gender understandings. To the Christian university professor, it meant loving one’s neighbor when that neighbor is an immigrant or a stranger. To Awake America Ministries, it meant a set of conservative policy choices they believe are supported by scripture. To me, it meant Christ-likeness, heeding the apostle Paul’s injunction to “clothe yourselves with heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness.” To my college friend it meant confronting the culture with his understanding of truth.
Such diversity in “biblical values” seems unreconciliable. Not only do our theological convictions differ, so do our culture and personal histories. These two dimensions – called our theological and sociological locations – profoundly shape our understandings of faith and are central to the stories we build for our lives.
But what if we could start afresh with some basic or first principles, formed by the gospel and independent of culture. And then see if we can arrive at a few central understandings of biblical values, faithful to the core tenets of the gospel?
Of course, many any of our first principles will vary. But perhaps it’s worth a try and for sake of moving forward, let’s start with a small set of core scriptures and gospel teachings which create the foundation for my biblical values: (1) a comprehensive integration of Old Testament laws given in Micah 6:8; (2) the sufficiency of Christ’s two great commandments; (3) the centrality of Jesus’ life and teachings; and (4) our calling to reflect Christ as measured through the fruits of the spirit.
First Principles: The Comprehensiveness of Justice, Mercy, and Humility
Did you know that most of us can distinguish roughly one million different colors? This amazing accomplishment occurs through three color receptors in our eyes. Working together, those three receptors boil down the vast diversity of incoming light into its three central components. The receptors then provide electrical signals to the brain so it can deliver a one in a million answer.
Just like the eye parses color through three types of lenses, God condensed His 613 Old Testament (OT) laws into the three biblical standards of Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
These three requirements – to love mercy, act justly and walk humbly – form the beginning of my benchmark or checklist when evaluating an issue or when considering consider what my “Biblical” view should be. Like a statistic is deemed “sufficient” if it captures all the information within a data set, these three requirements are likewise deemed sufficient through their capture of the entirety of OT law. Omitting or diminishing any one of the three leads to a deficiency in biblical values – a type of moral blindness – just like the diminishment of one of the color-sensing receptors in our eyes leads to colorblindness.
Benchmark #1 – Micah 6:8 tests our heart. Do we really “do justice” or would we rather just believe in justice, an easily spoken abstract idea rather than sacrificial and concrete acts focused on others? Do we really love kindness, a costly state of the heart, rather than a less demanding and often selective practice of performing kind acts? Do we really “do” humility, where humility encompasses every aspect our life and thoughts. Or is our focus on “showing” humility, an externally assessed mode of “walk” we control.
The 800 lb gorilla
Our human nature then throws a monkey wrench into the mix. Like the tip of an iceberg, our failure to act justly or show mercy becomes is easily seen and receives our greatest attention. But like an iceberg’s undersea portion, a failure to walk humbly has an outsized influence in ways mostly hidden to us.
I’m reminded of the well-known experiment where subjects were asked to watch a short video with six people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts – passing basketballs around. A reward will be given to those subjects keeping an accurate but silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera, thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Most subjects never see the gorilla when queried following the video. They are so intent upon their counting mission that they become oblivious to the obvious.
Our lack of humility acts in the same way. We naturally focus on the visible virtues and aspects of our lives. But most of us miss the gorilla in the room – how we are naturally disposed to think we’re right and to be certain about that “rightness.”
This lack of humility, made known through by our sense of certainty, is an inescapable outcome of pride, the “one vice no man of the world is free.” And it’s unfortunately a driving factor in our conversion of life experiences into the meaningful narratives which guide our lives.
It’s because our “rightness” gets built into our stories and usually without our awareness. Such stories prepare us for the complexities of life, like a flight simulator teaching a pilot to fly. They connect us together with likeminded people. They teach us about values through the example of our forebearers. And they enable us to efficiently live in a world overwhelmed with sensory input. But all this efficiency comes at a price and makes our stories like a two-edged sword.
Our stories must be instinctive for this efficiency to work, as Kahneman and others have shown. We do that through mental shortcuts to simplify the complexity in our lives. The cost of these shortcuts however is truth, through compromised judgements now embedded into our stories. We self-judge ourselves to be evenhanded, but we’re riddled with biases we can’t perceive.
Our stories are shaped by the communities we join. Our need to belong creates a new set of values, through a transfer of identity we don’t comprehend. We protect our reputation in these new tribes by defending their values which have now become ours. Our cognitive biases then finish the job through a motivated reasoning that binds and blinds.
Qualifying Principle 1: Humility, Humility, Humility. Because our assertion of “biblical values” cannot be separated from our culturally-infused narratives, how should we then live? Perhaps we should listen to the words of St Augustine “If you should ask me what are the ways of God, I would tell you the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility.”
Qualifying Principle 2: Circumspect in our Language. Given our human disposition to apply motivated reasoning to fit preexisting narratives, held with a sense of rightness sans humility, let us be careful in how we use the words “biblical values.” To wit: the categorical assertion of “biblical values” when applied with an air of authority too often turns “gospel values” into “my values” which then “misses the mark” – another word for sin.
Qualifying Principle 3: Precautionary Towards Christ’s Mission. A spirit of humility leads to a precautionary gospel protective of Christ’s mission. This mission-first focus, when mindful of the diversity across the traditions of the faith, constrains biblical values to privilege first order faith essentials, adhering to St Augustine’s maxim of: “in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.
First Principles: The Constraints of Love x Love
We often reduce the complexities of life into two-dimensional sets of maxims. Wise parents balance authority and affection. Good relationships arise from self-awareness and empathy. And years ago, while working late into the night to help wire a friend’s house, the electrician abruptly announced that life consisted of “motion and direction.”
Over the years, I’ve gotten great mileage from that last binary observation, especially in the workplace as a manager. But each of these reductionistic aphorisms eventually break down as the complexities of life refuse such simplistic answers.
Yet when the expert in the law asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life,” he received a binary answer that endures two thousand years later: to love God and love our neighbor with the second commandment as unto the first. On those two commandments alone, Christ said, “hung all the law and the prophets.” Jesus then made it universal when he defined neighbor as those from a different tribe, race or culture – the ones we naturally reject.
With just these two commandments, Jesus transformed the entirety of scripture into an interconnected mandate of love. Loving God amounts to loving others with our faithfulness to the former predicting our practice in the latter. Hence the proof of our heaven-ward love is measured by our love for one another, especially for those who are different than us.
This gospel of Jesus Christ is good news and our worship of Him and our care for others are two sides of the same coin. When Jesus launched His ministry, he stood up in Nazareth and said: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus was announcing the coming of God’s kingdom, the dawning of a new world order. Where the proclamation of His kingdom was mixed with hearts of compassion and an attitude of service, all joined at the hip and inseparable.
Benchmark #2: Our love for God and neighbor forms the two goalposts of our life. Our devotion to Christ connects them together forming a Christ-centered path for our life. Any biblical worldview must be faithful to these boundary conditions, with our worship of God involving a love of people, and with the depth of that worship measured by the depth of our compassion for the marginalized.
First Principles – The Centrality of What Would Jesus Do?
Years ago, while building our home, just a day before sheet rock was scheduled, the weather service forecasted an impending severe windstorm. We had just framed the house according to engineered plans, so I’m sure everything would have been fine. But to allay any concerns about the possibility of wind-driven uplift, I worked late into the night installing additional straps and hold-downs.
Each hold-down, affixed with an epoxied anchor bolt, can withstand 28,000 pounds of force. Now take dozens of them tied into 120 yards of concrete and you have a half million pounds of immovable weight ready and able to take on the southeastern Alaska winds. And when those winds showed up, repeatedly and with great force, I slept well every night knowing that the anchoring system would hold.
When we confess “Christ is the solid rock I stand,” we afix ourselves to Christ making him the foundation for each part of our life. From our actions to aspirations, every square inch of our lives becomes attached including those things we call “biblical values.”
Such biblical values, when connected to Christ, incorporates a new kingdom ethic and countercultural way of living. They focus on character and the attitudes of the heart. They arise through an alignment involving every aspect of our life – our thinking, behavior, perspectives, goals, and worldview –with both the teachings and example of Christ. They make the Christ in us clearly visible to the world, seen within and through us.
NT Wright puts it this way: These qualities [habits of the heart] —purity of heart, mercy, and so on—are not, so to speak, “things you have to do” to earn a “reward,” a “payment.” Nor are they merely the “rules of conduct” laid down for new converts to follow. They are, in themselves, the signs of life, the language of life, the life of new creation, the life of new covenant, the life which Jesus came to bring.
In U.S. constitutional law, the court can apply three different standards when determining if a law infringes a fundamental constitutional right. Their very highest standard is called strict scrutiny and requires the law to be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling state interest with the least restrictive means. A law is struck down and deemed unconstitutional when it fails to meet this very high bar.
Benchmark #3 Strict Scrutiny WWJD Test: In a spirit of humility and with an acute sense for the distorting power of our cultural narratives, are we willing to subject our assertions of Biblical values to a strict scrutiny-like test for What Would Jesus Do? To wit: are our biblical values narrowly tailored such that they satisfy the compelling biblical interest of reflecting Christ’s nature in the least restrictive or most easily understood manner? Hence, are we willing to deem anything falling short of a Christ-directed countercultural way of living, of a misalignment with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount ethics, unChristian and struck from our public witness?
First Principles – Spiritual Fruit
Over lunch the other day, Tammy asked a good friend of ours and a theologian by training why the “Christ in us” was so often invisible to our surrounding society. We had been discussing our calling of “image-bearers,” bringing a redeeming love into all the world. It’s a calling of vocation where we become part of God’s kingdom project for the present renewal of creation, as we await the final renewal still to come.
Like in Christ’s parable of the sower, the answers were many and all relevant to the question. Such invisibility can arise from those who are “Christians in name only” like the seed quickly eaten by the birds along the path. For others it arises from a superficial faith, a faith without root and hence withers under life’s pressures. Still others get entrapped by the thorns of competing desires yielding a distorted faith that eventually takes over.
This latter category is particularly common and driven by a host of causes. Materialism or consumerism hijack people’s loves because you can’t serve both “God and mammon.” Cultural allegiances kidnap Christian imaginations, changing one’s identity to conform to the tribe. Political ideologies exchange gospel verities, privileging a host of unbiblical notions such as individualism, authoritarianism, and populism. Christian Nationalism, formed from a mythic view of America’s origins, seduces many of the devout, turning their focus away from the “good soil” of a pure Christianity to be entrapped in the thicket of “guns, god and country.”
Yet one category in the parable remains: “Others fell on good soil and yielded fruit: some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty.”
That’s it. It’s what God wants from us, at least according to Jesus, and hence a governing basis for any of our biblical values. An inward transformation that yields an outwardly visible people of God principally known by a demonstration of spiritual fruit. Listen to the words of Jesus: “This is to My Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, proving yourselves to be My disciples.” The apostle Paul then teaches what that looks like calling out love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Benchmark #4: Fruit Any of our values, beliefs, behavior and attitudes lacking in or inconsistent with biblically defined fruit fail the most essential and easiest to understand test of Christianity.
A Modest Proposal
Let’s go back to the original question: What are Christian moral views? One obvious answer is “many,” of course, given the diversity within Christianity with over 33,830 denominations worldwide – unless we are willing to recuse some of these denominations, a task well above our pay grades. Here, Miles Law “where you stand depends upon where you sit” rings true given our diverse cultural and religious backgrounds.
But what if? What if we found common ground to at least reduce the dimensionality of the “many, by creating a small set of principles or standards derived from central themes of the Christian faith? Like a fence enclosing a large pasturing region, such principles could allow for diverse theological and sociopolitical beliefs given the inherent complexities of life’s issues and challenges while honoring our calling to be “ambassadors for Christ.”
Using the four central themes of the Christian faith I’ve laid out in the preceding sections, perhaps we can ask the following questions given an issue or belief: are our views
- Presented in humility, circumspect in language, and willing to listen to competing views?
- Precautionary towards Christ’s mission?
- Honoring of Augustine’s maxim: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity?
- Able to pass a “strict scrutiny” type of WWJD test, i.e., laser focused on reflecting Christ’s nature?
- Steeped in kindness and privileging acts of service, especially for the marginalized?
- NOT promoting beliefs, behavior and attitudes lacking in or inconsistent with biblical fruit?
If we can say “yes” to all of these for any particular issue, then we’re likely on the right track. And if those outside of our tribe say “yes” too, then we have certainly warranted the label “Christian.”
Final Thoughts
Jesus said “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” The Apostle Paul said “Christ within us [is] the hope of glory,” at least as long as that gospel stays pure.
We need a revival of pure Christianity, a Christlikeness that invades ‘every square inch” of our life. Where cultural change organically occurs through the faithful presence of Christ-like followers. Full of people who look like Jesus in every walk of life.
Exchanging a worldview formed by fear and ruled through power for a worldview formed by the cross and precautionary to His mission: centered in Jesus with Christ-like servant hearts and a listening spirit; choosing unity over division, love over disdain, and kindness over outrage. Marked by spiritual fruit as we show the world we are “God’s picked representatives of the new humanity, purified and beloved of God himself, be merciful in action, kindly in heart, humble in mind. Accept life, and be most patient and tolerant with one another, always ready to forgive if you have a difference with anyone. Forgive as freely as the Lord has forgiven you. And, above everything else, be truly loving, for love is the golden chain of all the virtues (Colossians 3:12).”