(A slightly different post. This is a very small portion of my thesis, in which I begin to argue that Christian ethics should be Christocentric, or it shouldn’t call itself ‘Christian.’ It’s a first draft, but if you’re interested I would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as any areas you think I should look into or, should just drop altogether.)
In the following pages, I will argue that at the core of any ethical framework that claims to be Christian is the person of Christ. A weaker expression of this argument would be to say, any ethic that can be described without reference to Christ is not Christian.[1] A stronger expression, and that which I wish to defend, is that a Christian ethic should be Christocentric, i.e. Christ should be at the hub of the wheel, with the ‘spokes’ of our ethic necessarily connecting to Him.
Before we move into the argument itself, it is worth noting one major complication that could affect the initial understanding of this claim. Although written for a popular audience, in Dominion Tom Holland convincingly argues that the influence of Christianity is so prevalent within Western culture, that it has become increasingly difficult to see the line between Christian and secular thought.[2] Many of the shared beliefs our cultures often take for granted, e.g. the Declaration of Human Rights, seem to derive their foundation from a Judeo-Christian worldview. Holland’s thesis has, of course, been challenged, and space does not permit us to address the arguments in depth, but it does raise the question of whether much of our ethical discourse has already been permeated with the Christian message, and by implication, with person of Christ. Sadly, it would be impossible to tease apart this problem in an entire dissertation, let alone in this chapter, but it is worth noting from the beginning.
In one way, arguing for a Christocentric Christian ethic can come across as linguistic common sense. There is no Christianity without Christ, so how can there be Christian ethics without reference to him either? But of course, it is not so simple. A few brief examples may suffice.
First, the Hebrew scriptures have plenty of ethical material within them that is not reliant on the person of Christ for its intelligibility. Since Christians have come to understand Hebrew scripture as part of their own canon, much of that ethical material has been incorporayted into understandings of Christian ethics. However, it is not always clear what effect, if any, the coming of Christ has on the interpretation of such material.[3] The revelation of Christ as the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, should potentially change our ethical understanding, and at the very least be incorporated into our ethical life as it is our wider theological worldview.
Second, as we have seen in our brief foray into virtue ethics, even a Christian iteration such as Aquinas’s finds little need to reference Christ or demonstrate why Christ is important to its working. Is Christ an essential component of the cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence? After all, such virtues were known before Christ was incarnate. And although the content of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, can change if one is looking to Christ as the author and perfector of our faith, it is probably unwise to assert these virtues are not possible for, as an example, an Orthodox Jew. Again, many forms of virtue ethics do not need Christ in order to be intelligible.
Third, natural law, for all its positive contributions to our understanding of ethics, has no clear need for Christ whatsoever. What is given in our natural bodily state is then followed by reason, to come to an ethical conclusion. One might argue that the incarnation affirms our bodily state and thus gives a starting point for musings on natural law, but it is difficult to see why such a starting point and affirmation couldn’t equally be found in the text of Genesis 1:26-28.
Finally, even versions of ethics that seek to take Christ’s teaching seriously, do not necessarily have room for the Christ we affirm in the Creeds, the Christ who was made incarnate, crucified and then resurrected. If they do not, then such understandings of ethics treat Christ merely as a teacher of moral truth, rather than the saviour Christian tradition claims him to be. But, I contend, Christian ethics is more than simply moral truth and guidelines. It goes to the root of who we are as people made in the image of God, people who are affirmed, saved, and redeemed through the faithful actions of Christ. Those actions of Christ are part of our theological doctrine, i.e. our core foundational beliefs, and as such they should not be divorced from our ethics.
[1] There are, of course, a range of ways to understand such a statement. I do not mean to imply that ethical frameworks that do not mention Christ are morally suspect, no more than I would claim that any ethical theories that do find their foundation in Christ are perfect. Any post-lapsarian ethic will have faults, even the most well-intended. However, I am arguing that a bare minimum for a Christian ethic should be its incomprehensibility were Christ removed. In some cases, this will mean that a Christian ethic comes to profoundly different conclusions than other ethical frameworks, but in other cases, it will not. We might expect, however, that the reasons some conclusions are reached will still differ.
[2] Tom Holland, Dominion, (pg number needed).
[3] Such questions need to be treated with great care, lest we end up with a sort of ethical supersession.