Fruit Asymetrical Christian Comparisons

Who is more righteous? The US Army that accepts same-sex marriage or the United Methodist Church that does not? 

Its a fruit-asymmetrical question. In other words worthless. 

Many Christians, and thus their non-Christian critics have a profound misunderstanding of the difference between sin and immorality, as they do the difference between righteousness and morality. This makes for bad theology, bad dialogue, and worse behavior. 

In scripture the word “sin” is invariably associated with the relationship of persons and nations to God. That brokenness may be observable through lawbreaking, but this is only because the laws broken are the laws of God. Similarly righteousness as it refers to humans refers to living within God’s covenant, and thus being in the correct relationship with God. Such a relationship is observable through obedience specifically to God’s law. 

Now when I looked up the word “moral” in the Bible I found it occurred only once, in the book of James, and even there in only a few translations. “Ethics” didn’t appear at all. “Immoral” appeared a number of times, and in every instance was preceded by “sexual;” the complete term being “sexual immorality.” A cruise through your old SBL Greek NT can educate your further.

In any case these uses of the term “immoral” in the New Testament are related to public (and even cross-cultural) standards of behavior rather than the concepts of sin and righteousness. Paul refers to these same moral standards in his letters when he speaks of the kinds of behavior and attitudes “everyone” approves. And understanding this is an ethical commonplace. 

Aristotle wrote the book on ethics in the Western tradition, and he wasn’t Christian and didn’t refer to scripture. His Asian equivalent was Confucius. Ethics is the pursuit of the good, and goodness can be known without recourse to special revelation. And it can be, and should be, transmitted in the form of social norms.

Now the distinction between righteousness and morality is critical. Morality is the agreed conventions of behavior in a society that lead to what society regards as good. Morality has to do with the covenant humans make with each other to behave in certain ways. Righteousness refers to living specifically within the covenant which God makes with God’s people, and more widely humanity. 

Put another way. If you want to know what kinds of behavior are righteous just read Genesis 9:1-17, which gives the specifics of God’s covenant with humankind. If you want to know what is moral you’ll need to engage in a more sustained conversation with the specific norms of the society in which you live. Of course there are disagreements about both righteousness and morality, but they must be argued in different venues on the basis of different authorities. Arguments about righteousness must refer back to the Bible. Arguments about morality will need to look for reasoned assessments of the good and concepts of social contract. 

Put yet another way, you can have morality without a relationship with God, but not righteousness.

Practically speaking this means that a person can be moral and still be alienated from God. Those who are willing to submit to the moral norms of society, the covenant we make with each other, are moral, but may not be righteous. And of course truly righteous people might find themselves obliged to break the moral norms of society. 

Now the church is called to be righteous, not merely moral. So you can’t compare the behavior of the church, obliged to live according to its covenant with God, with the moral behavior of an organization like the army, which merely carries out its duty within a purely human covenant. 

Coming up. The author of the facebook posting attributed “love” to the army, saying its behavior on accepting same-sex marriage was loving. That too represents sloppy ethical thinking. Which I’ll take up in the next post.