In light of that picture of humanity, Christian ethics cannot merely concern itself with knowing the right or good thing to do, it must first attend to being or—more starkly—becoming the right or good sort of being, the kind of being who might then do good things. Grace, redemption, and salvation are elemental to Christian distinctiveness. That the good life might be a vision for the sinful enemy of God attests a remarkable break from Greco-Roman ways, where gifts were granted to those innately apt to put them to good use. Yet Paul sings the praise of a God who justifies the ungodly and even dies for his own enemies (Rom 5:3–10).

Christians do not have unique possession of the ethical, of what is good and right. The Greeks wrote of the good life; today many different guilds work carefully to police the professional ethics of their respective fields. And plenty of other ancient or contemporary settings witness to the seemingly global concern for knowing the good, doing the good, and even for being good. That being so, we do well to seriously ask what Christians have to say that is unique, which is singular, and that warrants the modifier Christian ethics.
This question may seem incapable of a singular or coherent answer. Christians vary regarding their ethical commitments and even their theoretical understandings of the good life. To be sure, Roman Catholics frequently do disagree with charismatics or with Lutherans here. It’s also important to say, however, that there are disagreements between virtue ethicists and those committed to divine command ethics, categories which cut across rather than run alongside denominational fault lines. Indeed, Christian disagreement regarding ethics may only seem to compound as we add new methodological approaches to the historical pedigree of our still-proliferating church traditions. In the face of these divisions among Christians, can we give a coherent answer regarding what makes for Christian ethics?
And yet Christian ethics does offer some common concerns that set it apart from other approaches and that provide it a noteworthy sense of coherence. Much catholic unity can be perceived in this arena of theology.
In the following, we’ll seek to appreciate the myriad ways that Christian ethics distinguishes itself among various ethical approaches: in other words, we’ll discover what makes Christian ethics Christian. In so doing, we’ll consider the definition of the good, the knowledge of the good, the good person, the process of becoming good, what sort of goods are involved, how virtue and command relate to the good life, and finally, to what end the good is done.
What Is the Good?
Christian ethics finds fullest expression in the works of Jesus and the preaching of his commissioned apostles, and yet it is rooted in the prophetic witness of the law and prophets of Israel. In other words, both the Old and the New Testaments speak into Christian ethics.
The language of “the good” does not appear very often in Scripture, though confession of divine goodness appears often (as in Ps 145). But paired terms do appear in telling ways. The Bible, in both testaments, speaks of the “right” or “righteous,” which can be rendered as the “just.” (English splits language of justice and righteousness, but the biblical languages did not have this divide.) Psalm 11:7 says,
The Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds.
The upright will behold his face.
The register may be that of judicial rectitude rather than goodness, but the conceptual logic remains telling. “God is this, and therefore God loves this—and therefore those marked by this are the ones who will see God most intimately.” Divine character defines godly will, which then gives shape to the nature of rightness here and goodness elsewhere.
Goodness or the good is not a mere whim. It is not an arbitrary nominalist choice. It is not the sum total of aggregated social mores. The good marks God’s own being and character, which then defines the character of those who will be with him. Herein Christian ethics offers a robustly theological rooting to the nature of the good.
How Is the Good Known?
If the good is defined by God’s own character, then the question arises: How on earth might one know what is, in fact, good? God’s own character is not a simple thing; it is not available at one’s whim or caprice. And it is, therefore, no easy reference point for us to plot the good. God is spirit; he is elusive, transcendent. God is fire, wind, spirit. To know the good as knowing the moral implication of this one is to know mystery itself. Katherine Sonderegger has insisted on just this point.
Divine mystery is not a sign of our failure in knowledge, but rather our success. It is because we know truly and properly—because we obey in faith the First Commandment—that God is mystery. His metaphysical predicate of Oneness, when known, yields mystery.1
Sonderegger presses home repeatedly that mystery is an intellectual achievement flowing from divine presence, not a limit owing to divine absence.2 The mysterious God is known—and, with him, so is the incomprehensible character of goodness. God reveals goodness—the ethical—by his powerful mercy. And how do we know it now? We turn to God’s holy word, wherein divine instruction has been granted.
The whole counsel of God’s word conveys the totality of the good. Here the sufficiency of God’s word relates to the wisdom needed to live ethically. We see this especially in one of the most well-known passages attesting the nature of Holy Scripture. Second Timothy 3:16–17 not only attests the word of God to be “breathed out by God” or “inspired by God” (3:16), but also to be useful to equip and teach “so that the man or woman of God might be equipped for every good deed” (3:17). The logic of this passage is this: all Scripture forms one for all good works. This implies a threat: if we tend to anything less than the totality of Scripture, we ought to expect to be readied for only some good works.
The totality of Scripture is custom-designed to conform us, to prepare us, for all the challenges and temptations ahead. We see that principle in play when Jesus himself faced temptation. The threats were varied: food for survival, authority to summon the divine, riches galore. Jesus could have simply rebuked the tempter. He was divine, after all. But in each instance, he modeled the way that holy Scripture formatively prepares one for every good deed in that he responded to each inviting offer with a scriptural quotation drawn from the Old Testament.
Who Does the Good?
Christian ethics also distinguishes itself in its characterization of the agent of the good life. Good persons do good things. Agere sequitur esse or “action follows being.” Metaphysics form morals, for good or ill. So Christian ethics refuses to jump past the subject of the good life simply to consider the good or evil action. We must always begin with description of the subject of the ethical life.
Christianity redescribes the nature of the human. Humans are good, created by God himself. They are “very good” by his design and play a uniquely charted role in his cosmic order. Humans are evil, fallen into sin in Adam. They are contemptible and accursed, having let loose death and corruption since that primal sin in the garden. Christian thought conveys a textured picture, then, of humans as moral agents marked by great privilege and responsibility on the one hand, and yet marked by tragedy and limitation on the other.
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We recognize our emotions are broken, so we pray that God will change our hearts when it comes to reading the Bible. That we would not just do it, but love it. And then in faith, we start reading, believing that God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. If we make that investment, by God’s grace, our emotions will follow our actions, and we will not just read the Word, but love the Word.

Here is an expression that, even if you don’t use it, I believe will resonate with you if you’re a Christian:
I want, to want…
“Wanting to want” means this: It means that as Christians, we are to have a different value system than that of the world. We are to value things that, in the eyes of the world, might often look like a waste of time. We are to make eternal kingdom investments rather than spending our time, finances, and emotional energy on earthly things.
Take, for example, the practice of prayer. Prayer is valuable. And it is beneficial. Prayer is the means by which we enter into a deeper relationship with our Creator in whose presence there is fullness of joy. Further, prayer is the God-ordained means by which we can bring real change into the world. By any measure of logic, then, we should not only make it our practice to pray, but that we should actually want to pray.
Problem is we don’t. We want to watch Netflix and chill. That leads us to wanting to want when it comes to something like prayer. Ideally, we should desire to pray, and not just pray because we know we should. So we want to want.
That’s true for all kinds of things in the Christian life because our emotions are just as broken by sin as everything else is. As the Spirit of God is making us more like Jesus, He is not only changing our behavior; He is redeeming our emotional lives as well. Someday, in heaven, our emotions and our actions will be brought into harmony with each other. We won’t just do the right thing; we will feel the right thing. But until then, we want to want.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 3, 2022
We also learn by hearing the struggles of people who are still in the pit, describe the nightmares they’re living through, and tell us how on earth they’re continuing to worship God despite it making no sense at all. I learn as much, if not more, from these gnarled saints. Their struggles teach, and you don’t have to be out of the other side of your struggles to have learned wisdom. You see, treasure lives at the bottom of the pit, and like the inverse of Plato’s cave, those who have suffered much and still love the Lord can teach the rest of us how to live. Which shouldn’t surprise us, the Christian life is one of death and resurrection, after all.

When Christians suffer, when we experience pain, it often gives rise to doubt. We begin to wonder if it’s meant to be like this. One of the most quoted reasons to disbelieve in God is what’s usually called ‘the problem of evil.’ For most of us though it’s not the existence of conspicuous evil that’s the problem, it’s the pain in our lives and the lives of those we love. There’s a reason that C. S. Lewis formulated the challenge as The Problem of Pain.
Why does it make us doubt? I’m sure there are as many variations as there are sufferers, but broadly because if we truly believe that we are the beloved children of the most high God it raises some questions when, as best we can tell, he could improve our lot but hasn’t done so.
These questions are then painfully pressed on in many churches Sunday by Sunday as we preach a Christian life that sounds remarkably pain-free—this is certainly true in my charismatic tradition, but I’ve seen it much more broadly across evangelicalism in the UK. We preach what amounts to a prosperity gospel, where Christians are promised nice middle-classed lives.
Some readers might want to object that they haven’t heard this sort of preaching in their church, and thank the Lord if that’s the case, but for clarity I don’t mean that this is explicitly taught in the sermon, though that can happen. It’s often preached through the stories we share, through those we platform and those we don’t, through the questions our preaching does and doesn’t address, through the words of the songs we pick to sing, through so-called vulnerability that sufferers see right through, and through the reactions to those who are in acute pain.
We speak like the grand plan is that we’re all free from pain right now. Which, dear friends, it is not. You can quote Psalm 27 all you like but that isn’t what it means. There will be no more pain after the resurrection of the dead (Revelation 21), and that is a promise worth gripping to until your hands bleed. One day every ounce of existential dread, every lash of life’s cruel calumny, and every private howl you flung into the uncaring heavens, will melt in the face of the Lord Jesus as he smiles and embraces you, his little brother or sister.
And when I say it will melt, I don’t mean that as a nice verb to describe ‘going away.’ When the eyes of Jesus the consuming fire (Hebrews 12) look upon you tenderly, they will look on the root of Hell that has afflicted you with the force of a thousand suns and it will die.
One day our pain will go. But not yet. We aren’t promised that. In fact, the Bible tells us that our pain still has work to do—for suffering produces character (Romans 5). But even that can be a weight to bear, we are not responsible for ensuring we have achieved anyone’s definition of ‘adequate growth’ through our trials than the Lord’s.
Pain is required for growth. Ask any athlete. We immediately might have questions about how that death or that vile sting will cause us to grow, and it’s important to face them. They do not have clear and simple answers. Our struggles teach us.
I think I could be misread here. We often hear stories of challenge in our churches, and invariably they are told once those challenges are over, the people involved aren’t feeling the rawest edge of the pain, and it all sounds a bit neat and tidy.
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