Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 1 Foundations of Christian Ethics
Chapter 3: The Ethics of Jesus
3. The ethics of compromise
and for eternity.
The eschatology of Jesus was never the ethically barren thing that either the apocalyptists of his time or the premillennialists of ours have too often made it. Not only repentance, but sensitiveness to a brother’s need, determined status in the Kingdom (Matt. 4:17; 25:31-46). There is a tension between this world and the world to come, but to Jesus its resolution lay in God’s control over both realms and man’s responsive, obedient acceptance of God’s rule in faith and love and deeds of service.
The God to whom Jesus prayed was the Lord of heaven and earth; his will must be done "on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus’ outlook was too profoundly God-centered and ethical to permit him to fall prey to pessimism regarding this world’s fate, or asceticism regarding God’s gifts within it, or spectacularism regarding the grand finale, or moral indifference regarding the pedestrian steps God’s servants must take along the way. In short, his total outlook without eliminating
eschatology transformed it.
in the realm of God. Apparently such social applications as he made were incidental to this primary purpose. It is well for us that he did so, for not only did he give us what we need most, but with radically
changed social conditions the applications must change from age to age while his insights are eternal.
The other focus centers both in human sin and in the complexity of human social relations. Of sin, Jesus had ample awareness. It was for man’s "hardness of heart" that Moses permitted divorce (Matt. 19:8;
Mark 10:5); it is the "cares of the world and the delight in riches" that choke the word (Matt. 13:22; Mark 4:19). And for sin, repentance, forgiveness, faith, and obedience in love were the answer. It would never have occurred to Jesus to talk about the "lesser of two evils,"’ for to him sin was the supreme evil which must be eradicated root and branch — or to use his own metaphor, eye, hand, and foot (Matt. 5:29- 330; 18:8-9; Mark 9:43-48).
Of the complexity of human relations Jesus says little that is explicit. He makes some observations about the difficulty of a rich man’s entering the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:24; Mark 10:25), about the futility of massive accumulations of goods as a source of security (Luke 12:16- 21), about the inevitable doom awaiting those who were not following the ways that lead to peace (Luke 19:41-44). Yet, both became the making of changes in the institutional structure was not his chief
concern and because his human vista was limited by the conditions of a simple peasant society east of the Mediterranean in the first century A.D., he obviously could not foresee or make pronouncements upon the vast complex of particular problems that confront Christians in today’s world.
Nevertheless, he does not leave us in the dark. What, then, must we hold before us as we deal with the relativities of human existence in which some compromise seems inevitable?
First, Jesus never relaxed or scaled down the necessity of absolute, single--minded devotion to God, whatever the circumstances. There is no evidence that he believed the methods of love would always "work"
in human society. In fact, he foresaw that they would not. Regarding his own fate, he "began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed" (Matt. 16:21; Mark 8:31; Luke 9:22); regarding his followers, he promised them that fidelity to his gospel would bring upon them not
peace but a sword and the severest of domestic tensions (Matt. 10:34- 36; Mark 13:12; Luke 12:51-53). Yet there is no easing of the
requirement of utter integrity and of complete fidelity to the call of God.
Some, though not all, contemporary discussion. of compromise presupposes that physical security or social adjustment are ends so important that recourse must be had to compromise in order to secure them. This was not Jesus’ view.
Nevertheless, as if with tongue in cheek, Jesus tells his followers that the "sons of this world are wiser in their own generation than the sons of light" (Luke 16:8) and suggests that as they go out into a wolflike world, they be "wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matt. 10:16). Does this mean that they were to emulate worldly subtlety? Hardly, but to Jesus fidelity to God was no excuse for naivete. The gospel requires of men their best, including the best of strategy. One must "beware of men," and there are occasions for flight rather than martyrdom (Matt.
10:17-23). But not at the cost of fidelity and faith. The Oxford
Conference in its report on "The Universal Church and the World of Nations" caught perfectly the deduction to be drawn when it affirmed,
"To do what appears as relatively best is an absolute’ duty before God, and to fail in this is to incur positive guilt."6
Taken as a whole, the message of Jesus does not tell us to choose the lesser of two evils. It does tell us, with a realistic awareness of the range of these evils, to choose the greater good. This is more than a verbal difference, for the one takes the world’s evil as its base line, the other takes God’s goodness as it has been made manifest in Jesus. The greater good is that course of action which, in a given circumstance, is
relatively the fullest embodiment of faith and love with God at the center in the act of decision.
Circumstances change, and with them courses of action. God does not change, nor the type of obedient, faith-filled love which Jesus embodied and proclaimed. He does not, therefore, leave us unguided at the point of the concrete decisions of life. How his principles give guidance
among the relativities of our present world will be the main theme of the second half of this book.
NOTES:
1. Matt. 23:14, familiar from the King James Version, is placed in a footnote in the
R.S.V.
2. The Kittel Worterbuch article on agape by Gottfried Quell and Ethelbert Stauffer in Bible Key Words, tr. and ed. J. R. Coates (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951), p. 28.
3. Fosdick, op. cit., p. 76. Used by permission of Harper & Bros. The biblical references cited are Luke 10:30-37; 18:2-6; 19:2-10; 16:19-31;
Matt. 25:42-43.
4. See his Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1936) for an elaboration of this view; also Bright, op. cit., ch. vii, for a modified form of it.
5. Ibid., pp. 97-101.
6. The Oxford Conference (Official Report), Section V, 7.
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Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 1 Foundations of Christian Ethics
Georgia Harkness was educated at Cornell University, Boston University School of Theology, studied at Harvard & Yale theological seminaries and at Union
Theological Seminary of New York. She has taught at Elmira College, Mount Holyoke, and for twelve years was professor of applied theology at Garrett Biblical Institute. In 1950 she became professor of applied theology at the Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, California. Published in 1957 by Abingdon Press. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Harry W. and Grace C. Adams.