Shayne Looper: The roots of Christian differences on moral issues

A wide variety of stances exists among self-professed Christians regarding the ethical and moral issues of our time, even though most of them Christians would agree that the Bible is an authoritative source for instruction on the virtuous life. How people who claim to base their beliefs and behaviors on the same source can differ so dramatically is part of a long and complicated story.

That story may go back to the first centuries after Christ, but for brevity’s sake, we will pick it up with the early 19th-century biblical critic, philosopher, and theologian F.C. Baur. Immersed in the philosophical thought of G.W.F. Hegel, he looked at the Bible through a dialectical lens which sharply divided the theology of the Apostle Paul from the teaching of Jesus.

Fast-forward to another German theologian who was born almost a century later: Martin Dibelius. While Baur believed that Jesus’s views differed radically from the Apostle Paul’s and later Christianity’s, Dibelius believed that Jesus’s views cannot even be ascertained with any certainty.

This idea that a breach occurred between Jesus and the next generation of Christians, particularly in Pauline churches, has gripped biblical interpretation for generations. Jesus, as seen by Protestants who followed Baur and Dibelius, was a revolutionary who never intended to instruct his followers on how to live in society. Why bother? He thought society was about to be overthrown by the establishment of God’s kingdom.

Furthermore, this radical Jesus taught his followers to expect his return within their own lifetimes. So, the kinds of ethical instruction he gave — turn the other cheek, love your enemy, give sacrificially — were only intended for use within the Christian community, and that for a brief time. When Jesus did not return as expected, the church was forced to turn to other sources for ethical instruction for living in the wider world.

To support this view, Dibelius points to the various “household codes” in the New Testament, found in Ephesians, Colossians, Peter and elsewhere. These bear a resemblance to household codes that were part of the Greco-Roman world of the time, and particularly to those of the Stoics. According to Dibelius, Jesus’s “Christianity was unprepared for meeting [the needs] of family and fatherland” and was forced to borrow ethical instruction from non-Christian sources.

If he was right, if as early as the Apostle Paul, Christians were looking to secular society for their ethical instruction, then Christians are free to do the same today. They can, for example, look to the American Academy of Pediatrics for ethical instruction relating to children with gender dysphoria. Similar sources might be sought for instruction regarding same-sex relationships, abortion, immigration, and all the other hot-button topics of the day.

F.C. Baur’s views have largely been discarded, shipwrecked on the shores of later biblical scholarship. Dibelius’ contention that the Bible’s household codes were borrowed from the Stoics has been effectively challenged by John Howard Yoder, J.N. Sevenster, Rachel Held Evans, and many others. The content of the biblical household codes differs significantly from Greco-Roman codes and has its roots in Judaism and Jesus rather than in Stoicism.

This brief, historical survey of Christian ethical thought is obviously incomplete, but it makes an important point and raises a serious question. The point is that ideas are powerful and make a difference in the real world. How many people, even in the contemporary church, know who F.C. Baur and Martin Dibelius were? But their ideas have had lasting impact on how Christians approach today’s most vexing moral issues.

The question that is raised is this: If Baur and Dibelius were wrong to posit the existence of a theological chasm between Jesus and the Apostle Paul, if the apostolic writings are faithful to Jesus’s position on real-world issues, does it not seem unwise to give contemporary moralists more weight than we afford the Bible?

We are at sea, sailing through the rocky shoals of contemporary morality, always in danger of shipwreck. Because the needle on the compass of today’s moralists never stops spinning, I choose to be guided by the wisdom of Jesus and his apostles.

— Shayne Looper is a writer and speaker based in Coldwater, Michigan. Contact him at salooper57@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: The roots of Christian differences on moral issues