April 14, 2022

Ethics, Morals, and Good Friday: A Lesson in Loyalty and Disloyalty

April 14, 2022/ T.J. Gentry

Judas Iscariot (right), retiring from the Last Supper, painting by Carl Bloch, late 19th century

What comes to mind when you think of Good Friday? On the cultural side, perhaps a day off from school, one last Lenten fish fry sponsored by the local Knights of Columbus, or making sure someone knows to bring the ham and deviled eggs to dinner on Easter Sunday. On the religious side, talk of Good Friday usually evokes images of a traitor name Judas, Peter’s three denials of his relationship to Jesus, and the bloody and disfigured body of the Lord hanging lifeless on a Roman cross. What about ethics? What about morals? Do these two words come to mind when you think of Good Friday? Maybe. Maybe not. At the heart of Good Friday, we find poignant though beautiful ethical and moral lessons giving voice to divine grace and love as they whisper and even shout the gospel message. Before I discuss one of those lessons, let’s make sure we understand the overlap and distinctions between ethics and morals.

Most will have a general sense of the terms, maybe even thinking they are synonymous. Insofar as they both relate to matters of right and wrong, good and bad, ethics and morals are similar. However, there is an essential distinction between the terms as they are used today. Speaking of ethics tells of the more theoretical aspects of right and wrong, asking questions about the nature of the good life, duty, obligation, or right actions. For example, if I say that murder is wrong, I make an ethical statement. Morals are a bit different, less theoretical, and more practical. When we speak of morality, we address concerns related to behavior, conduct, and rules for a particular person or society. When I say that it is wrong to take the life of an unborn child, I am speaking about morality. Such a statement certainly has an ethical foundation: murder is wrong. However, when I apply that ethical norm to concerns over aborting a defenseless child, I move from the theoretical to the practical, from ethics to morality. Assuming the similarities and distinctions between ethics and morals are somewhat clearer, how do they relate to Good Friday? Consider one way, one lesson about ethics and morals from the narrative, a lesson drawn from the actions of Judas and Peter: I call it a lesson in loyalty and disloyalty.

Before Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, he walked with the Lord for three and a half years. He ate with Jesus, witnessed the miracles, sat at his Rabbi’s feet, and listened to the Truth speaking the truth. Judas was entrusted with the money and ministered alongside the other disciples. Yet, in the end, after letting Jesus wash his feet and Satan fill his heart, he betrays the Son of God for thirty silver pieces. Then he hung himself. Peter was the self-appointed spokesman of the Twelve, the first to verbalize that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. Peter was the only one who got out of the boat and attempted to walk on water, and he didn’t hesitate to draw his sword to protect Jesus and cut away Malchus’s ear. Yet, when pressed, his boldness evaporated, and his heart filled with cowardice. Though warned ahead of time by Jesus, he still did it; Peter denied his King not once, not twice, but three times. But he didn’t give up. Did he grieve? Yes. Was he broken? Absolutely. He was also one of the first two disciples at the empty tomb, and he didn’t fear jumping from his fishing boat into the water as he rushed to shore to embrace his risen Savior.

What might we learn from these two men, both loved by Jesus and part of His handpicked group of leaders? What do we learn as we consider that Judas went into the darkness and never returned, while Peter also went into the night but returned to the one who said He was the Light of the World? We learn about ethics and morals, loyalty and disloyalty. As an ethical consideration, loyalty relates to the duty and obligation of support and allegiance. Ethical loyalty is not blind sycophantic devotion divorced from an objective standard of goodness and its corollary oughts. Far from such a perversion of virtue, ethical loyalty centers on supporting and giving allegiance to a principle more than a person, or, in the case of Jesus, to the Person who is the living principle of the good and right. Peter eventually understood this and acted accordingly when Judas did not, bringing us to the morality of loyalty. When we realize that morality is the practical expression of ethical concern, we see just how moral Peter was contrasted to Judas’s tragic immorality. Because Peter committed himself to the ethic of loyalty, he was able to rise after falling, to grieve and repent until he eventually made his way back to Jesus. This is the point of Jesus asking Peter three times if he loved Him that morning on the beach after the resurrection. Each question Jesus asked was salve applied to Peter’s self-inflicted wound of temporary disloyalty. Each time Jesus responded with the commands to Peter to feed and tend the His sheep, Jesus was reminding Peter that He was loyal to him and willing to trust him once more: Jesus and Peter teach us the ethics and morals of loyalty.

Sadly, we learn from Judas the ethics and morals of disloyalty, a lesson in unfaithfulness, a lesson in violating allegiance and duty. Because Judas abandoned his ethical commitment to remain loyal to Jesus (yes, I do believe Judas fell away from something, from Someone he did know and at one time even love, and that Someone never stopped loving Judas), he willingly corrupted his morality and made himself subject to even greater corruption by Satan. Judas chose disloyalty when he could have chosen loyalty. He decided to grieve and die instead of grieve and return to seek the Lord’s mercy and live. There was room for another in Peter’s boat that morning, and Judas could have jumped in the water with Peter had he still been alive. He could have sought mercy from Jesus and even been restored, but he didn’t. It’s not that Judas could not. He would not. His compromise and fall into ethical disloyalty led to moral disloyalty. His fall is a poignant reminder of the ethics and morals of disloyalty.

Easter and Ecclesiology

April 10, 2020/ Brian G. Chilton

By now, you have probably been inundated with articles surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Some articles have told you about the dangers of the virus and why you should heed the advice of the CDC, whereas other articles have claimed that the pandemic is nothing more than a governmental conspiracy aimed at bringing forth socialism into the nation.

But one of the greatest challenges to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is a theological question that has been posed to the Church. The Church[1] has been unable to meet in person. However, due to the advances in technology, churches across the nation and the world have met virtually through online services and alternative styles, including drive-in services. The question has been asked, “Are these still church services?” An even bigger theological question raised is, “Who is the church?” These questions are part of the theological branch known as ecclesiology or theology of the church.

As we approach the Easter season, many churches will find themselves unable to meet in person. However, does this mean that the Church is no longer in operation? To answer this question, we might consider Jesus’ provocative statement from John 2:19: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” Jesus had challenged the disciples and Jewish leaders early in his ministry. It was something that resonated with both. The Jewish leaders exclaimed, “This temple took forty-six years to build, and you will raise it up in three days?” (John 2:20). The disciples only fully understood his message after the resurrection had transpired and the leaders used his message as fodder to fuel Jesus’s condemnation. Oddly, the message is not included in the Synoptic Gospels. However, it is reflected in the accusation of the Jewish leaders against Jesus during his trial, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands, and in three days I will build another not made with hands’” (Mark 14:58). Even on the cross, Jesus was ridiculed by individuals who said, “You who would destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!” (Matt. 27:40). The correlation of these verses across the Gospel accounts amounts to what Dr. Lydia McGrew calls an undesigned coincidence. That is, a correlation that was unplanned, but which shows a common source behind all the Gospel narratives.

The aged apostle John explained the message of Jesus, noting that Jesus “was speaking about the temple of his body. So when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the statement Jesus had made” (John 2:21–22). But what does Jesus’s teaching tell us about the Church this Easter season, especially during this pandemic? Here are a few applications:

1. The Church is a people and not a place. This is a recurring theme throughout the teachings of Jesus and something that makes him quite the controversialist. Early in Jesus’s ministry, he met with a woman that most modern Christians would turn away. She was a woman who had been divorced five times and was living with a man (John 4:17–18). While Jesus shared the gospel with her, she turned to the debate over place. She, being a Samaritan, said, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). Jesus redirected her attention to the true mode of worship. While admitting that Jerusalem was the chosen place to have the temple, he said something even more revolutionary about worship. He said, “But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:21–24). As the CSB Study Bible says in its commentary, “Jesus’s point was that since God is spirit, proper worship of him is also a matter of spirit rather than physical location.” This is something to which God is directing our attention during this time. Worship is not just something that happens corporately on Sunday mornings even though that is extremely important, but rather worship is something that can and should happen every day of the week.

2. The Church is a body and not a building. I have been concerned for quite some time that we as Christians worship the buildings in which we worship the Lord. This pandemic has unfortunately suggested that is so. By Jesus’s teaching concerning the temple of God being his body rather than the building, he was directing people against the idol worship of the temple building. Jesus warned the disciples that the temple would be destroyed (Matt. 24:2). Yet, the Church would be the bride of Christ (Matt. 25:1–13; Rev. 21:1–2). That is, the Church is a body—a universal body—which cannot be restrained by bricks and mortar. What makes us think that a building could ever hold the totality of God’s presence in the first place (Acts 17:24)?

3. The Church is an organism and not an organization. Jesus taught that the Church would not be built by organizations but rather through the organism of his Church. When Peter proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus noted that Peter had this truth revealed to him by the Father. He calls Peter blessed before saying, “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt. 16:18). The reality is that the Church is a larger assembly of people that one could ever realize. It spans across denominational lines, transcends time, and unites various nationalities and ethnicities.

We have long accepted the idea that the Church is equivalent to a local community club. However, the Church is an unstoppable organism of the like that COVID-19 shutters and flees. No organism can stop the Church. Several viruses much worse than COVID-19 have tried in the past and lost. Smallpox has hit numerous times throughout history from 165 to 748, and the Church lived on. The bubonic plague, otherwise known as the “Black Death,” killed thousands of people from 1348–1352, and the Church continued. Throughout the 1400s and 1500s (the time of the Reformation), the bubonic plague arose from time to time, and the Church remained formidable. The 1600s continued to see the bubonic plague strike and even into the 1700s. The Church has remained steadfast even still. We will survive COVID-19. If we return to the ecclesiology of Jesus, we will have a better picture of the Church and a better theology to accompany what and who the Church is supposed to be.

Remember, it was after the resurrection that the Church began to understand what Jesus meant by the temple being his body. Despite the challenges we face, may we remember the victory found in the resurrection of Jesus and our identity found in him.

Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University and is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has been in the ministry for nearly 20 years and serves as the Senior Pastor of Westfield Baptist Church in northwestern North Carolina.

[1] I use the capitalized Church to indicate the universal Church.

April 01, 2018

The Always Scandalous Cross

April 01, 2018/ Tom Thomas

The pagan Celsus was the earliest infamous, literary critic of Jesus Christ. He blistered Jesus for suffering on the cross. He railed against Christians’ affirmation that Jesus is God’s Son – even God himself. When Jesus was on the cross, why did he receive no assistance from the Father? Further, if Jesus were God, why was he unable to help himself? Underneath Celsus’ criticisms are assumptions humankind has shared across the ages. If God were God, would He really will his only Son to suffer so ignominiously? Would not God have foreseen such a tragedy and planned to avoid it? Furthermore, would the all-powerful God allow his power to be impugned and subverted by plotting priests, and his supremacy to be bested by Roman power? These questions and assumptions may be roadblocks for some in considering Jesus’ death. Let me consider them briefly.

The explanatory meaning of the Cross takes Celsus’ assumptions and turns them on their head! Scrutinizing Celsus’ criticisms gives us a singular portal into God and the cross. First, if God were God, would He really will his only Son to suffer so scandalously? Yes. The foreordained coming of a suffering servant-champion who would redeem humankind from the ghastly effects of the Fall begins as a thin red line in Genesis chapter three and runs through Isaiah chapter 53. The suffering and death which Adam and Eve’s sin caused has to be born. God’s coming Servant Prince takes this sin with its suffering upon himself in order to redeem humankind from it. Neither is God’s dignity offended nor is He blindsided by his Son’s cross. God knows with full intention the Serpent ‘will strike his heel’. ‘He was crushed for our iniquities’ and ‘by his wounds we are healed.’ Celsus says a god knowing this would not rush headlong into it. Oh no? Since when do champions, much less God, shrink from a noble end charged with pain and suffering? The very confrontation with suffering and victory over it is what gives champions their character. Olympic Half Pipe icon, snowboarder Shaun White, overcame a devastating, face-altering snowboarding accident last fall to win a gold medal in the 2018 Olympics. This made him an even stronger champ. Contrary to weakness and cowardice, Jesus’ conquering of the cross demonstrates the very heroic redemption of suffering and shame.

Take another of Celsus’ criticisms of Jesus. If Jesus were God’s Son, why did he receive no assistance from his Father? Further, if Jesus were God, why was he unable to help himself? Celsus deliberately echoes the chief priests’ mockery as they looked on the dying Jesus. ‘He saved others; is he unable to save himself? He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now….’ In my youth, I wondered the same thing.

Power is the ability to get something done. It may also be the ability to choose not to do something. Would not the killer by restraining himself from the impulse to gun down seventeen Stoneman Douglas’ students have shown greater power than by pulling the trigger? Choosing not to save himself on the cross enabled Jesus to demonstrate more power. Power is also the rate at which work gets done. A Corvette ZO6, going from 0-60 miles per hour in 3.3 seconds, gets work done faster than an Aston MartinV12 Vantage that takes 4.1 seconds. Jesus could have saved himself in three hours by coming down from the cross. In those three hours he would have saved only himself from death. He would have saved only himself from death but not conquered it. However, by waiting some thirty nine hours till Sunday morning to rise from the grave, he conquered death, saved millions, and all creation! Which is the greater display of power?

Celsus’ attacks perennially play to the lust for a momentary flash of brute muscle. The prideful lust for superiority and the diabolical wish to cut God down to size are perpetual temptations. Twenty one centuries later, what Salvation Army founder William Booth said remains true, ‘It is precisely because He would not come down that we believe in Him.’

March 28, 2016

An Easter Reflection

March 28, 2016/ David Baggett

My wife’s an English professor, and she’s helped me realize I’m late to a game, or a party—or an awkward social occasion; whatever! I'm late—that of seeing the power of stories, the way they shape us, how we define ourselves by and see ourselves in relation to them. It makes sense, but as a philosopher I’ve heretofore tended to be more interested, when it comes to something like “worldview,” to think in terms of what’s true and what’s false, what we have good reason to believe and what we don’t. It’s why my philosophy stuff, as much as I love it, sometimes seems so thin and dry in comparison with the richness and thickness of her literature.

Today is Easter, for example, and the evidential case for the resurrection is important to me. I am confident there’s a nondiscursive way of knowing, via personal experience, the truth of the resurrection, and it may be the most important knowing of all—but though that may be good for those who have it, it doesn’t much help those who don’t. Fortunately the historical case for the resurrection is amazing; my colleague Gary Habermas is one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. For those interested in wondering whether the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is actually true, whether there’s evidence for it historically, I’d encourage them to read Gary’s books.

That sort of thing is a fun intellectual exercise, and it appeals to me as a philosopher. But suppose we establish the truth of the resurrection, or at least the credentials necessary to believe in it rationally. It’s hardly the end of the story, but just the beginning. Even devils presumably believe in the historicity of the resurrection. That it’s true is extremely important, but its truth doesn’t mean we’re conducting our lives according to that truth. This is where seeing worldview as more than a set of propositions one believes to be true can come in so handy, and seeing the power of stories can help.

We are all of us inveterate storytellers. We love a good yarn—to hear them, to tell them. And the most important stories are the ones we most closely associate with our identity. On a garden-variety note, but one that rings with significance for me, I think of a few years ago, when my mom was still alive. A brother, my mom, a sister, and I met in Kentucky—and for a few hours one afternoon we reclined in a room together and endlessly rehearsed stories that make up our family lore. They were stories we’d told and retold a thousand times, each recounting as delightful as the one before, tickling us all to no end. We didn’t need to exaggerate or stretch the details; the canon’s already fairly established; too much deviation isn’t even allowed. The same stories, yet still rife with significance. I remember that afternoon, while regaling my family members with stories, and being regaled by them, I felt what I can only describe as unbridled joy. I was with people who’d known me my whole life, and we were relishing the stories that, to a significant degree, defined our shared lives together and knit us together as family. I was home.

The best literature shouldn't be enjoyed just once. C. S. Lewis once wrote that the sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. Some stories are good for ingestion; others are worthy to be relished, savored, digested. The greatest Story most of all.

Each Easter, I go to church, and hear the Easter story one more time. The details are the same. Nothing changes. But as my pastor said this morning, we change. Each time we hear it we’re different. We bring a new set of needs to it, but the story itself remains the same. I couldn’t help but think of Holden Caulfield’s visits to the Museum of Natural History—where the exhibits are always the same, which he found deeply comforting, but those visiting the museum, he recognized, are always different, either in big ways or small. The Easter story provides an even more significant point of constancy, an even more fundamental Archimedean point on which to stand. The narrative of self-giving love reaches its climax each Easter and offers itself to each of us, and though the story is the same, how it speaks to us is always slightly different. For it meets us where we are, at our point of need, reminding us of what doesn’t change, and offers to transform us. It offers us the chance to become part of that universal Story, to define ourselves anew in relation to it.

That the Story is true is obviously crucial, but recognizing its truth isn’t enough. The Story challenges us to become part of it, to define ourselves by It and Him, to grab hold of what’s constant and permanent, eternal and ultimate, while bracing ourselves for needed and inevitable change in the midst of growing and of life’s vicissitudes and contingencies.

The Story tells me who I am and what I’m called to be. It reminds me of what love looks like and that death isn’t the end. It challenges me not just to believe that it happened, but that the fact that it happened makes all the difference. It was the key plot point on which the whole narrative turned, marking love's victory and the death of death. It reminds me that as a Christian I don’t merely believe static truths, but dynamic life-transforming ones—that I’m part of a Story that’s still in the process of unfolding. And we’ve been afforded a glorious peek to see how it ends.

Image: Claude Lorrain (1604/1605–1682) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

April 05, 2015

Easter and Moral Apologetics

April 05, 2015/ David Baggett

Easter is the most important holy day for Christians; it’s the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Christianity is unapologetically historical. If the resurrection didn’t happen, and happen literally, then Christianity is false; and anyone and everyone is perfectly within their prerogative to heap scorn on Christianity to their heart’s content. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then Christians are of all men most miserable, for their hopes are in vain and their faith vacuous. But if Jesus was raised from the dead, scarcely anything could be more important, more revelatory of ultimate reality, more hopeful for the world and human beings.

When I think of the resurrection, my mind goes to Antony Flew, who had three debates with my friend and colleague Gary Habermas on the resurrection. Flew, perhaps the most famous philosophical atheist of the twentieth century, underwent a huge change of mind near the end of his life.

Having argued forcefully but respectfully his whole career that the evidence led in the direction of atheism, he came to believe that the preponderance of evidence pointed instead to the existence of God—though more the deity of Aristotle than the God of Abraham. On the strength of scientific arguments for theism, especially biological and fine-tuning ones, Flew left atheism behind, but only to become a deist, not a classical theist.

Interestingly enough, he remained unmoved by the moral argument, C. S. Lewis’s variant as the salient example in his mind. Since a deist does not believe in an interventionist God, arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus never quite brought Flew around, despite his having said that, if he became a theist, he would probably become a Christian because of the power of the case for the resurrection.

Flew’s resistance, it would seem, was primarily rooted in his inability to affirm God’s moral attributes, and his difficulty overcoming this challenge explains his resistance to the moral argument for God’s existence. Moral arguments have the distinctive advantage of accentuating God’s moral nature: his omnibenevolence, his impeccability, his goodness. If such arguments work, they make sense of a God who does more than merely contemplate himself; indeed, they dovetail and resonate perfectly with a God who pursues, who would deign to intervene, become involved, stoop to save, die to bring life. Flew could not bring himself to believe this, as far as we know.

Flew was a firm moral realist and, later on, a believer in libertarian free will. Belief in moral regrets, moral responsibilities, moral rights, and moral freedoms, one would have hoped, might have enabled him to see the power of theism to explain such realities. He came to see the inadequacy of a naturalistic perspective when it came to the laws of nature, the existence of something rather than nothing, human consciousness, the efficacy of reason, and the emergence of life. He took all of these to be sound evidential considerations in favor of a divine Mind. Why not moral experience and the existence of a moral law as well?

As far as I can tell, the reasons for his resistance to the moral argument(s) were four-fold. One issue was that he was convinced biblical exegesis led to the view that God inexplicably predestines some to an eternal hell for lives they could not have avoided. A second issue was that if morality were to depend on God, God would be its justification, which would lead, at most, to prudential reasons to be moral, based on the prospects of punishment for failure to comply. A third issue was his concern over the equation of goodness and being, originally deriving from the teachings of Plato. One like Gottfried Leibniz, Flew argued, used this equation to derive a system of ethics on theistic foundations that is irremediably arbitrary. Things not at all recognizably good are to be called good anyway. This concern basically sounds like the classical arbitrariness and vacuity problem rooted in Ockhamistic voluntarism.

Resurrection of Christ by Hans Rottenhammer — *Resurrection of Christ* by Hans Rottenhammer

And a fourth issue was perhaps the biggest of all, and in a sense the culmination of all of the above: the problem of evil. Flew’s resistance to the moral argument makes good sense thus construed, and it was inevitable that until he thought of God as personal and moral, rather than merely intellectual and impersonal, his resistance to special revelation would remain intact and he would continue to be convinced by the teleological and cosmological arguments but not the moral one. Of course his resistance to the case for the resurrection would persist as well.

Flew’s story underscores the need for moral apologetics, because all of Flew’s worries can be effectively answered. The historical, biblical, and philosophical evidence weighs heavily against the problematic predestinationist soteriology that worried him, and most recent theistic ethicists, especially since Locke, have focused on the ontological grounding of moral facts in God, not the motivational and prudential incentive for morality provided by divine threats. A theistic ethic that avoids Ockhamistic voluntarism can be defended, and moral apologetics and the problem of evil are locked in a zero-sum battle; only one can survive, and I think the evidence for the success of moral apologetics is strong. This is not to say the problem of evil lends itself to any simple solution; certainly it doesn’t. In fact, the way the problem of evil remains a problem for Christianity, though not an intractable one ultimately, is one of the distinctive strengths of this worldview; it’s the worldview that lacks the resources to offer a robust account of evil in the first place that suffers from explanatory inadequacy.

What all of this shows is that the case for the resurrection of Jesus—likely the strongest argument for Christianity (even more so than the moral argument!)—goes hand in hand with moral apologetics. They are not in competition; they are rather two star players on a very talented team.

Moreover, the resurrection shows the inauguration of God’s kingdom life; resurrection living, free from the fear of death and sin, is the sort of life for which we were designed. Resurrection represents God’s work of re-creation; the power that raised Jesus from the dead can be at work within us, renewing us, transforming us, making us into the people God intended us to be. The resurrection shows that our hope is not in vain, that the moral gap can be closed by God’s transforming grace, and ultimately that there is no tension or conflict between the dictates of morality and rationality. The resurrection shows that the grain of the universe is good; that God intends to redeem the entirety of the created order, making it teem with life according to his original plan; that the worst of evils can be redeemed and defeated; that life is a comedy, not a tragedy; that the day will come when all our tears will be wiped away.