by Peter Payne

Created on: April 16, 2009

OBJECTIVE MORALITY:

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

The question of what would Jesus do takes for granted that there are objective moral values, that Jesus knows these objective moral values, and always behaves according to them. For the sake of argument, let us assume that this is true. Let us also assume that all serious Christians take this question seriously and do their best to base their lives upon it. From the obvious observation that Christians often take opposite moral viewpoints on various issues, from slavery, the treatment of homosexuals, to the preemptive war against Iraq, it is clear that while Christ knows objective morality, Christians do not; so doing what one thinks Jesus would do is categorically different than actually doing what Jesus would do. Since Christ is a perfect being, and humans are not, this is not just understandable, but to be expected.

Still, should we not expect to find something in Christ's teaching to help any honest Christian determine what he would do? I think there is. I suspect most readers already know what I am talking about, but I am going to elaborate upon it a bit more before specifically identifying it.

Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder. Apparently, so are good and evil. The school of philosophy known as logical positivism assures us that statements such as "stealing is bad" are not objective statements about reality, but simply how the speaker feels about stealing; and indeed, nothing except how the speaker feels about what he personally identifies as stealing. If the speaker were opposed to homosexual marriage, a lesbian would surely feel that he was stealing this right from her. If the speaker were a wealthy corporate executive who underpaid his workers, those workers would feel that their right to a comfortable livelihood was being stolen from them. The list of such observations is essentially endless, and it is simply a truism that people engage in activities that are regarded by others as wrong, yet the people doing them not only do not regard them as wrong, but even as very good and noble. Moreover, both sets of people are often enough serious Christians. This dilemma has led many people to adopt an attitude of ethical relativism that good and evil are defined by culture, and hence can have no meaning beyond provincial prejudices. In the extreme, this means that there can be no objective criterion by which Nazi Germany and the antebellum United Sates can be judged as having done anything wrong - or so young

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