A Dysfunctional View of Christian Ethics
By Renate Hood, Associate Professor of New Testament
LeTourneau University, Longview, TX
Who or what determines the parameters of Christian ethics in contemporary society? Is it a so-called Christian worldview? Who then determines the boundaries of that worldview? Is it our Christian peers? For example, “biblical worldview” is an often-heard catch phrase. But whose biblical worldview is it? Is it the biblical worldview of the pre-Christian Mesopotamians or of the first-century Romans? Or perhaps the biblical worldview of the nineteenth-century colonized Africans? Or is it solely the worldview of the twenty-first century, conservative evangelical Christian Americans?
Several months ago, a renowned magazine carried a list of the most influential conservative evangelicals. That week Larry King interviewed some of these main influential persons on his night time talk show. I was about to do some channel surfing when King moved his questions in the area of ethical hot potatoes, including stem cell research. When a question concerning gay marriage was posed I held my proverbial breath. Not just because of a particular view, but also because of how the answer would be prefaced and how Christian love would be communicated regardless of, or in light of, biblical truth. And then my heart sunk. The answer given was one that cultural anthropologists would classify as a functional approach. However, this one was rather dysfunctional.
Two main routes of explaining social behavior are used by anthropologists and sociologists—a functional approach and a symbolic approach. The former approach is characterized by focusing on the rules, the mores, or the behaviors in light of its perceived intended purposes, i.e. functionality. The latter approach centers on an ontological reality of a symbolic understanding of society. In this case social communities and scenarios are not understood solely by their individual components.
Back to Larry King. From all the routes the interviewee seated across from King could have taken to answer this question, she resorted to a functional approach and talked about presumed physical behaviors of gay couples and their likewise associated risks. This then was linked to gay marriage without mentioning other aspects of marital commitments, Christianity, and homosexuality.
Next the conversation was stirred to HIV infections by the same guest. She cited statistics on the transmission of HIV as being the highest among homosexual gay men and correlated that to being compounded if gay marriage were to be legalized. Besides not being sure how this relates directly to a Christian view on gay marriage, theses statistics are horribly outdated as the highest populations of newly infected individuals with HIV are heterosexual males. So Christians were once again made out to be uninformed dupes.
From discussing gay marriage, the interview moved on to discussing premarital sex. King was intrigued with the concept of forgiveness. The idea of people being able “to live as they please” and yet be able to be forgiven completely was astounding to him. What a marvelous component of Christian ethics and of the Gospel, indeed. Rather, the conversation steered toward the “why.” Once again, a functional approach was utilized by the same couple being interviewed. God does not allow for premarital sex because it causes diseases.
That is it? God is afraid that His creation gets hurt? So God gave us rules. Voila! Don’t have premarital sex because you might just get Herpes. Okay. What makes these rules part of a Christian worldview? Perhaps they are just as well a medical worldview? After all, even condoms can tear. As a former middle and high school teacher, youth worker, and now a college professor and person in the pastorate with my husband, I can say that a functional approach tells little about God’s character and overtly relies on the strong will-power of individuals. As a result I have over the years seen the sad results of those young people who have swallowed the functionalist approach and have tried to see how far they could engage themselves sexually and still say they abstain from sex.
The functional approach is dysfunctional when it comes to protecting the emotions and the spiritual walk of some of our most cherished youngsters. We close our eyes and think our wonderful young Christian men and women walk down the isle crisp and clean, while in reality they engage in alarming number in all forms of aberrant sexual touching, (i.e., oral and anal sex), all in the name of abstinence, while sinning blatantly. Their silent screams go unheard because we do not like the statistics. We don’t want to hear these taboo words; it rocks our Christian world. If we give our young people a functional message they will work around it. “So we can get diseases? Well then we will find ways we can work around those dangers,” or so they (sadly mistakenly) think.
Who tells them a better way? The symbolic approach derives from our ontological place and dignity as created beings in the image of God? God’s holiness and our worth as humans are what draw boundaries around our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Our Christian ethics ought to draw from God’s character. That in turn will draw people unto God. That was what drew people unto Christ.
How dysfunctional is this poorly informed and “functional” kind of Christian apologetics as seen on Larry King that night? It’s another sad occasion for Christian ethics and an invitation to channel zapping. And so I ended up surfing the channels after all with a worse taste in my mouth than before, a taste of missed opportunity.
