70 in a Convertible
Since May 12th I’ve been building a blog series on moral decision-making. At the foundation of moral decision-making is goodness, determined by the character of God, and evil, a distortion of God’s goodness toward an end that opposes His design or intention.
When good and evil are applied in our world, we tend to speak of it as right and wrong. An act is right when it conforms to the goodness in God’s character in a given situation, wrong when it fails to do so.
Man’s finiteness and moral blindness due to sin muddy our grasp of God’s character and complicate moral decision-making. Choices about right and wrong are built on each individual conscience’s understanding of God’s character and its factoring in society’s moral perceptions (the moral vs immoral spectrum) and government and laws—the legal vs illegal spectrum. I’d like to devote this installment to the latter.
Some governmental laws merely recognize evils as wrong (murder, theft, perjury, adultery). But government can manufacture obligations that do not exist in nature, i.e. things not evil in themselves can be made wrong by law. Zooming along at 70 mph in a convertible, the wind in your hair, on a sunny summer day may be an exhilarating experience of the gift of life—certainly not an evil in and of itself—and on an open highway across Montana, no law stops you. Drop that same 70 mph onto a densely populated street in a town, and the calculus shifts. The 35-mph speed limit has some arbitrariness to it, but it is naming a real danger to real people who live there. Fast driving in a populated area moves in the direction of being, not just a violation of a prohibition, but a potential evil—recklessness that risks harm to the life of one’s neighbor.
Making moral decisions involves our consciences seeing alignment of social moral standards and legal prescriptions with goodness in God’s character. This, I believe, is how the apostles can tell us to obey legal authorities as God’s servants (e.g. Romans 13.1-4, 1 Peter 2.13-17) and yet, at the same time, when laws depart from the goodness of God’s character, they can say “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5.29 cf. disobedience to the kings’ decrees in Daniel 3 and 6).
At times, things arguably immoral or evil (at least from a Christian perspective) are legalized, e.g. abortion, embryo-destructive IVF practices, no-fault divorce, assisted suicide, and high-interest payday lending.
Perhaps more difficult are cases where both sides claim to be doing good, and the law chooses to legalize one side over the other, e.g. requiring expensive municipal permits to feed the homeless or banning the feeding of the homeless in certain neighborhoods, restricting gatherings (including church services) during the pandemic, and whistleblowing that leaks classified information to protect the public interest.
None of this makes the legal/illegal spectrum less important—only less final. Government is a God-ordained good, and law deserves our submission for that reason, not because it always gets things right. It can bind us to a 35-mph limit protecting a neighbor we'll never meet, but it can also call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). When it does that, each conscience must recognize the human throne cannot hold more than what the divine throne lends to it.
When good and evil are applied in our world, we tend to speak of it as right and wrong. An act is right when it conforms to the goodness in God’s character in a given situation, wrong when it fails to do so.
Man’s finiteness and moral blindness due to sin muddy our grasp of God’s character and complicate moral decision-making. Choices about right and wrong are built on each individual conscience’s understanding of God’s character and its factoring in society’s moral perceptions (the moral vs immoral spectrum) and government and laws—the legal vs illegal spectrum. I’d like to devote this installment to the latter.
Some governmental laws merely recognize evils as wrong (murder, theft, perjury, adultery). But government can manufacture obligations that do not exist in nature, i.e. things not evil in themselves can be made wrong by law. Zooming along at 70 mph in a convertible, the wind in your hair, on a sunny summer day may be an exhilarating experience of the gift of life—certainly not an evil in and of itself—and on an open highway across Montana, no law stops you. Drop that same 70 mph onto a densely populated street in a town, and the calculus shifts. The 35-mph speed limit has some arbitrariness to it, but it is naming a real danger to real people who live there. Fast driving in a populated area moves in the direction of being, not just a violation of a prohibition, but a potential evil—recklessness that risks harm to the life of one’s neighbor.
Making moral decisions involves our consciences seeing alignment of social moral standards and legal prescriptions with goodness in God’s character. This, I believe, is how the apostles can tell us to obey legal authorities as God’s servants (e.g. Romans 13.1-4, 1 Peter 2.13-17) and yet, at the same time, when laws depart from the goodness of God’s character, they can say “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5.29 cf. disobedience to the kings’ decrees in Daniel 3 and 6).
At times, things arguably immoral or evil (at least from a Christian perspective) are legalized, e.g. abortion, embryo-destructive IVF practices, no-fault divorce, assisted suicide, and high-interest payday lending.
Perhaps more difficult are cases where both sides claim to be doing good, and the law chooses to legalize one side over the other, e.g. requiring expensive municipal permits to feed the homeless or banning the feeding of the homeless in certain neighborhoods, restricting gatherings (including church services) during the pandemic, and whistleblowing that leaks classified information to protect the public interest.
None of this makes the legal/illegal spectrum less important—only less final. Government is a God-ordained good, and law deserves our submission for that reason, not because it always gets things right. It can bind us to a 35-mph limit protecting a neighbor we'll never meet, but it can also call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). When it does that, each conscience must recognize the human throne cannot hold more than what the divine throne lends to it.