The New Morality

It is impossible to reassess one's doctrine of God without bringing one's view of morality into the same melting pot. For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love - about the ultimate ground and meaning of personal relationships. There is no need to prove that a revolution is required in morals. It has long since broken out; and it is no 'reluctant revolution'. There are plenty of voices within the church greeting it with vociferous dismay. The religious sanctions are losing their strength, the moral landmarks are disappearing beneath the flood, the nation is in danger. This is the end term of the apostasy from Christianity: the fathers rejected the doctrine, the children have abandoned the morals. The great defection from God, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The old way of thinking that right and wrong are derived 'at second hand' from God. They are the commandments which God gives, the laws which he lays down (as with Moses on Mt Sinai). And supranaturalist reasons - that God or Christ have pronounced it 'a sin' - have force, and even meaning, for none but a diminishing religious remnant. But equally there is no suggestion in the Gospels that the Christian ethic is for 'the religious' only. It is for all men: it is based upon the nature of man, and for the foundation of his teaching on marriage Jesus specifically went behind Moses and the Law to creation. It is for all men universally: it is not for homo religiosus.

The moral precepts of Jesus are not intended to be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do, whatever the circumstances, and pronouncing certain courses of action universally right and other universally wrong. They are not legislation laying down what love always demands of every one: they are illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone. They are, as it were, parables of the Kingdom in its moral claims-flashlight pictures of the uncompromising demand which the Kingdom must make upon any who would respond to it. This insistence upon the parabolic character of the ethical sayings of Jesus should deliver us from the danger of taking them either as literal injunctions for any situation or as universal principles for every situation. The sermon on the Mount is relevant not because it provides us with an infallible guide to the moral life, but because as Martin Dibelius put it, 'we are able to be transformed by it'. What the supranaturalist ethic does is to subordinate the actual individual relationship to some universal, whether metaphysical or moral, external to it. The decision is not reached, the judgment is not made, on the empirical realities of the particular concrete relationship between the persons concerned. Man is made for the sabbath, and not the sabbath for man. Be the individual circumstances what they will, the moral law is the same-for all men and for all times. It is imposed on the relationship from without, from above: the function of casuistry is to 'apply' it to the case in question. It stands for 'absolute', 'objective' moral values and presents a dyke against the floods of relativism and subjectivism. And yet this heteronomy is also its profound weakness. Except to the man who believes in 'the God out there' it has no compelling sanction or self-authenticating foundation. It cannot answer the question 'Why is this wrong?' in terms of the intrinsic realities of the situation itself.

The revolt in the field of ethics from supranaturalism to naturalism, from heteronomy to autonomy, has been with us so long that we need not spend much time on it. It began with the magnificent grandeur of Kant's autonomous ideal, perhaps the greatest and most objective of all ethical systems. But this is really only secularized deism-and not completely secularized at that; for though Kant dispensed with the hypothesis of God to account for the source of the moral law, he brought him back, as a very crude deus ex machina, to ensure the eventual coincidence of virtue and happiness. Kant's moral idealism was living on religious capital. As this ran out or was rejected, it came to be replaced by every kind of ethical relativism-utilitarianism, evolutionary naturalism, existentialism. These systems, so different in themselves, have this in common: they have taken their stand, quite correctly, against any subordination of the concrete needs of the individual situation to an alien universal norm. But in the process any objective or unconditional standard has disappeared in a morass of relativism and subjectivism. Tillich sums up the situation in words that refer to culture in general but apply just as much to its ethical aspect:
'Autonomy is able to live as long as it can draw from the religious tradition of the past, from the remnants of a lost theonomy. But more and more it loses this spiritual foundation. It becomes emptier, more formalistic, or more factual and is driven towards skepticism and cynicism, towards the loss of meaning and purpose. The history of autonomous cultures in history of a continuous waste of spiritual substance. At the end of this process autonomy turns back to the lost theonomy with impotent longing, or it looks forward to a new theonomy.'