I BELONG TO A LECTIONARY STUDY GROUP that meets the first week of every January. We present exegetical papers on the texts for the coming year to each other and discuss them under the tutelage of a scholar we bring in from a seminary or university. The scholar is also asked to offer a general lecture on a topic of his or her choosing.
This year’s scholar was Ted Smith, professor of ethics and preaching at Emory’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. He was enormously helpful in guiding our discussion all week, but his chosen lecture was especially memorable. It focused on the jolting changes taking place in the mindset of our world and church. Among these changes, Smith said, is an ascendant assumption in the church that suggests “ethics is everything.” What he meant was that for a lot of Christians, especially in mainline churches, today’s “climate of opinion” often suggests that what you believe or how you worship is not really of ultimate importance. Rather, what finally matters is only what you actually do, ethically speaking, in your life. The bottom line is what you actually do in and for the world around you. I cannot recall if Smith used the word, but he hinted that this notion could perhaps rise to heresy.
He shared the story of a young woman, a recently ordained minister, who told Smith that in high school she’d been active in her church’s youth group, a youth group that was very engaged in mission work, but one that focused less on prayer, worship and Bible study. Smith asked the young pastor if other members of her former high school group were still as committed to the church as she was. She said, “No.” She told him that many were working in nonprofits or in other professions that emphasized doing good work in the world, but most were not active in a church. Smith asked if these young adults were rejecting what they’d been taught in their church youth group. “No,” she replied, observing that they were not rejecting it at all. In fact, they were doing exactly what they’d been taught. They’d been told that ethics is all that finally matters, but not so much the faith that undergirds ethics.
Paul Scherer, that master homiletician of the last century, insisted that sermons ought to primarily proclaim “the indicatives of the Christian faith, where all the imperatives are born.” Our world uses pejorative terms like “preachy” and “sermonize” to describe any form of communication, whether in or out of the pulpit, that leans toward raw imperative — somebody telling somebody else what they ought to do. But imperative has power only when it rests firmly on an indicative. Specifically, Christian ethics has authority only when it rests firmly on the proclamation of what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ. Of course, what we do in and with our lives, how we live and act, how we love or don’t love our neighbors, is a sort of existential “bottom line.” But underneath such a bottom line is the faith that forms our actions in the first place, the faith that makes us who we are.
I’m taken with nautical images and might put the point like this: “Faith without ethics is like an anchor without a boat. There’s nothing above the surface. Ethics without faith is like a boat without an anchor. Nothing down there to hold the vessel steady, and eventually she’ll drift away.”
MICHAEL L. LINDVALL is pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City.
