Dear friends,
Christians in Western society have had a large say in public morality. When appointed the Dean at our cathedral, I was told by several people that my role was to be the moral conscience of society. I thought I was supposed to preach the gospel, but what is the relationship of the gospel to public morality and of the church to the rest of society? 1 Corinthians 5 raises these issues for us; I hope you enjoy our discussion.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip: Today, we will look at the second part of 1 Corinthians 5. The first half was addressed last week in our episode The Arrogance of the Immoral as it told us how the Corinthian church was immoral and yet so arrogant. But the second half of the chapter, in a sense, is twisted around, and so we’re looking this time at The Arrogance of the Moral.
Peter: 1 Corinthians 5:6–13
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
That all sounds fairly rough. We are to see that such a sin as the man of the previous passage has committed corrupts the whole church, and indeed as we saw last week it was a corrupt church which allowed it, and that as a result he is to be cast out. It reminds me of some of the stories that our father told us about the country town that he grew up in during the 1920s.
Our father attended the local Anglican church and it was a blessing to him, but he also noted that there was a general critical mood in the town towards those who were judged to behave in non-Christian ways. So no woman hung out her washing on a Sunday, for fear of being sharply criticised for breaking the Fourth Commandment in doing the washing on a Sunday. The word of those critics was pretty strong around town.
Phillip: He mentioned to me the whole issue of the Sabbath, which he found was the most difficult of the Ten Commandments to keep, and the one that caused the most division and unhappiness. For most people, the majority of the commandments are obvious: you don’t steal, you don’t commit murder, you avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain. But if, for instance, you played tennis on a Sunday afternoon (assuming that Sunday is the Sabbath), then you could be condemned. He spoke of people, of men in particular, who would avoid attending church rather than face being condemned for hypocrisy, because they knew they would go to work or organised sport on the Sabbath. What was going on in those days?
Peter: There’s an old word for it, which you and I are old enough to use: ‘wowserism’. But since no one 10 years younger than us knows what the word means, I’m going to call it the power of moralism, of acting superior and looking down at people who don’t do what they ought to do.
Phillip: What did the word ‘wowser’ mean?
Peter: A wowser was a person who went around telling other people what they were doing wrong, like hanging out their washing on a Sunday, and criticising them for it. It was an acronym which stood for We Only Want Social Evils Remedied.
Phillip: There’s a lovely quote I once came across, and though I can never remember who said it, it goes, “If all the moralists are to be believed, England has been in decline since 1066.” Moralism and wowserism are very negative, then.
Peter: Yes, although the moralist sees it as a positive, in the sense that through moralism there is good to be done. But 100 years ago, Australia was regarded by most citizens as a Christian country, regardless of whether everyone went to church. Throughout the 19th century, there had been several strong movements aimed at putting Christian ethics into the daily life of the nation. One of the most famous was the Temperance Movement, an attack on the abuse of alcohol. Some people allowed moderate drinking, while others were against drinking at all. But as a whole, the movement focused on calling for strict controls to limit its use, for drunkenness was addressed as a real social evil.
Phillip: It drove forth the movement of women having the right to vote. One of the key motivators for it was to change the character of government, and enable the regulations of life that would come about by women who were the victims of alcoholic excess, and who were believed to have superior moral values. So the push for women voting, which happened in Australia very early, came out of this moralism.
Peter: I believe it did. I also understand that there was a movement like this in the United States which led to the period called Prohibition. I haven’t researched that for this episode, but according to my memory, Prohibition led to an improvement in people’s health, in social cohesion and so forth, though the consequences in criminality were so bad that it didn’t last.
Phillip: It led to the improvement of people’s health and of criminals’ wealth simultaneously. But it wasn’t only an attack on alcohol; gambling, the breach of the Sabbath, and smoking were all considered to be very bad things. It’s fascinating, of course, that 50 years later the community came to agree on the issue of smoking, and now those who smoke are treated like lepers and hang around outside buildings looking guilty.
Peter: Indeed. Some in the movement even looked down upon going to the movies.
Phillip: There was also the attack on the wearing of make-up, and the implementation of blasphemy laws, which we’ve done away with; though there are new blasphemy laws coming in with a different god in terms of Islam. These attacks on those moral problems were quite successful in a way, though they of course never succeeded in abolishing sin in any of these areas. But to understand it, you do need to know the history of us Australians seeing ourselves as a national church. But were these the blessings of the gospel, or was it that as a nation we were obscuring the gospel?
Peter: My answer to that is yes and no, so the whole subject is worth the discussion. This moralism was based on the idea that we were broadly a Christian nation, but what it became, as people became more and more strong in their arguments, was a finger-wagging perversion of the gospel; the ‘wowserisation’ of the gospel, if you will. The danger is that being moralistic makes you feel good, particularly if you have a great cause to fight for, because then you have an enemy to defeat. You regard your enemy as self-evidently morally inferior, as a bad person. Who wouldn’t want to be a moralist under these circumstances? Remember, these were often good causes, but they became an obsession. As you pointed out, they didn’t, in the end, succeed. You can control gambling, but you will never eradicate it. A government that knows its business will try to control the ill effects of sinful behaviour, but will not think that somehow we are going to eradicate the problem. We haven’t eradicated smoking, for instance. At the same time, as you said, the gospel gets lost in this.
Phillip: Yes, because the idea of a Christian nation 100 years ago is different to our society today. I believe Australia is still a Christian nation because our foundations, our way of thinking, and our whole history are all founded and based in Christianity. But we’re not a Christian nation as they thought of themselves 100 years ago, where being a Christian was considered to be the norm. Back then, around 90% of the population, according to census figures, identified as Christian, whereas today it’s less than 50%. So the nation we live in today is a different kind of Christian nation to what it was 100 years ago. Back then, people disagreed about normative ethics, or the norms of life. How you observed the Sabbath, or what trading hours you would have for the selling of alcohol, or in terms of shopping, were all contested topics. People disagreed about the details of the rules and regulations of morality.
But when you move to a non-Christian society like Corinth, and to some extent now Sydney, we no longer disagree simply about the norms of society; we now disagree about the very nature of ethics itself, what the professionals call ‘meta-ethics’. We ask, “Is there such a thing as right and wrong? How do we determine right and wrong? Who says that right is right and wrong is wrong, and why should we believe them?” Moralists still exist, of course, and so we’re beset with all kinds of moralism. But now the nature of this moralism has shifted. The norms that are being imposed now come out of causes and fiery advocates rather than a total package of a moral system. Anyone who doesn’t share this enthusiasm at the moment is shamed on social media or ‘cancelled’ from the public square. Think of the #MeToo movement, the climate catastrophising movement, feminism, transgenderism, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Rights, etc. In fact, some famous feminists have now come out against the transgender movement, and they are no longer welcome to speak on different university campuses. Nevertheless, there’s a whole range of these movements that are couched in very moral terms, even though our society has come to no agreement about what morality is.
Peter: In other words, these movements assume that we are moral creatures, and we therefore can respond to their morals, yet they do not agree on what the source of their morals is. I take it you’re not saying that these movements are necessarily all wrong, only that there’s a problem as to the question of where these morals come from, and the way in which some people exercise their morals in their finger-wagging, ‘wowser-istic’ way. When it doesn’t succeed, they demand for the government to do something in order to make things happen.
Phillip: One thing that moralists today and the moralists of Christianity in the past have in common is a tendency to focus on the minor issues. For example, we thought that alcohol was a problem in our society. The Temperance movement then took over, acting as if alcoholism was the only moral issue in society. When we base our morality just on causes—whether good, bad, Christian or non-Christian—we make rules about things, and we make the cause the totality of morality. With that being said, take us back to 1 Corinthians.
Peter: This passage raises the question, “How does a congregation relate to its social milieu?” For instance, Paul points out that the sin of the offender in 1 Corinthians 5:1 would be condemned by non-Christians. That is true of things that have happened in our own lifetime. Christians are likely enough, in fact, to face criticism from the world, for instance, due to our inability to cope with pederasty, which is child abuse. There is a lesson for us here: although a number of moralistic causes of our own time may conflict with Christianity and must be resisted despite criticism, there are a number of causes for which we should listen to what’s being said and change our ways. However, Paul makes clear that his strong words address the church, not the society in which they are living at this point. He’s not calling upon the church to become a little club or a sect cut off from the world; indeed, he expects Christians to live in their world, recognising, however, that sin is everywhere. But he does not call upon them to confront the sinfulness of the world with moral righteousness. Why not? Surely our love of our neighbour would mean we make a stand against things like sexual permissiveness, abortion, greed, and other sins by which people exploit each other. So why be so strong about a Christian brother needing to be chastised, yet so speechless about the world in which we’re living?
Phillip: I don’t doubt that the Christian ethic is for the good of society. Making sure that workers have the freedom to take a day off each week, for example, is a good thing for society. Furthermore, the abuse of alcohol and the prevalence of gambling in Australia has been a dreadful blight upon our society and ruined the lives of many people. Adultery, which is now semi-promoted in some circles, is a dreadful thing, causing untold damage to the lives of married couples, children, grandparents, uncles and aunts. But while imposing the Christian ethic would be good for society, Paul knows what our contemporary moralists don’t know—and frankly, the earlier moralists had forgotten this—that the power of Christian ethics is based on a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, not a performance relationship where you get rewarded or punished for your transactions. The basis of Christian ethics is the gospel of the Passover Lamb who has died for us and risen again, bringing us the grace of the gospel.
The moralists of today motivate people by finger-wagging and inducing guilt, and then they try to solve the problems through their government: throwing money at problems, changing laws and regulations, or through adding to the educational curriculum. But such moralists don’t understand sin and the gospel. Sin is the disease that gives rise to immorality, therefore band-aid solutions on the symptoms of sin don’t work. To make rules and regulations about certain sins, without addressing the issue of sin itself, will always fail, but the gospel brings atonement, forgiveness, relationship, and regeneration. These things change the hearts and minds of people, which in turn transform their lives.
Peter: It’s interesting too that the Christian gospel has had a very powerful impact all around the world on the social lives of people. It’s not as though the two things are not connected. It is just that if you forget the heart of the matter—loving God, loving your neighbour, and the need for grace and a new life—you will carry on about the causes, but you won’t have the essential insight into where this is coming from, what you call the meta-ethics. When I was in public office, I was not unwilling to enter into debates about the Sabbath, for example, because I regarded having the same day off each week as being important for Australian society; but I also tried on every occasion to link that back in to the gospel itself, so that people could see that it flows out of the gospel. The ethic has a source in the gospel of the grace of God, and the command to love God and love your neighbour. It is essential that people can see the gospel in the moralistic causes.
Phillip: The big problem of preaching the gospel in Australia is that people think we preach, “Good people go to heaven; bad people are punished.” That is because people have this moralist framework, and also because we address the morals of society. This is exacerbated by the fact that back in the days when Australia was a Christian country, we pushed our morals like the wowsers that we were. People then got very confused about the gospel, and I still find in evangelism that the fundamental obstacle for people coming to the Lord Jesus Christ is not atheism, nor doubting the existence of God; it’s that people think they’re Christians because they’re good enough, and that the gospel we’re preaching is simply about being good.
Peter: Returning to the passage, I notice that Paul is very strong in his condemnation of the sinner, but as you have pointed out, he is wishing that he repent and return to the fellowship. He loves the sinner. You have mentioned Galatians 6 and the way in which the failures of the Christian brother are to be treated in the fellowship. I think it is good to bring that passage to bear on 1 Corinthians 5 in order to help us to see the whole picture of what ought to happen in church.
Phillip: Galatians 6:1–5
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.
Those who are spiritual are to take action for those who are struggling with some sin. The aim of this action is restoration, as you are to seek to restore them. But you restore a person not in the spirit of judgementalism, but in the spirit of gentleness. We come alongside our brother or sister who is struggling with sin and gently point the sinfulness out and the consequences that are involved. But in the process it’s important to watch yourself for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I must never think that the sin that my brother or sister is committing is beyond me to also commit. As they have fallen into temptation, I too may fall into temptation. So I don’t approach my brother or sister as though I am approaching someone who is morally inferior, because I accept that I have the exact same sinful capacity that they have. There is nothing beyond my capacity for sinfulness, and so I go with the spirit of gentleness, watching myself.
Secondly, I must not be aiming to boast over a brother or sister’s weakness. I go on the basis that I am nothing, because if I think I am something, I deceive myself. That is how I bear my brother’s burden: by helping him with his difficulty. But that’s also how I bear my own burden, because I do not take credit for my superiority over him. I am nothing, as he is nothing, and the two ‘nothings’ must help each other. Yes, we may see our brother or sister fall into sinfulness, and the church cannot tolerate sinfulness, so must seek to address it. But how we address it always has to do with seeking the salvation of the other person: not seeking to put them out, to rule over them, or to establish our own superiority by their failure.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk from St Matthias evening church called New Morality or Old Morality.
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