Lights in the World - PH40-01

Advanced Bible Doctrine - Philippians 2:14-15

Morality

The New Morality

Most of you probably don't really understand the implications of the destruction of the laws against abortion; of the taking of an unborn life; and, of the taking of a fetus who is destined by God to be a human being. Apart from whether you want to debate the issue as to when a human being becomes a human being, whether it's at the point of conception or at the point that it takes its first breath; as to which point the soul enters the child is beside the point. The point is that this child is destined to be a human being, just as Jesus Christ was destined to be a human being. This is just as many characters of the Old Testament were destined for a purpose before they were ever born. This was the case with Jacob, and with Cyrus, the ruler of one of the ancient empires. The Bible is full of the fact that God has a purpose for a human being from the point of conception.

Situation Ethics

All acts today are viewed in American society as neutral. There is no inherent value, good or bad, in any act whatsoever: be it lying; cheating; murder; fornication; or, cannibalism. All of them are neutral.

So now, the American scene is of great interest to us because one of the first things we observe is that a moral code such as the Ten Commandments is the thing which is under the greatest fire and under the most constant rejection. One of the Watergate defendants attributed his illegal acts to the moral training which he had received from the chaplain at Yale University. What kind of training in morality had he received? He had received the training which we know as situation ethics, the new morality. This is what he had referred to. He had received at the hands of the chaplain at Yale the concepts that had been proposed by the Reverend Joseph Fletcher of the Episcopal Church. This view of morality has become the frame of reference for determining right and wrong in our nation. What this young man did in the Watergate situation is what is commonly done by American youth today. They all have the same basic frame of reference.

There is a level of older generation which is out of touch with the fact of what has happened to the younger generation's viewpoint. The younger generation is thinking exactly what its elders taught them. I want to connect the two. As we will see, the two are linked together. What we have produced is the horror wind from the dragon's teeth that the generation before has itself sewn in the thinking and in the practices of its own lives, and of our society in general.

What the new morality does, as we have pointed out, is that it calls immoral what the Bible calls moral, such as the Ten Commandments. People are steeped in the new morality. We are now to the point where we have a solid group of teachers at the high school and college level who are oriented to the new morality viewpoint. They are the people who are producing the teachers in our elementary schools and our junior high schools. They are the people who are influencing the new generation of college people. We have come now to where the link is more closely tied together to the total moral disorientation that our society has been moving toward.

The consequences of this view for determining what is acceptable personal conduct has been skyrocketing crime; pornography; obscenity; and, venereal disease (which shortly after World War II was practically wiped out of this society) has now taken over in monumental proportions. Rather than living by fixed principles of morality, situation ethics decides what is right and wrong as per the situation. The word "ethics" simply means what is right and what is wrong. And there has to be some basis for a society to decide what is right and what is wrong within their social relationships. For people between themselves, they had to have some basis of deciding what is right and what is wrong. The situation ethics (just combining these two terms) says that nothing is right or wrong in itself. It only depends on the situation at the moment.

So this raises an interesting question. For example, suppose a student is going to college. He has not studied. He has not applied himself. His parents have put out a lot of money. If he doesn't pass his final exams, the whole semester is shot. All of the investment is gone. A young person today says, "What is the moral thing to do?" Well, under the situation, this person will say, "If I fail my exams, my parents' money has been wasted, and my time has been wasted. So what is the greater evil: for me to cheat on the exam and pass it, or for me to be honest and fail the exam, and waste my time and my parents' money?" And under that kind of a situation, the answer comes up very easily. It's quite obvious that the lesser of the evils is to cheat and pass. That is the better of the two.

This is because people think in terms of the fact that it is a matter of picking the lesser of evils. Nothing is right or wrong. Everything is wrong, and everything is right. So you're just picking that which is best at the moment. Many people are actually practitioners of the situation ethics concept who have never even heard the theory discussed. You're probably going to learn more about this here than most people have ever dreamed existed about this matter. Yet, they themselves, while not knowing a thing about Joseph Fletcher or the new morality or situation ethics, are devout adherents of this viewpoint. They just picked it up because this is the general attitude of our day. This is what's hitting you through your advertisements. This is what is hitting you through the movies. This is what hits you on television. This is what is hitting you in literature. This is what is getting to you through the news media constantly--the concept of right or wrong, as per the situation.

The new morality is defended on the ground that Biblical concepts don't pay, so people don't observe them. Honesty is declared not to be the best policy. A lot of crime today does pay. I've had it pointed out to me that many well-to-do respectable people got that way through a healthy, big, fat bit of dishonesty in a certain situation. They had their period where they were able to dishonestly come into their wealth, and now they are the pillars of the church.

Right and Wrong

My parents used to run a grocery store. A man came in one time. I happened to be there and I was watching. He didn't see me. I saw him kind of wandering around like people do. All of a sudden he walked past the bread rack, reached up, grabbed a loaf of bread and shot out the door. Did that man do a wrong thing? Should we have gone chasing after him, and said, "Robber, thief, bring that 10-cent a loaf of bread back (in those days)?" That man may have had hungry children at home to feed. Would you say he did a wrong thing when he took that loaf of bread to feed his family? Should he have let them go to bed hungry that night?

This is the kind of stuff that Fletcher gives you. Then it begins to get into your heart and your thinking, and you say, "I don't know. Maybe he should have taken that stupid loaf of bread. I don't know that that was wrong. Did he really do something wrong when he did that?"

Moral Absolutes vs. Love

He bases this upon the fact that in Romans 13:8, the apostle Paul says, "Owe no man anything but to love one another. For he that loves another has fulfilled the law." "The principle here," he says, "is that love is the fulfilling of morality." It says so right here. What a person does in love will fulfill all that is moral in God's view. Verse 9, therefore, says, "For this, you shall not commit adultery. You shall not kill. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shalt not covet. If there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying: namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love works no ill to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law."

So the answer is that love is the guideline for determining what is right and what is wrong in any situation. I just want to point out in passing that what the apostle Paul is saying here is that if a person genuinely operates on "agape" mental attitude love, he will not violate these commandments. That's what Paul is saying. These specific moral statements and these specific moral absolutes is what love will observe. If you love a person, then you will not do any of these things, because as we see, the violation of these restrictions has a destructive effect upon other people as well as yourself. You may add to that Matthew 22:37-40 also as another element of the defense that love is the answer.

Intentions

However, this does raise the question as to whether an intention is good or bad. How do we determine whether our intention is good or bad? Supposing we said that love means that you have a good intention in what you do. How are we going to determine that our intentions are good?

In the movie The Godfather, a man comes to the godfather, the head of the Mafia family. His daughter has been attacked and violated by two or three hoodlums. He comes to the godfather and asks that these men be punished. When the godfather asks him what he wants him to do, he indicates that he wants these men killed. But the godfather says, "Your daughter was not killed. Your daughter has been abused. We will punish them. But because they did not kill your daughter, they do not deserve themselves to be killed." So he turns to his assistant, and he asks him to get a couple of men who will go out and find those men who abused the undertaker's daughter, and to rack them up good. But he says, "I want you to get somebody with controls, who won't go too far."

Then he makes the classic statement: "We are not murderers." He's the head of a mafia family. "We are not murderers." How could he say that? For the simple reason that whenever they do murder somebody, their intentions are good. It's always some fink who deserves to die. If he's a fink who deserves to die, that's a good intention. The whole world is better. There are too many finks in the world as it is. Therefore, somebody deserves to die. Then it is a right thing. Their intentions govern the morality of their acts, even an act of murder.

The men who executed Jesus Christ believed sincerely that they were doing a good thing. They believed that this man, Christ, had blasphemed the living God. The rule was that if you blaspheme God, you die for it. The Old Testament is very clear on that. Their intentions were the best in the world. That's why Dr. Fletcher, in all consistency, says that the men who killed Jesus Christ did a morally right thing. This is because as per their view and their set of values, their intentions were good.

But the Lord Jesus warned us of situation ethics even while He was here on this earth. In John 16:2, He told His followers that the time would come when people would kill them, and thereby believe that they were serving God. They would murder the followers of Christ, as did the apostle Paul before he was born again, and thereby believe that they were serving God. The situation, as per their value system, indicated to them that this was a good thing to do. Their intentions were to do something good. So if a person violates a moral principle, that's not the issue, even if he does it in ignorance. Even if he does not realize that this is against a biblical moral code, if his intentions are good, then the act is declared to be a loving act.

Consequences

The second thing that people in your family are thinking of are consequences. This is the second thing that new morality says determines whether a thing is love. What are the consequences that determine this? The consequences are whether it brings more pleasure or pain into the world--whether your act brings more pleasure to more people than it does pain. That's the determining factor. Morality is determined by the consequences of an act.

So anything goes if the results are viewed to be more pleasure than pain. For this reason, the concept of "the end justifies the means" is acceptable. This is viewed as the epitome of Christianity. This is because it is putting people above things. It amounts to saying that what is right is what you can get away with. What is moral is what you can get away with. If you try something, and the roof falls in on your head, then it's an immoral act. The consequences were bad. There was more pain than pleasure so it was a bad thing to do. But if you got away with it and all went well, then no matter what the act was, it is viewed as moral. However, the Bible declares that certain actions and thoughts are immoral, even if good may result from them.

The Dilemma of the New Morality

For example, Joseph in Egypt refused to accept the proposition of adultery from Potiphar's wife. The intention of Joseph was good. What was the result of his act? He got himself thrown into prison for a couple of years. So the consequences were bad. So Joseph's act was moral in its intention, situation ethics says, but immoral in its consequences. So the new morality really has no way of determining what is love. That is because these two things are contradictory. They actually come in and they butt against one another, and you have a situation that is impossible to determine. You cannot determine that a thing is loving because your intentions are good. Nor can you determine that a thing is loving because the consequences are good. That is because the two work against one another. So what you have in situation ethics is an undefined love. You cannot decide on the basis of either intentions or consequences.

So, they throw in another situation as another factor to clarify this. The situation will guide you as to whether the act is moral or immoral, and whether it is loving or not. The situation which determines conduct is, under new morality, the greatest good for the greatest number. This means that morality can be determined by calculating the amount of pleasure and pain that it may cause you to have. So actually, new morality will give you about seven points. It will say, "Before you do this thing, evaluate, on the basis of this scale of seven points, how much pain and how much pleasure will result out of this situation." However, you can only evaluate (possibly) the immediate consequences. The long-range consequences and the number of people involved you can't evaluate. That would require omniscience. The object is to produce pleasure in the world--the greatest good for the greatest number. So the situation that determines what is right is the one that produces the most pleasure.

The Nazis

Communism

What's the effect of all this business about having no moral absolutes? If we try to live by this, we're in for a lot of trouble. The Dallas Cowboys have been having a lot of trouble. Had the Dallas Cowboys elected to operate on the basis of situation ethics, they would be again going to the playoffs. Why aren't they going to the playoffs? Because they did not operate on the principles of this morality. Had they operated on the basis of the situation, there were many times when the Dallas Cowboys needed more players than 11 players on the field. So the situation would demand that they signal to the coach to give us another man or two here. There are also times when the Cowboys needed more time at the end of the game. So they should have turned to the time keepers and said, "We'll have another ten minutes, please." There are also times when they needed more than four downs, and they should have turned to the referee and say, "We'll take five this time, or maybe six." Whatever the situation requires, they should have asked for and demanded because that's how you play the game of life under the new morality. You make the rules as you go along.

This is justified, of course, because playing by rules is legalistic. Many of the Dallas Cowboys were playing the game without personal sincerity because they really want to break the rules. If the referees aren't watching, sometimes they do. This would cause all the cowboys to be sincere and open. That's how we want football players to be: sincere and open. We want people to be more important than rules.

Finally, they could have said, "Well, there's only one rule that counts." Dr. Fletcher said, "Love is the thing that decides everything. Love makes the world go round." The Dallas Cowboys should have said, "Fair play is going to be our guiding principle, men--whatever is fair." One of the players could say, "What's fair play?" The coach could have said, "Fair play means the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. Now, you know how many fans we have, men. Let's get out there and gouge them, and poke them, and do everything we can to win because fair play means the greatest amount of pleasure to the most people."

Bishop Robinson uses the phrase "loving concern." Well, you can see the result would be mayhem and chaos on the field as each team would maneuver to bring maximum pleasure to its fans. But because they were all adults, we assume they're capable of knowing what they should do in any particular moment. By the same token, the same idiocy, the new morality tells us that all the rules are out as to what is moral, and determining on the basis of the situation for the greatest pleasure and the best of intentions is all that we need.

So all the decisions for conduct on the basis of America's new morality are arbitrary and unpredictable decisions. Whatever one's system of values is will determine what you do. The old sin nature values of Satan become the guide for personal morality. An objective value system, such as the Bible gives us, has to come from outside of the man himself. Man within himself cannot come up with a system of rights and wrong. This has to be given to him from outside of himself. That's what God did in the Word of God.

The problem of the conscience phase of the dispensation of the gentiles was this very thing. Judges 21:25 tells us that every man went around doing what was right in his own eyes. It doesn't say they went around doing what was wrong. They went around doing what was right in their own eyes. They operated on situation ethics, and the world ended up in disaster.

For the situationist, what is good and moral today may be bad and immoral tomorrow. As a matter of fact, the time might come when the situationist would have to say, "Love is no longer the guiding principle. It's now hate. Whatever is hateful, that's what's good." So you have no stable social structure possible in a nation. In time, the new morality will destroy a society. No acts could be declared to be criminal. How could we say that Lee Harvey Oswald, when he killed President Kennedy, was doing a thing that was wrong? There are many people that felt he was doing things that were for the benefit of many people. I heard more than one person say something to this effect: "It's a terrible thing to say, but I want to admit that when I heard that Kennedy was dead, I breathed a sigh of relief because of the programs he was pursuing. How could we say that Oswald should be condemned for having done a wrong thing? His intentions were good as per his system of values. We could debate the question as to how much bad consequences and good consequences were the result of that act.

Robbery can be made moral if more people benefit from the victim's money than the victim is benefiting. That was the Hurst ripoff--the millions of dollars that were taken from Mr. Hearst for the ransom of his daughter were declared to be a moral act by those who were doing it. Why? Because so many more poor people were going to benefit from Mr. Hearst's money than he himself was benefiting from it.

Abortion and euthanasia (taking the life of elderly people) become moral and right because the situation at the moment decides that's a good thing to do apart from the hands of God.

When the Manson murders had taken place in California, and the trial was taking place, one of the girls involved was a girl named Susan Atkins. She was the girl who actually killed the actress Sharon Tate. When she was describing her role in this, she said, in part, "I feel no guilt for what I have done. Should I feel remorse or guilt for what I have done? Should I feel remorse or sorry for doing what was right for me, and doing what I know was right for me? What I did was coming from love to help my brother get out of jail. Anything that comes from love is good. I felt no hatred, no malice. I didn't even know those people, but they were part of the system that jailed my brother for something I did. I was going back on the system. It was right then, and it's right now. What feels right, feels good."

Sharon Tate and her unborn baby died because Miss Atkins operated on Dr. Fletcher's situational ethics. It was no longer wrong to murder people. In this situation. It was perfectly right in her view to do so. She doesn't feel any remorse over the matter. The consequences, she hoped, were good for the release of her brother.

Fraud in voting is moral if the party that is elected is best for the people. If you listened carefully to the Watergate hearings, you are aware of the fact that the attorney general himself said that they proceeded with these activities because they wanted to ensure the election of President Nixon, because the alternative to choose from the other side was so horrendous in their eyes that what they did, while illegal, was right because it was for the best interests of the American public that Nixon should be elected, and that McGovern should not be. What was that? Pure cold-blooded situation ethics.

You wonder why it is so widespread in our society. It's because it's upstairs, folks. It's up there in the highest echelons of the government. It's from the highest authorities of the rulers themselves that operate on these concepts. People are shocked to discover that it's there.

Well, there is a connection between morality and legitimate authority. The United States public is now very pessimistic. It's disillusioned. It's apathetic. This is because it's had a series of untrustworthy government officials. Elections to office we have for too long accepted as being the means by which we secure trustworthy officials, and that's not true. It is thought that if we follow a certain free-enterprise democratic procedure of coming to office, we will bring people to power to rule over us whom we may trust.

We have discovered that legitimacy to govern in our society does not come from simply being elected by the proper procedures. We have discovered that legitimacy to govern comes from an acceptance of the moral principles of the Word of God. Any society which has rulers which do not recognize first both God and the moral principles that come from Him is not a legitimate source of authority. That's what people are learning. They don't know how to verbalize it, but what they're discovering is that legitimate authority to govern comes from the acceptance of the absolutes of the Word of God. We've got men in politics who are situationists, and thus they are proving untrustworthy when they do get elected to office. Without a sense of subjection to God and His moral code, there can be no legitimate governing authority. The result then is that he seizes power who can.

Here's an example of this in our day. The little nation of Chile is a prime example of what happens when a nation goes down in moral decline. When a nation becomes unstable morally, then it has no legitimate government. The politicians in Chile in our time came to have no values to uphold. Corruption mounted. Greed for money and power became the motivation for public office. Revolutions and the military coups that have generally characterized what we call the banana republics have been practically unknown in Chile. Chile, for 150 years, had a stable government very much like our own under a constitution. But during a 10-year period, Marxist Leninist ideology had undermined the value system of Chile. An intellectual pseudo sophistication arose which scorned biblical morality and the Bible's God, which Chile once revered, and which was the source of the stability of its political system.

Because of this moral weakness that gradually developed over 10 years, along came a Marxist named Salvador Allende, and by a quirk of an election, got himself elected as president. He came to power. This man did not believe there is a God. This man rejected on all accounts every moral absolute of the Word of God. This man was a devoted follower of situation ethics. In three year's time, he had looted the nation to the point of bankruptcy. He had devised a plan where the gold reserves were to be shipped out of Chile. The plan was to bring people to such economic disaster that they would turn to the government and say, "Do something for us. Save us." Then they came within a week of putting into action the plan which had been devised. It only came to light after a coup deposed him from power and led to his own suicide. Within a week, Allende was going to execute all of the prime leaders of the government. He was going to have the prime military officers and generals assassinated, and take over with communism by gun, which is the way communism always has to operate.

Well, all this was made possible because the whole political system of Chile had lost its moral orientation, and thus its legitimacy to rule. When politicians have lost their moral absolutes, they have no legitimate grounds for ruling. They have no basis whatsoever for governing a people. Pragmatism, what's good for the moment, became the rule. Scrambling for the loot was the game plan. The military junta, which is now ruling Chile, saved the nation when it was at the brink of going over into communism and into slavery. It is seeking to rebuild on the lasting foundations of morality. It has turned back to its God and to the moral principles that once characterized the people of Chile. On the 11th of September, one of our correspondents was in Chile. She said that she was awakened that morning by a din of horns blowing in the streets. Then she discovered that it was following a pattern all over Santiago. When she inquired, she discovered that this was the first phase of the people's celebration of their salvation from going over the brink into communism, because it was a code symbol, a code of beats to say, "Viva Pinochet." President Pinochet was the military general who was in charge of the junta. The people were ecstatic.

You won't find that in the American press. You're going to find in the American press that the people of Chile are under some kind of a military monster which is now governing them. The truth of the matter is that the junta has permitted the free enterprise system to start working. Food is coming back to the shelves. Prosperity is rising, and inflation is beginning to come down.

A mere formula for coming to power is not enough to make you a legitimate ruler. A nation destroys itself when its rulers do not pledge allegiance to the moral principles of the Word of God.

I want to read to you a quote from Pedro Ibanez, a man who was in the Senate of Chile, to tie this up. And as he looks back now as to what happened to his nation, here's what he says. "I believe that our generation, and especially the coming ones, will have to be seriously engaged again in the study of an almost forgotten discipline--the philosophy of politics. Of necessity, a new formula for establishing power must be found. Democracy can no longer be a set of ritualistic rules for reaching power, and then using that power without recognizing there are limits to it--those of natural law being the most important."

By "natural law," he means absolute rights and wrongs. You notice that Chile's system was a democracy in contrast to ours which is a republic. A republic has limitations upon what the government can do. A democracy has no limitations. Thus Allende, a communist, could come to power. They have learned in Chile that without morality, there can be no preservation of freedom.

There is one more thing I'd like to quote from. This is from a newsletter by the former congressman, John G. Schmitz of California. In his recent newsletter, he makes an excellent summary of what we have been speaking of this morning of morality as it applies to our national freedom, and thus to your personal freedom. This is where new morality is going to take us if it's not reversed. If we don't have a 180-degree turn, we're going to go to the same place that Chile went to. In time, our leaders will be even worse than what we discovered in Watergate.

Congressman Schmitz says, "The last hope of Western civilization may well lie in the hands of those with the moral and intellectual courage to face the fact that the collapse of the political theory and the political institutions on which, for so many years, we and most other Western nations staked our future. Unless and until we recognize that public, as well as private, life is and rightly ought to be subject to the law of God, and the law of nature which is also His, that no power and no sovereignty are absolute but His, and bind our public order, not merely with the paper of a constitution and a confetti of ballots, but with the steel of unbreakable moral commitment, recognizing that commitment to be far more important than any electoral process, we will never save our country from the bitter degradation that is the ultimate fate of all human beings not touched by divine grace."

It could not have been said better. Post-Watergate morality will be no better for our republic than pre-Watergate morality unless it is biblical morality of absolute rights and wrongs. Perhaps you need a change in your own thinking on this issue. Our leaders and our rulers need a change around on their thinking. We need to get back to what has been often viewed as the good old days, which were not all that good in many respects, but they were far better when we believed in the God of the Bible and in His rules of conduct.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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