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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Ethical Christianity: A Reformation of the Protestant Church - Page 5
By Jeffrey C. Moon
This is to be interpreted as being blessed. By acting as a good and holy Christian, the believer comes closer to God, experiencing the holy spiritualism which motivated his original action. Therefore, emulating the character of Jesus, which is to live ethically, is a Christian spiritual vehicle to God. According to the well-known German theologian Paul Tillich, who defined sin as "estrangement from God," acting unethically is "sinning" because it separates the Christian sinner from God (78).
But why should ethics replace the hallmark traditions of the Christian church service? Because church music and ritual, which occupies much of a church service's one to two hours per week, is fundamentally centered on Jesus' salvationist quality (Borg 34). Baptism represents a "death to a life of transgression and a resurrection into a new life with Jesus." Confirmation is the declaration of "Jesus as the divine rescuer of sinners from hell." Repentance is the admission of sins to God so that the sinner may be forgiven from them with Jesus' sacrifice. With the Eucharist, bread and wine are consumed in remembrance of Jesus' death. Easter celebrates Jesus' rising after his death on the cross. These aged church rituals are primarily faith-based and unconcerned with the believer's resolve to live by a Christian moral code. This emphasis on passive faith challenges the most sacred of Christian scripture - the New Testament.
What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by good action, is dead . (James 2.14-17).
The Christian morality of James indicates that true Christians - who listen to the scripture that they regard as holy - are motivated on a spiritual level to do good. Otherwise, the fraudulence of the Christian is evident, and he is separated from God: "as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead" (James 1.26). Unfortunately, the rituals and music common to Protestant worship do not effectively convey this paramount message of charitable action, according Bishop Spong (78). An ecclesiastical emphasis on ethical action and not passive faith needs to be more clearly expressed in today's church services, which "guide the religious beliefs and practices of billions of current-day Christians" (Russel 6).
How might Ethical Christianity regard the death of Jesus? The capital punishment of Jesus was similar to Mahatma Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's - death was the consequence of what they were doing but not their purpose (Borg 160). Jesus knew, as they did, that his radicalism would endanger his life, but he valiantly and righteously persisted teaching the Christian way of ethical living. A religious conviction that strictly follows Jesus' direction is very different from the Judaism that spawned it; so different that Christianity would eventually become a new religious conviction. "The priestly leadership [of Jesus' day] may have regarded him as a blasphemer and potential threat to the delicate balance between Roman rule and Jewish welfare" (Harris 267). The Pharisees demanded his execution preserve their conservative faith, and their dark request was granted. Marcus Borg, a Lutheran theologian and author of The Heart of Christianity , is one of the leading historical Jesus scholars of this generation and has valuable hermeneutical insight on the death of Jesus,