The Insufficiency of Bible-based Morality

The pastor of my church recently shared a statistic about the percentage of people in the preceding four generations who have claimed a Bible-based framework for their morality. Though the dates of a given generation seem to differ from source to source, here are the numbers he gave: the Builders (1927-1945), 65%; the Boomers (1946-1964), 35%; the Busters (1965-1983), 16%; the Millennials (1984-2000), 4%. Other than showing me that Clara and I happen to belong to a different generation (my wife, the Buster), I wanted to take a minute to speak about this statistic and how it can be misleading.

Every culture organizes itself around what is often called a social contract. These are not literal contracts we sign when we reach maturity, but they are the implicit structures our society has constructed which we transgress at the risk of being ostracized, outcast, or imprisoned. These are the basic dos and don’ts that we hold everyone to equally. These change along different cultures and different periods. Most cultures hold to some of the basics—don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t act so as to put others at risk of harm, etc. Some exist only uniquely—for a few hundred years of English history attendance at the local Anglican parish was compulsory. And, for most of our nation’s history, the governing social contract was derived from the morality of the Bible. And, as a Bible-believing, faithful Christian I believe this to have been a pretty good thing. I like the system of morality within the Bible and think it sets up a culture for a lot of benefits. Indeed, think what you like about America, but we enjoy unique liberties, privileges, and prosperities that are largely derived from holding to this social contract for as long as we did. We are all, like it or not, the product of this system of morality and our country would be unrecognizable were it not for this framework that, until recently, seemed to hold sway.

However, there is a world of difference between adhering to a Bible-based system of morality with a view to constructing a prosperous, diligent, and innovative culture behind this system, and people being saved by the grace of God offered to us through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, a Bible-based moral system is not indicative of a culture that has accepted the Lordship of God. There are many reasons for adapting a particular social contract that have nothing to do with seeking salvation only through the mercy of a beneficent God.

I fear that as Christians we sometimes conflate these two things; we imagine that if people are adhering to the moral system our work as Christians is accomplished. This is a grievous error and causes the church to fall into all manner of wrong-thinking about this world. The following scriptural passage from the apostle Paul to the Corinthians is clarifying:

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 2:14 (ESV)

What the apostle Paul is saying in this passage is that people outside of the church do not understand the same things about truth, wisdom, and morality as “spiritual” people, those who have received the grace of God, are able to freely discern. Too often I feel as if we try and legislate and institute our morality as if this were the chief mission of God’s people on this planet. But, for the large part, our morality is incoherent to people who do not know God and have not been given faith to believe the gospel. This is not to say that all people are not born with a moral compass—everyone certainly is born with the capacity to discern moral truths—but our specifically Christian, “spiritually discerned” truths are folly to people who do not have the Spirit of God.

While some would look at the statistic I gave in the first paragraph and despair, I see reason for hope. As our pastor pointed out when he shared this statistic, this puts the church right back into the place it was in when the New Testament was being written. There are, of course, some downfalls to rejecting the Bible-based system of morality and these losses are to be lamented, but my hope for our nation is not a system of morality, but for the church to hold forth the Jesus of the gospels and for him to seek and save that which is lost.

This is every Christian’s greater hope. We do not seek for vindication on this earth; we do not feel like we have to fight all of our own battles; we can trust and hope in a God who we believe is eternal and not far from each of us, a God who thunders in the heavens and will one day make all things new.