by Christoper Ullman.
“Please help me in some ongoing research I am doing. Take out a blank piece of paper. Don’t sign it. I want to keep this totally anonymous. Write the numbers one, two, and three on it. Now, please write down three things that, under no circumstances, are morally acceptable. When you are finished, I’ll collect your papers.”
So begins the first activity for students in every college ethics course I teach.
They get puzzled looks on their faces, stare into space, and eventually start writing. Eventually, I collect their papers and then give them this context: “I will now tell you what some of the hundreds of other students have written when they participated in this survey. Despite the prevalent relativism of our society, student responses to this moral inquiry are remarkably predictable. In a class of thirty, I generally get at least 20 who will list rape as one of the acts that, under no circumstances, is morally acceptable. Incest is the number two response, followed by child abuse, child neglect, and remarkably, adultery.”
What happens in the Three Things exercise? You start thinking about lines beyond which nobody ought to go. You have begun, with these three prohibitions, to sketch the boundaries of acceptable human behavior. The job would have been a bit easier if I had asked, “Write down three things that, under no circumstances, you would find morally acceptable to be done to you.” (Ethics is always easier when it hits home.) Even so, the Three Things exercise helps erode the value in my students’ minds of the response “It depends…”
We live in a culture that produces moral stutterers. Many people today can’t find it within themselves to state the answers that their parents, or at least their grandparents, had no trouble at all answering. The catch-phrases of cultural relativism have been repeated unceasingly in our public school classrooms, in the workplace, in the home, and even in many churches. Repetition leads to reception, and reception leads to resignation. “Nothing is absolutely right or wrong…Nobody can tell anybody else what they ought to do…The same behavior might be wrong for you, and right for me…Right and wrong depend upon the person…It’s all relative to the culture and time in which you live.” In the universe of cultural relativism, tolerance becomes the one saving virtue, and autonomy the one salient value.
Yet no one, not even the cultural relativist, wants to live in a world in which everything is permitted. Without exception, students use the term “chaos” to describe such a world. The author of the book of Judges provided us with ample case studies of what happens to a society when every person does what is right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25). There is an intuitive awareness that some things are just wrong, and some things are just right, no matter what. We can’t seem to get around this fact of reality. C.S. Lewis found it to be so powerful that he made this the starting point of his argument for the existence of God in the first four chapters of Mere Christianity.
The cultural relativist leaves people with the unfinished sentence, “It all depends…” but he can’t tell us how to finish the sentence in a way that makes sense to all people, everywhere. Life demands some absolute moral reference points. To illustrate, here is the transcript of an actual radio conversation between a captain of a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995.
American: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid collision.
Canadian: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
American: This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadian: No. I repeat, divert YOUR course.
American (with much emphasis): This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States Atlantic Fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers, and numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north, that is one-five degrees north, or counter-measures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship!
Canadian: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
The story provides us with a metaphor of the struggle between cultural relativism and God’s standards, as revealed in the Bible.
The bigger and more powerful a society thinks it is, the more it thinks it can dictate the course of human destiny and set new standards for human conduct. The rock-solid standards of biblical morality often call for course corrections by society and its members; yet these necessary corrections are met with protests by many who think that standards must be negotiable. In spite of their objections, however, it is not the mass number or momentum of the ships that determine the course of those ships. The navigable course depends on the presence of immovable objects of sufficient dimensions that can shipwreck the fleet!
The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17) and the Two Great Commandments (Matthew 22:37-40) stand for all time as immovable, non-negotiable absolutes that need to be identified and used in our moral journeys. Our holy God calls His people to navigate through life guided by these lighthouses, in full view of the powerful ships of popular culture committed to maximum affluence and maximized autonomy. Affluence drives us to acquire as many possessions and experiences as possible, and autonomy drives us to use whatever means we want to get them. Will we successfully pass through the narrow straits and hidden shoals? It all depends on locating those lighthouses, and letting their luminous light show us the way safely to our destination.
Christmas in Consumer America is one season when affluence and autonomy team up to overwhelm, if possible, the unsuspecting individual sailing along. Talk about the perfect storm! Can anyone on his own resist its mounting waves and menacing winds? Even with the lighthouses spotted in the distance, many Christians succumb. Our culture works hard to make us feel all warm and fuzzy as the waves wash over us and sweep us to who-knows-where.
Titus was told that the grace of God teaches us to say, “No!” to worldly passions, and to live self-controlled lives in this present age (2:11-12). Paradoxically, it is our holy God’s free gift of unmerited love and compassion that makes optimal autonomy possible: freedom within the form, as Francis Schaeffer put it. Now there’s a Christmas present that truly satisfies!
Christopher Ullman is a faculty member and librarian of Christian Life College in Mount Prospect, Illinois
