Decades ago, while book browsing, I came across a book entitled Christian Ethics. Pulling it off the shelf and opening it, I saw nothing but blank pages—a joke, of course, but one with serious purport. I could enjoy it without being shocked because I have always thought that Christianity—I draw a sharp line between the faith and the faithful—lacks a core ethic, something differentiating and defining right and wrong, and guiding its believers’ ethical conduct.
An ethic is a set of ethical principles which apply to action or conduct, not beliefs, character, emotions, or values; the latter, commended or condemned, cannot specify conduct. For example, the injunction to be fair does not stipulate what a person should do, but an ethical principle like welcome strangers requires opening the gate, admitting them, and tending to their needs.
Judaism has a core ethic, or code of conduct. As tabulated by Maimonides in the 12th century, it consists of 613 laws of various kinds, with much repetition, in Holy Scriptures. Most of a millennium earlier, before this codification, rabbinical scholars interpreted these laws in the Jerusalem or Babylonian Talmuds. Jewish courts have ruled on cases in ways further interpreting the laws—a kind of benign casuistry. In theory, Jews should live in accordance with their laws; in practice, Jews are no better or worse than others in this respect. But the laws constituting their code of conduct define good and bad conduct, command respect, and urge compliance, in language reasonably clear and clearly judgmental.
The core ethic of Judaism took experience over time to develop. First came a belief in one undifferentiated god. The concept of such a god was a radical one. Religions before and after Abraham were polytheistic, with many gods possessing diverse powers but without a set of ethical principles. Judaism was radical in its belief in one god who was ethical and wanted Jews to be ethical according to His law—thus, ethical monotheism. Reflecting are two covenants between God and Jews. The First Covenant is a contract: God promises that Jews will be a thriving people in a promised land; Jews accept God as the one and only god; the outward sign of this contract is circumcision. The Second Covenant is another contract: God promises to favor the Jews; Jews promise to live according to His law, first delivered by Moses at Sinai and developed since, as an example to all others.
After the conquest of the Levant by the Greek armies of Alexander the Great, Jews responded in two ways. One was partial assimilation of Hellenic customs or participation in Hellenic practices; the other was armed resistance, notably and successfully by the Maccabees, the forerunners of the Herodian dynasty in the time of Jesus. About him, born, living, and dying a Jew, we know only the little which the Synoptic Gospels relate, most of which indicates that he was Jewish in thought and practice. What distinguishes Jesus from most contemporaries is his emphasis on righteous conduct rather than ritual practice.*
John and Paul relate little or nothing about Jesus; instead, they interpret him in ways more closely aligned with or more clearly reflecting Hellenic than Hebraic influence. Paul’s hybrid background in Hebraic and Hellenic cultures informed his understanding of the divinities and theologies of their religions. He was born, not in Jerusalem in Palestine, but in Taurus in Anatolia, in the Diaspora. Raised a Jew in its Jewish community, he lived in a city the predominant religion of which was pagan. Like pagan religions, it consisted of a collection of myths, some of miraculous births and deaths of gods or demi-gods, each with distinct powers and dedicated rituals, but neither any nor all having an ethic. Popular in Anatolia was the cult of Dionysius, a dying and reborn god acting as an intermediary between the living and the dead. So religions with plenty of gods and a paucity of ethic were familiar to Paul. Later, his entire enterprise involved replacing the Hebraic with the Hellenic, which influence is paramount in Christian theology.
Paul did not think of Jesus as a god; that thought many decades later was John’s. More decades later, Jesus had evolved from messiah to one of three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The relationship of these three separate persons—the Son, acting as an intermediary between the faithful and the Father—in a unified godhead is a central mystery of the faith. Yet calling this three-is-one godhead a mystery cannot elide the fact that the Christian God is a complex, not a simplex, entity. As such, it departs from monotheism and returns, however sophisticated or nuanced its explanation, to the multiplicity of divine figures characteristic of paganism.
Paul created an ethical vacuum in Christianity like that not only in Hellenic paganism, but also in its philosophy, with its lack of a core ethic. For example, Aristotle’s well known Nicomachean Ethics offers philosophical discussion, not ethical guidance; to be happy, one must be virtuous, but virtue is neither defined nor, of course, codified in ethical guidance. Paul created a similar void by repudiating Jewish law and replacing it with Christian love. His word for this love is the Greek word agape. This love is neither romantic or sexual love nor familial affection or close friendship. Its features are kindness toward, enjoyment of, and loyalty and dedication to another or others. Clearly, these aspects of love are general moral qualities, not specific ethical rules. (Their best known Christian articulation is 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13.) Paul’s contrast of Jewish law and Christian love is the basis of the quintessentially Christian dichotomy of the (dead) letter of law and the (living) spirit of love. Today, Pope Frances repeats this antisemitic antithesis when he declares Jewish law dead if it does not lead to Christ. Yet love is no core ethic because it is not a principle of ethical conduct, only a moral rubric which can cover almost anything declared to be a form of love.
The ethical vacuum created by Paul’s rejection of Jewish law and replacement by Christian love is reflected in the two earliest Christian creeds, the Nicene and the Apostles’, both of which reflect Hellenic traditions of miraculous births and marvelous deaths, and the omission of a core ethic. Both avowals of faith begin with Jesus’ miraculous birth and end with his miraculous resurrection after death. Missing is any word about his life between birth and death, except for a mention of his trial; not one word indicates his works: his miracles, ministry, or teachings. In short, neither the New Testament nor the earliest Christian creeds suggest a core ethic. When Christians want ethical guidance, as 17th-century Puritans did, they turn to the Old Testament; today, their fundamentalist descendants often but not always do likewise. So Christianity, in its Trinitarian godhead and its lack of a core ethic, is a religion more Hellenic than Hebraic. However, unlike other pagan religions, Christianity has the virtue of the moral rubric of love (agape) as a potentially redeeming starting point toward a code of conduct—a definition with ethical application about which, however, Christians vigorously disagree.
Before the Synoptic Gospels and the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, Paul realized that pagans in different regions, societies, or cultures would accept a new religion of a dying-and-rising god and promises of salvation and everlasting life if few strings—if no alien customs like circumcision—were attached. Paul’s proselytizing strategy had three steps: One, it rejected Jewish law and its many demands. Two, it replaced it with something stipulating no specific ethical demands, namely, one moral rubric, to love (agape), undefined, open-ended, and culturally adaptive; and three, leaving culturally specific mores in place. This proselytizing strategy was effective and successful. For better and worse, it enabled pagans-turned-Christians and Christians thereafter to be Christian in faith and Christian in works as they dubbed them so according to contemporary consensus on local mores.
Ever since, approved personal conduct or social behavior in a Christian community, not any code of conduct, has defined what may be called “Christian.” However large or small their differences, communities and individuals can still call themselves Christians, but their disagreements and disparate conduct confuse Christians and non-Christians alike about what it means to be Christian. Today, in the parlous times of the Trump presidency, the definition of “Christian” has become highly polarized, hugely political, and heatedly polemical. As a result and for many reasons, past trends of disaffiliation from churches and departure from birth religions have accelerated. Mainline denominations have lost most, fundamentalist denominations have gained some, but the net is smaller numbers of people identifying as Christian. The lack of a coherent core ethic and steadfast ethical religious leadership may be the most important reasons. People want moral inspiration and ethical guidance; check-book charity, welfare drives, study groups, and Sunday schools are inadequate substitutes to meet these needs.
I do not intend my fundamental distinctions between Judaism and Christianity to be invidious. I intend them to be respectful of both, and not disrespected by the canard of a Judeo-Christian tradition. No such tradition exists; no continuum from Judaism, with its simplex god and its ethic, to Christianity, with its complex god and no ethic, exists. Moreover, their fundamental purposes differ. Judaism urges its followers to seek salvation in this world by adhering to God’s law and in serving as an example of such a life to others. Christianity urges its followers to seek their salvation in the world after death, by means uncertain because of diverse beliefs about the relationship between faith and works in this world. It is no digression to opine that these two basic differences between Judaism and Christianity suggest why Jews have not become Christians. Paul designed a faith for pagans, not for Jews. For pagans, it promises salvation and everlasting life. For Jews, it represents a retreat from monotheism, a loss of ethic, and a loss of identity as a people; thus, it undermines the three pillars of Judaism: God, Torah, and Israel—a most uninviting prospect. Paul’s rejection by the Jerusalem Church and Diaspora temples likely derives from the subversive nature of his preaching.
From my perspective as an unaffiliated, non-observant, classical Reform Jew, I offer two suggestions to Jews and Christians alike. Both share similar texts; Jews have the Holy Scriptures, and Christians have the Old Testament. So both share the Ten Commandments. My suggestions are that followers of both faiths return to them for ethical guidance and ignore inflammatory instances and interjected abominations, to which these texts give little attention because they matter little in the Big Scheme of Things. If Ten Commandments are too many, an appropriate starting point might be the Tenth Commandment, not to bear false witness. Or, if Ten Commandments sound too dictatorial, perhaps the Golden Rule, shared by all major religions, might serve: treat others as they would wish or not wish to be treated themselves. Admittedly, it is no final answer in societies with increasingly mixed cultural populations—we may not know how those with different cultural backgrounds wish to be treated or not—but it is a first approximation.
* The Synoptic Gospels implicitly criticize the Pharisees, or rabbis, by contrast with Jesus. Admittedly, Pharisees, for what they thought good reason, were more concerned with observing the laws of purity, a necessary condition of holiness, than observing the laws of righteous conduct, also a necessary condition. Jews had traditionally regarded their conquest and occupation as punishment for their straying from God’s law. By the way, this view represents the Jews’ invention of history, an explanation of the causes of events. To them, a return to His law would release them from foreign tyranny. Not surprisingly, given the severity of Roman rule, Pharisees emphasized ritual purity as the easier, more practical, more popular, therefore more efficacious, way to demonstrate their fidelity. The failure of this approach does not refute its rationale. Jesus concerned himself, not with liberating Israel from the Roman occupation, but with ameliorating the lives and welfare of impoverished and oppressed Jews.
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