Moral Ambiguity and Human Pride

There appears to be much moral ambiguity in this world; what we in the Church often call “grey areas”. These are the ethical circumstances that, at least from our perspective, are not clearly identifiable as black or white. Even when we consult our Bibles we are not left with an unshakable sense that we can judge the circumstance with complete accuracy. These are the questions that tend to mark out many of the battle lines of debate between sincere believers. Some of these issues today might include the amount of wealth that any individual Christian should hold, the place of contemporary styles of musical expression in worship, the acceptability of divorce and remarriage among believers, etc. Some of these grey areas are ones that have challenged the Church since its inception and some are more the result of questions linked to how the surrounding culture has uniquely influenced the Church in any given era. Either way they are vexing for a people who claim to believe passionately in the reality and unchanging nature of absolute truth.

Some Christians deal with such troubling ambiguities of principle by simply claiming they do not exist. These are the brethren who have an answer for every moral question anyone could ever possibly bring before them. In their view the Bible leaves no room for debate on anything. The most difficult problem brought to them has a “thus sayeth the Lord” answer somewhere in the chapter and verse of Scripture. For them there is black and there is white. Grey is a non-existent color.

Other believers leave so much room for varying interpretations of the Word of God that black and white seems to be grey all over. They are uncomfortable with the absolutes that the Bible obviously endorses and so they either try to minimize the discussion of them or claim that what seems absolute really isn’t. They often argue that cultural context is far more important a determinant in understanding Scripture than what they would consider a wrongheaded (and wronghearted) approach based on a supposedly dogmatic and unsophisticated literalism.

Both these extremes are dangerous. Both assume too much human competence. The “thus sayeth the Lord” advocates often take for granted that they somehow have humanly acquired the moral omniscience that belongs only to God. Meanwhile the “cultural context” champions too often believe that they are qualified to discount what appear to be biblical non-negotiables according to largely human interpretive wisdom. The question can and should be asked whether either approach takes into consideration the idea that there are some types of knowledge that may only be granted by the Holy Spirit.

But even with the Spirit operative a child of God is not infallible in all ethical decision making. He or she certainly has an advantage over the non-believer, but not an absolute advantage. That kind of advantage is held by our Lord and Him alone. The best any unperfected Christian can do, and that is all of us, is to pray for the will and strength to obey the command of Micah 6:8, that tells us all to “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

The fact of the matter is that none of us is capable of either shrinking or expanding any given grey area with the perfect precision of the Divine. A certain degree of moral ambiguity is part and parcel of being a finite, fallen being who sees “through a glass darkly”. The only One who can perfectly dispel the fog of the grey areas is God Himself and that clearing of the air will only come on the Day of His final Judgement. In the meantime we who call ourselves by the name of Christ must find the humility of spirit to refrain from deifying any human viewpoint on moral issues. We can only read our Bibles and pray for Holy Spirit-aided discernment and the grace to do the best we can to accurately divide truth from error. Any other approach to our own moral decision making, and that of others, has more to do with human pride than the things of God.