6th Sunday of Mathew - Christian Ethics and Secular Ethics
Yesterday I had an interesting discussion with someone regarding bioethics. I take the opportunity to share this with you because we were trying to figure out the difference between secular ethics, based on science and logic and Christian ethics, and particularly Orthodox ethics, based in faith in God. Where does the conflict lies between these two?
The main object of this conflict is a different attitude toward existence itself. Christians acknowledge a Creator God, the source of existence and the final destination of humanity. The secular society regards life as a random event, a caprice of faith, as James Rachel puts it:
"We know that we exist by evolutionary accident, as one species among many, on a small and insignificant world in one little corner of the cosmos." [1]
In this pessimistic view of the world, with an unavoidable evolution toward a departure into non-existence at death, the single goal of humanity can only be the continuous improvement of human condition. This is why we see all the efforts made today to cure diseases, and not only that but , to improve even human condition, make the humans live longer and better.
Orthodox Christians on the other hand believe that God created Man out of love, so Man can partake in the perfect Love of the Holy Trinity. The world itself, the cosmos, is nothing else but a ladder to be used time and again to reach back to his lost place in paradise. [2]
But more and more people are satisfied with this idea that Man is an unintentional evolutionary product, an accident in a series of random events. He does not have, as a consequence, any moral obligations, other than preserving and eventually enhancing his own existence. The whole world in fact has no other meaning but fulfilling his daily wishes. Everything turns around him; he is the crème de la crème of evolution.
This narrow and mechanicistic view of life deprives Man of his spiritual nature and bonds him to an unforgiving reality in which death and non-existence is the final destination. This is why following secular ethics Man has nothing to loose, he only has on life and he has to live it at its best.
The Christian on the other hand walks toward death with hope, with the belief that beyond death lays the mystical union with God, the eternity of love in the Heavenly Kingdom. Death is just a gate in the true life in Christ. This life is important for us Christians indeed, but only in the perspective of the afterlife. If we get to know Christ here, We will know Him on the other side if not, I am afraid is going to be tougher to get to know Him there.
From this point of view Christian ethics are incompatible in many ways with secular ethics. We can only mix secular and Christian ethics if we sacrifice the potential of the eternal existence of Man.
This is why the trends we see nowadays in society are distinctive for an upside down set of values, where the true meaning of things is perverted on a daily basis. The behavior of man is strange and perplexing at times: on one hand Man has deprived sexuality from its core: human reproduction, by introducing more and more sophisticated contraceptive and abortive methods, but on the other hand it makes huge efforts in creating humans through a variety of artificial ways like IVF and cloning. We want to be better humans but we don't want to work for it, we are constantly looking for shortcuts: a pill, an army of nanorobots, a titanium exoskeleton and so forth. We want to win the race without breaking a sweat.
As much as we all love technology, taken to an extreme, technology becomes overwhelming and soon could take us over. This process is particularly dangerous because is not sudden and fierce, especially in biotechnology, but rather slow and insidious, hiding the wicked behind humanitarian intents.
But in the end, the peril does not lie in technology itself, but rather in the inability of Man to decide what he wants from life. In the race for the next discovery one forgets that none of today's news will last, and none of them will fulfill the tomorrow's needs of Man. There will always be a tomorrow when Man will want more and more, never enough.
What Man is actually missing in his quest for glory, is the ontological truth that lies deep inside him, under layers and layers of self sufficiency. A truth that Man already knows, but refuses to accept: the truth that God does exist and Man's existence is fundamentally linked with His. God is the only source of existence and by denying it one falls into non-existence.
As orthodox Christians, we should all go back one step, to our Christian origins and rediscover the Christological meaning of the world through living a life centered on the incarnation of Christ and the gifts that come from it.
Only a Church that has Christ in the center can offer solutions to Man from the perspective of salvation. The offered by the Church are not meant to take Man out of the world and isolate him in the apparent safety of a Christian sect, but on the contrary it is providing him with the necessary decisional armamentarium that will help him choose and live a life in Christ right there were he is, in the middle of the crazy world.
We should all struggle and fight the opposing wave of the society through prayer, through participation in the Church, because our strength does not lie in technology, nor brute force, nor intelligence, but in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let us therefore pray to our Lord Jesus Christ that He comes down to us as He did today with the paralytic and says"Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven [...] Rise, take up your bed and go home." Amin.
[1] James Rachels, The elements of moral philosophy, Mc. Graw Hill Ed., New York 1999, p. 195
[2] Dumitru Stăniloae, Ascetica şi Mistica Creştină, Ed. Casa Cărţii de ştiinţă, Cluj-Napoca 1993, p 133