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Social Responsibility: How Christians make moral decisions

Christians believe that God is the ultimate source of good so they must accept
God’s moral values found in the Bible and taught by the Church. Most Christians
will make moral decisions in one or more of four ways:

The Bible
The Bible, believed by Christians to be the authoritative word of God, is divided
into the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament was written before the time
of Jesus and contains, amongst other things, the Ten Commandments (Decalogue)
in Exodus 20:1-17 and the Law of Moses (Torah). The New Testament is concerned
with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Although all Christians believe the Bible
to be important, they do not all understand it in the same way. Fundamentalists
claim that every word of scripture is true and without error. Conservatives believe
that the Bible was inspired by God and contains spiritual truths but the teachings
need to be reviewed periodically to keep them relevant to today’s society. Liberals
maintain that the Bible was not written directly by God but by people who used
their own religious experience to communicate their beliefs using different literary
styles and adapting material to their culture and traditions.

The Authority of the Church

The church has authority over the lives of Christians. Priests and ministers are
seen as a source of authority and experts on the meaning of the Bible and its
application to the Christian life. As well as the teachings of their local church,
Christians can also discover how to lead their lives from the teachings of the
Christian Church as a whole. Within the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope and the
Council of Bishops offer moral guidance through the Catechism or from the official
letters of the Pope, called encyclicals, whilst the Church of England has an elected
assembly to guide its members, called the General Synod. Moreover, universal
teachings that all Christian Churches accept, such as the Creeds, are also accepted
as universal statements of Christian truth.

The Conscience
Conscience is the inner part of a person where the sense of what is right and
wrong is developed. Religious believers view it as the voice of God, which prompts
them to respond to his moral law by stimulating feelings of guilt or well being.
Christians claim that because humans have disobeyed God, the conscience is
imperfect and can only be made right by believing in Jesus. Conscience needs to
be trained and the more right choices a person makes the more they will be
inclined to make further right choices.

Situation Ethics
In the 1960s, the American theologian, Joseph Fletcher, argued that morality
should not be based on obeying rules which we did not always agree with. He
suggested that a better basis for making moral decisions was to use the principle
of agape love, based on the teaching of Jesus: ‘My command is this: Love each
other as I have loved you’ (John 15:12). Fletcher maintained that love is the one
principle that can be applied in every situation. He said that love meant there
could no longer be rules such as ‘never’ or ‘always’ and that people should always
be put first. Another supporter of situation ethics was J A T Robinson, who believed
that human beings had ‘come of age’ morally speaking and no longer needed to
be guided by absolute laws to make the right decision. He wrote: Whatever the
pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no
‘packaged’ moral judgments – for persons are more important even than
‘standards.’ He and Fletcher suggested that the way in which Jesus treated people
during his ministry was the right way, and that the church had got too caught up in
rules which ignored the needs of individuals.