Personal Ethics
You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:18 NASB
Neighbor – Ethics is a relational concept. It does not exist as an inner, entirely personal formation. To be ethical there must be a movement from an inner resolve to an outer expression. Ethics is found only in inter-connectivity.
My claim to be ethical means nothing unless it is expressed in relationship action. This is true for relationships with other people and for relationship with God. What can it possibly mean to say that I am ethically justified, ethically motivated or ethically correct with God if I do not fulfill the obligations He asks? No matter what I say, I am not ethical because ethical affirmation requires the fulfillment of an obligation to another.
Today we are confused when we think that ethics is nothing more than an inner personal standard, a moral code that I decide to embrace. The post-modern culture drives all valuation inside until “right” becomes a psychological term for the lack of inner conflict. If I don’t feel any pangs of irresponsibility, then I am ethically acceptable. This is practiced with fervent resolve by pushing out of sight any uncomfortable exposure to pathos.
Why isn’t it enough to concern myself with my own personal actions and attitudes?
First, this is not ethical even if it is honest and done with high integrity. Ethics is not about me and mine. Ethics requires a scope that reaches beyond my own advantage or benefit. Ethics is global by its very nature. Where do I draw the line and say, “I can be ethical about only this much”? When are global issues, environmental issues, geopolitical issues not my issues? When I decide that I can’t do anything about them? This is the problem with today’s selective government involvement in multi-national campaigns of freedom. Freedom is not restricted to geopolitical borders. As long as one person remains in bondage, the ethics of freedom demands involvement.
When I go to work tomorrow morning, what is the most important thing I can do to reshape the culture of the business where I work? What activity will have the most impact on the values of the business? What can I do to insure that the business acts ethically in the fullest sense of the word?
Why is “worldview” so important in understanding ethical behavior? How you view the world, its interconnectedness, its purpose, its progress; this determines your view of responsibility toward those obligations, obligations that are given to you simply because you are alive. The scope of your worldview dramatically affects who you consider your “neighbor.”
Topical Index: neighbor, ethics, Leviticus 19:18
Boy I really struggle with this ‘neighbor’ thing and in this instance it is a head slapper for me. I do look at sources for enhancement of understanding; this site, the Talmud, other vast resources we have at our fingertips. But I start to wonder if we miss the simple with self-indulgence in the necessity to constantly expand our ‘understanding’. Can we allow the author to define His terms?
In this case the subject “sons of your people” being categorized as ‘you neighbor’ in my simple mind means a very closed group…not the world at large. Of course the world at large was object of annihilation by the very same “sons of your people” where God directed them to do such after this apparently not ‘Love’ your entire world directive. And these ‘sons of your people’ were essentially NOT to have anything to do with the world at large ‘daughters’ or ‘idols’ etc.
Then there’s the little detail of application of God’s Words to be applied to all of those who came to join in with the ‘sons of your people’ and THEN become your neighbors (I would think) because they left behind those ‘daughter’ and ‘idols’.
Yes there is the practice of Justice, love and mercy where you stand, but I think a call to concern myself with what the pagan world is doing and to work through their systems with a worldly consciousness (because they don’t accept the system of the ‘sons of your people’) is a stretch from what the author defines as ‘neighbors’.
Yes…the scope of your worldview does dramatically affect who the ‘sons of your people’ thought their ‘neighbors’ were. But the scope of Gods view differed and those ‘sons of your people’ caught hell for expanding their understanding of who their ‘neighbors’ were.
Richard, you are trying to say something important. I saw the dichotomy at a young age between an exclusionary church and the lost world. I thought the ‘answer’ was to “work through their systems” as well as to look at the world through its own paradigm. I was a football, kicked around by that church and that world, too, as a result of successively attempting to work through both systems. I walked out of first one, and then the other, as both failed me. Was I wrong to want to love the lost? No. Was that better than staying behind the fort walls? Yes. But the method was wrong because it was the method of that world. I thought I had to be recognized BY the world to connect with it. That was a mistake because it just made me a sitting duck.
I saw a lot of stuff, those years I failed. I saw that a whole lot of what the church considered ‘righteousness’ was simply a thinly veiled agreement with the flesh, the world, and the devil. I saw the same definitions for things like what a community is (not), too. Those systems that look so good (in our democratic minds) of community, in particular. I fell for the world’s definition of marriage, family, medicine (well, maybe not that one, so much, for the medical establishment did nothing but fail me consistently), state and nation. None of it worked to resolve any of the problems I was having. I even tried exclusion FROM the world, physically, with the family unit. That did not work either. I had to see all this to believe it.
I am now going back to the Torah as well as the NT community to see where I was missing the boat. I am beginning to see some astounding things. I can see that the church has little to offer the world (other than itself) when it walks through the doors, if it does, anyway because the church does not understand that what people need most is true community. The reason is because the church structure is, essentially, pagan. I’m sorry to say that, but that, I am convinced, is why neither it nor the world had much to offer me when it came to my problems. And, no, the answer is not to hide from either, either. I done been there and done done that, as my cousin used to say, so I can say it with confidence.
I think it is time to relearn the correct definition and method of community in order to reach out the lost IN the church as well as out of it. There was a reason Abraham was directed to Canaan and it wasn’t so the Children could be out of the mainstream of the world. The community structure they were given was a model that assumed that Israel would be the head and not the tail of the world’s need. The queen of Sheba shows us what true righteousness does. It draws and awes. In the correct community, there is a plan for how to deal with that.
Yes Laurita, God plopped His nation right down in the middle of the Levant, the worlds trade route. They could have led but in reality they joined. Even today we see the ‘cooperation’ with the world on a global scale has led to restrictions on God’s chosen from the mount and the domination of pagan religions on that very same place that the temple sat. Even today the acquiescing of God’s chosen to the worlds system has brought them the same curses they have suffered all along. They withhold from their actual ‘neighbors’ (access to the mount) and provide for their worldly neighbors. Is THAT the story of the Bible?
My mama always said you don’t get the next lesson until you learn the last one, and we are now learning that lesson right alongside them (or continuing to refuse to). We certainly haven’t been able to see the next one. Babies in kindergarten.
Hello everyone, I’m reading this week in Deuteronomy that in blessing I shall bless you and in cursing I shall curse you. It’s the words we choose to say that come from the heart. When the heart speaks the soul listens. God tells his people that I shall bring all people to you because of your righteousness. Doesn’t one of the prophets a close to the same thing. Your righteousness shall be like a torch and it shall be to the Nations a light.
Once agin “The truth is in us and we in it only to the degree we actually walk in it” Art Katz &Paul Volk share in their profound small bookThe Spirit of Truth. Of course our culture believes it defines truth. I for one believe otherwise.