You can’t make sense of Christian ethics apart from Christian life. You can’t make sense of Christian ‘principles’ apart from the Christian community or apart from the practicalities that are the outworking of the love that holds that community together and makes it a public body that witnesses to God.
The discipline laid on Christians is not meant for other people. You may have heard the Christians talking about how to lead the Christian life, but that was meant for them to hear, not for you – unless you want to become one of them.
Christian ethics is not a sub-division of ethics: its first loyalty is to the whole Christian faith, life and people. The Christian ethic serves the unity and integrity of the Christian people. The Christian people are witnesses of God for the world. They are God’s first bystanders, to fill in all those who will become bystanders in the future on the action that they have missed. They are the community taught the skills of witness to God, and taught by God: ‘witness skills’ are not very different from ‘leadership skills’.
The Christian community is being taught the witness of God in order to lead the world out of its own self-preoccupation and to point towards the preoccupation of God with, and love of God for, the world. They are made demonstrators of the love and service of God to man. They are on display to the world, their job to be embarrassed and humiliated publicly before the world by their Lord, as an illustration of his compassionate condescension. They are something special, even unique. Of course much of the time the special thing is that they are misrepresenting God, a picture of the misery of man without God. But they are also the demonstration of the readiness of God to hear that man.
