Christian Ethics
How Christians decide right from wrong, and what Scripture says about government, war, justice, nation, race, technology, and work.
Recommended Order
Study in any order. This path builds each topic on the one before it.
Christians decide right and wrong by God's Word, not by feeling or the crowd: they obey what He has commanded, apply what He has taught, train the conscience, seek wisdom and counsel, and use their liberty in love.
God ordained civil government to restrain evil and reward good, so Christians obey the law, pay their taxes, honor those in office, and pray for them, while knowing that no ruler owns the soul and no ruler can save.
When rulers command what God forbids or forbid what God commands, believers must obey God, and they do it with respect, without violence, and ready to accept the cost.
God gave the sword to government and forbade private revenge, so we believe a Christian may serve his nation in arms and defend himself and those in his care, while we honor believers whose conscience will not let them, and no one may ever take up the sword for the Gospel.
We believe God has authorized government to take the life of a murderer after a just trial, because human life bears His image, and we hold that authority with fear, knowing that human courts fail and that faithful Christians differ on how a nation should use it.
A Christian may love his country and bring his faith into public life, but no nation today is God's covenant people, Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and the church must never be merged with the state, so we refuse both to idolize a nation and to despise one.
God made of one blood all nations of men, so there is one human race and no people stands above another; racism is sin, teaching that divides believers by group is error, and the answer is not a racial program but the Gospel, for Christ crucified has made believers one.
Tools are part of the work God gave mankind, and they multiply whatever is in the human heart; a Christian uses them with wisdom, guards his mind and his attention, and never gives a machine the place that belongs to God, to His Word, or to the people of God.
God gave man work before the Fall, the curse made it hard but not unholy, and a believer in any honest job serves the Lord Christ, working with integrity, resting with wisdom, and finding his worth in the One who finished the work of salvation.