By Daniel Bobinski
This is the third installment in my series on the biblical worldview. So far we’ve covered Theology (Who is your God?), Psychology (Who are you?), Biology (Where did you come from?), and Philosophy (What is real?). In this issue we tackle the next two worldview topics: Ethics and Sociology. In practical terms, we’re asking how we determine what is right and wrong, and how we should organize society.
The Ethics Question: How Do We Determine Right and Wrong?
Think about a conversation between two people. Someone proposes a policy to address an issue, but the second person calls it unjust. On the other hand, let’s say a person behaves badly and everyone agrees that what he did was wrong.
Who sets the standards? After all, people in different parts of the world will take differing views on many matters.
To a Bible-believing person, the answer is clear: God sets the standard because God IS the standard. Right and wrong are not cultural preferences, evolutionary adaptations, or majority votes; they are rooted in the unchanging character of God Himself. Therefore, because God does not change, morality does not change, either.
The term for this is ethical absolutism. It’s the belief that right and wrong are objectively real, unchanging, and not determined by an individual or a culture. In the Bible, ethics are revealed by God through both general and special revelation.
General revelation means that God has written a basic moral law on every human heart. Romans 2:14-15 explains that even people who have never read Scripture demonstrate a knowledge of right and wrong by nature, their consciences either accusing or excusing them. This is why virtually every culture in history has recognized that murder, theft, and lying are wrong. It’s a moral law that is universal.
Special revelation is found in God’s written Word. Scripture gives us more complete and authoritative guidance than moral instinct alone can provide. Jesus summarized the whole of God’s ethics in two commands: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Unfortunately, people who don’t like ethical absolutism are discarding the biblical worldview.
For example, people who hold that ethics should evolve with culture are aligning with secular humanism. The term is moral relativism – the idea that right and wrong are determined by the individual or the group.
Moral relativism collapses under its own weight. If morality is relative, then no one can say the Holocaust was objectively evil. It was simply one culture’s preference colliding with another’s.
Marxist ethics are similarly unmoored. To Marxists (or neo-Marxists), anything goes, so long as it advances their revolution. Postmodernism has a similar disdain for standardized morals, seeing morality as a power structure imposed by those who dominate.
The thing for Christians to remember is that without God as an unchanging reference point, no basis for moral judgment can exist. The strongest voice – or the strongest fist – wins. The biblical worldview is the only one that can say some things are genuinely, objectively wrong.
The Sociology Question: How Should We Organize Society?
Once we know what is right and wrong, the next question is how we should structure society. The biblical answer is both elegant and countercultural.
By studying the Bible, we can find three God-ordained social institutions, each with its own role and its own limits: the family, the church, and the state.
The family is at the center of a biblical worldview. Genesis 2:24 establishes marriage between one man and one woman. In other words, long before governments existed, God created the family. Deuteronomy is one of several books telling us that parents bear the primary responsibility for raising and educating their children.
When families are healthy, communities tend to be healthy. When families break down, communities follow suit.
After the family comes the church. Churches are not to be social clubs or political organizations. They are to be a community of believers called to worship God, grow in faith together, bear one another’s burdens, and bear witness to the world. The second chapter of the Book of Acts gives us a vivid picture of this, and the early church’s impact on the surrounding culture was nothing short of remarkable.
Another way to view this is that the church is to provide for the family what it cannot provide for itself.
The third entity is the state, which God ordains to maintain order, promote justice, and restrain evil (see Romans 13:1-7). The state’s role, however, is supposed to be limited. It exists to serve its people, not to replace the family, to absorb the church, or to become an end in itself.
Contrast this view with secular humanism, which elevates the state to the primary social institution. And Marxism goes a step further, seeking to eliminate the traditional family and religion altogether, replacing both with the collective.
Why Unified Thinking Matters
Ethics and sociology are connected topics. One’s ethical framework determines one’s sociological framework. If right and wrong are relative, then family structure is relative. And if no God-ordained social order exists, any arrangement is valid. Without a biblical worldview, pull the ethical thread and the social fabric unravels with it.
Christians who absorb a relativistic ethic from their surrounding culture while claiming a biblical worldview will find those two positions pulling in opposite directions. It’s an area for caution: the divisions will show up in every area of life, and a house divided will not stand.
God’s design for ethics and society is coherent, compassionate, and proven. It was working in the first century, and it works today.
By the way, if you missed earlier installments in this series, you can find them under the “columns” tab at the Christian Living Magazine website, https://www.christianlivingmag.com/columns. Just do a search for “worldview.”
Daniel Bobinski, Th.D., serves as Education Director at the Biblical Studies Center in Boise, Idaho. Reach him at Daniel.Bobinski@BoiseBSC.org.
