Contrary to popular Christian belief, it is not always so easy to determine what is sin, and what is not sin. Those who argue that the Bible is black and white on issues of sin neglect to take Scripture as something that is constantly in tension and not always in complete harmony with itself. This tension, for anyone who studies theology, is quickly realized and the Christian religion becomes a faith that includes a lot more gray.

This is not only true today but also in Paul the Apostles time, as he often gave his best answer to many “moral” issues of his time (Corinthians). Paul did not try to give concrete black and white answers, but understood the mystery apparent in faith and the cultural issues at hand allowing grace to be applied to the practice of Christianity. I will call that practice of grace “ethics,” but will get to that a little later. Additionally, the early church mindset was for Christ to make a speedy, at any given moment, return within their lifetime and not 2000+ years from then. Perhaps, if they would had had a different expectation their moral advice wouldn’t seem as temporal or fitting solely for that time. But was it intended to be in the first place or merely the moral outcome to be achieved in their specific situation – an applied ethic?

Even today, the Bible still does not answer all of our questions to moral issues. What the Christian should consider to be sin stems from understanding which Biblical mandates and directives are cultural, and knowing which one’s are timeless. The most religious of Christians will hold to the “letter of law” suggesting that every “do not” is a timeless description of sin for every culture and every generation to come. A fast, hard approach to sin which often gets praise from conservative Christians. The problem with this approach is creating an unpractical form of Christian religion bound by irrelevant laws (i.e. women with head coverings, etc.). It seems that every generation and culture has had the grace to determine what is morally right or wrong on these not-so-obvious moral issues within it’s society. I call this Social Ethics, specifically normative, applied and descriptive ethics on social issues.

Today in Christianity, applying Social Ethics is called soft, relativistic, and perceived as a weak approach to Scripture. The fear is if we can make moral decisions on not-so-obvious issues, where do we stop. Soon people will also make moral decisions about what’s obviously immoral. The reality is, we make decisions based on morals everyday so we are constantly doing ethics, even on obvious sin issues like murder. Morals become about ethics and ethics is always harder to practice because there is so much grey. Being ethical is the practice of morality afterall and it has never been acceptable to just know the moral answers, but to also understand the ethical implications.

Anyone who does this will find it that much harder to call, sin “sin” since understanding leaves those people in sympathy and empathy with other human beings striving to be as “right” as possible in often wrong situations.

NOTE: Definition of term: Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well founded reasons.

I was engaging in a conversation with my sister and wife on how my Christian spirituality has “forced” me more into my humanness. The more I have attempted to be like Christ, the more I’ve discovered my humanness – the characteristics of who I am, the sympathies and frailties of my human existence, the inner strengths I would otherwise not know, dreams and passions I never thought would give me life, etc. Human desires I once called “evil” were in actuality just who I was made to be. I’m coming to believe, in part, that this is what Paul the Apostle may have meant when he wrote about being a “New Creation” in Christ. There would be no escaping of who the Christian is as a genuine human being, but an eye opening look at the deepest parts of our existence and experience – that in order to be “like-God” who was born into flesh and blood, we too would also have to become more “like man,” more human, fully human, and at that, more ordinarily human.