Biblical Absolutes and Moral Conflicts

By Norman L. Geisler

[Norman L. Geisler, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.]

The Christian Ethic is an ethic of love. Jesus made it clear that all of the Old Testament commandments embodied principles of love (Matt 22:38–40). The New Testament repeats these moral commandments in the context of grace and enjoins them on Christian believers (cf. Gal 5:20–21, Rom 13:8–10).[1] These eternal ethical principles of love are as unchanging as the nature of God on whom they are based, for God is love (1 John 4:16).

Now in God there is no conflict among the principles based on His nature, for God is one in nature (Deut 6:4). And all attributes find their ultimate harmony and unity in the oneness of His nature. However, in the world there are conflicts in the commandments of love.[2] There are clashes of moral responsibility and overlapping of duties, as both Scripture and human experience verify. It is these conflicting ethical situations which occupy our attention here. The question before us is this: what is the Christian’s moral responsibility when two or more commands of Scripture appear to be in irresolvable conflict.

The people of God have often faced ethical dilemmas. For example, if it is wrong to kill one’s son and it is wrong to disobey God, then what should Abraham have done when God told him to sacrifice Isaac (Gen 22)? God commands obedience to the king, but the king commands the murder of innocent male children. What should the Hebrew midwives do (Exod 1)? The Scriptures enjoin obedience to parents but one’s parents insist that he not serve God. What is the responsibility of love (Matt 10:37)? The Bible forbids lying but the lives of God’s servants can be saved by intentionally falsifying. What should Rahab have done (Josh 6)? The queen commands that all God’s prophets be killed. A man defies her and hides one hundred of them. Was Obadiah right (1 Kings 18:13)? The Bible demands obedience to human government (Rom 13:1–2), but the king rules that all should worship an idol. Were the three Hebrew children wrong in disobeying the authorities (Dan 3)?

Besides these biblical examples there are many examples of moral conflicts which are instanced in human experience. Should the doctor take the life of the mother or the unborn baby, if both cannot live? Is it right to push someone out of an overcrowded life boat to save others? Should one first save his father or the man who just invented a cancer cure? Is it morally right to return a man’s gun to him if he demands it in order to kill his wife? There are several responses which one may make to such conflicting ethical situations. The four basic ones will be reviewed here in terms of the Christian biblical ethic of love.

The First Way: There Is Only One Absolute Duty of Love

One way to face the issue is to claim that there is only one absolute duty and, hence, there is really no conflict.[3] It takes two absolutes to have an absolute conflict. If there is only one absolute love norm, then all conflicts are apparent but not real. In each situation there is only one absolute duty, namely, do the most loving thing possible.

Several things are significant about this alternative. First, it is simple. The believer is not overloaded with the baggage of numerous ethical commandments which are many times in conflict with each other. Second, it desires to preserve the absolute nature of love. God is absolute love and the believer is called upon in each situation to perform the most Godlike (i.e., the most loving) deed. Third, this view is situational in that the action of love takes into consideration varying situations. The general rule is to love, but what this means in particular will be determined by the specific situation.

The situations listed above must each be examined in view of one question: what would have been the most loving thing for them to do? One cannot always be sure in some situations, but he must do his best to discover what is most loving and never do what he does not at least intend as the most loving thing he can do in that situation.

How does one know what love means? He discovers it through general ethical principles such as those stated in Scripture. None of these, however, is absolute in itself including those embodied in the Ten Commandments. Each merely contributes to an overall impression or intuition of love and this single principle of love is the only thing that is applied to the specific conflicting situations. How else, it is contended, could one resolve conflicts between given commandments unless he appeals to some one overall principle to which even these commandments are subject? Each of the Ten Commandments is not an absolute obligation of love. Rather, each is a general principle, spelling out what is usually the loving thing to do. But sometimes love will demand that a man lie or commit adultery or even kill or deny God. For if one could save lives by doing any of these, then surely love would demand that the commandment be broken.

On the surface this view seems attractive, but even in its best form it falls short of a truly Christian love ethic. There are several fatal difficulties. First, there is not just one duty of love; there are many. Jesus said, “Keep my commandments.” Even in minimal form Jesus stated at least two, love God and love other men, and indicated that this was merely a “summary” of the “whole” law which is comprised of many specific laws (Rom 13:8–9). Even these two basic levels come into conflict, as the cases of Abraham-Isaac and obedience to God versus parents demonstrate. As long as the duties of love are on two levels and in various overlapping areas in a sinful world there will be conflicts. And it will not do to say there is no absolute duty to love other men; Christ commanded to the contrary. For what makes the love of neighbor an absolute duty is that it comes as a commandment of God based in His very nature as love. To say there is only one duty is to evade the clear statements of Scripture and to ignore the multi-faceted relations of ethical relationships to the contrary.

Another serious problem with the one norm love ethic is that it is too general to be meaningful. It is like having only a summary of a story and being commanded to fill in all the content and details from one’s own situations. To tell a man to “love” in all situations without spelling out what this means is like telling him to do “X” or to “zirkle” when he faces a conflict. None of these symbols has any meaning unless it is defined with specific content. On the contrary, the commandments of Christ do spell out the meaning of love for the Christian. Each commandment indicates clearly what love means in a given human relationship. Without these laws the Christian would not know what the absolute obligations of love really are, to say nothing of being able to perform them. He would be left to his own subjective intuitions and guesses.

The Second Way: There Is Always a Third Alternative for Love

A widely held view among Christians, and one which has much more to commend it than the former, is the position that moral conflicts are false dilemmas.[4] In each case there is always a third alternative. One is never forced to do something less than loving, because all the alternatives are not evil. Rahab did not need to lie to save the lives of the spies. God could have preserved her from facing the question or could have delivered the spies from their captors, even if she told the truth. Then too, silence, even to the point of sacrificing one’s own life, is always a third possibility. God is faithful to those who are faithful to His law and always “with the temptation will also provide the way of escape…” (1 Cor 10:13). God intervened and saved Abraham from having to kill Isaac, and He would do the same for any one else who is faithful to His commands, as was Abraham.

Some obviously appealing features about this view emerge upon analyzing it. First, it maintains without compromise the many absolute commands of love in Scripture. There is no evasive attempt to reduce all the many absolute commands of God to a single, virtually meaningless and unusable “love” norm. Second, there is an earnest attempt made to seek third alternatives to breaking any commandment. The assumption is that if God commanded both, then He expects us to keep both and He will see to it that we are able to keep His commandments without sinning. All of this is commendable. One can, so to speak, have his “cake” of many absolutes and eat it too, knowing that they never really conflict.

But that is precisely where the rub is. Are all conflicts merely apparent? Is there really always a third way out? The evidence is to the contrary. True, Abraham did not actually kill Isaac, but he did have to intend to do so. And Jesus taught morality is a matter of intent (Matt 5:22, 28). The Hebrew midwives saved the children’s lives but they had to disobey God’s command to obey government in order to do so. If this was right then at least some commands of God must be suspended on occasion. If so, which ones and on what basis? Surely the ethical principles embodied in the Ten Commandments would be candidates for absolutes. And yet Jesus pointed out real conflicts between the first and fifth commandments. When a parent commands a child to show his love for the family by denying the true God, what third alternative does the child have? It seems overly simplistic and naive to hold, in the face of innumerable cases both in and outside the Bible, that there never are any real conflicts.

A further problem with the third-alternative position has already been implied. Do all commandments have the same force? Are there no higher relationships which take precedence over lower ones. Do all the commandments stand on the same footing? The answer is negative. Jesus spoke of lesser and greater commandments (Matt 5:19) and of “weightier” matters of the Law (Matt 23:23). Some things are of higher value than others (1 Cor 13:13). Indeed love itself comes in degrees of which Jesus called self-sacrifice the “greatest” (John 15:13). So, when there is conflict between lesser and greater commands, then one must give way to another. But if this is so, then the position that all the commandments are equally binding on the believer is not so. For when equally binding commands conflict then the alternatives for this position would necessitate breaking one of the commands. But if one must be broken then the position is invalidated. For in that case there was a real conflict with no real third alternative.

Finally, this position often leads to legalistic consequences such as were condemned by Jesus. For example, to insist that a man’s property rights to his gun take precedence over his wife’s right to life is an unethical following of the letter of the law. Such is worse than the Pharisees who insisted on the lesser matters of the law while neglecting the “weightier” matters (Matt 23:23), who kept the sabbath while neglecting justice and mercy.

The Third Way: Performing the Least Non-Loving Act

There is another way to maintain an absolute ethic of love without sacrificing the universally binding nature of biblical commands.[5] One may simply admit that there are real conflicts between some absolute commands. Sometimes there is no loving possibility open to a Christian. In this event one must simply do the least non-loving thing available. This is an evil world and tragic moral dilemmas are part of this kind of world. The best one can do is sometimes the least evil possible. This position is popularly called the “lesser of two evils” view. In terms of a Christian ethic of love it contends that when there is no way not to break one of the absolute love commandments, then all that remains is to do the least non-loving thing in that situation.

Of course, when one breaks a commandment of God he is guilty. But sin is sometimes unavoidable. The love of God provides forgiveness for those who confess, but the providence of God does not always provide a way to escape sinning. Sometimes there is no third alternative to breaking a commandment. The laws of God are absolute and ought never be broken. But the world is sinful and it is occasionally necessary to break one of God’s laws, even for the most godly of believers. When one is confronted with this undesirable conflict, he must decide which is the lesser of the two evils and act accordingly.

Several things commend this view. First, like the previous view, it has the advantage of preserving the absolute nature of biblical commands. There are no exceptions to God’s imperatives to love under any circumstance. It is always wrong to lie and to kill, and so forth. If these conflict, then so be it. One must do the lesser evil and lie to save the life. A second advantage is the fact that, unlike the previous position, this view is realistic enough to admit to real conflict situations. There is no special pleading to divine providence to provide miraculous third alternatives and no subtle redefining of terms to escape real dilemmas. There are many absolute commandments and they do sometimes come into irresolvable conflict with each other.

Each of these points would be valuable in an absolute Christian ethic, operating in a real but sinful world. But can we contend for both? Can an ethic be truly Christian if both of these things are so. Three forceful arguments indicate a “no” answer. First, is it consistent with the nature of an all-wise, all-loving God to hold a man guilty for doing what was unavoidable? If sometimes a man cannot avoid sinning, but chooses the lesser evil, then God is blaming him for doing what He demands, namely, the least evil. It does not seem consistent with the nature of the God of Scripture to set up absolute but unavoidably conflicting commands and then impute individual guilt to men because they had to break them, even though they did their moral best. Rather, God condemns only those who by His enabling grace could have done otherwise (cf. Matt 25:26–30).

Secondly, there is a most serious problem this view raises with regard to the sinlessness of Christ. We are informed that Christ is our moral example, that Christians should act as He acted. Further, we are assured that He is our complete moral example. He faced all the kinds of moral situations that we will face. He is “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb 4:15). But if there are real moral conflicts and Jesus faced them, then sinning was inevitable for Him too. He must have sinned. But the Bible says clearly that He never sinned in word, thought or deed (cf. 1 Peter; 1 John). It follows, then, that there are no situations where a lesser evil is called for. There is always a positive good possible. Here too, evasiveness will not salvage this position. One might be tempted to appeal to some kind of providential sparing of Christ from these moral dilemmas. But this would be to forsake the lesser of evils position for the third alternative view. For if God provided third alternatives for Christ, then why not for us too. Furthermore, if Christ was spared moral dilemmas, then how can He be our example; we have them. Hence, either Christ had irresolvable moral conflicts and sinned, or else He was sinless and there are no situations where the only alternatives are sinful or unloving. God always provides a way for the most loving act to be performed.

A third problem with the “lesser evil” view arises from its insistence that a man is obligated to do the lesser evil. Since it is a moral obligation and since the action is nevertheless morally wrong, the absurd consequence is that a man is morally obligated to do what is immoral. But this is obviously nonsense to speak of a moral duty to do evil.[6] But if the view retracts the moral duty, then a man is left with key ethical situations with no moral imperative. In this case, then, he should be without ethical condemnation and it would no longer be a lesser of evils position. This leads really to another position.

The Fourth Way: Subordinating the Lower Laws of Love to the Higher Ones

Love is never caught on the horns of a dilemma. There are levels and spheres of love and one is always higher than another.[7] Each love command is absolute in its area. But when that area overlaps with another area, then the lower responsibility of love should be subordinated to the higher. One’s duty to God has priority over his duty to his fellow man when the two conflict. The obligation to save an innocent life is greater than to tell the truth to a murderer, and so on. Each of the absolute commandments of the Bible is absolutely binding on the relationship it specifies. There are no exceptions. Adultery is always wrong as such. Murder is never right as such. Lying is universally culpable in and of itself. However, when one or more of these relationships, which are wrong in themselves, overlaps with another area, then one’s duty to the lower may be suspended in view of his responsibility to do the higher. There are no exceptions to absolute commands but there are some exceptions in view of higher priorities of love. There is always a greater good.

First, let us distinguish this greater good position from the preceding ones.[8] It differs from the one norm position in two important ways. First, it holds that there are many norms which are absolutely binding as such. There are no exceptions to universal ethical commands. Secondly, because there are many laws defining the nature and areas of love, one has advance information of what love should do in a given situation. Love is not determined by the situation. Rather, love prescribes in advance what must be done in the situation.

This greater love position is different from the other two views as well. In contrast to the third alternative view, it holds that God’s commandments do sometimes overlap. There are real moral conflicts in which both laws cannot be followed as one normally would. And in contrast to the lesser of evils view this position contends that both alternatives of the dilemma are not wrong. God will not hold a man guilty for doing his best. One way is always the morally right way, namely, following the higher commandment.

The Scriptures give ample illustrations of the principle that higher commands take precedence over lower commands. Jesus said that love for God is more important than love for parents, even though both are commands of God (Matt 10:37). Peter made it clear that the command to obey human government was not higher than the one to preach the Gospel (Acts 4). The Hebrew midwives (Exod 1) and the three Hebrew children (Dan 3) were all commended for disobeying human government when it conflicted with a higher ethical command. Abraham’s intent to kill Isaac was morally right only because it was put in irresolvable conflict with his direct obedience to God’s higher command to obey Him (Gen 22).[9]

Three things are clear from these and other biblical examples. First, there are real conflicts among God’s commands which are personally unavoidable by the individual. Second, a man is morally obligated to follow the highest command when he cannot do both. Third, God does not hold men guilty for following the highest command. Rather, God commends them (cf. Abraham, Hebrew midwives).

This raises one final question, namely, in what sense is this view absolute when it allows that one is not obligated to follow some (lower) ethical laws when they conflict with higher ones? There are three ways in which it may be said that all commands based on God’s nature are absolute even though they must sometimes be subordinated to higher ones.[10] First, they are absolutely binding as such on the particular relationship toward which they are directed. Lying as such is always wrong. And in relation to another man’s life, it is never right to murder him, and so forth. However, what is absolutely binding as such in a simple relation is not necessarily the right course of action in a complex situation where one must decide between two commands as conflicting. Secondly, when there is a conflict, it is an absolutely binding ethical obligation to follow the higher law revealed by God in His Word. Finally, implied in the above is the truth that God has established absolutely the very order of commandments based on their proximity to His very nature as holy and loving. In short, some things are more godly and more loving because they are more Godlike. And Scripture is the only true source for knowing precisely the ordering of God’s priorities. If we are wrong in ethic judgment, then, it is because as Jesus said, “You do err not knowing the Scriptures…” (Matt 22:29).

A knowledge of the priority of values has two very important implications. First, by knowing which commands are higher and which are lower, one knows which “evil” is the greatest good in the more rare irresolvable conflicts. Secondly, an awareness of divine priorities enables the Christian to distinguish the best from the merely good in the more common everyday choices. For it is not only a good to choose the lesser “evil” in unavoidable conflicts, but it is also an evil to elect the lesser good when there is no unavoidable conflict. In this latter respect ignorance of the biblical priority of values leaves the Christian vulnerable to the perennial temptation to sacrifice the best on the altar of the good.

Notes

1. See Roy L. Aldrich, Holding Fast to Grace (Findlay, Ohio, n.d.).
2. When the oneness of God’s love shines through the prism of finite experience, it forms a whole spectrum of His characteristics, some of which come into conflict with others in present human experience.
3. This is the view advanced by Joseph Fletcher in his book, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia, 1966).
4. See John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids, 1957).
5. See Erwin Lutzer, The Morality Gap (Chicago, 1972).
6. This contradiction in John Montgomery’s view was pointed out a couple of times in Situation Ethics: True or False (Minneapolis, MN, 1972).
7. See my book, The Christian Ethic of Love (Grand Rapids, 1973) for further elaboration.
8. For a separate treatment and critique of each of these views see my Ethics: Alternatives and Issues (Grand Rapids, 1971).
9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York, 1906), 111, 437–38, held that there is a hierarchy in God’s commands. Even some of the Ten Commandments take priority over others.
10. This does not mean that dispensational commands based on God’s will for a given people and/or period do not change. Only commands based on God’s nature apply to all persons in all periods of time.