IB World Religions 3.6.1. Interpretation and Authority: Bible, Church, Conscience and Ecumenism Notes

3.6.1. Interpretation and Authority: Bible, Church, Conscience and Ecumenism

Sources of Christian moral authority

1. Christian ethics begins with a question about authority: where should a believer look when deciding what is right. The tradition names four sources, scripture, tradition, reason and experience.
2. Methodists call that set the Wesleyan quadrilateral. The phrase is modern, but all four factors appear in some form in every major Christian tradition.
3. Denominations weigh them very differently. Protestants who hold to sola scriptura place scripture above the rest, while Roman Catholics set scripture and tradition together under the teaching office of the Church.
4. Eastern Orthodox Christians speak less of ranked sources and more of the mind of the Church, formed by scripture, the Fathers, the councils and the liturgy working together over centuries.
5. Conscience runs through all four as the point where a person actually decides. Every major tradition insists that it must be formed rather than simply obeyed.
6. Christians also share a moral vocabulary with the societies they live in. Church statements on public questions normally argue in the language of rights, dignity and law as well as in the language of faith.

The Bible as moral authority

1. The Bible gives Christians commands, laws, stories and principles. The practical difficulty is that these come in different forms and cannot all be applied in the same way.
2. The Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 are direct prohibitions, and nearly every church still teaches them as the basic frame of Christian conduct.
3. The Sermon on the Mount works differently. Jesus intensifies the commands, forbidding anger and lust alongside murder and adultery, while giving very few rules for particular cases.
4. Paul's letters combine both approaches, mixing instructions for named congregations with principles such as the primacy of agape, self-giving love, in 1 Corinthians 13.
5. Christians disagree about commands addressed to ancient societies. Passages regulating slavery are now cited by almost all churches as proof that scripture must be read for its direction and not only for its individual instructions.
6. Literalist readings hold that a plain command binds directly, while others argue from the movement of the whole biblical story. The same believer may use both methods on different questions.

The teaching Church

1. Roman Catholic ethics works through the magisterium, the teaching office of the pope and the bishops, which claims authority to interpret scripture and tradition for the whole Church.
2. Its main instrument is the encyclical, a letter addressed to the churches. Rerum Novarum of 1891 set out the rights of workers, and Laudato Si' of 2015 addressed the environment.
3. Catholic moral reasoning also uses natural law, the claim that human reason can work out what genuinely fulfils human nature. That argument is designed to be usable in public debate with people who do not share the faith.
4. Eastern Orthodox churches teach through councils, synods and the guidance of bishops, and apply oikonomia, a pastoral flexibility that adapts the application of a rule to the person in front of them.
5. Anglican provinces debate ethics in synods and at the Lambeth Conference, whose resolutions guide without binding. Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches decide through conferences and general assemblies.
6. Baptist and independent churches hold that the local congregation governs itself. Denominational resolutions there carry moral weight but no compulsory force, and a congregation may take a different view.

Conscience and its formation

1. Thomas Aquinas separated two things that English collapses into one word. Synderesis is the built-in disposition to seek good and avoid evil, and conscientia is the judgement that applies it to a particular case.
2. That distinction lets the tradition admit that conscience can be wrong. Aquinas held that a person must follow conscience even when it errs, and is answerable for having formed it carelessly.
3. John Henry Newman wrote in 1875 that if he had to give an after dinner toast he would drink to conscience first and to the pope afterwards. He also insisted that conscience means obedience to God, not personal preference.
4. The Second Vatican Council made the same point in Gaudium et Spes, describing conscience as the most secret core and sanctuary of a person, where they are alone with God.
5. Protestant traditions trace the theme to Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521, who refused to recant because his conscience was captive to the word of God. Quakers speak instead of the inner light in every person.
6. Formation is the shared demand. Churches teach that conscience is trained by scripture, prayer, teaching and community, and they treat an unformed conscience as one that simply echoes the surrounding culture.

Ecumenism and shared ethics

1. Ecumenism is the movement for cooperation and eventual unity among the churches. Much of its practical work has been ethical rather than doctrinal.
2. The World Council of Churches, founded in 1948, now brings together more than 350 Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches, and has campaigned on racism, debt, war and climate change.
3. The Roman Catholic Church is not a member but cooperates closely, having committed itself to the movement at the Second Vatican Council in the decree Unitatis Redintegratio of 1964.
4. Agreement on ethics often runs ahead of agreement on doctrine. Christian Aid, Caritas and local Churches Together groups run joint programmes while the churches behind them stay divided over sacraments and ministry.
5. Jubilee 2000 showed what that cooperation can achieve. Its campaign for the cancellation of poor countries' debt joined Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches to secular development agencies and trade unions.
6. Ethics has also become a new line of division. Lutherans and Catholics signed a joint declaration on justification in 1999 while remaining divided over sexuality and ordination, and those disputes now run inside denominations as well as between them.

Handling moral disagreement

1. Churches separate questions that define the faith from questions on which Christians may differ. Protestant theology calls the second group adiaphora, things indifferent.
2. The line between the two moves over time. Slavery was once argued from scripture on both sides and is now treated by every major church as settled rather than open.
3. Where a church regards a question as settled it has instruments of discipline, including refusal of communion, the removal of a minister's licence, and in the Catholic case the withdrawal of a theologian's mandate to teach.
4. Where it does not, churches build structures for living with disagreement. The Anglican Communion has done this for provinces that differ over sexuality and the ordination of women.
5. These arguments do not stay inside the churches. Congregations and denominations appear in courts and legislatures over conscience clauses, charitable status and religious exemptions from general law.
6. A Christian facing a contested question therefore asks four things: what scripture says, how the Church has taught it, what reason and experience suggest, and what conscience concludes. Traditions differ mainly in which answer they let override the others.