Christian Ethics

Definition and Meaning

Christian ethics is a branch of theology that discerns right and wrong and explores how life should be directed on the basis of the Bible and the Christian faith. It is sometimes divided into personal ethics, which concerns individual conduct, and social ethics, which addresses questions of institutions and structures. It is also a discipline that asks what sanctification, the process by which Christians are made holy, looks like in everyday life.

Biblical and Historical Background

In Scripture, the basic foundations include the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), and Matthew 22:37–40, which names love of God and love of neighbor as the greatest commandments.

In church history, Augustine placed love at the center of ethics. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas systematized natural law ethics. During the Reformation, Martin Luther set forth the doctrine of the two kingdoms, which distinguishes the roles of the church and secular authority, while John Calvin emphasized the role of the law as a standard guiding the life of the believer. In the twentieth century, figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazi regime, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who addressed sin embedded in social structures, exerted significant influence. The Lausanne Covenant, adopted at the 1974 Lausanne Congress, explicitly affirmed Christian social responsibility alongside evangelism.

Practice in the Korean Church

The Korean church has long emphasized personal ethics such as Lord's Day observance, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, honesty, and self-restraint. The emphases of various denominations are as follows:

• Evangelical-leaning denominations: These tend to stress standards of conduct grounded in the authority of Scripture, as well as sexual ethics and bioethics.
• Methodist and Holiness churches: Within the holiness tradition of Wesleyan theology, they speak of personal holiness and social action together.
• The Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea and the National Council of Churches in Korea: These have actively engaged in social justice issues such as human rights, democratization, and peace.

In 1987 the interdenominational Christian Ethics Movement of Korea was founded to promote honesty and the practice of justice among Christians. Major issues today include hereditary pastoral succession, financial transparency in churches, taxation of clergy, homosexuality and the church, and abortion and the church. Judgments on the same biblical texts differ according to denomination and theological position. At theological seminaries, Christian ethics is taught as one of the principal subjects of the curriculum.