The Archive

There are three key ideas in Christian ethics, ideas that are fundamental to virtually every concept within the field. They are:

• Man is made in God’s image.
• Man sins.
• Man reaches the Kingdom of God after death.

These are explained in detail below.

Man is made in God's image.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.¹
    Genesis 1:26-27

This idea is incredibly significant to Christian ethics because it implies that we are all made in an attempt to imitate God's appearance - His "image" (this could be regarded as the very purpose of our appearance). As God is a perfect being our appearance can be regarded as sacred, as our appearance is a facsimile of His. By inference, then, this implies that mankind as a species is sacred. God created man in His image so that we might live lives of responsibility and freedom, and He created the world with design and purpose; as such human life is precious, and it too has a purpose. God came to Earth in the form of Jesus Christ and His life is an example of how to live a perfect, ethical life, and Christians are therefore called upon to imitate Him and follow His teachings.

Man sins.

'Sin' describes an action that is intrinsically wrong, one that contravenes a form of natural or religious law, and as such goes against God's will. In the Bible specifically it refers to an act that does not follow God's moral guidance, as portrayed in the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis. They disobeyed God by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which gave them the ability to judge and know good from evil for themselves. In a New Testament biblical sense, sin is defined in the First Epistle of John:

Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.²
    1 John 3:4

Christians aim to deal with sin through confession, repentance and the continued effort to follow the example of Jesus.

Man reaches the Kingdom of God after death.

The term 'Kingdom of God' refers to a just and holy society for all people. According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is within (or among) people, is approached through understanding, and entered through acceptance like a child, spiritual rebirth, and doing the will of God:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.³
    Matthew 7:21

The Kingdom demands peace, mercy and justice, and will only come once humankind has corrected their relationship with God. This is at the heart of Jesus's social ethic. He was not just concerned with personal morality, but also with society as a whole; He was concerned with what was necessary in order to bring about the Kingdom of God.