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ETHOS: LIVING OUT AN INEVITABLE IDEA
By Garry J. Moes
L ife magazine once noted that "every age or epoch is inspired by what may be called its inevitable idea — the ethos of the century."
Ethos: a fascinating and powerful word! A direct adaptation from the Greek word of the same spelling and meaning, its English definition is "character or moral nature" — "the guiding beliefs, standards, or ideals that characterize or pervade a group, a community, a people or an ideology; the spirit that motivates the ideas, customs, or practices of a people, an epoch, or a region."
A Christian camp recently hosted a youth retreat for which the leaders had designed a special T-shirt reflecting the theme of the weekend. On the front was that word: ETHOS. On the back, was the amazingly simple definition: "Live what you believe."
From this word ethos we also get the word "ethics." Ethics, of course, is the discipline dealing with what is good and bad, right and wrong. It is the system of moral duties and obligations we have, our standards of behavior, our system of moral principles, our set of values.
When we codify our ethics, we call the result "law." When codified by God, His laws become "divine scripture" and are enforced by whatever means God chooses to work His will in our world. When ethics are codified by the state, the laws are enforceable through the state's police power, a comforting arrangement when our laws grow out of a just and righteous ethos, but a frightening prospect when they spring from an evil one.
It has been said, vainly, that morality cannot be legislated. But that is patent nonsense. All law is morality legislated — ethics codified.
Ethics, then, is exactly what our campers' T-shirt said: "Living what we believe." To not live what we believe (or profess to believe) is called "hypocrisy," the one sin which virtually everyone professes to be intolerable these days.
In one sense, however, it is unnecessary to call people to live what they believe. People do live what they believe. Their behaviors almost inevitably reflect their system of morality, i.e., their ethics, the "inevitable idea" of their age. The question is not so much whether we will act out what we believe.
The more important question is what, indeed, will we believe?
Someone once said, "Ideas have consequences," and that is precisely the point. Our ideas, our beliefs, will always work out in the real world as consequences, as behaviors.
Our civic life in America is reflecting this reality and, due to the subversion of our ethos, it is an ever more frightening reality.
The poet/essayist T.S. Eliot, perhaps unwittingly foreshadowing and explaining the sordidness which has characterized our political scene in recent times, once wrote that the behavior of politicians is determined by "the general ethos of the people they have to govern."
Former Republican Party strategist Colonel V. Doner wrote recently, "It doesn't take a membership in Mensa to realize that social policy and law eventually reflect the moral concepts held by the ruling elites, whether liberal Democrats or establishment Republicans. Clearly, the context of this morality, and hence the resulting public policy, flows from certain presuppositions about God (does He exist?) and His law (is it applicable?)."
All of the above is set forth to provide context to what I believe is one of the most remarkable messages to enter our nation's political dialogue in several decades. It was delivered on February 16 as a open letter to the nation's conservative movement by one of its central architects, Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation.
In his widely reported message, Weyrich, in effect, declared that the so-called cultural war between the defenders of America's Christian ethos and the forces of secularism/socialism has been lost by the former.
There has been a sea-change of historic proportions, he said.
"Suffice it to say that the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture, Weyrich argued. "[I]t is impossible to ignore the fact that the United States is becoming an ideological state. The ideology of Political Correctness, which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture, has so gripped the body politic, has so gripped our institutions, that it is even affecting the Church. It has completely taken over the academic community. It is now pervasive in the entertainment industry, and it threatens to control literally every aspect of our lives."
What was so unusual about Weyrich's message was that he did not call for rededication by the forces of righteousness to engage the battle. He did not call for redoubling our efforts to retake the battlefield.
What astonished the political world and media was his proposal that Christians and other traditional moral conservatives disengage from the established order, bypass established institutions, and create their own countercultural institutions — including educational endeavors, courts, and entertainment avenues — and reevaluate their faith in reformation of the country by political means.
"I think it is fair to say that conservatives have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected," he said. "But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics."
Weyrich's new position came as a shock to many well-intented reformers who remain certain that harder work in politics and cultural engagement can still reverse the apparent trends — the "inevitable idea" of our epoch.
The hard work to date was largely inspired by reconstructionists of one ilk or another who were certain that our cultural/political deterioration was the result of Christians having abandoned the battlefield, beginning perhaps a century ago, in pursuit of a quiet pietism, spiritual sanctuary, and personal salvation. Re-engage the battle, they argued. Take back God's territory.
It was and is a compelling argument. Yet some of us who took up that challenge have come to sense that something is yet missing. Or, perhaps, a time has arisen in which a strategic battlefield retreat is indicated to allow God, whose battle it really is, to accomplish some wise purpose unique for our time. I submit that that purpose may have something to do with judgment.
(A personal note: I have sensed that my intercessory prayers for our nation and world in recent years have met with negative responses at Heaven's Throne. So much so that I have felt led to all but cease such intercession and bow temporarily to what I am perceiving to be God's unfolding cycle of judgment.)
To assume that some common ground can be found on which both the City of God and the city of man, to use Augustine's construct, can be built is no doubt folly. There can never be a political or cultural consensus among these two populations in our world, and, insofar as politics is the art of compromise, it can never be a vehicle for building the City of God.
The February 1999 edition of Ligonier Ministries' devotional booklet Tabletalk examines the unending historical war between these two cultures, showing from the prophecies of Isaiah "how God deals with rebellious nations that refuse to honor Him and how He deals with His own people who become faithless as they are seduced by the city of man."
From Isaiah, for example, we see how God, from time to time, turns our sins back upon us, forcing us to live with the consequences of our ideas, giving us rulers who govern according to the principles of our own perverted ethos. As explained in a phenomenon known as the doctrine of concurrence, God, who does no evil, works His good and just will through the evil schemes of fallen men.
"We see how God uses His enemies as tools to carry out His purposes. Though wicked men act according to the evil schemes of their own hearts, God uses them to serve His purpose, i.e., to bring judgment on the world and to chastise His people," says R.C. Sproul.
In the meantime, how can we be sure that our ethos and consequent behaviors will be right and pure, in line with the perfect will of God? Ephesians 5:1 puts is as simply as it can be put: "Be imitators of God." We must live and fulfill His Great Commission according to the standards of His Word, our perfect law.
And rest in His sovereign control, fearing Him, but never fearing men.