Rocky Cape Christian Community

God's laws are eternal. They are to be obeyed and respected above all man-made rules.

God's laws are "eternal ethics."

The teachings of Jesus (such as those of the Sermon on the Mount) give God's eternal ethics to us in their purest form. Such teachings need to be obeyed and respected above the time-related teachings of Moses, the prophets, and above the teachings of Christians who live today.

But Jesus did something unusual. He did not write his teachings down into a book. He told them to his disciples. He charged his disciples with passing those teachings on to the Christian church.

Because of this we obey those first disciples (the apostles), just like we obey Jesus. Following their example is the same thing as following Jesus' example.

The apostles taught us eternal ethics. The church is built upon them, as upon twelve foundations (Revelation 21:14).

If a church that holds to apostolic doctrine (Acts 2:42) decides that something is good or bad, we do well to obey its decisions. But we must remember, the voice of the church is not the voice of the apostles themselves.

The church can make decisions about time-related things, but it cannot make decisions about eternal ethics. The church can decide how to separate itself from the world, how to put its nonresistance to practice, and how to bring the Gospel to others. But decisions made by the church are like the decisions made by Moses. They are good only for a certain time and a certain place.

The church's decisions have had to be readjusted innumerable times and in innumerable places, since Jesus' day. God's eternal ethics are not adjustable.

We may divide ethics into three categories: eternal ethics, defined by God. Time-related or "situational" ethics, defined by men, and unethical rules, originating from evil.

The first category includes the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. The second category includes the laws given through Moses, the Biblical church, national governments, institutions, homes, etc. And the third one includes the world of fashion, bad entertainment, destructive national laws, and others like them.

What causes confusion is where ethics of the second and third categories become mixed. What causes even more confusion is where churches or governments take second or third category ethics and present them to the world as the eternal ethics of God!

Around the core of God's eternal ethics, the pulp of human tradition has grown many times. The older and riper such tradition becomes, the more it hides the ethics within it.

It is normal that human traditions should grow up around God's eternal ethics. And it is normal that once those traditions become old and useless men should peel them back again. To see the God's eternal ethics in their peeled state look at the Gospels. To see them in the first stages of the growth of healthy tradition, look at the primitive Christian church.

The Church and Eternal Ethics

The early church shone for years after Pentecost. It was the true and catholic church of Jesus. It shone in a light from heaven because Jesus had removed the veil of sin between it and God.

Where Jesus removes the veil, God's eternal ethics stand clearly revealed. These ethics in practice are the identifying mark of the true church.

We need to evaluate Christianity in the light of God's eternal ethics. Christians that do not live them out are not his true catholic church.

There are false churches everywhere, just as there are false coins, or false paintings. We need to know the catholic church well, to tell the difference.

The catholic church is simple. It teaches simple doctrines and lives simply like Jesus did. The clearer the light the simpler the teaching.

The Gospels record 32 commandments of Jesus. Jesus said we are his friends if we obey his commandments. They are eternal ethics.

But we cannot get along on this earth with only the 32 commandments of Jesus. The Apostles gave us more commandments. And the catholic church has given us "localized" and time-limited commandments to maintain order ever since.

We need the commandments of God and men. No society, no church can function without them. But the commandments of men dare not obscure God's eternal ethics.

Too many commandments make trouble, just like not enough commandments make trouble. To find safety and balance in this area we do well to look at the early church. The catholic church has never been as balanced and powerful for as long a period of time, as in the first centuries A.D.

Eternal Ethics and Church Divisions

God gave us only one set of eternal ethics. How could Christians who live by them be divided?

Jesus divided light from darkness. Christians that walk in the light do not suffer divisions. But once they depart from God's eternal ethics (Jesus and the apostles' doctrine), divisions will break them apart.

The more split up that Christians are, the further they are from the holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Most church divisions have nothing to do with Jesus or the apostles' commandments. They take place where people disagree about the commandments of men.

To understand the church we must stop looking at it through denominational eyes. Denominational boundaries, like political boundaries, are imaginary lines. We need to judge who is Christian and who is not from the standpoint of God's eternal ethics.

We dare not think of our sect or denomination as being the catholic church in its entirety.

Dangerous, exclusive narrowness seeks to hem us in on every side. There is narrowness in church fellowship, cultural narrowness, and doctrinal narrowness. The most narrow-minded people belong to sects with the most powerful central organizations. We must refuse to join them, not because we have a problem with what they believe, but because they have destroyed the mechanism through which mistaken beliefs can be corrected.

Churches that produce people not given to thinking about what they believe, are false churches. The catholic church not only tolerates but encourages the interchange of constructive ideas. God's laws take effect and revival occurs within it.

Many Christians talk about unity, and about one universal church. But few of them want the unity that would come from everyone returning to the way of the early church and God's eternal ethics. Few Christians are ready to pay that price. Few Christians really want to work together. Few want to learn from each other, to "give-and-take" in the area of applications to Bible teachings, or to recognize one another's work. Every church seems to prefer being left alone and to be given perfect liberty to do as it pleases.

Is it not strange how such proud, individualistic churches have become such experts at identifying the sin of individualism in their members?

Some churches make too much out of group loyalty. If loyalty teaching is focused on loyalty to God's eternal ethics, it is good. But church loyalty-teaching apart from that is dangerous. Look at what happened in the 16'th century, or in the days of Jesus. The Jews did not get alarmed until they detected in Jesus' words what looked like disloyalty to their tradition. Then they killed him.

A large part of modern Christian activity centers around wall-building. Walls to shelter group from group and Christians as a whole from the rest of humanity. Does that come from Jesus' example?

At the same time, large denominations have taken down walls that should have stayed standing, and allowed Satan to intrude into their midst, pulling the veil of sin and impurity across them again.

Christian denominations run like the notes of the scale. There are liberal, moderate, conservative, and ultra-conservative Baptists. The same is true of the Brethren, the Anglicans, the Mennonites... and Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists for that matter. Such divisions seem to have more to do with personality than belief.

Small church groups tend to consist of small-minded people. If the bounds of what we consider "our" religion lie at the bounds of our particular sect, or worse yet, at the bounds of our local congregation, it is no wonder that we cannot see God. Neither God nor his eternal ethics fit into such small spaces.

Eternal Ethics and Doctrine

Binding and loosing were common Jewish terms in Jesus day. They were used to declare things lawful or unlawful.

Jesus, while speaking privately to his disciples, gave them authority to bind and to loosen, to declare things lawful or unlawful for the catholic church, according to the teaching he had given them (Matt 16:19).

Only Jesus' apostles received such authority. Only his apostles were breathed on by him and given power to remit or retain sin (John 20:19-23).

Christian doctrine rests on the foundation of that apostolic authority (Eph 2:2 and Eph. 3:5). Since the days of the apostles, no-one has possessed it. No-one has had the right to establish Christian doctrine apart from what the apostles established. Early Christians writers made it a point to differentiate between their teaching and the teachings of the apostles of Jesus Christ.

This early end of the defining of doctrine was Christianity's built-in check to keep it from regressing to the confusion of Judaism and its oral law. But unfortunately much of Christianity ignored this check and kept right on defining and establishing more doctrines throughout centuries following. Christian leaders gathered in councils to decide upon what was orthodox in the field of doctrine and what was heresy. But many times they were mistaken, and more often than not they ended up defining things which God had never meant for them to define.

This mania for orthodoxy has done Christianity unspeakable harm. Supposed orthodoxy is the root of the problem of Christian divisiveness. A haze of complicated doctrines has closed in upon much of Christianity to dim the light of truth shining down from God and his eternal ethics.

Christians today have lost the concept of the early church that there are certain truths in the New Testament to be pondered but not defined. In some cases there is no such thing as one correct definition of a Bible truth, or one correct application of a principle. Some truths are like diamonds. They may be correctly viewed from many different angles.

Christians' attempts at narrowing New Testament doctrine into one denominational mold, have not narrowed it down at all. Such attempts have simply made Christianity more diverse.

Christian doctrine is good or bad in proportion to the amount of it which comes from God.

Peter Hoover
Río Cuarto de Grecia
Costa Rica
1991