Morality: Love in Place of Law?

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The 20th century's sexual revolution directly challenges Christianity's basic teachings against fornication and adultery. Some progressive church thinkers now advocate a "new morality" to take account of these facts of life. What they propose is an ethic based on love rather than law, in which the ultimate criterion for right and wrong is not divine command but the individual's subjective perception of what is good for himself and his neighbor in each given situation.

"We Are Delivered." More than 900 clergymen and students gathered last week at Harvard Divinity School to ponder the new morality and its significance for the church. Inevitably the speakers reached no definitive conclusions, but they generally agreed that in some respects the new morality is a healthy advance, as a genuine effort to take literally St. Paul's teachings that through Christ "we are delivered from the law." "Lists of cans and cannots are meaningless," said Princeton's Paul Ramsey. Yale's Protestant chaplain, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, similarly approved the new morality's concept of "guideposts" rather than "hitching posts," although he thought that the church would have to be restructured to accept it as a way of life.

In defense of tradition, Ramsey suggested that the new morality could not ignore the divinely given natural link between sexual relations and procreation. Harvard's Gordon Kaufman answered that the perfection of contraceptives was breaking this link. Ramsey also cautiously agreed with the new morality in its tolerance of one sin the church has adamantly condemned—premarital sex between engaged couples. It ceases to be "premarital," he said, once the couples have made a commitment to each other.

Divine Imperative. Joseph Fletcher of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge thought that no sexual relationship should be absolutely condemned by the church, which at the least ought to be less scandalized about teen-age promiscuity in urban slums. The new morality, he said, would certainly approve of an Episcopal priest in New York who provides contraceptives for a gang of delinquents he attempts to serve.

The core proposition of the new morality, argued Fletcher, is that "there is only one thing which is always good regardless of circumstances, and that is neighborly concern, social responsibility, agape—which is a divine imperative." In the situational approach of the new morality, he said, "one enters into every decision-making moment armed with all the wisdom of the culture, but prepared in one's freedom to suspend and violate any rule except that one must as responsibly as possible seek the good of one's neighbor." Which is quite a long thought for an 18-year-old during a passionate moment in the back seat of a car.