Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, catches our eye with a piece in the Times Online about how the Judaeo-Christian ethic has managed to survive the changing moral climates of many eras.
In the current condition, Sacks finds us not so very different from, say, that of the Ancient Greeks.
For the Greeks, the political was all. What you did in your private life was up to you. Sexual life was the pursuit of desire. Abortion and euthanasia were freely practised. The Greeks produced much of the greatest art and architecture, philosophy and drama, the world has ever known. What they did not produce was a society capable of surviving.
If sustainability is the question, the binding moral formation offered by bedrock Jewish and Christian teaching shows the way forward – or at least shows a way of thinking and living that itself has managed to remain relevant and alive.
Individuals don’t need to believe in God to be moral. But morality is more than individual choices. Like language it is the result of social practice, honed and refined over many centuries. The West was shaped by what today we call the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Lose that and we will not cease to be moral, but we will be moral in a different way.
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The Judaeo-Christian ethic is not the only way of being moral; but it is the only system that has endured. If we lose the Judaeo-Christian ethic, we will lose the greatest system ever devised for building a society on personal virtue and covenantal responsibility, on righteousness and humility, forgiveness and love.