In a comment on a recent post, I was taken to task, in the nicest possible way, for dissing the 1990s phenomenon of wearing WWJD bracelets as a reminder to ask “What Would Jesus Do?” when faced with ethical conundrums.
WWJD actually dates back to 1896, when Charles Monroe Sheldon wrote the Christian novel In His Steps. Subtitled What Would Jesus Do?, the book tells the story of a small-town minister who encourages his flock to move beyond singing hymns on Sunday about following Jesus, to actually doing so in their daily lives, with radical results.
In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?
By getting his co-religionists to go back to the roots of their faith, the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels, Sheldon did Christianity a great service. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, In His Steps “ranks as the 39th best-selling book of all time, along with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.”
But Sheldon’s aim was not to provide a simplistic moral compass: what the Evangelical WWJD wristband movement turned it into – a moralistic “Beam me up, Scotty” for Christian teenagers whose mates are “tempting” them with booze or porn – wouldn’t have been further from his mind, I’m sure.
Sheldon was a Christian socialist as well as a Congregational minister, and when he asked the WWJD question, he was looking squarely at what’s often called social sin. As Paul Raushenbush wrote in The Huffington Post, In His Steps was addressed to:
…an American society rife with social inequalities and ills due in part to the rise of industrialization and the capitalist exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. While the book has undeniably patronizing tones, it compellingly tells the story of a prosperous church whose members respond to the challenge of living their life by the question: What Would Jesus Do? The characters in the book include a business man who decides to make his factory a cooperative, a tenement owner who repents of his policy of neglect towards his tenants, and an heiress who gives up her fortune to give housing and religious instruction to the poor women of the slums.
My first criticism of WWJD, then, is that we’re doing it wrong. Instead of trying to invoke Jesus to come done on one side or another of our personal moral quandaries, we should be seeing how we live up to what Jesus had to say about life’s big questions. And the biggest question – which Sheldon saw clearly – is what we do about wealth, poverty and injustice, whether in our own neighbourhoods or globally. If you’re going to wear a WWJD wristband, I suggest you wear a Make Poverty History one along with it.
Secondly, when I called WWJD not “a particularly Christian question”, I should really have said New Testament. Surprising Bible fact #1: only once in the New Testament does anyone explicitly mention imitating Jesus as a basis for Christian ethics.
It’s St Paul in 1 Cor 11:1, and his comment comes at the end of a section justifying his own behaviour: some may call him wishy-washy, but he tries not to pointlessly upset people of different religious sensibilities for the greater good of helping people know God. How this relates to something Jesus did in life, at least as recorded in the Gospels, is beyond many. Jesus upset everyone!
So if a literal imitatio dei is not a foolproof method of discernment, where do Christian ethics come from? What does following Jesus look like? And can we ever move from text to praxis? In first semester this year I took a fascinating subject at theology college called “Ethics in the New Testament”. The central thing I’ve taken from that class is this, and it’s a significant one: a popular way of using the New Testament in ethics is to look at the ethical outcomes – the whats – we find in the text, to try to synthesise them (or not) and then to attempt to apply them to the contemporary situation. A more fruitful way is to see the New Testament as series of snapshots of communities captured in the process of trying to do ethics themselves and to take their methods as our models – the hows - rather than their outcomes.
So rather than saying, ” the Bible says this about this, so we should too”, a better approach is to consider how the communities whose records come down to us in the New Testament are portrayed as coming to grips with ethical issues themselves. Do they appeal to their own scriptures (the Old Testament)? Do they model themselves on paradigmatic situations or people, or invoke rules or commandments? How do they harmonise with or differentiate themselves from the other religious and ethical perspectives in their societies? Do they seek to create situational heuristics or rules for all time? More fruitful, but a lot harder to do.
The course also emphasised the fact that the construction of Christian ethics in the New Testament is inseparable from the establishment of (early) Christian community. The questions they asked tended to concern “What does it mean to be the people of God in this new, radical situation” (i.e. post the resurrection of Jesus). The questions we ask concern “What should I (the individual, which is largely a post-enlightment construction) do in situation x”.
Unfortunately, you’d have to have a pretty thick wrist to manage What Kind of Community Are We Creating In The Light of The Jesus Event? But, when you think about it, this was really the question the original WWJD phenomenon was prompting us to ask.
