The below is based on a presentation I gave at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church.I spend a lot of time on Reddit, various Christian subreddits, dozens of them. Every day someone asks somewhere, “Is XXX a sin?” Sometimes I’ll answer, and my answer is always, “You need to back up and ask, how do you determine right from wrong? Because asking Reddit is probably not the best approach.”

I’m not an ethicist, but I’ve spent some time studying, specifically Dr. Chidi Anagonye. There are three basic kinds of ethical systems:

  • Rule-based * An action is good because it follows the rules (whatever they are)
  • Consequentialist * An action is good because it has good consequences (however you predict and judge consequences)
  • Virtue-based * An action is good if it makes you a better person by your doing of it

People often ask questions like, “Why is there a rule against this thing? It doesn’t hurt anyone!” Which is muddled thinking, but fundamentally it’s really asking “Why are Christian ethics rule-based when I expect them to be consequentialist?” So we have to ask, which kind of system are we dealing with?

Christian ethics are virtue-based. Christ spoke on many occasions against rule-ethics: a man who would murder his brother, but happens to not today, is still a murderer. A man who would commit adultery, but happens to not today, is still an adulterer. We are, by nature, selfish, short-sighted, and self-destructive. Unless we change, we will die, not simply because of God’s judgment against us, but because we cannot live. God’s saving work in history is his acting to give us a new nature, to re-create us, to make us into the image of his Son that we were always intended to be. And the perfected person acts correctly, not because they know the rules, but because correct action flows from who they have become. We see this throughout scripture.

  • (Jeremiah) “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
  • (Hebrews) “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes and carefully observe my regulations.”
  • (Romans) “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
  • (Romans) “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”
  • (Titus) “He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
  • (Ephesians) “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

Christian discipleship is the process of changing who we are. A disciple does what his master does, for the reason his master does them, to the end of becoming like his master. The Spirit works within us, and we take the action that makes us more like Christ, that builds the Christian virtues in us, because that makes those actions more natural to us the next time. Our nature is replaced over time.

In short: I have been saved, I am being saved, I hope to be saved.

So what, then, are the Christian virtues? There are a few classical lists, but I grew up in a tradition heavy on scripture and light on big-T Tradition, so I tend to take a different approach. I’m also an engineer. I systematically identified every virtue list in the New Testament (about 25) and grouped the virtues in them (about 200). There turn out to be ten clusters, which are very much like the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians, so I take that as a hint I’m on a good path here. These are the things the Spirit brings about in us:

  • Love, leading to respect and affection
  • Joy, leading to satisfaction, contentment, and gratitude
  • Peace, leading to forgiveness, drive for relationship and covenant
  • Patience and hope
  • Compassion, leading to kindness, mercy, generosity and benevolence
  • Righteousness within, leading to justice without
  • Faithfulness and endurance
  • Humility
  • Integrity and self-control
  • Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
    • This one’s not in the Fruit, but it’s kind of necessary for the rest to make sense. We can’t know what action is kind without having some understanding of cause-and-effect in the physical world.

So when a question is asked, “should I do X?” I suggest that it should be asked in this framework.

  • Does it make me more loving, respectful, affectionate? Or less?
  • More joyful, satisfied, contented, grateful? Or less?
  • More peaceful and forgiving? Or less?
  • More patient and hopeful? Or less?
  • More compassionate, kind, merciful, and generous? Or less?
  • More driven toward greater righteousness and justice? Or less?
  • More faithful and endurant? Or less?
  • More humble? Or less?
  • More self-controlled and consistent? Or less?
  • More driven toward knowledge and wisdom? Or less? Now, this kind of framework does make us uncomfortable at times. For one, it means there may not be consistent answers. What’s “wise” is dependent on the context; five centuries ago the “wisest” people on earth didn’t have any understanding of how diseases spread, so a perfectly wise and kind person could still spread diseases that killed millions of indigenous Americans. We have to act in accordance with current wisdom, but also be humble enough to repent in the face of new knowledge.

Further, in a broken world we are faced with situations where there is no good choice, only a decision among bad ones. We cannot be maximally kind to everyone in a context of limited resources. We cannot always be faithful to oaths to obey the law and also working toward greater justice in the world. We cannot be both loving to the Jews hiding under the kitchen table and truthful to the Nazis searching for them. Which means it’s difficult to have a virtue-ethic system that universally proscribes any specific action. A virtue-based system does not provide easy answers to all situations. In fact, it makes life harder than rules do, because it demands that we recognize the complexity of the world and wrestle with it. What action is most virtuous is very contextual.

Now, in the context I grew up in, the immediate response would be “That’s situational ethics, Patrick!” But in fact it is not. It’s only situational if you assume ethics are about rules. The ethical framework is fixed, it’s the applications that are situational.

So all that said, let’s talk about cannabis, which for the purposes of today I’m assuming to mean “getting high” and not the non-psychoactive uses. Most virtues, I don’t see as necessarily relevant to its use. But others might!

  • Does it make me more loving, respectful, affectionate? Or less?
  • More joyful, satisfied, contented, grateful? Or less?
    • Arguably it could, in a medical context
  • More peaceful and forgiving? Or less?
  • More patient and hopeful? Or less?
  • More compassionate, kind, merciful, and generous? Or less?
    • Doing pot in situations where it can result in harm to others is bad, don’t ever do that.
  • More driven toward greater righteousness and justice? Or less?
  • More faithful and endurant? Or less?
    • Do you perceive yourself to have an obligation to not use cannabis because the law in your context says not to?
  • More humble? Or less?
  • More self-controlled and consistent? Or less?
    • Some people are dependent on cannabis. You should work towards being able to do without it. But if you’re dependent on something, don’t pretend you’re not. Improvement takes time. We run towards a goal we may not be able to reach in our lifetimes. Dying before we get there isn’t really a problem for us.
  • More driven toward knowledge and wisdom? Or less?
    • Behaving like an unwise person makes you less wise, and less like the person God wants you to be. Inhaling smoke is always bad for you, cannabis addiction is a thing for some people, and habitual usage for people whose brains are still developing is almost certainly a terrible idea.
    • Use of pot may be unwise for any number of other reasons. In a world where many false claims are made we can’t determine what’s wise without understanding how reality actually behaves, how pot really affects individuals. (“REEFER MADNESS!!!” “CBD cures everything!!!!”) That’s hard, and this is not the context to evaluate those sorts of claims. * Don’t believe everything you read, and don’t believe everything that makes you happy, and don’t assume that because something was probably true yesterday means it’s still probably true today. We learn.

In summary, I don’t have answers. But I hope that this provides a framework for thought about this issue and many others.