Dr. Daniel giving the students parting remarks wearing the Karen Shirt made and gifted by the students.

This fall I taught at four different schools two in China nearly 1600 miles apart and two along the Thai – Myanmar (Burma) Border about 80 miles apart. I started out in Harbin a beautiful city of about ten million people in the northeastern corner of China above the Korean Peninsula a stone’s throw from Siberia. From Harbin I went to Wenzhou and then after finishing there I flew to Bangkok and onto Mae Sot, Thailand where I served Hill Light Theological Seminary followed by KKBBSC inside Mae La Refugee Camp. In each setting I taught ethics courses. In this posting I provide my readers with a synopsis of some of the ideas that composed my teaching. In a later post I will explore some of my experiences and reflections on the schools and their cultures.

My thesis was that Christian ethics is a bottom up, inside out phenomenon – the ethic i.e. the way we are to live in the world first has its source in God’s ethic with us. In and through the Gospel of Christ God gives us three things – faith, hope and love nothing more nothing less. Each of these reaches us as a gifts we are freed to receive and enjoy and then once these take spiritual residence, if only a little, within us they are to become our ethical way in the world. Rather than a milquetoast, toothless grandma kind of ethics I set out to show just the opposite.

Dr. Daniel at HLTS preaching during chapel “With Peter Walking on Water Everyday: the Science of Faith.”

Faith in things unseen (“we walk by faith and not by sight” 2 Corinthians 5:7) is the mother of reverence because faith by its nature reverences the ‘hiddeness’ of God and God’s ways and respect for all things that God has clothed in subtly and wrapped with invisibility in this world. Faith does not need to see to believe. More over the reality of things unseen supports, informs and exceeds that of things seen. The sin of this generation especially in the West and in America is that of profanity and arrogance. We walk with a heavy foot and measure everything by the length of our reason and our immediate direct experience. We believe that what we see is what we get and we tend to baptize every pleasure as a simple good and every experience where the brokenness of life impinges on us as a simply bad. All mystery has fled from our eyes.

It is true that Christian faith is nourished not merely by respect for a hidden mystery embedded in life but draws from the Apostolic revelation of the reconciliation of life with Life, with God and good. Standing at the cross roads of history, in time the Apostles saw that Christ reconciled the world to God and connected it to new hope. Drawing from this source faith gathers into itself not only reverence but also joy and expectation and also courage in the face of all that would argue that life is irreconcilably broken and fickle.

Hope in those better things Christ has secured spoken of in the Lord’s Prayer “… our Father who are in heaven.. your kingdom come on earth…” is the mother of restraint.   The real power needed to exercise restraint, whether it is in regards to gaining wealth or experiencing pleasure or reigning in anxiety over one’s problems comes not from religious or Biblical imperatives. The law, any law, is long on what we should do and short on the power to do it. The promise of bigger and better things coming extended to us in the Gospel, once we believe in them, downsizes the magnitude of the problems and pleasures of the present. Before a person is connected by faith to hope the problems and pleasures of the present almost always become the be all and end all. After hope they are less significant. Before the coming of hope we free fall into the present good or bad that faces us but after hope we are able to transcend the idolatry endemic in the present. Whenever the present and its experience is everything, whatever face it wears – good, bad or ugly, idolatry is born. But standing in the present in the grip of bigger and better things promised and coming we are able to emancipate ourselves if not in body always in spirit.

Dr. Daniel teaching the senior class – Ten Faces of the Ethic of Love.

Love is often made into an impossible spiritual imperative, something we must do and be. But when love is first understood as something we receive a new freedom and power for love is released in us and in the world if only a little. The wheel that turns every other wheel is in God and God’s way with us in Christ. Love first received from others but ultimately from God empowers the freedom to turn from the preoccupation with self and outward toward others to lift up others.

None of the students had ever thought of Christian ethics as consistently grounded and informed in this way. Nevertheless, they took to it and some of them with great enthusiasm realizing the power and freedom it carried.

PICTURES ARE TAKEN AT HILL LIGHT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY which is located in Huay Nam Khun (Klee Thoo Klo in Karen) a Thai-Karen village about twenty minutes drive south from Mae Sot Thailand, a town ALONG the Thai – Burma (Myanmar) Border.