Christianity and Morals by Edward Westermarck

There would have been no Paul without Christ, but there would have been no Christianity without Paul. The new faith would, no doubt, have merely remained the religion of a Jewish sect destined to pine away, if Paul had not rescued it for history, and made it a religion of the world. He did this by transforming its character. Jesus had taught, in the Sermon on the Mount, that the salvation of any man depended on his own moral conduct, and that the way which led to the kingdom of God was anything but easy. According to Paul, future life was the result of a divine work of redemption, which prepared the salvation for mankind once for all through the death and resurrection of Christ and faith. Christian theologians often tell us that there is no essential difference between the teaching of Jesus and that of Paul. But from the moral point of view the difference is radical.

I have tried to show that the ethics of Jesus were expressions of his moral emotions, and that these were in general agreement with the nature of such emotions when guided by sufficient sympathy and discrimination. This is proved by the great similarities between the teaching of Jesus and that of the world's other great moralists. Moral emotions are disinterested retributive emotions. Personal anger and vindictiveness are strongly condemned by Jesus; and the injunctions of forgiveness and kindness to enemies are also found in the Old Testament and other Jewish writings, in the Koran and the Mohammedan traditions, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Chinese ethics; and the principle of forgiveness had advocates in Greece and Rome, as well, the condemnation of anger and resentment being particularly abundant in Stoicism. Quite different from the resentment and retaliation springing from personal motives are moral resentment and the punishment in which it finds expression. These vary indefinitely. The moral indignation of Jesus is often intense, and the future punishment he assigns to unrepentant sinners enormous. This is an unsurmountable stumbling-block for those who insist on the objectivity of the rules of Christian ethics. Nowadays Christians are shocked by the ancient doctrine of hell and make vain attempts to explain it away. But side by side with the doctrine of retribution there is in the gospels the message of forgiveness for the repentant sinner. That repentance is followed by forgiveness is also found in other religions, such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, and the Vedic religion. But repentance not only blunts the edge of moral indignation and recommends the offender to mercy: it is also the sole ground on which pardon can be given by a scrupulous judge. When sufficiently guided by deliberation and left to itself without being unduly checked by other emotions, the feeling of moral resentment is apt to last as long as its cause remains unaltered, that is, until the will of the offender has ceased to be offensive; and it ceases to be so only when he acknowledges his guilt and repents. That moral indignation is appeased by repentance, and that repentance is the only proper ground for forgiveness, however, is due, not to the specifically moral character of such indignation, but to its being a form of resentment. This is confirmed by the fact that an angry and revengeful man is apt to be influenced in a similar way by the sincere repentance of the offender.