In Jesus' teaching, the classic illustration of the principle that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, that compassion for the individual is above all law, is His shocking approval of David's actions, which he considered that human need (even if it were his own) more important than all precepts, however sacred:

"Have you not read what David did when he hungered and those who were with him? How did he enter into the house of God, and eat the showbread, which he was not to eat, nor to those who were with him, but only to the priests?" (Matt. 12:34).

Of course, this is a very risky ethic. Representatives of supranaturalistic legalism will always fear it, just as the Pharisees did in the time of Jesus (Matt. 12:14). However, I think that this is the only ethics for an "adult person". Resistance to it in the name of religious sanctions will not stop it, but will only give it anti-Christian forms. For, as Fletcher says,

"In our time, the law of the Torah is undergoing a second decline, and even more radical than during the first attacks on it by Jesus and the Apostle Paul. The fact is that the cultural environment today is much more conducive to such a decline than in the apostolic and patristic periods."243

There is no need to mourn the destruction of dilapidated installations. We should have the courage to accept this process as a challenge to Christian ethics, to free itself from the props of supranaturalistic legalism, on which it has relied too long and willingly. Of course, this release cannot go smoothly. To quote Fletcher again:

"Pope Pius XII, in his solemn speech of April 18, 1952, correctly designated this modern form of Christian ethics as 'situational' and 'existential'. He repudiated, of course, pointing out that such an unprecepted ethic could even be used to justify a Catholic who had left the Church of Rome if he seemed to be drawing closer to God as a result, or to defend birth control for the good of the individual. Four years later, on February 2, 1956, the Supreme Sacred Congregation "Sanctum Officium"244 called it a "new morality" and expelled it from all academies and seminaries in an attempt to counteract its influence on Catholic moralists.

But, of course, Protestants and Anglicans react to the new ethic with the same suspicion as soon as it becomes clear what judgments it can lead to and what rules and attitudes it threatens.

And yet there is nothing that is "vicious" in itself. For example, it is impossible to proceed from the statement that "premarital sexual relations" or "divorce" are vicious or sinful in themselves. This may be true 99 or even 100 times out of 100, but it is not an absolute statement, for the only absolute evil is the absence of love. Sexual abstinence and the indissolubility of marriage can be considered the guiding norms of love, they can and should be maintained by the laws and conventions of society, because they protect love in this world of impermanence and unlove. But, morally speaking, they must be defended "situationally, not prescriptively," as Fletcher puts it, i.e., on the basis of the dignity of the individual and the conviction that the deepest good of these particular individuals is more important than anything else in the world in that particular situation. The casuistry of love must be deeper, more probing, more exacting than all the precepts of the law, precisely because it penetrates into the very essence of the individual personal situation. And in the end, we must say with Professor Fletcher: "If the emotional and spiritual good of both parents and children in a given family will be most of all served by divorce, then love demands just that, however base and vulgar divorce may usually be."

These words will again be regarded as permission for licentiousness and immoral life. But the gates of love are strait and narrow, and its demands are infinitely deep and all-embracing. For example, a young man asks about his relationship with a girlfriend, "Why not?" The easiest way is to answer him, "Because it's wrong," or, "Because it's a sin," and then condemn him when he—or his entire generation—doesn't pay any attention to those words. It is much more difficult to ask him in reply, "Do you love her?" or, "How much do you love her?" and then to help him to make the decision that if he does not love her, or does not love her very deeply, his act is immoral, and if he does, he must respect her too much to take advantage of her or to take liberties with her. Chastity is a manifestation of love and care. And this is the criterion for any form of behavior, in marriage and outside of marriage, in sexual ethics and in any other field, because this is the only thing that makes an action right or wrong.

This "new morality" is, of course, no other than the ancient one, just as the new commandment is an ancient, but eternally new commandment of love (1 John 2:78). For Blessed Augustine wanted to say the same thing with his words "dilige et quod vis fao," which, as Fletcher rightly insists, should not be translated as "love and do what you like," but "love, and then do what you will." Of course, the "casuistry of love" requires the most careful examination both of the depth and sincerity of our concern for it—whether it is really the self-sacrificing agapae of Christ—and of our calculation of what will be the best expression of love for each actor in a given situation. Such an ethic cannot but rely in deep humility on the guiding rules in which the experience of obedience, both our own and the experience of others, is accumulated. This treasure trove of experience presents us with the working rules of "ought" and "ought" without which we would flounder at every step. And it is precisely these rules, constantly rechecked, that should be included in our codes of law for the protection of the individual, which operate paradoxically, "regardless of persons." But love is the end of the law (Rom. 13:10) precisely because it unconditionally looks at persons – at each unique, individual person. "The absoluteness of love is in its power to enter into a concrete situation, to reveal the concrete need to which it turns." For all the connection between the law and the requirements of love, there can be no ready-made moral judgments for a Christian, because the person is more important than the "rules."

The desire to preserve sincerity in these judgments will inevitably lead the Christian into conflict with the guardians of established morality, both ecclesiastical and secular. He will often find greater sympathy among those whose rules are different from his own, but whose rebelliousness is fundamentally motivated by the same protest in defense of the primacy of the individual and personal relations over all heteronomy, including the supernatural. For many of these people, too, are groping their way to a new theomy, to which the Christian must answer, "Yes," even if its theos is not "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." For example, D. H. Lawrence comes very close to what we have been talking about when he writes about the essence and depth of personality:

"And then—when you find your masculinity—your femininity—then you'll know she's not yours, that you can't do what you want with her. It is not in your will. It comes from – from the depths – from God. Beyond me, in the depths, is God."253

"God is transcendent in the midst of our lives," Bonhoeffer repeats the same thing almost word for word. The "God" in question is undoubtedly very different in these two authors.255 But here, at least, the path to the transcendent is visible in a non-religious world. And a Christian must find himself on this path if he has to say something to those who follow it. In morality, as in everything else, the question of "where is the exit" from the quagmire of relativism is resolved, I am sure, not by a call to return to religion, not by reaffirming the sanctions of the supernatural. It is solved when we take a place next to those who are deep in the search for meaning, "etsi deus non daretur", even if God did not exist. And this means joining those who are on the road to Emmaus, who have no religion left (Luke 24:21), and here, in the encounter of man with man and in the breaking of our common bread, with this and under this to discover the unconditional, to meet the Christ of our life.