Theological Ethics w/ Dr. Gary Deddo

Theological Ethics w/ Gary Deddo

Welcome to the GC Podcast. This year, we’re centering on Kingdom Culture and exploring how it transforms ministry and equips leaders for kingdom living. Through conversations with Grace Communion Seminary professors and a few other guests, we’ll explore how their teachings equip ministry leaders to embody kingdom values.

This is the GC Podcast, where we help you grow into the healthiest ministry leader you can be. Sharing practical insights and best practices from the context of Grace Communion International Churches. Here’s your host, Cara Garrity.

Cara: Hello friends, and welcome to today’s episode of GC Podcast. This podcast is devoted to exploring best ministry practices in context of Grace Communion International churches.

I’m your host, Cara Garrity. And today we are blessed to have Dr. Gary Deddo as our guest. Dr. Deddo is a professor at Grace Communion Seminary and has been participating in GCI and GCS since 2012.

And today for our first episode of 2025, we are going to begin exploring our theme of kingdom living through exploring particularly the course of theological ethics that Dr. Deddo teaches at Grace Community Seminary. So, thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Deddo.

[00:01:35] Gary: Thank you, Cara. It’s a privilege to be with you and to address your audience.

I’m very happy to talk about the seminary and in particular this class that we call Theological Ethics. But that is a very important topic and very complex as anytime you hear the word ethics everybody gets stiff and maybe a bit worried. And so, it’s a huge topic.

It is complex, complicated in a way, but that’s what you need a class for, right? You need a class to have time, to have resources, to think and to talk and interact with others and to work things through, to pray things through, to study scripture that’s relevant to the topic. So, it really does take a good amount of time and some discipline.

And usually, a class helps us be disciplined. You’d make out plans and say I want to read this book, or I want to look into this. And then, of course, you don’t. But a class helps because you’re working with others. And so certainly this topic, theological ethics, does call for that.

And so usually we have a great time. This is, I think, the fourth time we’ve had the class, and it’s always been very productive.

And part of it is, it does take time, and it does take effort. And there’s so many complications, and there’s also many pressures on us to try to discern what’s good, what’s true, what’s right, what I ought to do. And a lot of times, of course, we’re thinking about what others ought to do and that’s certainly part of it, but we have to start with ourselves.

Yeah, we have a class on it that lasts twelve weeks and people put in about, oh, twelve hours a week for each of those weeks to work things through. We have a couple of textbooks.

But the topic itself is important. We call it theological ethics. And the reason we qualify the word ethics with theological is because not all thinking about right and wrong, not all teaching about right and wrong, is theological. That is, it doesn’t connect with who God is or who a particular god is or who the Christian God is.

And in this class, we want to link together who God is — the God revealed in Jesus Christ according to Scripture — and then see what does that have to do with how we live our lives, how we discern what’s good and right, how we avoid being deceived or used, or use others or treat others poorly.

So, you want to connect together theology, which is our knowledge and faith in the living God, and how that then yields fruit in our lives: what we do, what we think, how we act, how we react. So, it’s a theological ethic.

Often without the connection between who God is and trusting in God, we just do what’s right because we just have a feeling, and then we think about it later. Or we’ve heard someone say something, and it sounded good to us, so we went with it. Or sometimes it’s out of guilt or fear or anxiety that we decide to act a certain way, react a certain way, and there’s not a lot of prayer; there’s not a lot of thought.

Or later on we realize, wow, I didn’t take into consideration that. Wow, if I would have realized that, I probably would have decided differently or reacted differently or decided differently.

We want to bring our theology, our faith, our worship, our prayer together with what we think and decide and how we react and reply, and yes, even sometimes how we vote, what that adds up to. So, it’s a theological ethic. In the biblical way to talk about this comes up, actually, in Romans chapter 1. And then Romans 16, the last chapter as well, Paul says his whole ministry is to do nothing other than to bring about the obedience of faith. That phrase, the obedience of faith, that’s another way to talk about what a theological ethic is about. It’s trying to discern and prepare ourselves to do what is good and right according to God’s will and way and God’s heart and mind, and to do that out of trust or faith in the living God, as if God is real, as if God is present, as if God is active, as if God knows better than we do, and what’s the best for us.

And that’s why we hear in His word, we’re given directions as to which way to go, which ways to decide. So, we obey by faith, out of trust. So, it’s a part of our worship relationship with the living God. Rather than just stoic, “I have to do it,” or there’s a rule about it, so I better, or someone’s going to be unhappy with me, or I’m going to be unhappy with myself.

Rather, the only obedience — a response to God’s will and way and heart and mind — is to trust Him. So that’s another way to talk about the obedience to God. The obedience of faith is another way to talk about a theological ethic.

So that’s what we’re looking into. And of course, you can’t figure everything out in a class. That’s not the purpose of it. And anybody would already immediately recognize, no, we’re probably not going to do that. And we don’t. The point really is to be better prepared. That’s the point. How can we get better prepared? And how can we find others who can help us get better prepared? And how we might be able to help others get better prepared to hear the Word of God, to trust God, so that we’re free, and we see the good and right of what God is calling us to do. We’re getting better prepared by coming together, praying together, studying Scripture together, and reading others who have worked through the matters of good faith and evil, right and wrong better and worse. So that’s what we do in the class. And that’s what theological ethics is.

So, we could talk about also what it has to do with, you asked about the practice or the nature of the kingdom of God. That’s another part of it too. Where do ethics really come from?

As we know, a kingdom is a group of people. Jesus talks about He has come, and the kingdom is present among you when He comes. So, it’s about relationships. And of course, ethics isn’t anything …

[00:09:35] Cara: Yes. And I thank you for sharing that. And I took this course a couple years ago and what you’ve shared, I think that as someone who’s taken the course that I want to highlight for our listeners is like you said, we can’t learn and cover everything.

We can’t learn and cover everything in just one course. But what I found really helpful and practical is that we really dove into the process, right? Like how do we approach it and go about. And as you said, that’s the theological approach to ethics. And so, as you said, the preparation for that.

And so, I think that is clear with how that really has to do with our theme for 2025 of kingdom living. it really informs how do we live and how do we move through this world, right? Like you said, how do we discern as we do that?

And so, I wonder because it seems like this course and my personal experience, and as you describe it, has a very practical impact on our lives as disciples of Jesus.

What if you had to name just one — and I know that can be difficult. What would be one major takeaway from this course that would develop a student’s practice of kingdom living if they’ve taken the course?

[00:11:17] Gary: Yes, a lot of it is just dealing with Scripture that really directs us in our lives as to what’s important.

Obviously, we start with the love of — the two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. So just dealing with Scripture and all that it says. What does it say about yes, caring for the poor or loving your neighbor? All these kinds of things that are there. So, part of it is just a survey of Scripture that starts from the Old Testament and then runs to the New Testament.

But it does focus on sorting out the nature of love, and I think there’s lots of confusion about that. And that’s a problem. Everybody says you ought to be loving, and you ought to be kind. But the thing is, what do you mean and what does that look like in a particular situation?

And it turns out that in the New Testament, for instance love really requires knowledge. You have to know something in order to be loving. You have to know something about what’s true. You have to know something about what is good. So, we explore that so that your love is not an unloving love or a less than good kindness.

But there’s a lot of very simple understandings of love and kindness that float around. And everybody thinks you can instantly and immediately know what it is. So, we delve a lot into what it means t