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A CHRISTIAN ACCOUNTING ETHIC

God’s image and work transform our image and work

What can Christianity uniquely contribute to the accounting profession’s ethics? Exploring that question is this chapter’s purpose and can be of interest to both Christian and non-Christian accounting professionals. Presenting a Christian perspective’s contributions to accounting ethics speaks directly and beneficially to Christian accounting professionals while also informing those unfamiliar with Christianity who wish to consider how Christian concepts can contribute to accounting ethics. Although the contributions of faith-based perspectives to accounting ethics have not received significant attention¹, exploring the contributions of Christianity importantly is warranted since Christianity, and more generally religion, is recognized to be “one of the strongest influences in individual’s behaviour” (Espinosa-Pike and Barrainkua-Aroztegi 2014, 1127).

A Christian perspective on accounting ethics recognizes that God’s image and work transform the Christian’s image and work. God’s Word revealed in the Bible² informs the Christian what God does for the Christian through His character and work. While we consider other important aspects of God’s character like His righteousness and His sovereignty, it is God’s love in Jesus Christ that is centrally important to a Christian ethic. The outpouring of God’s undeserved love in Jesus³ and His free gift of salvation distinguishes Christian identity and forms the basis for a uniquely Christian ethic. Christians call this outpouring of God’s unmerited love “grace.”⁴

The Christian ethic acknowledges two realities: (1) an accurate diagnosis identifying the severity and depth of the problem that everyone is born with a flawed sinful human nature (Psalm 51:5),⁵ as an enemy of God (Romans 5:10),⁶ and enslaved to and dead in sin⁷ (Ephesians 2:1; John 8:34),⁸ and (2) an adequate prescriptive solution that recognizes the necessity of God’s love in the character and work of Jesus Christ to bring transformative rescue that restores God-glorifying motives, desires, and intuitions in the Christian’s heart and mind. Since this Christian perspective to ethics begins with God’s restorative unconditional love through Jesus, it is, in this sense, a radically backwards approach: Instead of our good performance leading to God’s love for us, God’s unconditional love for us leads to our good performance. We perform acts of love for God and others because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).⁹ This Christian approach sees transformation as a relational process that begins with the conversion of the human spirit by God’s love and ends in performance of accounting activity and social change for God’s glory (Niebuhr 1951; Siker 1989).

With a focus that begins with the need for God’s love to restore the motives of the heart, a Christian perspective can serve as a bridge to bring Haidt’s (2001) recognition of the ethical significance of desires, intuitions and motives into accounting ethics. Haidt (2013) finds that morality is shaped more by emotions, intuitions, desires, and motives than reason and that we use reason to justify post hoc our motives and desired actions. This focus on desires and motives challenges earlier moral reasoning philosophies, which argue we use reason to determine the best course of action. In this chapter, we develop the implications and contributions of a Christian ethics perspective to enhance extant accounting ethics research. First, in the second section of this chapter, we review common attributes in familiar codes of accounting ethics and connect them to familiar approaches to accounting ethics (Kohlberg 1969; Mintz 1995, 1996a, 1996b). This sets the stage for placing a Christian ethics perspective in accounting ethics and identifying its useful contributions, which we do in our third section. In the fourth section, we discuss implications of this Christian perspective for the accounting profession (May 2001) and practice in the presence of opportunities and incentives to rationalize fraud (Cressey 1953). The fifth section concludes the chapter.

We begin by reviewing common attributes in accounting codes of conduct and connecting them to familiar perspectives in accounting ethics in preparation for identifying unique opportunities for Christianity’s contribution to ethics in the next section.

Accounting practitioners are familiar with professional accounting codes of conduct.¹⁰ A profession’s members agree to be bound to higher standards and adopt a code’s set of principles and rules to educate members and the public about their roles and responsibilities. Although unique in specifics, many codes of conduct share the common attributes of: (1) professional competence, (2) professional character and (3) professional public service. A succinct example of a professional code that embodies these attributes is that of the United States Air Force Academy: “Integrity first. Service before self. Excellence in all we do” – character, public service, and competence.

These familiar code-of-conduct attributes are informed and supported by the logic of ethical perspectives commonly used in traditional approaches to accounting ethics, including consequentialist, non-consequentialist, and virtue ethics theories (Cheffers and Pakaluk 2011; Crane and Matten 2007). Consequentialism considers consequences of conduct where moral reasoning results in “good” consequences. Non-consequentialism considers the “goodness” of the action itself independent of consequences. Virtue ethics focuses on the role of “good” character traits in self-regulating action.

Each of these perspectives views unethical accounting differently. For example, a general ethical challenge accountants face involves how to balance the reporting of financial information and management of economic resources with the welfare and safety of public stakeholders like investors, employees, customers, and other constituents. Consequentialism views reporting activities as wrong when they lead to ineffective and inefficient risks and outcomes. Non-consequentialism’s legalistic perspective views reporting activities as wrong when they violate just accounting standards, rules, and laws. From a virtue ethics perspective, reporting activities are wrong when they fail to comply with developed professional virtues. The next section explores how a Christian view adds the spiritual perspective that reporting activities are wrong when they fail to love, honor, and glorify God by using His resources to extend His love to others by following His righteous standards and sovereign laws.

In preparation for presenting this Christian perspective in the next section, this section reviews and compares how these traditional approaches to accounting ethics inform familiar attributes of codes of conduct in accounting practice.

Accounting ethics education’s traditional focus on moral reasoning competence (Mintz 1995; 1996a, 1996b) supports the professional competence attribute found in codes of conduct and has its roots in Kohlberg’s (1969) moral development theory, which measures moral reasoning development at pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional levels (Kohlberg and Hersh 2001). Both consequentialism and non-consequentialism inform approaches to moral reasoning competence. Two common forms of consequentialism are utilitarianism and egoism (Crane and Matten 2007). Under utilitarianism, actions are morally good if they result in the “greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people affected” (Crane and Matten 2007, 100). Egoism as reflected in the work of Adam Smith (1976) considers self-interested pursuits morally acceptable if they produce morally desirable societal consequences through the marketplace’s invisible hand (Samsonova-Taddei and Siddiqui 2016). Egoism narrows considered consequences from utilitarianism’s societal outcomes to only individual self-satisfying outcomes consistent with Kohlberg’s (1969) pre-conventional levels of moral reasoning. Consequentialist moral reasoning underlies the motives for opportunistic reporting choices that maximize economic consequences (Zeff 1978) in agency theory (Eisenhardt 1989; Jensen and Meckling 1976) and positive accounting theory (Watts and Zimmerman 1986). These ideas are summarized in the first column of Table 9.1.

Non-consequentialist moral reasoning competence entails applying general imperatives or rules regardless of consequence (Campbell 2005). Kant’s categorical imperative is a form of non-consequentialism that states, in its simplest form, that a decision is moral only if the decision and the reasons for it (i.e., its “maxim”) can be willed a universal law (Godar 2005). Kant’s categorical imperative demonstrates that a code’s formal rules and standards play the determinative role in guiding non-consequentialist moral reasoning consistent with Kohlberg’s (1969) conventional levels of moral reasoning (Larry and Moore 2008). The second column in Table 9.1 summarizes these non-consequentialist ideas.

Reflecting an Aristotelian ethical perspective, virtue ethics (Mintz 1995, 1996a, 1996b) guides and informs the professional character attribute found in codes of conduct by focusing on the actor’s character traits instead of the action’s underlying moral reasoning (Solomon 1992; Crane and Matten 2007; Cheffers and Pakaluk 2011). These virtues, or character traits, are defined as normative qualities that reflect an individual’s ability to act ethically (Libby and Thorne 2004; MacIntyre 2013). Virtue ethics draws attention to the actor one should be instead of the actions one should do. The third, right-hand column in Table 9.1 summarizes these ideas from the virtue ethics perspective.

The virtue ethics perspective to accounting ethics has gained momentum (e.g., Cheffers and Pakaluk 2011; Mintz 1995, 2006, 2010) and usually starts by focusing on classical ethical theory’s four cardinal virtues (i.e., justice, wisdom, courage, and self-control). Thorne (1998) integrated virtue ethics theory and the cardinal virtues with Rest’s (1983, 1994) four component model of ethical action. Rest (1983, 1994) extended moral development beyond moral reasoning by describing moral action as a multifaceted phenomenon (Guthrie 1997) of (1) moral motivation, (2) moral awareness, (3) moral judgment, and (4) moral character. Table 9.2 incorporates this prior research to connect Rest’s (1983, 1994) four components of ethical action (the first column in Table 9.2) with virtue ethics’ four cardinal virtues (the second column in Table 9.2) and the common attributes of codes of conduct in accounting practice (the third column in Table 9.2).

Table 9.2 explicitly recognizes the importance of developing virtues to support the: (1) moral will to handle incentives (the first row in Table 9.2) and (2) moral skill to appropriately respond to opportunities (the third row in Table 9.2) (Schwartz and Sharpe 2010). Moral will and moral skill guide and protect moral judgment (the second row in Table 9.2). This section has reviewed common and familiar perspectives on ethics and their contributions to moral reasoning competence (Kohlberg 1969) and moral character (Rest 1983; 1994) in accounting ethics and how they contribute support to code-of-conduct attributes in practice. This sets the stage for exploring a Christian perspective and how it can uniquely contribute to this accounting ethics landscape.

Comparing the code of conduct attributes (i.e., professional competence, professional character, and professional public service) with the traditional ethics perspectives (i.e., the moral reasoning perspective and the virtue ethics perspective) and Rest’s (1983, 1994) moral action elements (i.e., moral awareness, moral judgment, moral character, and moral motivation) reveals opportunities for a Christian perspective’s unique contribution to accounting ethics. While the moral reasoning perspective draws attention to a code of conduct’s professional competence attribute and the virtue ethics perspective focuses on a code of conduct’s professional character attribute, neither brings central attention to the moral motivation of the professional public service attribute. While Kohlberg’s (1969) moral reasoning competence approach focuses attention on Rest’s (1983, 1994) moral awareness and moral judgment factors and a virtue ethics approach centers attention on Rest’s (1983, 1994) moral character factor, neither approach gives central attention to moral motivation.

A Christian perspective can contribute to these accounting ethics perspectives, then, by drawing attention to the foundational importance of Rest’s (1983, 1994) moral motivation factor. Haidt (2001, 2013) finds that emotions, intuitions, desires, and motives shape morality more than reason, drawing attention to the significance of desires and motives, and a Christian approach can serve as a bridge to bring attention to these ideas in accounting ethics. Beneath the needs for moral virtue to change behavioral action and moral reasoning to improve judgment and decision making, a Christian perspective first recognizes the foundational need for Jesus and His love to transform the motives and desires of the human heart. The Bible recognizes the spiritual importance of the heart. When the Bible uses the term “heart,” it refers to a person’s causal core. The heart is the center of our loves and what we serve, commit to, worship, hope in, and trust. A Christian approach identifies first and foremost the importance of a love-based spiritual solution to transform the underlying spiritual condition, desires, and moral motives of the heart.

Presenting and articulating this Christian perspective begins by identifying what it means to be Christian. In the simplest sense, Christianity is “the religion based on the person and teaching of Jesus” (emphasis added).¹¹ Answers to two foundational questions about Jesus, also called the Christ (or Messiah), identify Christianity: (1) Christ’s person or image: Who is Jesus? and (2) Christ’s work and teaching: What did Jesus do and teach? Christians recognize that the person of Jesus is the Son of God and is fully God, Creator of all things.¹² They believe that God’s Word in the Bible¹³ shares what God has performed for us by His love, in that God’s Word became human¹⁴ in the person of Jesus to fulfill His work as our Savior and Redeemer through His perfect life, innocent death, and resurrection, to reconcile us to God and restore humans’ relationship with God.

Jesus taught that through faith in Him and His redemptive work, Christians have the forgiveness of sins and eternal life in heaven.¹⁵ Jesus’ performance restored and secured God’s acceptance, making believers members in God’s family. But Christ’s image and work does more than transform our future, eternal identity and existence. This section explores how Christ’s image and work transform the ethics of our present image and work, redeeming the present moments of our daily living here and now. We begin by identifying God’s intended plan and diagnosing the problem. We then consider God’s provided prescription and the process through which God’s image and work transform the ethics of our present image and work.

Christians believe that God, our Sovereign¹⁶ Creator, spoke everything in creation into existence.¹⁷ All things were created through Him and for Him and His glory.¹⁸ Importantly, God distinguished humans by creating them in His image: “God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule … over all the creatures.’ … So, God created mankind in His own image” (Genesis 1:26–27). The image of God was God’s created ideal for humans, with notable implications. First, each human structurally is a unique creation having unique dignity imbued from God, our Creator. Second, humans functionally are God’s representative managers (i.e., the image of God on earth), given the managing responsibility of “ruling over” God’s creation for God’s glory. In this sense, relationally, the image of God established an important principal-agent relationship between God and man, and this spiritual relationship with our Creator guides our physical and societal relationships with creation.

As a result, accounting and accountability were an important part of God’s created functional and relational ideal. We give an account to a righteous God of our right stewardship and management of His creation, including the time, talents, and treasures with which He blesses us. As stewards and managers, have we managed His creation rightly for Him and His glory?¹⁹ From creation, God instilled work with this sacred spiritual purpose of stewardship, service, worship, and accountability. Our English vocabulary uses the term vocation, or calling by God, to recognize work’s spiritual underpinnings.²⁰ This is God’s created ideal and intended well-lived life for human well-being and flourishing²¹ from a Christian perspective.

However, instead of obeying and serving God, Adam and Eve, the first humans, desired to be like God (Genesis 3:4–6)²² and mismanaged the fruits of creation by disobeying God’s righteous words and commands. Consistent with Haidt’s (2013) finding that morality is shaped more by motives and desires, the sinful motives of their hearts foundationally and problematically led them astray – desiring to use God’s creation to serve, promote, and glorify themselves instead of serving and glorifying God – which then led to sinful reasoning and sinful actions. In this way, sin and death entered the world and came to all people (Romans 5:12; Romans 3:23).²³ As a result, humans became enemies of God (Romans 5:10),²⁴ born with a sinful human nature (Psalm 51:5),²⁵ and enslaved to and dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1, John 8:34).²⁶ Solzhenitsyn (1974) recognized the depth of human nature’s brokenness: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

According to Solzhenitsyn (1974), our empirical human experience confirms the reality the Bible confronts us with: The change most needed within us is not in our reasoning or intellect or even in our actions, but in our hearts. Our “desires for change are not wrong; they are just not deep enough” (Lane and Tripp 2005, 16). The Bible recognizes the spiritual importance of the heart as a person’s causal core. For example, the following passages underscore the importance of the heart:

• Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it (Proverbs 4:23).
• As a person thinks in his heart, so is he (Proverbs 23:7).
• People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).
• All a man’s ways are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the motives of the heart (Proverbs 16:2).

In diagnosing the problem of sinful human nature, the Bible also communicates the depth of the heart’s spiritual brokenness:

• The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? ( Jeremiah 17:9).
• For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly (Mark 7:21–22).
• What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within your hearts? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives [in your hearts], that you may spend what you get on your pleasures ( James 4:1–3).

Given the recognized importance of motives and desires and broken spiritual condition of the heart, a Christian approach to ethics relies first on God’s love in Jesus to transform foundationally the human heart (e.g., Ezekiel 11:19; Ezekiel 36:26),²⁷ consistent with Haidt’s (2001, 2013) work drawing attention to the importance of the desires and motives of the heart in shaping morality. The right-hand column of Table 9.3 appends Table 9.1 by adding this Christian perspective.

Jesus viewed “the primary source of evil in the world as the evil in the individual’s heart” (Cahill 1987, 153) and taught that the reign of the kingdom of God brings about a transformed heart capable of doing good in human community (Hengel 1973). The kingdom of God refers to God’s spiritual rule and reign in a Christian’s heart and life as a gift of God’s grace in Jesus (Hagner 1997). Jesus details how the kingdom of God facilitates a process of Christian ethical change in the Sermon on the Mount (i.e., Matthew 5–7) – the most concentrated portion of Jesus’ recorded ethical teaching (Sturz 1963, 3). It portrays a new relationship with God made possible by Jesus (Cahill 1987, 148).

Recognizing the foundational need to first restore our status, our identity, and the motives of our hearts, Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12), or blessings Christians receive in Jesus. God, in His love, sent Jesus to rescue us from sin and restore community and relationship with Him.²⁸ Jesus communicates that the Christian transformation process begins when Christians receive the blessings of pure hearts (Matthew 5:8; Psalm 51:10)²⁹ and new identities as children of God (Matthew 5:9)³⁰ as a result of His gracious work and sacrifice. The Beatitudes are not telling us to do anything but rather what Jesus and His coming have done for us.³¹ They describe our human state and situation in general and how the coming of Christ and his kingdom in our hearts blessedly changes our relationship, status, and identity with God. Given the importance of the Beatitudes – or blessings in Jesus – to a Christian approach to ethical change, the Appendix provides the interested reader with an expanded analysis of them. The blessings of Christ’s love transform our inner spiritual natures and redeem our identities from powerless sinners (Romans 5:6, 8)³² and enemies of God (Romans 5:10)³³ to adopted and accepted children of God (Ephesians 1:5; Galatians 4:4–5, 7).³⁴

Blessed with a new relationship and identity in Christ, Jesus next tells Christians in the Sermon on the Mount that they have a new outward-focused calling and purpose to live for God and His glory (2 Corinthians 5:15)³⁵ by serving others ( John 13:34–35; Philippians 2:3–5)³⁶ as salt and light in the world (Matthew 5:13, 14, 16).³⁷ Later, Jesus encourages us to embrace the purpose of serving God and not money or creation (Matthew 7:19–21, 24).³⁸ Ramsey (2008, 179) concludes that identifying a clear purpose and maintaining “purity in heart” are important business ethics lessons from the Sermon on the Mount. These connections between God’s love and a Christian’s restored relationships, redeemed identity, and transformed motives and purpose are presented in the first row of Table 9.4. Table 9.4 appends Table 9.2 by connecting concepts from traditional accounting ethics perspectives in the two left-hand columns to corresponding concepts from the Christian perspective in the two right-hand columns, which summarize how aspects of God’s character transform our Christian character and work.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is presenting a radically backwards approach to change. Instead of our good performance leading to God’s love for us, God’s unconditional love for us inspires our good performance. A Christian heart genuinely transformed by God’s love responds to God and His character in new ways.³⁹ We now explore how the heart transformed by God’s love leads the Christian to respond to God’s righteousness and sovereignty in changed ways (the second and third rows in Table 9.4).

Jesus continues the Sermon on the Mount with examples illustrating God’s righteousness and extending God’s righteousness beyond right behaviors or right thoughts to right motives and “attitudes of the heart” foundationally (Hagner 1997, 50). Beneath right actions and right thoughts, Jesus communicates the importance of right motives and desires consistent with Haidt (2001, 2013). Murderous actions are a symptom of the sinful murderous motives from an angry heart (Matthew 5:21–22).⁴⁰ Adulterous activity is a symptom of sinful desires from a lustful heart (Matthew 5:27–28)⁴¹ Jesus is leading Christians to recognize that the motive and principle of “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10)⁴² and instructs Christians to use God’s laws to guide expressions of responsive love for God to others in practice (e.g., Matthew 7:12).⁴³

Jesus continues with several examples to underscore the important point that righteous thoughts and actions require righteous motives of genuine love for God and others. His examples illustrate that righteous actions performed with unrighteous motives of self-love and self-promotion become forms of false righteousness (Matthew 6:1).⁴⁴ Righteous practices like giving to the needy (Matthew 6:2),⁴⁵ praying (Matthew 6:5),⁴⁶ fasting (Matthew 6:16),⁴⁷ and providing counsel and judgment (Matthew 7:1–2)⁴⁸ become unrighteous if performed with motives of self-love and self-promotion.

Jesus continues by teaching that a Christian’s responsibility to fulfill the motive and principle of love may extend beyond fair laws. While certain behaviors may be permissible and fair under the law, like retaliatory fairness (i.e., “eye for eye, and tooth for tooth”) and hating your enemies who hate you, Jesus teaches that right love for others in these situations extends beyond the law – repaying bad with good (Matthew 5:38–39)⁴⁹ and loving your enemies (Matthew 5:43–44).⁵⁰ Instead of playing fair and trading good for good and bad for bad, Jesus encourages playing right, since the retaliatory standard of playing fair destroys relationships (Cloud 2006). Following the principle of love for God and love for others creates moral responsibilities that extend beyond compliance with laws of fairness, and Jesus is encouraging love-motivated, principles-based, post-conventional Kohlbergian (1969) moral reasoning when applying laws to practice in these situations.

Jesus’ instructions in applying regulatory laws have implications for Christian accounting practice. In general, Christian motives of love for God and others complement accounting principles and standards in practice. Like Jesus’ examples given earlier, the motive to glorify God by loving others should guide accounting judgments and inform application of accounting principles and standards in practice to fulfill the public service attribute in codes of conduct for the Christian accountant. Similarly, accounting principles and standards can serve as helpful aids for Christian accountants’ practical expressions of love for God and others in the accounting domain. However, Christian accountants’ moral motive to glorify God by loving others implies a moral responsibility to report accurate and useful information that extends beyond technical compliance with accounting standards (even if man-made accounting rules permit technical accounting treatments, judgments, or estimates that obscure users’ reported information). We provide examples in our discussion of a Christian perspective on accounting ethics in the next section.

The principle and motive of love for God and others inform a Christian’s moral responsibilities and guide a Christian’s moral reasoning and application of the law. These connections between God’s righteousness and a Christian’s restored responsibilities and reasoning are presented in the second row of Table 9.4.

The Christian with a heart transformed by God’s love reacts to and trusts the sovereignty of a loving God and becomes more trustworthy and credible in character to God and others. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs Christians to “not worry about your life … for … your heavenly Father knows [what] you need” (Matthew 6:25, 32). Instead, Jesus encourages Christians to “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33) in practice. The Christian can confidently and credibly want to follow God’s guides and commands in practice knowing that God’s love sovereignly controls situations, circumstances, and outcomes. Christians “know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). God, in His love for us, uses His sovereign control for our good. Trusting the sovereignty of God’s love in any situation and circumstance, the Christian can react in credible and trustworthy ways. In this way, “the grace of God … teaches us … to … live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age” (Titus 2:11–12), generating the Christian’s character of credibility and trustworthiness in situations and circumstances regardless of outcome. These connections between God’s sovereignty and Christian character are presented in the third row of Table 9.4.

The Christian approach recognizes that moral motives underly moral reasoning and moral practice and that God’s love transforms how the Christian responds to God’s characteristics, moving the Christian from moral motives to credible motions.⁵¹ This Christian process shares similarities with Stoic philosophy. Pigliucci (2017) divides Stoicism into the three disciplines of desire, assent, and action. The discipline of desire deals with feelings and knowing what is proper to want or desire. The discipline of assent manages thought by applying reason to evaluate judgments. The discipline of action is about behavior balancing virtuous action for activities within our control with acceptance of outcomes beyond our control.⁵² God’s characteristics of love, righteousness, and sovereignty in Table 9.4 correspond to these Stoic disciplines of desire, assent, and action, respectively. Christianity provides a spiritual foundation for the philosophical Stoic disciplines. While Christianity and Stoicism share similarities, there are differences (Evans 2013). One primary difference of note is that love is the supreme ethic in Christianity focusing on the desires and motives of the heart (Haidt 2001, 2013), while rationality or reason is the supreme Stoic ethic.

According to May (2001, 7), a professional is someone who professes something (an intellectual characteristic) on behalf of someone (a moral characteristic) in the setting of colleagues (an organizational characteristic). All three professional characteristics are part of the accounting profession’s identity and responsibilities. Table 9.5 incorporates these professional characteristics into Table 9.4’s presentation of a Christian perspective to ethics.

So, how can the Christian accountant protect these professional characteristics in the midst of the opportunities and incentives of professional challenges? The contributions of the Christian perspective to limiting the fraud triangle’s elements of trust violations (Cressey 1953) are presented in the right-hand column of Table 9.5. The Christian recognizes that God uses opportunities and incentives in situations and circumstances to test and train the heart (Proverbs 17:3; 1 Corinthians 4:5).⁵³ Managing blessings and burdens, treasures and trials reveals the spiritual condition of the heart and provides opportunities for training, development, and growth ( James 1:2–4).⁵⁴ For the Christian, the process of growth embraces God’s love in the middle of challenges. A heart attached to the love of Christ is better able to resist the attachments of economic and social incentives. A Christian secure in the sovereign provision, protection, and control of a loving God is able to exercise credibly self-control when presented with opportunities. A mind yielding to a loving God’s righteousness is guided to avoid rationalization. As a result, the Christian is prepared to respond appropriately to situations and circumstances.

Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax accountant, provides an example of how Jesus’ acceptance limits fraud and leads to performance of professional activities motivated by Jesus’ love (Luke 19:1–10). Although society considered Zacchaeus a sinner (Luke 19:7),⁵⁵ Jesus accepted Zacchaeus and wanted to enter his house and heart (Luke 19:5).⁵⁶ Jesus’ love and acceptance transformed Zacchaeus’ performance. With a new heart motivated by the love of Jesus, instead of incentives to accumulate wealth and cheat others, Zacchaeus wanted to follow Jesus and His righteous commands, avoiding rationalization and instead using the opportunity of his sovereignly God-given professional position and wealth to help the poor and compensate any person he had cheated (Luke 19:8).⁵⁷ The first row of Table 9.6 summarizes how Jesus’ love and the Christian approach transformed and protected Zacchaeus’s accounting activity from incentives, rationalizations, and opportunities for fraud.

In a similar way, Christian accounting professionals motivated by God’s love to resist incentives for ill-gotten gains and led by God’s righteous guides to avoid rationalization can use the opportunities of professional accounting positions sovereignly provided by a loving God to manage reported information resources to help others for His glory. For example, the Christian tax accountant motivated by God’s love to glorify Him by loving others resists incentives to minimize tax liabilities and avoids rationalizing aggressive tax strategies like tax shelters. Instead, the Christian tax accountant uses the opportunity of his/her position to glorify God by managing tax strategies and information that serve others by fulfilling responsibilities to the tax system and clients. The Christian financial accountant motivated by God’s love to love others resists incentives for gain by rationalizing obscuring and manipulating reported results through accounting treatments (e.g., off-balance sheet financing) or earnings management practices (e.g., adjusting accounting estimates and methods, channel stuffing). Instead, the Christian financial accountant uses the opportunity of his/her position to provide useful reported information that meets responsibilities to serve the investing public, financial statement users, the company, and others. The Christian auditor motivated intrinsically by the incentive of God’s love to love others uses the opportunity of his/her position to glorify God by providing auditing and assurance services that serve others with rational judgments that fulfill responsibilities to the investing public, clients and others. The motive and incentive of God’s love to love others guides the Christian managerial accountant to use the opportunity of his/her position to glorify God by using rational judgment to produce relevant, reliable, and useful accounting information serving and fulfilling responsibilities to managers, the company, and others.

The contributions of a Christian perspective to accounting ethics considered in this chapter are useful to Christians and non-Christians alike. Christian accounting professionals are better informed as to how to integrate their God-given professional work into their Christian faith. Moreover, this chapter informs those who come from different perspectives how to better understand a Christian perspective and its contributions to accounting ethics, bolstering communication and dialogue between various groups. Including faith-based perspectives offers new avenues to enhance accounting ethics and curb fraud.

Given flawed human character and sinful human nature, the Christian perspective recognizes the need for God’s unconditional love to transform the heart’s right motives and desires. This solution is consistent with Haidt (2001, 2013), who draws attention to the importance of desires and intuitions in ethics. The heart transformed by God’s love is enabled to respond to God’s righteous commands in new ways and is able to manage credibly and accountably professional situations and circumstances a loving God sovereignly provides as Christian professionals seek to serve the public interest with character and competence for the glory of God.

Appendix

ANALYSIS OF THE BEATITUDES

In the Beatitudes, Jesus describes our human state and situation in general and the Gospel (i.e., the “good news”)⁵⁸ of the blessings of new relationship, status, and identity with God as a result of His coming and work. Consistent with Hagner (1997), we consider the whole Gospel of the New Testament when studying the Beatitudes. Christians who are poor in spirit are now blessed with a new, converted relationship with God and have a share in the kingdom of heaven because Jesus has come (Matthew 5:3)⁵⁹ (Cahill 1987). Christians who mourn in life with sorrow and shame receive the blessing and comfort of new status and identity because Jesus has come (Matthew 5:4).⁶⁰ Meek Christians with few worldly resources and wealth receive a spiritual inheritance and status as children of God because they have Jesus (Matthew 5:5).⁶¹ Christians who hunger and thirst for God’s righteous standards now are filled with the blessing of God’s righteousness because of Jesus (Matthew 5:6)⁶² Merciful Christians in need of mercy and forgiveness now receive the blessing of God’s mercy in Jesus (Matthew 5:7)⁶³ Christians are blessed with pure hearts (Matthew 5:8),⁶⁴ peace, and new identities as children of God (Matthew 5:9)⁶⁵ because of Jesus.

In the same way, Jesus closes the Sermon on the Mount by reminding Christians of the foundational blessings of new identity and life that are found only in Him. He is the gate and way to life (Matthew 7:13–14; John 14:6),⁶⁶ the tree of life (Matthew 7:16–20, John 15:5),⁶⁷ and the rock of life (Matthew 7:24, Acts 4:11).⁶⁸ A Christian with a new identity and transformed heart rooted in Christ is able to respond and bear fruit in practice. A Christian with an identity and heart founded on the rock and cornerstone of Christ’s grace responds by putting God’s Word into practice. Christianity’s Gospel-centered, grace-based approach recognizes that God’s grace and acceptance in Christ transforms a Christian’s identity and heart, which leads to new reasoning and practice. Instead of our performance leading to Christ’s blessings, Christ’s blessings in the Beatitudes lead to our performance.