The Philosophical “Big Ideas” in the New Testament

What did Jesus look like? People have been using art to answer that question for two thousand years. All of us have some mental image of Jesus’s appearance, probably shaped by a picture we saw as a child or a painting that is familiar in our culture, like Warner Sallman’s Christ at Heart’s Door (see fig. 5 for one nineteenth-century example). In modern America this image presents to us a relatively attractive Jesus with nicely defined facial features; long, well-combed brown hair with a bit of a sheen; and full-length robes. In your mind’s eye he probably has a benign expression that is serene and kind, though probably not laughing. But what did Jesus actually look like?

We can’t know for sure, but we can be reasonably certain he looked not so much like a modern painting but like an olive-skinned, underfed first-century Mediterranean Jew—because this is what he was. Recently, scientists have used DNA and bone samples to digitally re-create something close to what an average man of Jesus’s time and place would have looked like.1 The results are not quite what our modern images have been—he wouldn’t be on the cover of GQ or even the front of the VBS curriculum.

Figure 5. Traditional depiction of Jesus from the late nineteenth century (artist unknown) [Renáta Sedmáková / Shutterstock.com]

So even though we can’t know for sure what Jesus looked like, we can ask another important question: How did people present Jesus’s appearance in the first several centuries of Christianity? Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, he was often portrayed as very somber—a dour, long-faced Jesus either serenely teaching, or performing a miracle, or writhing in pain on a cross. Alternately, Jesus was often depicted as the risen and ruling king, fully robed and with the crown of thorns replaced with a golden diadem and scepter.

But what about in the earliest centuries of the Christian faith? How was Jesus depicted in early Christian art? This matters because how Jesus was painted or mosaicked or sculpted reveals much about how he was understood by his earliest followers and worshipers.

In her book What Did Jesus Look Like?, Joan Taylor explores this question. The short answer is that in the earliest centuries Jesus was depicted in one of two ways—as a philosopher or as a king. In the first instance, it is easy to see that Jesus was depicted as a philosopher because of how frequently philosophers were portrayed in paintings, mosaics, and sculpture. Remember Dura-Europos. In the Roman Empire in the first couple of centuries AD, philosophers were presented in fairly standard ways, typically wearing a wrapped garment that covered the left shoulder with the right shoulder bare. Philosophers were posed as looking ahead, not triumphantly but with confidence, or as holding a scroll and thoughtfully looking at it. Sometimes philosophers would be seated, since teachers taught from this position, but never on a cushioned, jewel-encrusted throne like an emperor. The hairstyles varied by century and fashion, sometimes long and shaggy, sometimes short and clipped, and beards came and went as fashions changed. But it was always clear who the sculpted philosophers were and the role they played as sculptors of society.2 In the context of these widespread iconic images of philosophers, we find standardized images of Jesus, short-haired and bearded, with the clothing and stance and look of the philosophers. Over time, Christ as a shaggy-haired philosopher/teacher becomes the trajectory.3 But always it is clear by the artistic representations that Christians understood Jesus as a philosopher.

As Christianity spread to the cities of the Roman Empire and moved out of the hidden art in the catacombs into statues, paintings, and sarcophagi in churches, Jesus is also depicted as a king and the emperor of the world. In paintings and mosaics, Jesus is in his risen state, seated and reigning over the world, scepter and crown in place, attended by angels and the saints.

While these two images of king and philosopher are distinct, they are not contradictory. For a large part of the philosophical tradition, stemming from Plato’s Republic, the philosopher was the king, and a king must be a philosopher, a wise man. This has a strong tradition in the Old Testament too, with the first son of David, King Solomon, renowned as a wise-man king. The distinct images of Jesus as itinerant disciple-making teacher and as reigning emperor are not odd companions. They are juxtaposed to explain the one Jesus, philosopher and king.

One example of this important combination of images can be seen on a beautiful painted sarcophagus from around AD 300 called the Junius Bassus. We see Jesus going about his healing activities clad in a mantle and holding a scroll as an invitation to viewers to read what he taught—clearly a philosopher. On the same sarcophagus Jesus is also depicted as a god-king seated on his throne, ruling and reigning. These images are to be taken blended together to understand who Jesus is. As Taylor describes it, “Christ gloriously enthroned as a divinity is the philosopher-healer Christ.”4 Or as Tolkien said it earlier, “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so the rightful king could ever be known.”5

We began this book with the third-century house church at Dura-Europos and its depictions of Jesus as a philosopher. We also met Justin “Philosopher” Martyr. Justin wasn’t alone in thinking of Jesus as a philosopher. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, regularly spoke of Jesus in the same way, saying that Jesus offered to the world the true politeia or way of structuring society and relationships, the philosopher par excellence. Augustine begins his discussion of Christian ethics by addressing head-on the great philosophical question of happiness, and he goes on to argue that Jesus provides the true answer.

But what about the New Testament itself? Is this widespread early interpretation of Jesus as a philosopher a deviation from the New Testament, or is it in fact rooted in the Bible? We’ve already seen that the Old Testament can be rightly read as a piece of ancient philosophy, trafficking in the same ideas and answering the same questions—the great human questions of knowing, happiness, ethics, and nature. The New Testament is the same. We only need to learn to ask of the New Testament writings another set of questions that we’ve unlearned to ask—the ancient philosophical ones.

Even though he is one of the most famous people in the history of the world and the implications of his teachings are still being explored and written about and taught, he never wrote down anything himself. Of course, I’m talking about Socrates. I’m also talking about Jesus. To understand what the Gospels are, it is helpful to think about the kind of Greek literary and cultural context the Gospels were a part of.

Even though Socrates never wrote anything, he is well known and influential because the stories of how he lived, what he taught, and how he died were written down by his disciples. Plato, who became a famous philosopher himself, was a disciple of Socrates and the main source of what we know about him. Plato reflected on the life and teachings of Socrates as he made his own disciples, setting up the famous Academy in Athens.

Plato was not alone in this habit of writing down the sayings and deeds of his teacher. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds one of the most important and influential types of writing was the bios, the retelling of the “life” of someone famous. These bioi (pronounced “by-oi”) were written about all manner of people—generals, emperors, heroes—but especially important were the biographies about the philosophers, because people needed help to figure out how to live well.

This habit of bios writing was firmly established by the time of Jesus and had proven to be a very efficient and effective way to present a philosopher’s teaching, manner of life, and, especially important, the way in which the person died with dignity. This is the first clue that the Gospels are presenting Jesus as a philosopher: simply, the form and content of the Gospels very closely resemble the many Lives that were written about other ancient philosophers. And this is not something that only modern scholars have observed looking backward. This connection between the Gospels and the biographies of philosophers was universally assumed in the early church. Good old Justin the Philosopher/Martyr described what church services looked like around AD 150. Central to these early Christian gatherings, Justin tells us, was the reading aloud from the “memoirs” about Jesus, referring to the Gospels in the same way that the lives of the philosophers were described.

Why did people write a biography of a philosopher or a Gospel biography of Jesus? The reason was very clear—a biography was the most powerful and effective way to accomplish several things:

• to record the teachings and sayings of a wise man;
• to show stories that reveal the great person’s character; and, bringing these together,
• to encourage people to become disciples of the philosopher by learning how to see the world in a certain way and how to behave in the world in certain ways.

The wise man whose life was recorded in the biography was both a conduit of truth and an example to be followed. A philosopher was only worth his salt if he actually practiced and modeled what he taught. As Seneca said, a teacher who is not an experienced model “cannot benefit me any more than a seasick pilot in a hurricane. . . . What help can a ship’s sternman give me who is stupefied and throwing up?”6

A biography is the perfect means by which to accomplish the task of disciple making. A bios alone can simultaneously give content and the motivation of showing the teacher as an example. Abstract teachings divorced from a real, lived life would be as motivating and trustworthy as an obese exercise instructor or a bankrupt financial planner.

The writing of biographical Gospels is our first hint that the New Testament authors were intentionally depicting Jesus as a philosopher. When we open the pages of the Gospels, we also see that the style with which Jesus taught shows striking parallel to the philosophers of his day. This can be seen in Jesus’s teaching with aphorisms and parables.

An “aphorism” is a short, pithy saying that gives a memorable hook for how to see the world in a certain way. Often an aphorism is unexpected—that is, it has a twist in it that arrests and shocks the hearer into a great awareness of how to live life. Aphorisms are the regular tools of ancient wisdom teachers (philosophers) because of their long-lasting and life-changing effect.

Amor fati (the love of fate) is an easily memorized aphorism from the influential philosophy of the Stoics. It describes a way of seeing and being in the world that teaches that to be happy we need to embrace all that we experience, not longing for something else, some other fate. This is at the heart of the Stoic philosophy. If a person becomes a Stoic disciple, one can eventually learn to love what fate gives them. The aphorism amor fati provides a succinct, memorable saying that shapes those who meditate on it and incorporate its truth into their life experiences.

Think of how many heart-challenging and life-shaping aphorisms Jesus used. “The last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt. 20:16). “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them” (Matt. 15:11). “Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:19–20). And that’s just a few. This is the kind of memorable teaching style that was the mark of ancient wisdom teachers.

So too with Jesus’s famous parables. It has been estimated that at least 35 percent of Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels is parabolic in form. We can count over sixty different parables that Jesus used. He was known for this style of teaching, and many of his parables are so famous that even non-Christians are familiar with them and can reference them by name—parables such as the prodigal son, and the lost sheep, and the sheep and the goats.

What many people today may not realize, including Christians, is that Jesus was not alone in his style of teaching with parables. In fact, this was a common technique that ancient philosophers used as a tool of their trade. Parables are powerful because they are imaginative and memorable and teach disciples to see the world in an unexpected way and invite an appropriate response in attitude and behavior—exactly what sages were all about. Aesop’s fables are good examples of ancient wisdom parables outside of the Bible.

Jesus plays the role of a prophetic philosopher, a sage-prophet who is inviting people to see the world from the perspective of divine revelation that goes beyond human-centered knowledge. This prophetic emphasis does not make Jesus any less of a philosopher, but it does add an urgent edge to his teaching. Jesus regularly inserts the weighty tagline “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” That is, “If you can understand my wisdom, then pay attention!” Jesus’s teaching in aphorisms and parables would have immediately identified him as a philosopher during his own lifetime.

Another way Jesus functions as a philosopher is the many stories in which he is shown to be a winsome and powerful reasoner, especially in debates with other intellectual leaders.7 For example, in Matthew 12:1–14 Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees and scribes about an issue that was very important to Jews—the keeping of the Sabbath. Jesus and his disciples appear to break the Sabbath laws. When he is questioned on this, Jesus engages in a nuanced set of reasoned arguments as to why in fact he and his disciples are practicing the Good (in biblical parlance, “righteousness”), while his opponents are not.

Jesus provides quick-witted arguments about how sometimes it was necessary to do actions that on the surface violated Sabbath laws but did not actually constitute lawbreaking. He uses a story from David’s life and the practices of the priests. Jesus also reasons with his opponents by using practical illustrations from real life. For example, What do you do when your donkey falls into a ditch on the Sabbath? You get the animal out! Even though this involves work, it is an act of compassion that means that the Sabbath law has not been broken.

All of this is wisdom. It is the work of a philosopher, a sage. Reasoning through complex ethical issues, complete with memorable examples from life, shows Jesus to be remarkably wise and playing well the role of the philosopher. Many other examples from Jesus’s life could be added. The Greatest Hits album of Jesus as a wise reasoner would include one of his most memorable aphorisms—when asked about paying taxes, Jesus quips, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:21). With such philosophical acumen, Jesus is presented as winning every argument he gets dragged into.

Another way Jesus is presented as a philosopher is through the summary of his teachings into philosophical epitomes. We use the English word “epitome” today to refer to a summary of the essence of something. In the ancient world an “epitome” had a similar sense, but one that was more specific and technical—it referred to a collection of a philosopher’s teachings on a certain topic. A philosophical epitome was a memorizable group of sayings, usually organized around a big idea. It was not a comprehensive summary of the philosopher’s teachings but a shorthand guide with the intention of helping disciples-in-training learn the master’s way of seeing and being in the world.

When we look at the Gospels, we see that the Gospel writers utilize this common method to present Jesus’s teachings. This is most apparent in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew, Jesus is presented as a disciple-making wisdom teacher (a philosopher) whose teachings are collected into five major topical epitomes (Matt 5–7; 10; 13; 18; 23–25). Jesus says and does many things outside of these teaching blocks, but these five collections provide the backbone to the organization of the whole First Gospel. It would have been obvious to any first-century reader of Matthew that Jesus’s teachings are skillfully arranged and presented as philosophical epitomes with the goal of making the Gospel of Matthew a powerful disciple-making book.

Not only is Jesus’s mode of teaching akin to those of all other ancient philosophers, so too were the topics that he addressed in his teaching. What Jesus taught was not identical to other ancient philosophers—Jesus’s own answers to the great philosophical questions of the day managed to offend both Jews and gentiles—but the topics and questions that were common throughout ancient philosophy were the same topics and questions that Jesus addressed.

The first epitome in Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), is a prime example. The sermon begins with nine macarisms (5:3–12)—nine statements concerning what it means to be truly and fully happy, to experience fullness of life and flourishing.8 Whatever a philosopher proclaimed was makarios (“happiness, flourishing”) revealed much about their whole philosophical system. Statements of makarios were very important for disciples to take note of if they were going to adopt their teacher’s mode of life. It is no mere accident, then, that the very first teaching in the very first Gospel shows Jesus to be giving his own authoritative opinion on what constitutes true happiness. This is what philosophers did. The way of life that Jesus describes as being truly flourishing—poverty of spirit, lowliness, giving up one’s rights, being wrongly persecuted—is shocking to any hearer in the ancient world or today. But what does not surprise first-century readers is that Jesus the Philosopher is pontificating on what makes for happiness.

The Sermon on the Mount goes on to present Jesus’s epitome on what it means to be truly good. “The Good” (in biblical terms, “righteousness”) was the focus of ancient ethics, and Jesus addresses it directly with his own authoritative vision. Matthew 5:17–7:12 focuses on true righteousness. That is, what is the Good, and how does one live rightly in accordance with it? According to Jesus, the Good is found by looking at God himself, who is teleios (whole, mature, complete, perfect; 5:48).

Therefore, to be good/righteous requires seeing and being in the world in ways that match how God the Father himself is. This means obeying God’s commands not just externally but from the heart, in the inner person (Matt. 5:21–48). This means performing acts of piety not for the praise of others but to receive a true and lasting reward from God himself (6:1–21). This means living in such a way that money and possessions don’t consume and control you (6:19–34). This means treating others wisely and kindly, with the memorable guide being the Golden Rule—treating others as you would want to be treated (7:1–12).

Jesus himself is the ultimate model of all of this righteousness because he is the fully pleasing, Spirit-indwelt Son of God (Matt. 3:17). Jesus teaches about this greater righteousness so that his disciples have a vision to guide their lives in his ways. There is also a great urgency to Jesus’s call to living in accord with the Good. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, bringing a change in the cosmos through Jesus (4:2). But not everyone will enter into this coming heavenly kingdom—only those who listen to and do the will of the heavenly Father (7:21; 12:50). Unless a person’s alignment with the Good as revealed by Jesus is greater than the kind of righteousness that was being practiced by the scribes and religious leaders, they will not enter into the Father’s coming kingdom. This added note of urgency makes Jesus the Philosopher’s teachings even more powerful and effective in creating both disciples and enemies.

Verse after verse in the sermon, Jesus is not only presented as a great philosopher addressing the Good but also shown to be a law-giving, wise king. Jesus’s message is about the coming kingdom of heaven in which he will be the king, authoritatively giving laws and interpretations of laws so that people might experience flourishing. This dovetails well with Plato’s vision of what it means to be a philosopher-king, a vision that had already gathered into its stream Moses and Solomon. As the scholar Robert Kinney notes, the Sermon on the Mount “is not only successful in presenting Jesus as an authoritative mediator of both law and heavenly reward for those who follow his exhortations to righteousness; it is also successful in presenting Jesus as a Socratic figure—one who gathers disciples, teaches disciples, and so mediates their development for the good.”9

The repeated presentation of Jesus as a sage culminates in the image Jesus uses to conclude the sermon—the contrast between wise and foolish builders (Matt. 7:24–27). The final call of the sermon is for people to listen to what Jesus has said and to do what he has taught—that is, to put into practice a life of discipleship based on his way of seeing and being in the world. Those who do not do what Jesus teaches are compared to a fool, a person who makes a wreck of their life by living in an unexamined and undirected way. By sharp contrast, the one who listens to Jesus and practices what he teaches is described as wise—a phronimos person. This loaded term is the same one the Greek philosophers used to identify those who practiced the ways of the philosophers.

This representation of Jesus as a philosopher has been drawn mostly from the Gospel of Matthew, but this vision is not unique to Matthew. We could also foray into the Fourth Gospel, John’s biography of Jesus. The most distinctive aspect of John’s Gospel is the lengthy and profound dialogues that occur between Jesus and various people. Jesus converses with the Pharisee Nicodemus (John 3:1–15), the Samaritan woman he met at a well (4:1–26), various Jewish leaders (7:14–36), and even the Roman governor Pilate (18:28–40). In each conversation the issues are the big life-philosophical questions: How do we know things? What is the proper way and place to worship? And ultimately (with Pilate playing the role of a Cynic philosopher), “What is truth?” (18:38).

Throughout John’s Gospel, the greatest repeated theme is life—how to experience the fullness and goodness of living well forever (“eternal life”). Jesus declares that the reason he came was so that people might experience fullness of life (John 10:10), the same promise that any good philosopher would offer. In fact, many scholars have noted how John’s emphasis on “life” makes his the Gospel that is most obviously trying to present Jesus as a contemporary (and superior) philosopher in his day.

While the other Gospels also occasionally present Jesus as talking about “life” and “eternal life,” Matthew, Mark, and Luke primarily describe Jesus’s message as about “the kingdom of God.” For the Jewish people, “kingdom of God” and “life” referred to the same thing. To enter into and be a part of God’s kingdom means one will enter into a life that is full and flourishing—shalom. And conversely, to enter into fullness of life is to enter and live under God’s good and perfect rule with his people. Thus, all the Gospels are presenting Jesus as the true teacher of life, the authoritative one who is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). The Gospel of John shows great sensitivity to the Greco-Roman context by describing Jesus’s ministry primarily with the common philosophical language of “life” and only rarely with the more politically loaded verbiage of the “kingdom.”

When we reread the Gospels sensitive to their historical and cultural context—a context that was rich with philosophers and philosophical life questions—Jesus makes sense as a philosopher.

What about the rest of the New Testament? When we read the other parts of the New Testament we find that once again, the other twenty-three books are naturally and consciously interacting with the Greco-Roman philosophical world into which Christianity has arrived. What the Good is and how to live according to it drives the letters and treatises and vision of the rest of the New Testament. As with the Hebrew Scriptures, we can see this by examining the four compass points or main ideas that philosophy trades in—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. (We’ll save the discussion of politics for a later chapter.)

Metaphysics. As a reminder, metaphysics deals with the big questions of being, time, and nature. Metaphysical discussion is important because a philosophy is really not a philosophy at all if it doesn’t have some reflection on the nature of the world we inhabit. This is because the universal idea is that to live well, to experience the Good, requires living in accordance with how things really are. We might describe this as cutting “with the grain” of the wood of the universe. Anyone who has run a jigsaw or circular saw through a two-by-six knows how different cutting with the grain and cutting against it feels. So too with life, according to the ancient philosophers. Only when we live in the direction of how things really are will we find peace and flourishing. So every philosophy has a series of metaphysical ideas, because all subsequent exhortations regarding ethics and politics are rooted in the great reality of the world. The New Testament is no different, and the grain with which we must cut is God himself.

Like every other aspect of the New Testament’s teaching, the metaphysics of the New Testament are rooted in the same fundamental world-understanding as the Hebrew Scriptures—namely, the belief that the eternal, timeless, singular God created humanity, male and female, as fundamentally good, with authority and responsibility over creation. God is in control of the world and is personal. He engages humanity graciously, even though there has been a breaking of this relationship because of sin. This world is bound in time, but God is eternal and will bring this current age to an end. He will reestablish his relationship with all of creation in a new and everlasting age of goodness.

The New Testament’s vision is the same, but it adds key information that affects the interpretation of the whole. Crucially, the agent of God’s creating and sustaining of the world is the Son of God, who became a real human, died, and was raised from the dead and ascended to rule over the world—that is, Jesus. This could not be said any more clearly than it is in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the churches in Colossae: “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:15–17).

It is hard to imagine a loftier claim than this! Thus, at the center of Christianity’s metaphysic is the belief that a divine-human man, Jesus the Christ, is the manifest image of God himself. This world that we experience is actually created and upheld by the incarnated and now-risen Jesus, in unity with God the Father. This is a radical metaphysical claim not only for Jews but also for Greeks and Romans, who also had a highly developed metaphysic of both the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.

For Greeks, the organizing structure of the world, the blueprint and pattern of how things came into being and hold together, was called the logos. It is no mere coincidence, then, that the Gospel of John opens with equally lofty claims about Jesus as the cocreator of the world and calls him the Logos (John 1:1). This beautifully and powerfully reorients the cosmological understanding of both Judaism and the Greek world. Jews did not expect that God would incarnate himself in his Son. Greeks did not expect that the logos could ever be called a person. This is a radical metaphysic. This claim about the nature of reality as centered in Jesus Christ will prove to be fundamental to Christianity’s self-understanding. It becomes the basis for Christianity’s claim to be the true story of the whole world—not just one religion or philosophy among many.

Another aspect of the New Testament’s metaphysical discussion concerns time and the future. Sharing the worldview of the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament understands the universe not in an endless state of reincarnation or fluctuation between various forces. Rather, the world as we know it is a God-controlled temporary stage between its original created state and a new age to come. History is not circular but linear, heading toward a restoration of what was lost, a restoration that will even supersede the goodness of the original creation. Yet again, in a reinterpretation of the worldview of the Old Testament, the New Testament claims that Jesus is the means by which this new age is coming into the world. This can also be called the kingdom of God, when Jesus will be fully installed as the Sage-King, the good Ruler who will bringing flourishing and shalom to all of God’s people.

Such ideas, which are crucial to Christianity, are philosophical claims. These bold statements about the nature of the cosmos, humanity, and time are foundational to Christianity’s way of seeing and being in the world. They are consciously standing in a lively interaction with contemporary metaphysical claims.

Epistemology. Epistemology deals with the question of how we know things and know them truly. Students of the Bible often wrestle with the question of what theme holds all of the Scriptures together. Some good offerings on the table are the glory of God, covenants, kingdom, and faith. Another good candidate for a whole-Bible understanding is the grand theme of knowledge. We’ve already seen in the Old Testament that, beginning with the Genesis stories of the creation and the fall, knowledge was key to what it meant for humans to live well. True knowledge of God was the key to life. Israel’s fate rose and fell based on how well they knew the Lord.

The New Testament continues the biblical emphasis on knowledge—both the necessity of knowing God and the epistemological question of how we know. True knowledge of God is now found only through Jesus Christ, who perfectly reveals the mystery of God. That is, up until now the knowledge of God, the seeing of God clearly, has been limited and partial. Now that Jesus has come, all of the world has the ability to see and know God when they look to the perfect image enfleshed in the God-man Jesus. Jesus explains the Father to us (John 1:18).

There is still one problem with knowing, however, and this gets us to the great epistemological discussion of the New Testament. That problem is the same one that the Old Testament highlights and that started the whole problem of knowing: sin. Sin, the inherent and active resistance to God that is in all of humanity, affects not only behavior but also the mind itself—the capacity to reason consistently and humbly in pursuit of the Good. We call this the noetic effect of sin. Sin is knowledge-skewing. It obscures our ability to see the Good.

This noetic effect of sin can be seen in many places in the New Testament’s teachings, but no place so clearly and foundationally as in Paul’s great letter to the churches in Rome. In Romans 1 Paul begins his powerful theological treatise with an argument that isn’t exactly what we’d expect. Paul starts on the very negative note that all people have a worship problem.10 Human sin, Paul says, is a function of worshiping the wrong things. Instead of giving the uncreated God the highest honor and thanksgiving, humans have instead praised created things, thereby dishonoring God. This would be like obsessively kissing, praying to, and pampering a statue instead of speaking with, loving, and befriending a kind and wonderful person in the same room.

This misappropriated worship comes from a failure to know correctly and results in a greater darkening of our understanding. God gives humanity over to more of its own willful misunderstanding and misworshiping as a just judgment, resulting in further misunderstanding and misworshiping in a vicious downward cycle. This is humanity’s choice and fate. Thus, sin is a matter of knowledge and an epistemological problem.

What is the solution to this dire state? The knowledge of God the Father revealed in God the Son is only accessible through God the Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who quickens, awakens, and enlivens the mind—that is, enables our understanding. The solution to our Romans 1 sin-worship-knowing problem is found in Romans 12: “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (12:1–2).

That is, our worship of God can only be restored as we are transformed by the regeneration of our thinking. This regeneration and renewal of our minds is, according to the rest of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of this world (Satan) has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor. 4:4), but the Holy Spirit reveals the glory of Christ to believers (2 Cor. 3:18). It is the Holy Spirit who washes and renews us (Titus 3:5). This enables a new knowledge that results in right worship.

Much more could be said about the big theme of knowing in the New Testament, but the important point is that the New Testament authors are once again dealing with issues that are core philosophical questions. They are universal human questions. The New Testament authors, especially more educated ones like the apostle Paul, are very aware of the discussion whirling around them in culture and are offering a distinctly Christian understanding in response. On the important questions of epistemology, the New Testament presents itself as a distinct philosophy, with the key idea being the spiritual blindness of all people and the necessity of the Spirit of God to reveal the knowledge that is necessary for life—knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Ethics. Ethics (or as the older Christian tradition calls it, “moral theology”) deals with the rightness and wrongness of our actions. This may sound like a simple topic, but it quickly becomes very complicated and nuanced:

• What is the source of our knowledge of right and wrong?
• What do we do when commands and good actions conflict, like when more than one good can be done and we have to choose, or when doing good in one sense (hiding Jews from the Nazis) involves otherwise wrong actions (like lying and deceiving)?
• Does it matter how I feel when I do something good (or bad)? Do my motives make an action good or bad?
• Is it okay if I can benefit from doing good?

The questions of ethics are very important in both the Old and New Testaments because of the metaphysical belief that there is a singular God who is consistent in his actions and who calls people to be like him. As we saw when discussing Old Testament ethics, the moral theology of the Hebrew Scriptures are imitative. This means God’s ethical demands are rooted not in some external law or random code but in God’s own nature. Humans will only find life and flourishing when they imitate their Creator, when they learn to inhabit the world in the ways that accord with God’s own nature, will, and coming kingdom.

Closely related, biblical ethics are agentic, meaning that we as moral agents matter, that who we are as people is significant—our understanding, our emotions, our motives, and our desires are wrapped up in what is right or wrong. We as human agents matter in the equation of morality, not just whether the action itself is good or bad objectively. If I help relieve the suffering of a child but do it grouchily, berating the child the whole time, or with great resentment, or for some opposite motive such as that people will perceive me as compassionate when I’m really not—these ways of performing the action (my agency) are part of the determination of whether my acting is right and good. This is true even if the external factual part of the helping is the same.

This imitative and agentic kind of ethic is called a virtue understanding and is the driving factor of the Greek and Roman philosophical systems as well as the Bible. Virtue ethics focuses not just on the external issues of right and wrong but on our interior person and our development to be a certain kind of people. In the Bible, this means becoming more like God himself.

Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels clearly manifest this virtue vision of ethics. The Sermon on the Mount is one of the many places in the Gospels where Jesus is shown to be a wisdom teacher/philosopher. Intimately related, at the core of the sermon is a virtue-focused ethics. Jesus’s critique of the Pharisees is that they lack wholeness or integration (Matt. 5:48), because although they perform good deeds and obey God’s laws, they lack something more important—a heart of love that is attuned to God and to others. Thus, even in the midst of their externally apparent righteousness (goodness), they are deficient in both imitative and agentic ways. This applies to Jesus’s disciples then and today, with the key idea of the sermon summed up in the challenge—“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the teachers of the law [that is, it is interior not just exterior], you will certainly not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (5:20).

The apostles’ writings are built on the foundation of Jesus’s life, teaching, and example. So we will not be surprised to find that when we turn to Paul, for example, we find a comparable Christ-centered, kingdom-oriented ethics of virtue. Every teaching and sermon and letter from Paul contains beautiful proclamations about what Christ has done on behalf of humanity and theological explorations of what this means. And subsequently, every teaching and sermon and letter naturally concludes with an invitation and exhortation to inhabit the world in ways that accord with these truths. These exhortations are imitative and agentic.

Explicitly, several times we find Paul root his teachings in the foundation of imitation. Christians are to imitate their leaders (like Paul) as those leaders imitate Christ. “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Paul says it this way in his letter to the Philippians: “Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do” (Phil. 3:17). And in one of the most powerful and important texts in the New Testament, Paul describes Jesus’s choice to humble himself even to the point of death as the imitative basis for how Christians must relate to one another in humility and self-sacrificial love (Phil. 2:1–11). Make my joy complete, Paul says, by being united in love and spirit, by adopting the same way of thinking and being as Jesus himself.

Another way the imitative and agentic nature of ethics appears is with the role of the Holy Spirit producing fruit in us (Gal. 5:16–26). Utilizing Jesus’s frequent image of a tree bearing fruit according to its nature and its health (Matt. 7:15–20; Luke 6:43–45; John 15:1–8)—notice the imitative idea—Paul describes the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life as bearing the natural fruit in us that reflects God’s own nature. Our sinful nature (described as “the flesh”) wants to produce a different kind of life in us, but when we walk in step with God’s Spirit—notice again the imitation, keeping up with the Spirit as we walk—the result is that we become a certain kind of people, manifesting externally an interior goodness of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22). This is virtue.

We’ve been looking only at a selection from Paul, but the same virtue-ethic approach is found throughout the rest of the New Testament, a prime example being in Peter’s first letter. First Peter contains a household code comparable to Paul’s (1 Pet. 2:18–3:7), and Peter quotes the same crucial Old Testament text that lies at the core of the Bible’s imitative ethic—“Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:15–16; Lev. 11:44–45; 19:2). Additionally, Peter’s primary exhortation to his Christian readers is that they base their lives of wholehearted righteousness on the example of Jesus himself. Christians are to imitate Jesus in their relationships with each other and with those outside the church with humility and mercy, even as Jesus himself did (1 Pet. 2:21–25).

The purpose of the New Testament’s ethical teachings, like those of its contemporary philosophy, can be summed up with one goal: to help humans come into fullness of maturity, to enter into what it means to be fully human. Christianity is offering the answer to what it means to mature into the fullness of humanity, with Jesus as the prototype of the new humanity, the Second and Perfect Adam.

This new-humanity emphasis can be seen in many places in the New Testament. At the end of the lengthy 1 Corinthians, which addresses a wide range of ethical problems in the church, Paul concludes with a list of aphorisms: “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love” (1 Cor. 16:13–14). This translation inevitably covers up an important philosophical idea that is difficult to translate. The “be courageous” phrase is one word in Greek—an important word, andrizesthe, “be a man; act like a man.” “Be courageous” is a better translation today than “be a man,” because to today’s English ear this sounds like bravado and chauvinism. If someone told someone else today to “act like a man,” this would sound negative and degrading both to the male in question and to all women, who are implicitly denigrated.

But this is not what andrizesthe would have sounded like to Paul’s hearers. Rather, this word taps into the widespread Greek idea that there was a standard of virtue that is honorable for humans (male and female) to pursue. To “act like a man” meant to exercise maturity, moral courage, and virtue in doing what is right. This same notion is also expressed in Greek with the phrase teleios anēr (the mature or complete human). Living a complete life as a virtuous human is the only way to experience flourishing.

The Letter of James also casts a vision for the Christian becoming a teleios anēr (James 3:2) by learning virtues such as taming the tongue and enduring through trials (1:2–4). Likewise, Paul prays for his disciples that they will grow into maturity and unity in the faith through knowledge of Christ so that they may become an andros teleios (complete man), which he then describes as the “whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

Once again, these are all topics in Greco-Roman philosophy, which likewise teaches ethics for the purpose of bringing people into the fullness of humanity and maturity. We can see again that the New Testament’s ethical teaching is trafficking in Roman- and Greek-understandable ways—that we need to become complete humans. The Christian difference is not the goal but the means. This is only possible, according to the New Testament, through the birth, life, model, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension of the God-man Jesus, who gives the Holy Spirit to those who believe. The New Testament is a book of philosophy.