4. The New Testament as morality: what morality (and what theology) does the New Testament teach?
It is very common to hear people speak of ‘Christian values’, ‘Christian ethics’, or – on the other side of the coin – ‘un-Christian behaviour’. And although we often speak of Judaeo-Christian values and traditions as though they were consistent and uniform, not surprisingly it is the New Testament rather than the Old that is seen not only as the core element, but often as superseding the Old, with a contrast between the supposedly rule-governed and vengeful religion of the Old Testament, and the forgiving spirit of the New Testament where what matters is the inner state, not the outer observance.
So let us ask – what are ‘Christian values’? What morality does the New Testament teach?
First, is the New Testament offered to all the peoples of the world – or only to Jews?
We find many assurances in the Gospels that the mission is to all men (and of course women too). All three Synoptics end with the risen Jesus sending his disciples out to ‘all nations’ (Matthew 28:19, Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47). Paul never weakens in his determination to take the word to Gentiles, and his theology is carefully worked out to explain how this fulfils the divine plan (see Acts 10 and 11, and in due course Romans, especially Chapter 11). Conversely the treatment of Jews in the New Testament – as we have seen – is relentlessly negative.
Yet we cannot avoid a great deal of contradictory evidence. Paul’s letters record a struggle in him, a conflict reflected in Acts 11:19–20: ‘Now they which were scattered abroad … [preached] the word to none but unto the Jews only. And some … spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus.’ Those who preached only to Jews had reasons for their actions. Whatever changes his later followers made, the evidence is overwhelming of ‘a firm tradition that Jesus had not ordered a mission to the Gentiles’,29 and that Jesus thought of his mission as being entirely to his own people. Consider, for example, the reluctance to heal a Syrophoenician child (‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs’, Matthew 15:26, Mark 7:27: bread represents healing that belongs by right to the children of God, that is the Jews, and not to the non-Jewish Syrophoenicians). Consider too the limitation placed upon the twelve apostles to ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles … but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 10:5–6 and 15:24), and the promise to those apostles that they will ‘judge the twelve tribes of Israel’ (Matthew 19:28, Luke 22:30). And the very early Church, as we know from Acts and the Letters, did indeed keep itself in Jerusalem and regard the Temple as ‘head office’: the principal leaders of the movement – the apostles Peter and John, and Jesus’ brother James – maintained their fealty to Jewish customs and Mosaic Law until the end. Jesus’ insistence on the primacy of Jewish Law (Matthew 5:17) and his desire to focus on the lost sheep of the house of Israel – embarrassing as this became after his death – cannot be sidestepped.
Second, is the morality of the New Testament forgiving – or punitive? There is the morality of this world – and the morality of the next. All cultures wonder whether there is a life after death. The Romans speculated about a rather dreary afterlife populated by shadowy forms of the living, and the Jews of the Old Testament period had Sheol, the realm of the dead, but it was not a pillar of their faith. We saw in Part One of this book that the Old Testament religion of the Hebrews was very much about this world and its redemption, rather than about an afterlife, and this carries through to the period in which the events of the New Testament took place: by and large the Jews of Jesus’ time believed that life ended with death. (The fact that the Pharisees were mentioned as believing in an afterlife merely reinforces the point that the vast majority of their fellow-believers didn’t.)
Into this world the writings of the New Testament burst like a bomb. There is an afterlife: it is eternal: and it is joyful. But who is it for? Is God punitive – or loving? Will justice prevail – or mercy? Will everyone be saved – or only the righteous?
Christian theology has been uncompromising. Catholics, drawing on Matthew 25:31–46, believe that there is a Last Judgement, at which some are allocated to Hell (a place of permanent torment), some to Purgatory (where they are ‘purged’ of their sins before being saved), and some directly to Heaven. (Modifying Matthew’s teaching, they assert that only christened believers go to Heaven.) Protestants did not challenge the Last Judgement; they took out Purgatory, but kept Hell. The threat of damnation runs through the whole of the New Testament: not only in Matthew, but in Mark (‘it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell’, Mark 9:43); in Luke’s parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31); and in John (‘And shall come forth [from their graves]; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation’, John 5:29). It goes on into the Letters of Paul (‘Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off’ (Romans 11:22)), and the Letter of James: ‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you’ (James 5:1). And of course the Revelation of St John has a splendid list of those who will suffer for ever in the lake of burning brimstone: ‘the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars’ (Revelation 21:8).
For well over a thousand years this interpretation of Scripture guided the theology of the Church and determined its behaviour towards heretics and sinners. If the sinner – or the unbeliever – is damned, then simple charity requires us to save that sinner from damnation: no penalty, and no torture, in this world, can ever be as awful as the torture that awaits in the next.
But what if the sinner is not damned?
There is a growing strand of Bible scholarship that points to a different teaching: one in which divine love is not selective, but universal, and in which there is no room for damnation. We find this in Revelation (‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain’, 21:4). And we find it in the writings of Paul: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15–22, italics added); ‘even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life’ (Romans 5:18, italics added; see also Romans 11:32 and Colossians 1:19–20). But then Revelation is a very late text, and you can find most things in Paul if you know where to look. What about the Gospels, where we have a chance of getting closer to the authentic words of Jesus? We have seen the case the Gospels make for a Last Judgement and an eternity of damnation. But is that the only view they give us of the nature of God?
I think not. If there is a stern, judgemental, selective Jesus – and there certainly is – there is also a mild, forgiving, inclusive Jesus. This is the Jesus who calls his heavenly father ‘Abba’ – Dad – and who paints that father as infinitely forgiving and generous. ‘Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find … What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?’ (Matthew 7:7–9). This is the Jesus who urges his followers to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22), or as Luke puts it, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you’ (Luke 6:27–28). This is the Jesus who even on the cross asks that his persecutors be forgiven (Luke 23:34). And this is the Jesus whose follower Paul created in 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 8:38–39 two of the most celebrated hymns ever written to love and to a loving God.
Which is the real Jesus? Indeed, which is the real God? Who knows – but what we do know is that the New Testament offers us both, and they can’t both be true.
Thirdly, is the message of the New Testament one of conformity, obedience, and propriety – or was Jesus frankly a dissenter and a rebel? What would he have thought of respectability?
The established churches that we know in the modern world are profoundly – well, establishment: forces for law and order, for conformity and respectability, for monogamous marriage and the traditional family with a clearly defined hierarchy for husband, wife, and children. Their sacraments of baptism, marriage, and burial, like the Sunday morning service followed by the Sunday roast, are all part of the ordered life of society. In this they follow closely the advice of Peter, Paul, and James to the early Church. The first Christians required believers to live in settled communities of blameless respectability, supporting themselves in regular employment (‘We commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat’, 2 Thessalonians 3:10) and led by worthy deacons of quite exceptional dullness (1 Timothy 3:1–12).
By contrast, the Gospels constantly and amazingly emphasise the irresponsible, imprudent, joyful, and deeply ‘un-sensible’ side of Jesus. This is the man who wanders round Galilee with no wife, no children, and no visible means of support except the savings of the women who follow him (Luke 8:3); who calls on his followers to be like the lilies of the field, taking no thought for the morrow; who welcomes and consorts with tax-collectors and sinners and who eats and drinks in their houses with enthusiasm, whose contribution to a wedding (John 2:6) is to produce over a hundred gallons of wine, who allows a devotee to anoint him with a jar of spikenard ‘which might have been sold … and given to the poor’ (Mark 14:5), who orders his disciples to go out into the cities of Galilee with neither food nor money and to live off charity. This is the Jesus who allows Martha to slave away washing dishes in the kitchen so that her sister Mary can sit in the front room and talk to him about the meaning of life (Luke 10:38–42). This is a man who consistently values freedom over control; impulse over reflection; desire over restraint; paradox over reason; wit over effort; and joy over work. Anything less sensible and respectable (and more calculated to irritate an average Sunday-morning congregation) would be hard to imagine!
For those branches of Christianity – and that includes most – that put the family at the centre of their faith and worship, Jesus must be a constant disappointment. This is not just because of his refusal to penalise the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1–11), or his insistence that his followers abandon their domestic bonds and familial responsibilities to follow him (for example Luke 9:60). It is not just because he himself appears to have had neither wife nor children – or, if he did have them, to have abandoned them so absolutely that they make no appearance in the official records. As much as anything it is because when Jesus comes to speak directly about families and communities, he is so off-hand about them. His return to Nazareth is a disaster, revealing that he could do no great works among those who knew him as a child and young man, and prompting the famous comment that ‘a prophet is not without honour, but in his own country’ (Matthew 13:57, Mark 6:4, Luke 4:24). His attitude to his family of origin – if the Gospels are to be believed – is similarly dismissive: when they send word to him through the press of his followers, he responds with the cutting comment, ‘Who is my mother, or my brethren?’ (Mark 3:33).
If Jesus is financially irresponsible and indifferent to family values – the kind of foreign immigrant you would certainly reject if he applied for UK citizenship – what about his politics? Here again the peaceful, conservative, conformist picture painted by the established churches since the 1st century AD seems starkly undermined by the Gospel accounts. If the Sermon on the Mount is to be believed, it is the poor, the downtrodden, the losers who are blessed: wealth – as in the story of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) – leads directly to damnation.
And should his followers accept this world of injustice, of poverty, of oppression? Is this a religion of resignation – or of action? Of compliance – or of rebellion? Well, there is plenty of evidence for the compliant, other-worldly Jesus whose kingdom is ‘not of this world’ and who advocates ‘turning the other cheek’. But let us not forget the references in the Synoptics to violent division: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10:34); the peculiar comment in Luke’s Last Supper (Luke 22:36–38) that it is time for selling cloaks and buying swords; and above all consider the manner of Jesus’ death. He was crucified (the death meted out to political rebels) in between two ‘lestai’ (bandits), and with his crime – ‘King of the Jews’ – clearly defined by the Romans as political.
We asked earlier – questioning whether Jesus was forgiving or punitive – ‘Which is the real Jesus?’. And at this point we need to return to that question. Orthodox Christianity sees here a paradox, but not a problem: Jesus is the Son of God, born without physical intercourse as a unique combination of God and man, an example to all of us of the perfect human life lived without sin, risen from the grave as a physical body, the Saviour who with his willingly accepted death takes over the burden of guilt from all of us, redeems us all from our sins, and points us to a divine kingdom that is ‘not of this world’.
Did the Gospel writers see him in this way?
It seems unlikely that they did. If we could speak to the author of Mark, writing a generation after the crucifixion, we would find that he attached little importance to the idea that Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity (there are only two references in Mark to this, 10:45 and 14:24; scholars suspect that both are later additions). We would find a Jesus who though certainly ‘a’ son of God – a righteous man – never seems to think of himself as ‘the’ Son of God; a Jesus who never describes himself, or is described, as of sacred birth; who dies in despair (Mark 15:34); and whose followers are left at the end baffled and frightened. The original ending of Mark (16:8) is scarcely a triumphant one: ‘neither said they any thing to any man, for they were afraid’.
Above all – as we saw earlier – we would find a very this-worldly Jesus who believed in the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God.
So how do we begin to understand and make sense of these contradictions in story and in morality?