John’s Gospel told the story in ways quite different from the Synoptic Gospels, and its account of the moral life was also quite distinctive. It was written that the readers might have “life in [Jesus’] name” (20:31), and that life was inalienably a life formed and informed by love. Christ was the great revelation of God’s love for the world (3:16). As the Father loves the Son (e.g., 3:35; 5:20), so the Son loves his own (13:1). As the Son “abides” in the Father’s love and does his commandments, so the disciples are to abide in Christ’s love (15:9-10) and keep his commandments. And his commandment was simply that they should love one another as he had loved them (15:12; cf. 15:17). This “new commandment” (13:34) was, of course, hardly novel, but it rested now on a new reality: the love of God in Christ and the love of Christ in his own.
That reality was on display in the cross, uniquely and stunningly rendered by John as
Christ’s “glory.” The Son of Man was “lifted up” on the cross (3:14; 12:32-34). His glory did not come after that humiliating death; it was revealed precisely in the self-giving love of the cross. And that glory, the glory of humble service and love, was the glory that Jesus shared with the disciples (17:22). They too were “lifted up” to be servants, exalted in self-giving love.
The commandment in John was to love “one another” (e.g., 15:12) rather than the “neighbor” or the “enemy.” John’s emphasis surely fell on mutual love, on relations within the community. But an emphasis was not a restriction, and the horizon of God’s love was the whole world (3:16). And as God so loved the world that he sent his Son, so Jesus sent his followers “into the world” (17:18; cf. 20:21). The mission of the Father’s love seeks a response, an answering love; it seeks mutual love, and where it finds it, there is “life in Christ’s name.”
Taut and His Gospel
Before the Gospels were written, Paul had addressed pastoral letters to the churches. He always wrote as an apostle (e.g., Rom. 1:1) rather than as a philosopher or a code-maker. And he always wrote to particular communities facing specific problems. In his letters he proclaimed the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ and called for the response of faith and faithfulness.
The proclamation of the gospel was always the announcement that God had acted in Christ’s cross and resurrection to end the reign of sin and death and to establish the coming age of God’s own cosmic sovereignty. That proclamation was sometimes in the indicative mood and sometimes in the imperative mood. In the indicative mood, Paul described the power of God to provide the eschatological salvation of which the Spirit was the “first fruits” (Rom. 8:23) and the “guarantee” (2 Cor. 5:5). But the present evil age continued; the powers of sin and death still asserted their doomed reign. The imperative mood acknowledged that Christians were still under threat from these powers and called them to hold fast to the salvation given them in Christ. “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25).
Reflection about the moral life was disciplined by the gospel. Paul called the Romans, for example, to exercise a new discernment, not conformed to this present evil age but instead “transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Rom. 12:2). There is no Pauline recipe for such discernment, no checklist or wooden scheme, but certain features of it are clear enough. It involved a new self-understanding, formed by the Spirit and conformed to
Christ (e.g., Rom. 6:11; Gal. 2:20). It involved a new perspective on the moral situation, an eschatological perspective, attentive both to the ways in which the power of God was already effective in the world and to the continuing assertiveness of sin and death. It invoked some fundamental values, gifts of the gospel and of the Spirit, notably freedom (e.g., 2 Cor. 3:17; Gal. 5:1) and love (e.g., 1 Cor. 13; Phil. 1:9). And it involved participation in a community of mutual instruction (e.g., Rom. 15:14). Discernment was not simply a spontaneous intuition granted by the Spirit, nor did it create rules and guidelines ex nihilo. Existing moral traditions, whether Jewish or Greek, could be utilized, but they were always to be tested and qualified by the gospel.
This new discernment was brought to bear on a wide range of concrete issues faced by the churches: the relations of Jew and gentile in the churches, slave and free, male and female, rich and poor. Paul’s advice was provided not as timeless moral truths but rather as timely applications of the gospel to specific problems in particular contexts.
The Later New Testament
The diversity of ethics in Scripture is only confirmed by other NT writings. The Pastoral Epistles encouraged a “quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Tim. 2:2). It was an ethic of moderation and sober good sense, avoiding the enthusiastic foolishness of others who might claim the Pauline tradition, whether ascetic or libertine.
The subtle theological arguments of the book of Hebrews did not exist for their own sake; they supported and sustained this “word of exhortation” (13:22). The theological basis was the covenant that was “new” (8:8, 13; 9:15; 12:24) and “better” (7:22; 8:6), and the fitting response to that covenant was to “give thanks” and to “offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe” (12:28). Such worship, however, was not a matter of cultic observances. It involved “sacrifice,” to be sure, and that “continually,” but the sacrifice that is pleasing to God is “to do good and to share what you have” (13:15-16). Hebrews 13 collected a variety of moral instructions, including, for example, exhortations to mutual love, hospitality to strangers, consideration for the imprisoned and oppressed, respect for marriage, and freedom from the love of money.
The Letter of James too was a collection of moral instructions, and a somewhat eclectic collection at that. There was no single theme in James, but there was an unmistakable solidarity with the poor (1:9-11; 2:1-7, 15-16; 4:13-5:6) and a consistent concern about the use of that recalcitrant little piece of flesh, the tongue (1:19, 26; 3:112; 4:11; 5:9, 12). James contains, of course, the famous polemic against a “faith without works” (2:14-26), and it seems likely that he had in mind a perverted form of Paulinism, but J ames and Paul perhaps are not so far apart. When James called for an active faith (2:22), readers of Paul might be reminded of Paul’s call for a “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6).
The ethic of 1 Peter was fundamentally a call to live with integrity the identity and community formed in baptism. The “new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3; cf. 1:23) was a cause for great joy (1:6, 8), but it was also reason to “prepare your minds for action” and to “discipline yourselves” (1:13). In 1 Peter the author made extensive use of what seem to have been moral traditions associated with instructions for baptism (and which are also echoed in other NT texts [see Selwyn]). The mundane duties of this world in which Christians are “aliens and exiles” (2:11) were not disowned, but they were subtly and constantly reformed by being brought into association with the Christian’s new moral identity and community.
The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude defended sound doctrine and morality against the heretics who “promise them freedom” (2 Pet. 2:19). In 2 Peter is a carefully wrought catalog of virtues, beginning with “faith,” ending with “love,” and including in the middle a number of traditional Hellenistic virtues (1:5-8).
The Johannine Epistles, like the Pastoral Epistles and 2 Peter, defended sound doctrine and morality, but these epistles made their defense in ways clearly oriented to the Johannine perspective. To believe in Jesus—in the embodied, crucified Jesus—is to stand under the obligation to love. In Jesus’ death on the cross we know what love is (1 John 3:16). And to know that love is to be called to mutual love within the community (e.g.,
1 John 2:9-11; 3:11, 14-18, 23; 4:7-12, 16-21;
2 John 5-6).
The book of Revelation, like most other apocalyptic literature, was motivated by a group’s experience of alienation and oppression. In the case of Revelation, the churches of Asia Minor suffered the vicious injustice and petty persecution of the Roman emperor. Revelation encouraged and exhorted those churches by constructing a symbolic universe that made intelligible both their faith that Jesus is Lord and their daily experience of injustice and suffering. The rock on which that universe was built was the risen and exalted Christ. He is “the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (1:5). He is the Lamb that was slain and is worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might” (5:12). The victory had been won, but there were still sovereignties in conflict. On the one side were God, his Christ, and those who worship them; on the other side were Satan, his regents, the beasts, and “the kings of the earth,” and all those who think to find security with them. The bestiality of empire was on display, and it called for “patient endurance” (1:9; 2:2-3, 10, 13, 19; 3:10; 13:10; 14:12).
The conflict is not a cosmic drama that one may watch as if it were some spectator sport; it is an eschatological battle for which one must enlist. Revelation called for courage, not calculation, for watchfulness, not computation. And “patient endurance” was not passivity. To be sure, Christians in this resistance movement against the bestiality of empire did not take arms to achieve a power like the emperor’s. But they resisted. And in their resistance, even in the style of it, they gave testimony to the victory of the Lamb that was slain. They were to live courageously and faithfully, resisting the pollution of empire, its cult surely and its lie that Caesar is Lord, but also its murder, fornication, sorcery, and idolatry (cf. the vice lists in 21:8; 22:15; see also 9:20-21). They were to be the voice of all creation, until “those who destroy the earth” would be destroyed (11:18), until the Lord makes “all things new” (21:5).
Ethics in Scripture are diverse, not monolithic. Yet, the one God of Scripture still calls in it and through it for a faithful response, still forms and reforms conduct and character and community until they are something “new,” something “worthy of the gospel of Christ.”
Bibliography
Barton, J. Ethics and the Old Testament. 2nd ed. SCM, 2002; Birch, B. Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and the Christian Life. Westminster John Knox, 1991; Burridge, R. Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. Eerdmans, 2007; Hays, R. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, and New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996; Mendenhall, G. Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East. Biblical Colloquium, 1955; Selwyn, E. The First Epistle of St. Peter. 2nd ed. Macmillan, 1947; Verhey, A. Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life. Eerdmans, 2002; von Rad, G. The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Trans. E. Trueman Dicken. Oliver & Boyd, 1966, 1-78; Wolff, H. “The Kerygma of the Yahwist.” Pages 41-66 in W. Brueggemann and H. Wolff, The Vitality of Old Testament Traditions. John Knox, 1975; Wright, C. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. InterVarsity, 2004.
SCRIPTURE IN ETHICS
A History
CHARLES H. COSGROVE
ΠΓ
hroughout the history of the church Christians have looked to the Bible for theological concepts by which to understand their moral obligations, commandments by which to live, values by which to order personal and social existence, patterns of life worthy of emulation, and insight into the dynamics of character formation. At the same time, the Bible has been used along with other sources of moral understanding (acknowledged and unacknowledged) and has been read in a wide variety of cultural contexts that have shaped the way it has been interpreted.
The Early Church
In the NT direct appeal to the Bible in ethical exhortation and instruction is not nearly as frequent as appeal to other authorities. In the Gospels, Jesus is the chief model and authority for ethics. Elsewhere too we find appeals to the example or teaching of “Jesus” or “Christ” or “the Lord Jesus,” and so forth (e.g., Rom. 15:1-3; Phil. 2:5-11; Eph. 5:2; 1 Tim. 6:3; 1 Pet. 2:21-23). Other normative voices are civic authorities (Rom. 13:1-5; 1 Pet. 2:13-15); household authorities—masters (Col. 3:22; 1 Pet. 2:18), husbands (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1), and parents (Col. 3:20; Eph. 6:1); church leaders (Phlm. 8, 21; Heb. 13:17); common knowledge (Rom. 1:29-32; cf. 1 Cor. 5:1), including knowledge of one’s duties (Rom. 13:6-7); and traditional Christian instruction in so-called vice and virtue lists (1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 5:19-23). The Jewish Scriptures figure in ethical argument and exhortation sometimes independently and sometimes in connection with other sources and authorities.
The Mosaic law became a subject of great debate in the early church. Throughout the early period, appeals to Scripture as a rule for ethics were complicated by the fact that an increasingly influential wing of the church rejected the Mosaic law as a norm for the church or defended a complex (and perhaps sometimes confused and uncertain) understanding of its bearing on questions of behavior. For Paul, the law’s authority as a rule for righteousness has terminated in Christ (Rom. 3:21-4:25; 10:1-13; Gal. 3:6-4:7). Nevertheless, the ethic of Christ coincides at points with Mosaic commandments; and love, which Christ commands, fulfills the central purpose of the law (Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:13-14). Moreover, since Scripture was written for “us” (those in Christ who live at the end of the age), Paul reads Deut. 25:4 allegorically as a warrant for apostolic rights (1 Cor. 9:8-10) and interprets Ps. 69:9 christologi-cally in describing Jesus’ self-giving way as an example to be imitated (Rom. 15:3). Paul also bases instructions about nonretaliation on Deut. 32:35 and Prov. 25:21-22 (see Rom. 12:19-20), and in a few places he adduces cautionary moral examples from Scripture (1 Cor. 10:1-11; 2 Cor. 11:3).
The conviction that love is central to the Mosaic law was already taught by ancient Jewish rabbis. Mark and Luke attribute this belief to Jesus but imply that other Jewish teachers affirmed it as well (Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28). In Matthew, Jesus teaches that all the law and the prophets “hang” on the two Great Commandments (Matt. 22:40). One can understand Jesus’ opinions in controversies over the law as instances of applying the love command as an interpretive rule (e.g., Matt. 12:1-8, 9-13). In the Sermon on the Mount, however, Jesus casts his teaching at several points in the form, “You have heard that it was said [in the law of Moses]. . . . But I say to you . . .” (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44). Is this reinterpretation, which upholds the authority of the law but asserts that Jesus is the authoritative interpreter, or is it supersession of the law’s authority, making Jesus the sole authority and rendering the law’s specific commandments obsolete? Other parts of Matthew favor the first alternative (see Matt. 5:17-20; 8:4).
Jewish followers of Jesus had already been shaped by their upbringing in the synagogue, where Scripture (especially the Torah or Pentateuch) was central. Hence, much of the moral instruction of the early church takes for granted prevailing Jewish views about various moral subjects, including sexual ethics, concern for the poor, gender roles, the virtues that should characterize a godly person, and so forth. These assumptions occasionally become explicit in appeals to Scripture that rest on traditional Jewish interpretation (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:9-15). The Jewish heritage is especially evident in the most common form of direct moral appeal to Scripture, the example. Paul singles out Abraham as a man of steadfast trust in God (Rom. 4); so does Hebrews, mentioning other exemplary biblical figures as well (Heb. 11). James refers to the prophets and Job as examples of suffering and patience (Jas. 5:10-11). Negative examples are also adduced: Lot’s wife (Luke 17:32); Israel (1 Cor. 10:1-11; Heb. 3:16-4:11); disobedient angels, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cain, Balaam, and Korah (Jude 6-11); Esau (Heb. 12:16); and Cain (1 John 3:12).
The Patristic Period
By the second century, the church possessed not only the Jewish Scriptures but also apostolic writings (Gospels, the letters of Paul, etc.) as guides for ethical reflection. On many topics the church fathers worked out views consistent with the ethics of Greek and Roman philosophers by claiming that the Greeks had stolen their ideas from Moses and by articulating a theory of natural law available to all human beings. The concept of natural law came from philosophy, but the fathers found support for the idea in Rom. 1.
The church also staked out distinctive positions on moral questions such as service in the army, abortion and infanticide, and sexuality. Regarding participation in the Roman army, Jesus’ “disarming” of Peter in Gethsemane was a crucial proof-text (Matt. 26:52), taken as signaling a new era of nonviolence for God’s people that superseded the old era, in which violence was sanctioned by God (Tertullian, Idol. 19). The Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas include abortion in lists of prohibitions modeled on the Ten Commandments (Did 2.2; Barn. 19.5). Later church teachers developed this position by working out theories of the embryo as a living person (with a soul), as evidenced by, for example, the fetal kick of John the Baptist (anonymous Christian cited in Clement of Alexandria, Exc. 50).
The fathers generally affirmed the Pauline rule of freedom from the Mosaic law but worked out their own understandings of it. By the middle of the second century Christians were distinguishing between commandments meant to be taken literally by the church and commandments meant to be interpreted only spiritually. According to Justin Martyr, some laws have enduring force because they are moral law; some concern the mystery of Christ; some were given because of Israel’s hardness of heart and had only a temporary purpose (see Justin Martyr, Dial. 44; 46). According to the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, the Jews were deceived by an evil angel into interpreting the Mosaic laws of sacrifice and so forth literally (9.4), but Moses wrote “in the Spirit” (10.2, 9) for those who have heard the “voice of the Lord” (9.7) and are spiritually circumcised in their hearing (10.12).
At the same time, Jewish teaching remained an important influence in Christian ethical in-struction—for example, in Christian adoption of the “two ways.” Developed in Judaism as an interpretation of the two paths set forth in Deut. 30, the “two ways” concept assumed a variety of forms. Christian versions appear in Did. 1-5; Barn. 18-20; Apos. Con. 7. Book 1 of the Didache (Did. 1.1-6.2) is a paraphrase of teachings known to us from the Sermon on the Mount. Otherwise, the instructions in Did. 1-5 and Barn. 18-20 contain practically no material drawn directly from the oral Jesus tradition, the Gospels, or other first-century “apostolic” writings (such as the letters of Paul or James). But one can see forms of ethical expression found also in the Sermon on the Mount and the letters of Paul, particularly the vice and virtue list and the apothegm (a succinct moral directive sometimes briefly elaborated). By contrast, Scripture is used heavily in the moral instructions in book 7 of the Apostolic Constitutions, where the “two ways” teaching is explicitly traced to Deut. 30:15, the apothegm is the primary form of instruction, and specific apothegms are drawn from many different parts of the Bible.
Hostile attitudes toward Jewish conceptions of God, creation, and the moral life existed in some of the Christian groups who styled themselves “gnostics.” At least some gnostics taught that the creator depicted in the Jewish Scriptures is an evil deity whose activity as creator and promulgation of the law through Moses brought human souls into spiritual darkness and servitude. A number of gnostic interpreters apparently regarded the Scriptures as in some sense authoritative and devoted considerable energy to interpreting Genesis, which offered them material for working out their spiritual-theological cosmologies of human origins. Some of this commentary survives in the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Ar-chons, and the Tripartite Tractate. It appears that gnostics took a dim view of sexuality and bodily appetites, which perhaps made a rigorous asceticism morally normative in most gnostic circles.
In the wider church, the Jewish Scriptures were studied as a source of moral instruction and a reservoir of moral examples. We see this already in 1 Clement, which begins with a long moral discourse based on biblical examples of behavior to be imitated and avoided (1 Clem. 1-12). In a revealing description of what “preaching” meant in the second-century church, Justin Martyr mentions lengthy readings from “the writings of the prophets or the memoirs of his apostles,” after which the “president” exhorts the people to imitate what they have heard (1 Apol. 67). In time, Christian schools were formed, which included
moral instruction through study of biblical examples. Fourth-century Christian school exercises in “characterization” (ethopoiia) taught students to imagine what biblical figures might have said in moments of moral crisis (e.g., what Cain said after he killed Abel [P.Bod. 33] and what Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac said after God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac [P.Bod. 20]). This was preparation for the day when the students, as preachers and teachers, would present biblical stories as compelling moral examples.
In addition to extracting moral examples from Scripture, Christian writers backed up their exhortations with one-sentence scriptural proofs. The purpose of these sentences probably was not so much to prove something as to restate the exhortation in scriptural language and thus give it greater motivational force. The use of short proof sentences from Scripture became a staple of Christian moral discourse for later writers, being used in all aspects of moral appeal. For example, in Basil’s Longer Rules, Scripture sentences are adduced to reinforce a rule of practice, underscore the consequences of a certain action (as a warning or motivation), stress the requirement of right means to an end, and define appropriate ends.
Allusion and unmarked paraphrase of Paul, the Gospels (and oral Jesus tradition), and other earlier Christian writings are also extremely common in the apostolic and postapostolic fathers, many of whom saturate their discourse with phrases from Scripture. Apparently, it was assumed that the audience would detect most of the borrowing, in which case a high concentration of scriptural phrases gave the impression that the speaker’s exhortation and instruction were simply the voice of the Bible, as if no interpretation were going on. In fact, the selection and disposition of the scriptural words as they were knitted together by the speaker’s own formulations made for a highly interpretive use of Scripture.
Virtually all of the church fathers engaged in forms of allegorical interpretation, a method of exegesis based on the assumption that Scripture contains hidden (encoded) teaching. This often involved the discovery of instruction about the moral-spiritual journey of the individual soul. For example, commenting on the words “Come to Heshbon, let it be built” in a sermon on Num. 21:27 (Hom. Num. 13), Origen interprets “Hesh-bon” as the soul torn and emptied of its pagan beliefs and immoral habits, then rebuilt and outfitted with pious thoughts, correct understanding, and upright morals. As a general rule, the literal sense of the apostolic writings was regarded as the guide and control on allegorical interpretation. Some fathers spoke of a “rule of truth” or “rule of faith” as normative for interpretation (e.g., Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine). This rule, which included an ethical aspect, was regarded as expressing the essentials of apostolic teaching.
Some church fathers differentiated between higher and lower forms of Christian moral life. The idea is perhaps suggested already in Herm. 56.3 and Did. 6.2 (cf. Tertullian, Ux. 1.3). Advocates appealed to what they saw as evidence of such a distinction in the NT, in 1 Cor. 7:25-38; Rom. 3:3 (so Origen); Matt. 19:21 (so Ambrose). Ambrose and Augustine distinguished between “precepts” (mandatory for all) and “counsels” (freely chosen only by some), a distinction that became basic to the thinking of the medieval church (Ambrose, Vid. 12.72; 14.82; Augustine, Virginit. 15.15).
The fathers also took up specific moral issues, relying on various sources of inquiry in their day. These included, along with Scripture, “common knowledge” based on custom and cultural consensus and arcane knowledge based on specialized inquiry. For example, advocates of an ascetic lifestyle drew on philosophical asceticism, medicine, and Scripture in working out their teachings on fasting, sexual abstinence, and other forms of bodily self-denial. Often appeals to the various authorities were tightly interwoven. For example, Jerome counsels the widow Furia about how to ward off sexual desire by interpreting 1 Cor. 6:18 in the light of Galen’s theory that certain foods stoke the body’s internal heat, arousing passion (Jerome, Epist. 54.9). Similarly, Augustine seems to assume some current medical-philosophical conception of gestation when, commenting on Exod. 21:22, he says that the question of murder does not arise where the fetus is “unformed.”
Augustine was the most important figure of the patristic period for the future of Christian theology and ethics in the Western church. He accepted the allegorical method but cautioned against excesses and insisted on respect for the letter. Augustine worked out what we would call an “ethic of interpretation,” emphasizing that judgments about which interpretations of the text to embrace should be guided by love of God and neighbor, a view that manifestly reflects Matt. 22:40 (Doctr. chr. 1.36.40). Augustine also found a basis in Jesus’ teaching for the principle that intent, as consent to an action and not simply desire, is the basic criterion for evaluating moral action. Hence, although adultery is wrong, it might be permissible in certain cases, such as when a wife yields to the sexual advances of a wealthy suitor in order to get money that her husband desperately needs to pay his taxes, provided she does not submit out of desire for the man (Serm. dom. 1.16.50).
The Medieval Period
The fathers developed the concept of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit, and by the fourth century the basic contours of the canon were established. They also assumed that Scripture contains levels of meaning beyond the ordinary meaning of its words. The fifth-century theologian John Cassian formalized this hermeneutical tradition of multiple senses of Scripture into a fourfold scheme: historical (literal), allegorical (Christ and his church), anagogical (eschatologi-cal/heavenly), and tropological (having to do with the moral-spiritual formation of the soul). Thus, a number of fundamental interpretative assumptions were established in the early centuries of the church and taken over by the medieval church. To illustrate, in the Latin-speaking West the author (Lat. auctor) of Scripture was identified as the Holy Spirit and distinguished from the writer (Lat. scriptor) of a book of Scripture, the writer being a human being whom the Spirit used as an instrument. The concept of the unified authorship of Scripture justified interpreting passages far apart in time and place in the light of one another. Moreover, almost everyone assumed that Scripture contains secrets veiled under shadow and figure that could be discovered through allegorical interpretation. The plain sense set a certain limit on what allegorical exegesis could discover, but the latter also offered a way to find cherished philosophical concepts in biblical books that looked unphilosophical at the literal level. Greek moral philosophy, which focused on the formation of character, had been an influential conversation partner of the fathers. In the medieval period the allegorical method helped build a conceptual bridge between the unified authorship of Scripture and the newly rediscovered Nicomachean Ethics of “the Philosopher” (Aristotle).
The relation of Scripture to the world was also conceived differently than in the days when the church’s relation to the world was essentially op-positional—as in early Christian apocalyptic but also in the pre-Constantinian church’s sense of being an alien minority in a hostile world from which the path to martyrdom or the way of monastic and ascetic life was the noblest means of resistance and escape. The growth of the church in the fourth century and the changed political situation prompted a reconceptualization that affected how Scripture was read “historically” and “politically” in the early medieval period. In several works Eusebius had already woven scriptural history together with pagan history to form a salvation-historical narrative in which the Jewish patriarchs were cast as superior in understanding to their pagan counterparts. The Christian poet Prudentius viewed not only the Jewish but also the pagan past as preparatory (in a typological way) for the revelation in Christ and as part of a unified salvation history. Working in a similar vein, later minds not only read wider history in the light of Scripture but also interpreted Scripture in the light of wider history. Hence, in 492, responding to a crisis in which the current emperor claimed authority over the church in doctrinal matters, Pope Gelasius I argued that the emperors of Rome ceased to exercise priestly authority once Christ appeared, showing that Christ, the true priest and king, had in effect established a new relation between priestly and royal power. Apparently, Gela-sius treated history and Scripture as both divinely authored, with Scripture providing clues to the meaning of history and history providing clues to the meaning of Scripture.
The new view of Christ’s relation to temporal power encouraged the use of the OT for models of rulership (kingship), but the relation between church and state had to be worked out. Gelasius observed that in the past some persons, such as Melchizedek, were both kings and priests, but that when Christ appeared, the true king and priest (an allusion to the Christology of Hebrews), he established a separation of these offices. In the twelfth century, the conviction that Christ is the true and supreme king over the world inspired the idea that the pope is the vicar (representative) of Christ. This meant that whatever Scripture says of Christ could be applied to the pope as his vicar. Allegorical interpretation of the “two swords” text in Luke 22:38 proved that the priesthood possesses both spiritual and political authority. Hence, it became plausible to use OT stories of kings, along with other passages deemed to speak (literally or allegorically) about temporal power, in support of a pontiff’s political aims and actions. Notable examples of this kind of self-serving exegesis are found in the “political” sermons of Pope Clement VI (1291-1352).
The Christ of the Gospels was also the model for the Christian life generally. Naturally, the proper way to imitate Christ was debated. One of the most pronounced discussions concerned the poverty of Christ. This interpretive conflict reached particular intensity in the fourteenth century between the Franciscans, who insisted that imitation required a vow of absolute poverty, and Pope John XXII, who rejected the claim that Jesus had ever embraced absolute poverty. Both sides appealed to a common fund of biblical passages. Central was how to understand the instructions in Matt. 10:9-10 to the disciples, when they are sent out on their mission, about taking no gold, silver, copper, and so on, a topic that led to the question of whether Pope John XXII had violated a “natural right” when he legally annulled Franciscan poverty in a series of bulls in 1322-23. William of Ockham’s defense of the Franciscans helped to establish the concept of a natural right as a freedom, a notion that would outlive the debate about Christ’s poverty.
In the medieval world, rules for the ordering of life under churchly authority, including moral behavior and discipline, were developed in what came to be known as “canon law,” a loose body of authoritative tradition that was eventually systematized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Gratian’s Decretum and a collection of papal decretals assembled by Raymond of Penafort under Pope Gregory IX. Sources included the Bible and Roman law as well as papal and conciliar decrees. In this era, but less so in subsequent development of canon law, the influence of the Bible was conspicuous. According to Gratian, the Bible reveals natural law, which is distinct from human custom, and in his Decretum the Bible figures prominently as a source of prooftexts.
The work of codifying and interpreting canon law differed from moral theology, the primary purpose of which was not to articulate and interpret rules but rather to give an intelligible account of the moral-spiritual formation of the soul in preparation for heaven and the beatific vision. This went back to Augustine, who also inherited from his Christian and pagan predecessors a view of ethics as virtue-centered and oriented to character formation. Hence, the great French scholastic Peter Abelard (1079-1142) opened his treatise on ethics (Scito te ipsum) with the statement “We regard morals as the virtues and vices of the mind that make us prone to good or bad deeds.”
In the theological summa (a systematic compendium of theology), discussion of right action assumed the teaching of the church (codified in various bodies of canon law), which the scholars sought to interpret, not debate. The scholastics applied reason to moral questions in the light of Scripture and through interaction with other revered authorities—the church fathers and certain ancient philosophers regarded as sources of insight, to be reconciled where possible, not simply as debate partners.
Byzantine scholars transmitted ancient commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and wrote their own commentaries on the same. The Byzantine interest in Greek philosophical ethics is also evinced in a Christianized version of Epictetus’s Enchiridion, which served as a cherished introduction to ethics in the East, and Eastern moral exegesis of Scripture appeared in all kinds of works, including ascetical writings on prayer and spirituality. Nevertheless, Eastern Christian ethics did not become the subject of treatises but rather was treated almost exclusively as a dimension of theology, specifically, as a basic aspect of divine communion (or “deification”).
The importance of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition for Western medieval scholars led to debates about whether philosophy (and philosophical ethics) could be legitimately pursued on its own terms as an inquiry separate from theological ethics and the revelation in Scripture. One advocate of this conceptual separation was Albert the Great, who wrote the first Latin commentary on the whole of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In conversation with Aristotle, Albert defined happiness as intellectual contemplation of immaterial, invisible realities achieved through detachment from earthly things through ascent to the divine.
In his commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, Albert quoted Scripture only rarely. For example, in his extensive treatment of chapter 10 in his first commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Albert quotes Scripture only about ten times. Far more frequent are quotations from the fathers and from more recent scholars (including other commentators on Aristotle). The relative absence of Scripture owes in part to the topics, which often do not lend themselves to easy prooftexting from Scripture, and above all to the nature of the discourse as Albert conceives it: a philosophical discussion based on reason with only minimal recourse to proofs from the Bible. This approach was typical of a good deal of philosophically oriented medieval discussions of ethics. Methodologically, philosophical ethics, unlike theological ethics, did not rely on Scripture and Christian tradition but rather was conducted on the basis of reason through commentary on classical philosophers such as Aristotle. Hence, the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by the great thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (Sententia libri ethicorum) does not refer to Scripture at all.
Scripture does play a role in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, including the second part, where he examines the conditions of moral existence and its philosophical foundations. Thomas begins with the purpose of human life and the nature of the moral life (human action, passions and habits, vice and virtue, law and grace), then goes on to examine specific virtues and vices. These include the primary “theological” (or “supernatural”) virtues of faith, hope, and charity, along with the chief “natural” virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Conceiving moral existence in terms of virtues and vices was a traditional approach, going back to the fathers and especially to Augustine, who derived the theological virtues from Scripture (with 1 Cor. 13:13 providing the hermeneutical key) and the natural virtues from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition as mediated through Christian reflection.
The sections of Thomas’s Summa theologiae dealing with ethics take the same form as other parts of the work. He presents logical analyses set forth in a consistent pattern of formal disputation (proposition, objections to it, his answer, and his replies to the objections) in which authorities are quoted from time to time. These authorities are Scripture, church fathers (Augustine, Ambrose, and others), certain ancient philosophers (especially Aristotle), and occasionally another source such as canon law. One or more of these authorities may be found in many arguments, but not every argument contains an appeal to authority. Quotations from Scripture appear in some objections, but most are found in Thomas’s statement of his own view (in contraries, answers, and replies). These quotations are almost always a single sentence from the Bible: a declaration, often in the form of a sententia (apothegm) or treated as such; a statement about what God does (past, present, or future tense); or an exhortation that can be treated as expressive of a principle or as showing a relation between concepts. The scriptural sentences are used in various ways: as a major premise in an argument, as a supplemental proof of a conclusion of an argument, as a formulation of a contrary, as evidence for the meaning of a key word or concept, and as a basis for drawing an inference about a relation between concepts. Thomas rarely appeals to anything but the plain sense of Scripture, although he does not oppose the hermeneutic of multiple senses and argues that the ceremonial and judicial laws of the OT have figurative meanings. He also never debates the interpretation of a text but almost always treats the meaning of Scripture as self-evident; only very occasionally does he cite an authority for an interpretation of Scripture (e.g., ST II-I, q. 4, a. 2).
A different rhetorical form of ethical discourse is found in Abelard’s Scito te ipsum, a logical-philosophical analysis of moral culpability in which Scripture figures not only as a fund of sententiae but also as a source of moral examples. Sometimes Abelard expounds the meaning of a scriptural sentence. He also sometimes brings together groups of scriptural statements and discusses their interrelation as he develops a point, always assuming the inherent unity of Scripture. It is apparent that Scripture profoundly shaped Abelard’s thinking. At the same time, he depended on the scholastic tradition for concepts and questions for interpreting Scripture.
A common theme in scholastic ethics is the nature of love as the central moral teaching of the Bible. The NT and the fathers bequeathed to the later church the conviction that love is the highest affection and the supreme virtue. Augustine, on whom medieval thinkers heavily depended, sought to encapsulate this teaching in an epigram: “Love, and do what you will” (Tract. ep. Jo. 7.8). For Augustine, love was not simply a criterion for judging right from wrong but rather a “weight” in the heart that moves the will to a good purpose and ultimately to union with God (Conf. 13.9.10). In this sense, love is passional but in a spiritual sense, without bodily desire.
The idea that love, rightly understood, lacks sexual desire might have posed problems for the medieval efforts to interpret Song of Songs, but ever since Origen, that book had been interpreted as an allegory of spiritual love: Christ the bridegroom burning with celestial love for the church (or for the soul of each believer). Origen called that love eros (much less frequently agape) and thus inspired a spiritual eroticism of commentary on Song of Songs. Medieval divines interpreted Song of Songs on the basis of the fourfold reading of Scripture, which included a tropological (moral) sense. The tropological modus was variously understood as speaking in Song of Songs of the nuptials of the soul and Christ in a purifying spiritual ascent (Honorius); the soul’s progression through faith, hope, and charity (Bernard of Clairvaux); the soul as a bride whom the Spirit makes “fertile with the offspring of the virtues” (the Eulogium sponsi di sponsa [PL 176, 987C]); and so forth. The medieval tradition of commentary on Song of Songs also saw a shift from expositions focused on the higher moral-spiritual life of the cloistered to interpretations that applied Song of Songs to the more general human struggle to order and direct desire.
The book of Psalms also offered expressions of the soul’s ardent love for God and was revered as an innerbiblical corpus containing virtually everything found elsewhere in Scripture. That comprehensiveness was understood as including a moral voice in which David’s colloquy with God is also David’s dialogue with the church. David was seen as both a moral exemplar and a moral instructor. In commentary and preaching, as well as paraphrases and imitations of the psalms, David was taught as a model of compunction and penance, a source of soothing words to the soul in spiritual pain, and an example of justifiable individual and collective complaint in the midst of spiritual and temporal sufferings. Richard Rolle (1290—1349) extolled the psalms as medicine for the sick soul, urging recitation of them as a means to attain a vision of heaven. An instance of politically charged use of the complaint psalms is John Lydgate’s rewriting of Ps. 136 in his Defense of Holy Church (1413-14). Lydgate encouraged readers to think of Henry V as a modern-day David who ought to remain vigilant against the political machinations of the Lollards.
The Reformation Era
The various branches of the Protestant Reformation championed the principle of sola scriptura and tended to be biblicistic in their approaches to theology and ethics. This biblicism led to reconceptualizations of the relation of church and society. Martin Luther’s insistence that gospel and law are fundamentally different revived the old question of how Christians are to understand and make use of the Mosaic law. Reformers who represented what came to be known as the Lutheran and Reformed branches of Protestantism worked out a threefold use of the law: the law given to constrain behavior (the “first” or “civil” use); the law as God’s means of convicting sinners and driving them to the mercy of the gospel (the “second” or “evangelical” use); and the law (or certain parts of law, the Ten Commandments above all) as moral law for the church (the “third” use). The third use of the law first appears in the writings of Philip Melanchthon. Luther seems generally to have affirmed it, although he did not emphasize or expound it. The third use became enshrined as an expression of Lutheran faith in article 6 of the Formula of Concord (1577) and was also embraced by John Calvin (Institutes 2.7.12), becoming a hallmark of Reformed theology.
Calvin’s understanding of the third use of the law was closely connected with his conception of sanctification as a process of increasing conformity to the Ten Commandments. Calvin regarded the Ten Commandments as the most comprehensive revelation of moral principles in Scripture. Under their broad injunctions one could order all the more specific moral instructions of the Bible. Other Reformers gave pride of place to the Sermon on the Mount as the epitome of scriptural ethics, and everyone found a hermeneutical key in Jesus’ teaching that all of Scripture “hangs” on the two Great Commandments, love of God and neighbor (Matt. 22:40). For Calvin, the double love command ought to guide the interpretation of individual commandments. For Luther, the double love command showed above all the unity of the law in love as a principle for distinguishing law and gospel.
Another area of fresh discussion was the Sermon on the Mount. Against tradition, Luther argued that this sermon presents not counsels of perfection for the few but rather a gospel ethic to which every Christian is to aspire. At the same time, the sermon defines the moral life of the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of this world—that is, not the social order, which must be governed by law and not by the gospel. The distinction between law and gospel and the doctrine of two kingdoms guided Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching about civil authority in Rom. 13. According to
Luther, the word person (anima or “soul” in the Vulgate) in Paul’s instruction “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1) includes the pope. Hence, the church does not stand above civil authority and must be obedient to it, at least in matters pertaining to worldly order (To the Christian Nobility).
Where Luther sharply distinguished temporal and spiritual authority as belonging to different spheres (different “kingdoms”), other Reformers assumed a greater unity between the two. Of particular significance is Huldrych Zwingli’s notion that the ordination of civil authority, according to Rom. 13:1-7, includes the idea, or at least the possibility, that the Christian magistrate who hears the gospel will carry out his office according to God’s will (On Divine and Human Justice). The concept of the Christian magistrate was a basic hermeneutical axiom in Zwingli’s approach to civil authority, and he tended to think of the body of Christ (the corpus Christianum) as a unity entailing the whole of society. Accordingly, in his commentary on Jeremiah (1531), Zwingli proposed that when citizens and magistrate heed the gospel, “the Christian city is nothing other than the Christian church.” Zwingli interpreted Matt. 18:15-20 (on dealing with an offender) as a basis for the Christian magistrate to exercise the right of excommunication, and he appealed to the fact that the OT spoke of rulers as “shepherds” to argue that the magistrate has a role in church discipline.
If Paul’s teaching about law and gospel in Romans and Galatians became guiding canons for Luther and his followers, the concept of disciple-ship in the Gospels provided the hermeneutical key for the Anabaptists, who made up the bulk of the so-called radical wing of the Reformation. According to Anabaptists, the prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount are not individual and as-pirational goals but rather are divine commands for a disciplined ordering of community life. The Anabaptists stressed the moral transformation of the believer and rejected or downplayed the concept of original sin, emphasizing the teaching in Ezekiel that sons do not inherit the guilt of their fathers (Ezek. 18:4, 20). Christ, they said, makes believers ethically righteous, which is the main point of the only Anabaptist writing that directly discusses “atonement theory” (On the Satisfaction of Christ [c. 1530]). The Anabaptist focus on the example and teachings of Jesus as the template for community ethics led most Anabaptists to embrace pacifism (e.g., those influenced by Conrad Grebel and Menno Simons, but not Thomas Muntzer and his followers). Article 6 of the Schleitheim Articles of the Swiss Brethren (1527) summarizes the scriptural basis for nonviolence; almost all the prooftexts come from the example and teaching of Jesus. Moreover, on the basis of Jesus’ teaching about discipleship (Matt. 6:19-34; Luke 12:33; 14:33) and descriptions of the community of goods in Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-5:11, Anabaptists also renounced private property (so the Hutterites and Swiss Anabaptists according to the Swiss Congregational Order of 1527) or at least put special importance on simplicity of life and care for the poor. Anabaptists understood the reference in Luke 4:18 to preaching good news to the poor as a crucial expression of the gospel, calling for a church of and for the poor. They also rejected the taking of oaths (on the basis of Matt. 5:33-37).
The Roman response to the Protestant Reformation involved the so-called Counter-Reformation, in which the Council of Trent (1545-64) played a crucial role. At this council the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed but also revised its canon law, declared that both the Bible and unwritten traditions passed down from the apostles are to be revered as sources of truth, and stressed that the church must be regarded as superior in its judgments over private interpretation (Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, Session IV [1546]). But responding to Protestant challenges was not the only concern of the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. A number of creative thinkers were working on their own questions in the domains of both theology and ethics. A subject bearing on biblical interpretation was “probabilism.” Dominican theologian Bartholomew Medina, commenting on Thomas Aquinas, had formulated the following principle: “If an opinion is probable, it may be followed, even if the opposing opinion is more probable” (Commentary on the Summa I-II, 19.6). This view became a dominant topic of discussion among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Roman Catholic divines. In matters of ethics probabilism touched individual moral freedom, and in Apologema pro antiquissima et universalissima doctrina de proba-bilitate (1663), Juan Caramuel analyzed examples of moral action in Scripture in an effort to show that an incipient probabilism is present in Scripture’s judgment on those actions.
The Modern (and Postmodern) Era
By the late nineteenth century, questions of personal morality, domestic relations, contemporary social and political problems, the relation of church and state, the duties of citizenship, relations between nations, the proper role of government, the nature of justice, movements such as communism and socialism, questions of human rights, the poor, and so forth were ordered under a discipline of “Christian ethics” (in the Protestant world) or “moral theology” (in Roman Catholicism) distinct from the disciplines of biblical theology and dogmatic theology. This development was an eventual result from a momentous shift in the late eighteenth century when study of the Bible (in the universities of Europe) began to be separated from dogmatic theology as a distinct historical subject. According to the new conception, set forth programmatically by Johann Philipp Gabler in a famous address in 1787, specialists in biblical studies were to supply the theologians with critically established historical descriptions of biblical theology; the theologians, for their part, had the constructive task of translating biblical theology into contemporary thought forms. For Christian ethics, this meant applying the Bible to the questions of the day with awareness of the need for translation from the ancient world into the modern. Christian ethics and moral theology emerged as later disciplinary divisions. In practice, however, no strict division of labor was followed by individual scholars; one finds systematic treatments of ethics that depend on ethicists’ and dogmaticians’ own interpretations of Scripture, as well as historical studies of biblical ethics that are oriented to modern questions and concerns.
Nevertheless, there was growing agreement that while the Bible has a fixed sense (its historical sense), Christian ethics is a constructive discipline that must constantly evolve to grapple with new issues and to rethink old issues under changed conditions. At the same time, there was an increasing sense of a gap between the diverse moralities of Scripture and what seemed morally proper and rational to the modern mind. This posed a challenge to the Protestant project of basing theology and ethics directly on Scripture. Hence, for some, the Bible’s perceived moral deficiencies called for defense through rational interpretation and explanation (e.g., J. A. Hessey, Moral Difficulties Connected with the Bible [1871]; Newman Smyth, The Morality of the Old Testament [1886]).
The new relation between biblical morality and contemporary moral thought was worked out in terms of new modes of inquiry set in motion by the Enlightenment, which solidified the Cartesian method of inquiry not only in science but also, in modified form, in other fields. In a way that almost defies historical analysis (because of the interaction over centuries of so many political and intellectual forces), the Bible helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment but also became an object of Enlightenment criticism, including criticism based on Enlightenment notions of religion. Advocates of the Enlightenment approach to knowledge championed reason against the authority of institutions (notably the church) and ancient books (the Bible and Aristotle). The recognition by seventeenth-century scientists (philosophes) that neither ancient philosophy nor Scripture offered adequate or accurate foundations for inquiries into cosmology, geography, geology, physical anthropology, and the like had led to a distinction between the scope (scopus) of philosophy (science) and the scope of Scripture. The province of science was empirical truth; the province of the Bible was the truth about God and salvation. In the eighteenth century this view was increasingly embraced by divines, including John Wesley. They regarded the Bible as authoritative for matters of faith and the moral life, not for knowledge about the physical world.
For some, however, the authority of the Bible was no longer absolute even for doctrine or ethics. Alexander Geddes (1737-1802), an early historical critic, concluded that the divine command that the Israelites exterminate the Canaanites (Josh. 1-3) was not really from God but rather was an invention of “some posterior Jew” (The Holy Bible, vol. 2 [1797], ii). This form of moral criticism of Scripture differed from the traditional view going back to the church fathers, who claimed that God had accommodated to “Jewish weakness” by encoding with allegory various practices commanded in the Jewish Scriptures that were later superseded in their literal sense by Christ. Geddes and other Enlightenment Christians treated the Bible like any other ancient book, subjecting it to the same moral criticism that they applied to Homer and other ancient writers. Geddes and other practitioners of what was called “higher criticism” also tended to differentiate the teachings of the OT from the “pure religion of Jesus,” which they understood as essentially moral and rational (devoid of the supernatural and of traditional dogma). Intense interest in reconstructing the true history and true religion of Jesus behind the trappings of the Gospels led to numerous portraits of Jesus from 1750 through the early twentieth century, many of which cast Jesus chiefly as an enlightened moral teacher (so Joseph Priestley, G. W. F. Hegel, Ernst Renan, and Adolf von Harnack). The religio-moral authority of Jesus was largely taken for granted in these reconstructions, but the Bible was treated not as an authority but rather as a fallible historical source for recovering the life and teaching of Jesus. This shift from the assumption that authority resides in a text (Scripture) to the view that authority resides in history (in the Jesus of history or in God’s activity in history) was one aspect of a broader theological problem posed by the Enlightenment: how could faith rest on the “accidents” of history and the uncertainties of historical knowledge?
For the majority of Christians who continued to accept the authority of Scripture, a number of ethical issues came to the fore as matters of intense debate in the nineteenth century. These included the question of whether the Bible supports slavery (a debate begun by abolitionists who began marshaling Scripture against defenders of the institution) and whether it teaches the subordination of women (to their husbands and to men in general). In working out their arguments from Scripture, women such as Elizabeth Wordsworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Florence Nightingale used the concept of “progressive revelation” (developed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) to assign patriarchy (and other things in the OT that they found morally repugnant) to the primitive beginnings of biblical morality. Moreover, by assuming that the revelation of morality in Scripture is from the primitive to the more enlightened, they plotted an evolutionary trajectory that pointed beyond the limited egalitarian vision of the apostles (such as Paul) to perfect equality of the sexes as God’s ultimate will.
The concept of progressive revelation in biblical morality was also embraced by abolitionists such as Francis Wayland to argue that the slaveholding of the patriarchs has less revelatory weight than NT teaching (notably the command of Jesus to love one’s neighbor as oneself). Wayland and other abolitionists also developed a hermeneutic of “ethical implication,” which seems to have owed something to principles of legal interpretation invoked in nineteenth-century debates about the US Constitution. They argued that the moral teaching of Scripture consists in what is commanded or prohibited in Scripture but also in what is required by or consistent with Scripture’s explicit injunctions. Accordingly, they maintained that the system of slavery in America, because it did not recognize the parental rights of slaves, violated implicit ordinances of Scripture, namely, the duty of children to obey parents and of parents to care for and exercise authority over their children (Wayland, Elements of Moral Science [1856 edition]).
A good deal of nineteenth-century Protestant ethics entailed establishing Christian morality on the basis of theological doctrines and, with the aid of theophilosophical principles, working out positions on specific moral questions (e.g., in the influential works of Hans Martensen, G. C. A. Harless, and Isaak Dorner). Gabler’s program assumed the existence of “universal concepts” by which to translate biblical theology into dogmatic theology. This idea appears to have controlled the constructive efforts of many nineteenth-century Christian ethicists who referred to the Bible only occasionally (and usually in the old prooftexting style of the medieval theologians that they claimed to have superseded) by referring generally to what Scripture “teaches.” Thus, it is with breezy confidence that R. F. Weidner asserted (in an epitome of the Christian ethics of Martensen and Harless) that “the education of man for the Kingdom of God” is a basic teaching of Scripture about “the aim of history” (Christian Ethics, 2nd ed. [1897], 37). This and similar theophilosophical conceptions of the message of the Bible reflected an age devoted to the idea that history is evolving progressively through increasing enlightenment toward the earthly kingdom of God.
The end of the nineteenth century also saw the birth of the history-of-religions school, which put in question the presumed uniqueness of Israelite and early Christian religion in their ancient religious environments. Within the diverse theological movement known as neoorthodoxy, higher criticism’s historical relativization of biblical ethics was met with different responses. For Rudolf Bultmann, who maintained that there is nothing in the ethics of the NT that an upstanding pagan would not have endorsed, the witness of the gospel, preserved most clearly in Paul, entails freedom not simply from the Mosaic law but from every human convention and moral norm. The Bible bears on ethics not by providing its material criteria but rather by disclosing a way of being characterized by radical faith, which Bultmann expounded through a Christian form of existentialism. Most neoorthodox theologians accepted the results of historical criticism and recognized that the moral teachings of the Bible are diverse, reflecting a variety of practices in different times and places and showing the influence of the beliefs of other ancient Mediterranean peoples. Hence, except within emergent fundamentalism, it was generally agreed that biblical morality had to be mediated through some kind of critical hermeneutic and could not be accepted naively.
In the twentieth century, the use of the Bible in ethics often entailed the assumption that Scripture speaks appropriately to the present not at its moral rule level (the level of specific prescriptions) but only at the level of its general ethical concepts—love, justice, mercy, peace, nonviolence, reconciliation, equality, and so forth (e.g., Paul Ramsey). Some who operated with this hermeneutical assumption attended to biblical rules (commandments and other moral instructions) by looking to the purpose behind the rule and treated that purpose as more important than the letter of the rule.
In addition to taking seriously the problem of the great cultural distance between the social worlds presupposed by biblical morality(ies) and those of the modern era, twentieth-century interpreters also approached biblical ethics with awareness of the apocalyptic assumptions under which NT writers framed their moral instructions. Many interpreters concluded that since the early Christians expected a near end of the world, their instructions about how to live ought to be understood as “interim ethics”—that is, an ethics for the time between the passing present order and the soon-to-arrive new creation. This concept was famously applied to the Sermon on the Mount by Albert Schweitzer but also influenced how Paul’s practical instructions to his churches were viewed. Seeing NT ethics as largely interim ethics was another argument against appropriating its teachings at the rule level.
Some twentieth-century interpreters embraced the concept of eschatological transition (found in, e.g., 1 Cor. 7:29-31) and made it the basis of a “crisis ethic.” Eschewing moral rules as alien to the gospel, they maintained that every believer is always living between the times and must discover God’s will in the crisis created by the tension between the ever-present old and new. Bultmann worked out a crisis ethic through conversation with existentialist philosophy. Karl Barth maintained that ultimately the Christian is called to be obedient not to Scripture but rather to God’s personal address, contending that the Bible’s witness to God’s revelation in Christ prepares one to hear God’s command, but that the command is not found in Scripture and must be heard in the concrete situation. Others who adopted the eschatological framework maintained that believers are called to live between the times by embodying the radical ethic of Jesus. The church has to discern the way, but that discernment ought to hew closely to the specific patterns of life expressed in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and displayed in the paradigm of Jesus’ life (so Stanley Hauerwas).
The scope and the purpose of Christian ethics also were in dispute. In the first half of the century it was largely assumed that, in addition to working out norms for personal ethics, the church has a responsibility to apply Christian ethical principles to society, a task requiring judgments about the bearing of biblical teaching on social and political questions. Advocates of “Christian realism” distinguished the personal from the social, arguing, for example, that the Sermon on the Mount presents an ideal suited to individual moral aspiration but impractical for social life. Social existence requires a realistic ethic of justice worked out in terms of broad biblical concepts, not concrete biblical prescriptions (so Reinhold Niebuhr). In the latter part of the twentieth century a number of influential voices began insisting that the church, not the individual or society, is the proper subject of Christian ethics. The church is called to be a distinct moral community that bears witness to the world by embodying the way of Jesus. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and other rigorous NT moral instruction were meant not as a general social ethic or a merely personal ethic but rather as an ethic for the church. For some, this understanding of ecclesial ethics was a way of rejecting the assumptions of Christendom (the notion of a unified Christian social order) in favor of the agonistic relation between the church and the world assumed by the NT (so John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas). Increasing religious pluralism and secularization made this way of thinking attractive for those who wished to conform their lives in Christian community as closely as possible to what they understood as NT patterns of faith and life without imagining that the church could or should shape the wider society in the image of the kingdom of God.
In Roman Catholic circles natural-law ethics tended to dominate, although after Vatican II there was greater interest in a renewal of moral theology nourished by study of Scripture (Opta-tam Totius §16). At the same time, critical academic study of Scripture was much more likely to receive the Vatican’s imprimatur than in previous generations. Meanwhile in Europe (in the form of political theology) and in Latin America (in the form of liberation theology) the post-World War II period saw both Protestants and Catholics engaging Scripture with fresh interest in a Christian social ethics that would place the problem of the poor front and center. Latin American liberation theology espoused a new hermeneutical principle, contending that the Bible speaks not only on behalf of the poor but also from their perspective; hence, the poor are in the best social location to understand Scripture. This idea, called “the epistemological privilege of the poor,” was allied to the conviction that social location (and precommitments) shapes interpretation of the Bible. The appearance of liberation theology in the Western academy ushered in an era of per-spectival interpretation. Various scholars began stressing that the influence of social location is not a problem to be overcome but rather is a necessary condition of interpretation that should be formalized as part of the hermeneutic process (see, e.g., Tolbert and Segovia). At the same time, the field of hermeneutics was overwhelmed by theoretical challenges. Whether in the dialogical forms espoused by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur or the deconstructionist brands associated with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, philosophical hermeneutics confronted Christian ethics with questions about the semantic clarity of texts and the location of meaning in texts, radicalizing the kinds of questions that earlier generations of Christians had tackled in discussing, for example, allegorical interpretation, the perspecuity of Scripture, and probabilism.
The interaction between liberationist and philosophical hermeneutics raised fresh questions about both the interpreter and the biblical text as factors in the hermeneutic process. If the church fathers and most theologians of the medieval and Reformation eras had assumed that in order to interpret rightly one needed to be well formed spiritually, and if the Enlightenment and its heirs had tended to emphasize the power of reason and the importance of “method” in interpretation, an increasing number of late-twentieth-century interpreters focused on the process by which the socially (or ideologically) conditioned interpreter constructs meaning out of a (somewhat or radically) “indeterminate” biblical text under the impulse of a certain interest (or precommitment). Recognizing that in a situation of multiple interpretive possibilities and competing human interests the interpreter must be regarded as a moral agent led to reflection on the “ethics of interpretation” (Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Daniel Patte).
Biblical scholarship also became increasingly sensitive to the role of literary or oral “form” in textual communication and the importance of considering the nature and purpose of a biblical text before using it as a basis for conclusions about ethics. Hence, one asked whether poetic descriptions of God’s knowledge of the person in the womb (Ps. 139:13-16) were being used appropriately if made the basis for inferences about the moral status of the fetus or whether references to animal life in poetic descriptions designed to extol the greatness of the Creator (Ps. 104) warranted philosophical inferences about the moral status of living things in Christian versions of deep ecology At the same time, many biblical interpreters were also developing a fresh appreciation for the way Scripture, in the variety of its genres (and not only or even primarily in ethical prescriptions), bears on ethics by shaping community Christian identity and providing insight into moral formation.
By the close of the twentieth century, the role of the Bible in Christian ethics had become a highly complex theological and intellectual problem. Except in fundamentalist circles, one could no longer simply equate biblical ethics with Christian ethics. The diversity of moral perspectives in Scripture and the epochal difference between antiquity and modernity (or postmodernity) made it difficult to conceive the Bible as a direct source of Christian ethics. This problem was only exacerbated by a growing perception that Scripture was not only a weapon against ideology (as Latin American liberation theology generally treated the Bible) but also a purveyor of it (as some feminist biblical interpreters contended). Hence, by the dawn of the twenty-first century, almost all participants in the discussion agreed that the Bible is in some sense an authority for Christian ethics, but conceptions of that authority—its force and scope—continued to vary widely.
Bibliography
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Law Review 70 (1995): 1557—81; Jones, D. Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of Differences That Separated the Protestant Reformers. University Press of America, 2004; Kuczynski, M. Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995; Luthardt, C. Geschichte der christlichen Ethik. 2 vols. Dorffling & Franke, 1888—93; Matter, E. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; Ogletree, T. The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics: A Constructive Essay. Fortress, 1983; Shaw, T. The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity. Fortress, 1998; Siker, J. Scripture and Ethics: Twentieth-Century Portraits. Oxford University Press, 1997; Swart-ley, W Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation. Herald Press, 1983; Tolbert, M., and F. Segovia, eds. Reading from This Place. 2 vols. Fortress, 1995; Walsh, K., and D. Wood, eds. The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley. Basil Blackwell, 1985; White, R. E. O. Christian Ethics: The Historical Development. John Knox, 1981.
SCRIPTURE IN ETHICS
Methodological Issues
BRUCE C. BIRCH
ll traditions that regard the text of the Bible as Scripture would agree that these texts should be important resources for Christian ethics. Yet there is little agreement on, and often little attention paid to, how Scripture and ethics relate. Although the literature on this relationship has grown significantly in the last two decades, the tendency in practice in the Christian life is to leave this relationship unexamined. Texts are only casually or haphazardly brought into conversation with formative or normative concerns for Christian ethics. This article seeks to raise some issues of perspective, foundational understandings, and methodological practice that might be helpful in constructing a more self-conscious relating of Scripture to the moral life in Christian practice. The views reflected here in brief draw on and are consistent with longer treatments of this subject in previous publications (Birch and Rasmussen; Birch, Let Justice Roll Down).
Perspectives on Biblical Ethics
It is helpful to think of different arenas within which questions of the relationship between the Bible and ethics can be raised. Each of these arenas poses different challenges and offers differing insights, but it is important not to confuse them or assume only one to be significant.
The World behind the Text
Some treatments of biblical ethics have focused on recovering, understanding, and critically assessing the morality of the biblical communities out of which the biblical texts were produced. Since these texts represent the witness of Israel and the early church stretching over more than fifteen centuries, the ethical systems of differing times, places, and groups reflected in the biblical text are diverse and complex.
Naturally, there has been considerable interest in recovering the morality of Jesus as the central figure in Christian faith, understood by most Christian traditions as God incarnate in human history. How Jesus lived, who he understood himself to be, and how his death and resurrection became the confessional foundation for the formation of the church make Jesus’ own understanding of ethics crucially important. The popular slogan “What would Jesus do?” reflects this concern to use the ethics of Jesus as a model for moral conduct.
By the same token, entire denominational traditions have placed a high value on discovering and emulating the pattern of moral life practiced in the earliest church, especially as reflected in the book of Acts and the writings of Paul and other early church leaders in the NT Epistles. These NT writings often are treated as manuals of conduct for contemporary Christian life.
Efforts to discern and understand the ethics of Jesus or the early church may help to deepen our knowledge of the biblical communities that produced the witnesses of the biblical text. However, these communities were diverse and complex, and their testimonies in the biblical texts do not produce a single, unified ethic that can be emulated. There are four canonical Gospels, and each has a unique portrait of Jesus. There have been many notable efforts to recover the actual words and teachings of Jesus in a historical sense, and these have produced no uniform result. The writings of Paul and other NT authors reflect the unique circumstances of early congregations in differing time periods, and although all contribute to the resources for Christian ethics, there is once again no singular unified Christian ethic to be recovered and emulated.
With respect to the OT, the witness of Israel to its life lived in covenant with God is even more diverse and stretched over a longer period of time and historical circumstances. Efforts to find unifying themes throughout the OT texts or developmental patterns of moral conduct have been notably unsuccessful. We cannot produce a typical or complete history of ancient Israelite ethics. Different texts reflect different social strata and historical settings. Many recent studies have helped us to understand these glimpses of ancient Israel more fully in their own contexts, but there is no singular code of moral conduct to be emulated here. Instead, there is a richness of testimony of life lived in relation to God, both in obedience and disobedience. We may learn from these and be informed from them in our own moral efforts, and this methodology is addressed later in this article.
The Text as Canon
Another way to understand biblical ethics is to see it as the moral conversation contained within the texts collected, edited, recognized, and passed on as a canon of Scripture. For Christians, the canons of the OT and the NT (and, for Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the Apocrypha) have been collectively passed on through the generations as foundational for Christian faith and practice, theology and ethics. As soon as these texts have been gathered into the collections of Law, Prophets, Writings, Gospels, and Epistles and given authority as scriptural canon throughout historical processes of collection and recognition, a new context is created for assessing the biblical resources for Christian ethics. Individual books and at times divergent voices within a single book may be studied for their moral witness, but also subject to study and reflection are the moral conversations that take place between books and texts within the canon. Tensions, agreements, convergences, continuities, and contradictions are now handed on from one generation to the next. One concern of biblical ethics is to listen carefully and critically to the moral witness of the entire canon.
The character of the moral conversation created by the formation of canon is to some degree an artificial construct that transcends the witness to any particular historical context in biblical times. Biblical ethics at this canonical level can be informed by what we can critically discover about the particularities of the world behind the text, but the canon itself forms a new context within which texts make their moral witness in a larger conversation. This canonical moral witness may or may not be capable of connection to concrete moral worlds behind the text (e.g., the entire book of Job reveals little about the world out of which its witness came).
The nature of the moral conversation may differ greatly within the canon. Sometimes continuities of moral witness may be observed, such as the consistent concern for the welfare of the poor and the dispossessed. New juxtapositions raise new issues for moral conversation. Why do we have four Gospel portraits of Jesus, and what does each contribute, singly and in juxtaposition, to the moral vision grounded in the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth? What are the moral implications of encountering the universal God of creation before beginning the particular story of God’s promise to Abraham? How is this altered further by Paul’s extension of God’s people to include gentiles as well as Jews? Sometimes the canon forces us to deal with moral tensions. For example, what is the proper role of faith to public civil authority? We must read both the story of Daniel and Rom. 13.
Biblical authority will be discussed more fully below, but here it should be said that a proper understanding of canon emphasizes that canon is not a definitive collection of timeless, divinely revealed truths. Canon is a collection of witnesses to an ongoing encounter with the presence of God in the lives of persons and communities. The canon is witness to a process of experiencing, witnessing, preserving, and passing on testimony to the experience of divine reality in a wide range of human contexts. Thus, the canon functions not as a static deposit of timeless truth, but rather as a partner in conversation with our own experience of God’s presence in our lives. “The canon functions not in isolation from our own experience of God but precisely in the process of letting our own story be intersected by the biblical story and reflecting critically and acting faithfully in the church out of those intersections. The end result toward which we should strive is a deabsolutized canon which allows for the honoring of ancient witness to the degree that it reveals to us the basic truths of our faith while at the same time honoring the power and authority of our own experience of God” (Birch and Rasmussen 156-57).
The Text as Scripture in the Present
The canon of Scripture, both OT and NT, originated in ancient times, but these collections of texts and their voices have been passed on through the generations to the present as authoritative in some fundamental way for the moral character and conduct of contemporary communities of faith. Thus, biblical ethics can refer to critical reflection on these texts and the way in which they inform the moral life of contemporary Christians. Some of the issues and dynamics of this will be discussed below, but here we should note that studies focused on Scripture as a resource for contemporary ethics will not find there some uniform system or pattern of moral identity and behavior that can simply be adopted or imposed. Nor is it productive to force upon the canon some moral system formed outside the text.
It may well be that the canon invites readers into a process of moral conversation and discernment with a diversity of witnesses that communities of faith have passed on as valued dialogue partners. These texts do not invite us into a ready-made set of moral rules, norms, and conclusions. The process of conversation and discernment will yield diverse results: illumination and insight in one instance, but dialogic struggle and tension in another. In reading of Jesus’ life and ministry, we may find models to emulate in practice and thought. But in reading of Israel’s experience as God’s people, we will encounter testimony to both obedient and disobedient life lived before God. The faithful moral alternative in one biblical context may not be the faithful choice in another. Differences between the biblical world and our own must be faced honestly, and the use of Scripture as an ethical resource cannot be a simple pattern of emulating ancient ways, nor will we find a single, unified moral code to merely adopt. What the canon represents is the judgment of generations of faithful communities that have found these texts worthy of moral contemplation and ethical reflection. They witness to the experience of relationship to God and the challenge of life as God’s people in diverse contexts and circumstances. The moral authority of these texts is foundational for the moral character and conduct of contemporary communities of faith, but only in dialogue with the traditions that passed on these texts and with the best critical understanding of our own experience of God and the world we live in now.
Foundational Understandings
The relationship between Scripture and ethics is dynamic and multifaceted. The Bible is certainly no simple prescriptive manual, nor is it just distant historical background for the Christian life. The church’s claim that the Bible is a living resource for the life of faith is a serious one, but to understand that relationship requires clarity about some foundational matters. The sections below discuss some of these, related to community, moral agency, biblical authority, and divine reality.
The Centrality of Community
The canon of Scripture is the product of community. Whatever the diverse origins of particular texts or books of the Bible, the communities of ancient Israel and the early church collected, preserved, debated, and passed on the particular collection of ancient faith witnesses that we know as the OT and the NT. As a resource for Christian ethics, the witness of these texts is fully available only in the context of contemporary faith communities.
The Bible is the story of a community of those who understood themselves to be God’s people, both ancient Israel as God’s covenant people and the early church as the body of Christ. For those communities, the moral life was never a matter of individual character and conduct alone. The moral life is lived in the midst of and held accountable by the faith community. Individual moral life is lived in the context of a community that understands itself to be called into being by the gracious activity of God, seeks together to discern the nature of the moral life, and holds its members accountable to one another. Israel, the early church, generations of the faithful, and the contemporary church in its diverse forms all serve as interpretive communities within which the Bible is both a witness to the experience of God’s grace and a testimony with the power to mediate that divine grace to transform new generations.
The Bible is the church’s book. The church is shaped by the story and testimony of the canon of Scripture. Both the church’s identity and its ongoing activity are shaped in dialogue with the Bible as a foundational resource. This relationship between ecclesial community, the Bible, and the moral life has multiple dimensions.
The church acts as the shaper of moral identity. In the life of faith communities the stories of Israel, Jesus, and the early church are encountered in worship, teaching, and testimony. Here others are invited to make the biblical story a part of their own identity.
The church acts as the bearer of moral tradition. Differing ecclesial traditions give testimony to the power of the text of Scripture to shape Christian life and mission. We do not begin anew each time we open the pages of the Bible seeking resources for the moral life; others have gone before us, and we stand in rich streams of moral tradition as we seek to be faithful moral agents in our own time.
The church is the community of moral deliberations. Christians are not isolated readers of the text trying to discern the witness of Scripture to moral life. The life of faith communities provides contexts and forums for sharing both insights and challenges in claiming the biblical witness as central to moral life in our own world. Discernment happens not by heroic individual reflection but rather by sharing our deliberations with others in the effort to see how biblical witness to God’s grace can help us discern that grace in the pathways of our own lives.
The church is the agent of moral action. There is always a place for the faithful ethical action of a committed individual, but those actions are a part of a larger active witness by ongoing historical communities. The power of even an individual act of moral witness is magnified by awareness of the larger church community of moral action to make God’s grace visible in the world. And actions joined in systems of active witness can have remarkable transformative power.
The text of Scripture is where the originating and the ongoing interpretive communities meet. It is out of those intersections that the Bible has moral influence mediated through faith communities, both ancient and modern.
Moral Agency and Aspects of Christian
Ethics
The Bible assumes that we, as humans created by God, are capable of moral responsibility. In the language of Christian ethics, we are created as moral agents, capable of being shaped by relationships to God and neighbor and capable of making moral decisions that affect those relationships. As such, the Bible also assumes that we can be held morally accountable for our lives as moral agents in the world, accountable for who we are and what we do as individuals and as communities. Moral agency encompasses both character and conduct, both our being and our doing. Here we will look at three aspects: (1) decision-making and action; (2) character formation; and (3) virtue, value, obligation, and vision.
For many, Christian ethics automatically suggests decision-making and action. In this dimension of Christian ethics the central question is: What are we to do? This can be applied to any of the many moral issues that face ancient or modern persons and communities. How is the Bible a resource for questions of moral conduct?
Over the centuries there have always been some tempted to make the Bible into a prescriptive code of conduct. This has never been very successful. At best, the result has been a picking and choosing of biblical texts that seem more usable in this way—for example, the Ten Commandments or the teachings of Jesus. But the simple truth is that the Bible never makes moral decisions for us, nor do biblical texts lay out strategies or courses of action. And biblical texts do not speak with a single voice. The commandment says, “Do not kill,” but other laws in the Pentateuch allow capital punishment and waging of war. The teachings of Jesus include those often called his “hard sayings,” radical demands of the kingdom that few can meet.
Many of our modern issues requiring moral discernment and action simply could not be anticipated by the biblical communities (e.g., issues of bioethics). Others appear in such radically altered modern contexts that moral response seems complex and unclear. The early church dealt with issues of economic disparity by owning and sharing everything in common, but this does not translate immediately into morally responsible decisions in a complex global economy where economic disparities are intertwined with complex sociopolitical systems.
Still, the Bible is an important resource for the ethics of doing as long as we do not expect the text to do our decision-making for us. The texts of Scripture do make clear broad moral imperatives that frame our moral decisions—for example, the constant concern for those marginalized in human community: the poor, the weak, the hungry, the outcast. Scripture offers images that challenge our moral imagination and consideration of moral alternatives (e.g., Jesus with the woman taken in adultery). The Bible supplies important principles, norms, and standards that can guide our decisions in particular contexts: justice, love, compassion, righteousness. We should note, however, that this does not let us off the hook in deciding what the most just or loving action might be in a given context. The Bible also makes clear that faithful life as moral agents is never lived in isolation; we are a part of God’s people, called to hold one another accountable for our actions in the world and to regard the failure to act at all as a moral failure.
Christian ethics, however, involves more than what we do. It involves who we are to be. Alongside moral decision-making and action we must consider character formation, questions of identity, of “our basic moral perception.” “Character formation is the learning and internalizing of a way of life formative of our own moral identity. It is our moral ‘being,’ the expression of who we are. . . . Character includes our basic moral perception—how we see and understand things—as well as our fundamental dispositions, intentions, and motives” (Birch and Rasmussen 190).
Moral character and identity are shaped by many elements: family, culture, relationships, particular experiences. But Christian moral character must have a fundamental relationship to the Bible. Christian moral agents are nurtured by relationship to the stories, hymns, visions, commandments, and teachings of the entire Scripture handed on and reflected upon by generations of God’s people. In the life of Christian congregations we are exposed to the entire range of materials in Scripture, and this helps to shape our identity as people of faith and moral agents. This material shapes us in different ways both by the
diversity of the texts themselves and by the way
they are read, taught, and used in the lives of congregations and individuals.
While moral character and conduct, being and doing, provide a broad framework for the moral life and the Bible as a resource for Christian ethics, there are many other useful categories that provide nuance, perspective, and insight into the full complexity of moral agency. A full discussion of the Christian moral life would want to discuss categories such as virtue, value, obligation, and vision. Virtue focuses on qualities that mark us as Christian moral persons and communities (kindness, courage, humility, love, righteous anger, and others). Value tends to focus on qualities that mark the social embodiment of morality (justice, love, equality, peace). Scripture helps to name and form virtues and values, and these overlap in actual human experience. Obligation has to do with duties, commitments, and responsibilities that arise out of the decision to live our lives in the context of Christian community and the Scripture that foundationally defines its life. Some obligations are a part of the common frameworks that we share with others in our social contexts (e.g., family, citizenship, culture). Christian obligation arises out of our decision to be a part of the church, and then the Bible becomes a part of the resources that the church uses to shape its character and conduct in the world. Moral vision is the large picture of the moral drama that Scripture invites us into as partners with God in the redemptive activity of God’s people. Moral vision is the category that suggests a framework anchored in the character and conduct of God that encompasses our being and our doing as Christian moral agents.
The Nature of Biblical Authority
The nature of biblical authority and how it functions in the life of Christian traditions and communities have been the subjects of considerable diversity of opinion, and this is one reason why Christian faith has such a variety of expressions. The Bible, understood as Scripture, is acknowledged by all Christian traditions as normative for the understanding and living of the Christian life. It shapes Christian identity and practice, as referenced in the preceding section. But how does the normative character of the Bible express itself? What is its relation to other authorities that also shape human moral life?
“Authority is not a property inherent in the Bible itself. It is the recognition of the Christian community over centuries of experience that the Scripture is a source of empowerment for its life in the world” (Birch and Rasmussen 142). To function in this way, however, the Bible must be understood as pointing beyond itself to the experience of the biblical communities with the character and activity of God. Authority rests not in the pages of the text, but rather in its function as a mediating witness to God, who called biblical communities of covenant and church into being and is still graciously active in our present experience.
Human moral life is shaped by many sources of authority. We become moral agents because we have been given identity and have been guided in our actions by a complex matrix of authoritative influences that are then shaped by us as individuals and members of various communities. These influences include family, nationality, ethnic identity, cultural context, formal and informal education, gender experience, signal life events, influential individuals in varied roles, and professed religious belief. The Christian moral life must include the Bible and its interpretive traditions as authoritative in some manner; otherwise, there is no basis on which to label our ethics as Christian. However, in Christian ethics the Bible, though always primary, is never self-sufficient. The Bible cannot be the sole source of authoritative influence, and thus it is never the exclusive authority for the moral life. Nevertheless, the Bible is indispensable for ethics to be labeled as Christian because it places us in a common tradition with other varieties of Christian experience throughout history and in today’s world.
The Bible’s primary and central role finds expression in a variety of ways because the Bible itself is an entire library of diverse texts. First and foremost, the Bible tells the story of who we are as the people of God connected historically to the communities responsible for the witness and preservation of the biblical texts. Centrally important within this entire biblical story is the story of Jesus, told in the diverse voices of the Gospels. But Jesus’ story is connected both to Israel’s story and to the early church’s story. That story can model for the church both faithful and unfaithful moral life. To reflect on the biblical story is to aid us in discerning God’s presence and activity in our own stories. For those who choose to be part of the Christian community, the Bible becomes an active dialogue partner in assessing and drawing on the other sources of moral influence in our lives. It is a matter of both content and process.
The authority of Scripture resides partly in its witness to a process of discerning and responding to the character and action of God in the life of the biblical witnesses. This in turn invites us to a similar process of discernment in our own time, guided by the way in which Scripture sensitizes us to the presence and activity of God here and now. But,
attention to biblical authority as it mediates a process does not mean there is no continuity of biblical content to be claimed. . . . Our identity as the church is obviously shaped by images, concepts, and metaphors that are part of the Bible’s content and not just witness to a process. But these cannot be regarded as revelatory deposits functioning as divinely sanctioned doctrine. The content must be constantly tested by the process. Which stories and images continue to manifest the redeeming power of God? Some matters of content are reassessed by the church, e.g., the biblical acceptance of slavery, Paul’s admonition for women to keep silent in the church. Some matters of content are reasserted, e.g., God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed. Some matters of content remain central although our interactions with them may change, e.g., the gospel story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. (Birch and Rasmussen 157)
Already implied in this brief discussion of biblical authority for Christian ethics is the recognition that the broad diversity of biblical material suggests various ways in which these materials are used and are experienced as authoritative. “Different types of biblical material must be appropriated in different ways. . . . The problem with most discussions of biblical authority is that they seem to imply a monolithic view of the Bible and its use. There is no single way in which the Bible is authoritative in ethical matters” (Birch, Let Justice Roll Down, 157). A constant moral imperative to care for the poor and dispossessed will carry authority in a contemporary ethical discussion in response to poverty. At the same time, diverse witnesses to the attitude of the faithful toward the power of the state will range as widely as the story of Daniel and the admonitions of Paul in Rom. 13. The authority of Scripture here is not to prescribe a course of action or even a line of response. It operates more to define a framework within which moral options in relating to the power of the state must be considered and weighed. Stories and hymns have authority in shaping the character of our lives as persons and communities that read and sing them and respond to the character of God revealed in them.
The Bible as the Scripture of the church forms the necessary authoritative framework within which ethical reflection must take place if it is to be Christian. Within that framework other moral influence can be engaged in dialogue and discernment. The God of the biblical text is still active in our own lives, our own faith communities, and our own religious experience. Hence, we must discuss the importance of witness to divine reality both in the biblical text and in our own time as a focus for Christian moral claims.
Divine Reality
For those who regard the Bible as Scripture, the texts that have been collected and passed on in the OT and the NT are witnesses to divine reality. They are the gathered testimonies of Israel and the early church to their experience of God in the life of Israel as God’s covenant people; in the testimonies to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; in the formation and spread of the early church. Hence, Scripture as a resource for the Christian moral life mediates a divine reality that is assumed to be still present and active in the lives of contemporary confessing communities. Understanding who God is and how God has been active, what God wills and what God models, is essential to the Bible’s role in Christian ethics.
The common popular view of the Bible’s use in Christian ethics focuses on morality as obedience to God’s revealed will. In its unexamined form this finds expression in those who think of the Bible as a prescriptive handbook for moral behavior. On closer examination, this always proves to be a highly selective sample of biblical texts. In more sophisticated forms the stress on revealed divine will has tended to identify a canon within the canon of texts regarded as serious expressions of God’s will for how we are to conduct ourselves, guides to moral behavior and God’s intention for us. The result has been emphasis on important texts such as the Decalogue, the preaching of the prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and the moral admonitions of Paul and other early church voices. Such texts are indeed centrally important, for the Bible does call us to live a life obedient to God’s purposes for us, and for Christians, the teachings of Jesus in particular are important guides to moral conduct in lives that express love of God and neighbor.
However, God is much more than a lawgiver or a moral teacher in the Bible, and earlier we noted the limitations of the Bible in giving us moral instruction on what we are to do. It is more faithful to the range and diversity of biblical materials to focus on the character of God as well as the will of God, especially as revealed in divine activity related to the biblical communities of faith.
In addition to the roles of lawgiver and teacher, associated with the will of God as seen in, for example, the Decalogue and the teachings of Jesus, God plays many other roles in Scripture. These include creator, promise giver, deliverer, judge, redeemer, sovereign, and covenant partner. These roles do not appear in systematic discursive treatments in the biblical texts. They appear in stories of God’s encounters and relationships with key biblical figures and ongoing biblical communities. They appear in relationships that the biblical stories tell us God has risked in divine presence within human history and divine encounters with individuals and communities that have given testimony in the biblical texts to these encounters.
Some scholars have appropriately highlighted the imitation of God (imitatio Dei) or of Christ (imitatio Christi) as a basis for ethics in the use of Scripture. Texts such as Lev. 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” or the entire emphasis of 1 John on loving as God has loved, make this moral imitation of God explicit. Many other texts name qualities of God’s character that model moral character for God’s people: love, righteousness, justice, compassion, faithfulness, service.
The Practice of Using Scripture as a Moral Resource
Beyond the scope of this article lies the complex set of practices that persons and communities must cultivate in light of the methodological perspectives discussed above. It is an ongoing process that stretches and matures through the Christian life. These practices include:
• The development of critical skill in reading and understanding the biblical texts as fully as possible. This is more than exegesis of individual and isolated texts; it is the development of patterns of reading that allows conversation between texts within the canon while honoring the full witness of each text. Fortunately, many useful tools are available to aid our reading, such as study Bibles, commentaries, concordances, dictionaries, computer programs, and Internet resources.
• The practice of “reading in communion” (see Fowl and Jones). Christian ethics is not informed by isolated individual reading of biblical texts so much as the reading together in community that takes place in the ongoing use of Scripture in the life of congregations. This is not simply the obvious practice of formal study of the Bible in various programs within the church; it also involves exposure to the Scripture in liturgy, preaching, hymns, and devotion. When this exposure to the biblical story is rich, the ongoing conversation in Christian community about the issues that challenge us will be informed by the implicit and explicit shaping of lives and decisions that comprise our identity as Christian moral agents in the world.
Clearly, the relating of Scripture to Christian ethics is a rich and complex conversation that is both historical and global. We are invited into the conversation not for the discovery of fixed moral truths, but rather to experience the moral power of life lived in the presence of God and as a part of God’s people.
Bibliography
Barton, J. “Approaches to Ethics in the Old Testament.” Pages 113—30 in Beginning Old Testament Study, ed. J. Rog-erson. Westminster, 1982; idem. “The Basis of Ethics in the Hebrew Bible.” Semeia 66 (1996): 11—22; idem. Ethics and the Old Testament. Trinity Press International, 1998; idem, “Understanding Old Testament Ethics.” JSOT 9 (1978): 44—64; idem. Understanding Old Testament Ethics: Approaches and Explorations. Westminster John Knox, 2003; Birch, B. “Divine Character and the Formation of Moral Community in the Book of Exodus.” Pages 119—35 in The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium, ed. J. Rogerson, M. Davies, and M. D. Carroll R. JsOTSup 207. Sheffield Academic, 1995; idem. Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life. Westminster John Knox, 1991; idem. “Moral Agency, Community, and the Character of God in the Hebrew Bible.” Semeia 66 (1994): 23—41; idem. “Old Testament Narrative and Moral Address.” Pages 75—91 in Canon, Theology, and Old Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs, ed. G. Tucker, D. Petersen, and R. Wilson. Fortress, 1988; Birch, B., and L. Rasmussen. Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life. Rev. ed. Augsburg, 1989; Blount, B. Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context. Abingdon, 2001; Cahill, L. “The New Testament and Ethics: Communities of Social Change.” Int 44 (1990): 383—95; Childs, B. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflections on the Christian Bible. Fortress, 1993; idem. Old Testament Theology in Canonical Context. Fortress, 1985; Clements, R. Loving One’s Neighbor: Old Testament Ethics in Context. University of London Press, 1992; Eichrodt, W. “The Effect of Piety on Conduct (Old Testament Morality).” Pages 316—79 in vol. 2 of Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. Baker. OTL. Westminster, 1967; Fowl, S., and L. Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life. Eerdmans, 1991; Hauerwas, S. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Ethic. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; idem. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. University of Notre Dame Press, 1983; Hays, R. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, and New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. HarperSanFran-cisco, 1996; Hempel, J. Das Ethos des Alten Testaments. BZAW 67. Topelmann, 1938; Janzen, W. Old Testament Ethics: A Paradigmatic Approach. Westminster John Knox, 1994; Knight, D. “Political Rights and Powers in Monarchic Israel.” Semeia 66 (1994): 93—118; Matera, F. New Testament Ethics: The Legacies of Jesus and Paul. Westminster John Knox, 1996; Nasuti, H. “Identity, Identification, and Imitation: The Narrative Hermeneutics of Israelite Law.” JLR 4 (1986): 9—23; Ogletree, T. The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics: A Constructive Essay. Fortress, 1983; Otto, E. Theologische Ethik des Alten Testaments. TW. Kohlhammer, 1994; Rodd, C. Glimpses of a Strange Land: