Biblical Assumptions
The striking and unitary vision of oikos (“household”) in ancient Christianity and the biblical assumption of the integrity of creation provide the grounds for the understanding and practice of economics and economic ethics in Scripture.
The vision of oikos. The word economy (Gk. oikonomia) shares the same Greek root, oikos, with ecology and ecumenics. The word oikos refers to the house and household, whether the family household, the “households of faith” of the early Christians, or the earth itself as the world house. The oikoumene (whence “ecumenics” and “ecumenical”) is the whole inhabited earth or imperial claims to it. (The Roman Empire at the time of Jesus and Paul referred to itself as the oikoumene.) The emphasis of oikoumene falls on the unity of the household. All belong to the same family. This unity lies across the expanse of inhabited terrain. Thus did the Christian households of faith (oikoi) include a conscious effort to stand for the whole church in each place, scattered as it was on three continents around the Mediterranean basin. This identity and mission required instruction, called oikeiosis, and borrowed from the Stoic notion of appropriation. It was appropriation in the sense of making something one’s own, whether as a member of the family, society, the human race collectively, or the world (cosmos) as a whole.
The Christian householder was the oikonomos, literally “the economist,” the one who knows the house rules (oikos + nomos [“law”]) and cares for the material well-being of its members. Thus, oikonomos sometimes is translated as “steward” or “trustee.”
Household dwellers are oikeioi. Their task too is the mutual upbuilding of community and sharing the gifts of the Spirit for the common good (1 Cor. 12-13), a good that included meeting one another’s material needs (Acts 2:44). This is designated oikodome, the continual upbuilding of the oikos. Such care requires intimate knowledge of community structures and dynamics. It requires knowing the household’s laws and logic, which is exactly what “ecology” means (oikos + logos).
Oikos is, then, the root notion of economics, ecology, and ecumenics as interrelated dimensions of the same world. Economics involves knowing how things work and managing “home systems” (ecosystems) in such a way that the material requirements of the whole household of life (oikoumene) are met and sustained.
The integrity of creation. This ancient unitary Christian vision accords with the seamlessness, or integrity, of creation in the OT. The underlying assumption of the Scripture and teaching that Jesus knew is that creation is both the handiwork of God and the household of God. Creation is the dwelling place, the abode, of God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining Spirit; the transcendent God is “home” here, as are humans and all life. Early Christian theologians even referred to the way by which creation is upheld and redeemed as the “economy of God” (oikonomia tou theou).
The same seamlessness, or integrity, continues with the conviction that this vast cosmos is a shared home. All are born to belonging, and all—human beings and nonhuman creatures as well—are coinhabitants who live into one another’s lives and die into one another’s deaths in a complex set of relationships that sustain the life of creatures and the land.
Creation’s shared life and integrity are assumed everywhere in the Old and New Testaments. In the Genesis account, ’adam (“Adam”) is formed by God from fertile soil, ’adama (Gen. 2:7). The English equivalent is “human from humus.” There is a difference, however, since in the Genesis account all other creatures are also created from ’adama, and they share, with humans, the same breath of God that animates all life. Though differentiated by “kind” (Gen. 1:21), all creatures are also kin by virtue of their common origin and shared destiny.
Within this earthy humus order, human earth creatures are designated somere ’adama, “guardians of earth,” its custodians and preservers. “Stewards” can be an appropriate translation, provided it moves beyond “good management” to capture the Hebrew sense that humans belong to the land itself as those who serve it. “To till and keep” (le'obdah ulesamrah) the garden is the primordial task given to humans by God, the human vocation itself (Gen. 2:15). The Hebrew here connotes not only working the soil as a cultivator but also working for it, attending to its needs as creation worthy of service (Davis 31). This is economy and ecology combined as sacred work. Not by chance, the words cultivation, culture, and cultus (“worship”) share the same root.
When humans abdicate this task, and the integral relationship between God, fertile soil, and human earth creatures is broken by wayward humans, the ground itself is cursed (“because of you” says Gen. 3:17). The first of many instances of this violation of creation’s integrity is the death of Abel at the hands of Cain. Strikingly, it is not Adam and Eve who cry out, according to the text, but ’adama (Gen. 4:10). And the consequence of this primal violence is that the ground “will no longer yield to you its strength” (Gen. 4:12).
Cain’s response is further testimony to creation’s many-sided wholeness. To be alienated from ’adama is a punishment heavier than he can bear. “Today you have driven me away from the soil,” he says to God, “and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Gen. 4:14). Cain, alienated from his very origins, fertile soil, is homeless on earth and estranged from God.
Differently said, the biblical testimony is that the flourishing and degradation of human life is of a piece with the flourishing and degradation of the land. The human economy belongs to the economy of nature as part and parcel of it. Human injustice bears destructive consequences for the whole community of life, whereas righteous living yields abundance. Economic, ecological, ecumenical justice assures the survival and continuation of flourishing life.
The first covenant in Scripture strikes this same chord. Usually identified as the Noahide covenant, it is better understood as God’s covenant with earth. It comes after the escalation of human violence from Cain to Lamech causes God to regret the course of the initial creation and begin anew, after the flood. The first covenant accompanies this new beginning. “God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh’ ” (Gen. 9:12-15a). Noah, strikingly identified as “a man of the soil” (Gen. 9:20), hears the covenant with creation articulated by God no fewer than four times, the last of which underscores yet again this covenant as the covenant “between me and all flesh that is on the earth” (Gen. 9:17).
The flourishing and degradation of the earth hinges on keeping or violating this divine covenant with creation—a theme as strong in the prophets as it is in Genesis. The prophets’ discourse for this commonly centers on the life of righteousness. Righteousness is both “inner” and “outer,” a matter of character and conduct, and of practice and policy as well as piety. Righteousness is synonymous with a just way of life, right living in good institutions. It is right relations with all that is—God, one another, the land, and the rest of nature. Righteousness achieved is known by its fruits—the fullest possible flourishing of all life.
A passage from Jeremiah must suffice to illustrate the harmony and the abundance that flow from keeping creation’s covenant and observing the ways that God has commanded Israel. This passage envisions all nations streaming to Zion’s mountain, itself rising from the redeemed plain.
They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. (Jer. 31:12)
Paralleling the visions of creation redeemed are the prophetic warnings of consequences that flow from the violation of creation. In a likely reference to the consequences of violating the covenant of God with earth (“the everlasting covenant” of Gen. 9), Isaiah writes,
The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth.
The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. . . .
The city of chaos is broken down,
every house is shut up so that no one can enter.
There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine; all joy has reached its eventide; the gladness of the earth is banished.
Desolation is left in the city
the gates are battered into ruins.
For thus it shall be on the earth and among the nations,
as when an olive tree is beaten,
as at the gleaning when the grape harvest is ended. (Isa. 24:4-5, 10-13)
Hosea’s account of what happens goes like this:
Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
(Hos. 4:1-3)
Not to be missed in this consistent account of earth’s flourishing or destruction at human hands is the presence or absence of economic justice. Selling the righteous for silver, the needy for a pair of shoes, and trampling “the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” while pushing “the afflicted out of the way” (Amos 2:6-7) is the kind of exploitation that cries out to heaven and elicits from God a refusal to accept even the sacred offerings of worship: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21).
Isaiah has different words for much the same:
Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!
The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant. (Isa. 5:8-9)
But this is not all. The work of economics and of economic ethics, which in biblical terms means cultivating the material conditions for the continuation and flourishing of life, goes beyond the creation and covenant accounts of Genesis and the warnings of ecological collapse and the visions of abundance in the prophetic literature. Torah economic legislation is extensive and includes the Sabbath, sabbatical, and Jubilee laws that mandate rest for the animals and the land together with human laborers. This allows the economy of nature to regenerate and renew on its own terms (see Lev. 25). The wisdom literature, to choose yet another body of texts, argues that material moderation is good, inequities are destructive, and enough is best. “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God” (Prov. 30:8b-9). And the Bible closes, after the radical critique of imperial Rome by John of Patmos, with redeemed nature in the new Jerusalem. Trees of life line the banks of crystalline waters that flow from the throne of God, with fruit for each month and their leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:1-2). Not least, “nothing accursed will be found there” (Rev. 22:3). Here is the reversal of the ground cursed by human violence in Gen. 4. John’s images nicely capture the integrity of creation reflected in the early Christian cosmology of oikos and the seamlessness of creation that marks Scripture from its opening to its close.
Modern Economics
With these biblical notes in hand, we turn to modern economics, the political economy of industrial capitalism (and, until 1989, of state-sponsored socialism). The year 1750 often is designated as the onset of the Industrial Revolution and modern economics because it marks the advent of that which made the modern industrial era possible: the use of accessible, compact, stored energy in the form of fossil fuels—first coal, then oil, then natural gas, and now all three.
Fossil fuels meant compact, stored energy. Armed with appropriate technologies and longdistance trade, humans no longer needed to live, as their ancestors did, in sync with the rhythms of renewable energy sources and their requirements— solar cycles, hydrological cycles, and the imperatives of the land and seasons in one’s home locale. With stored, compact energy humans could create a built environment to replace the more immediate dependence on the unbuilt environment, which, in that fateful split-off of modernity, came to be called “the natural environment,” as though human beings and the built environment of the human oikos were of another order altogether, no longer nature. “Organization” displaced “nature” and “city” displaced “country” as the dominant human environment, habitat, and home, or so we thought. In fact, what we came to think was “human” and “nature” as different entities and realms.
Fossil fuels thus made possible the transformation from “an organic, ever-renewing, land-based economy to an extractive, nonrenewing, industrial economy,” the one that now reigns as “a controlling presence throughout the entire planet” (T. Berry, Evening Thoughts, 107). Fossil fuels also made it possible to solve one of the three nagging problems that every economy must address: production.
No human economy has come close to solving the problem of production for so many people as has industrial/postindustrial capitalism. None has been so successful in harnessing Prometheus’s gift of fire for mastering nature and subjugated cultures for human well-being (some humans far more than others, to be sure). None has generated wealth on a scale that even approaches modern economic orders. The very definition of a “mature” modern economy is an economy of growth that sustains high mass consumption (Rostow). And no economy has so effectively channeled other forces—science, technology, culture, law—into a way of life whose very understanding of the good life is the life of goods created and used in a world of our own design and making. For good reason, then, the modern era became synonymous with progress, and progress was associated above all with economic growth and prosperity.
But all this came at a price. On this end of the great transformation from feudal to modern, nature is no longer conceived as a communion of subjects, as it was in the primordial visions of humans and as it remains in the traditions of some indigenous peoples. Nature is a collection of commodified objects readied for human use (Swimme and Berry 243).
This change in conceptual worlds, economic practices, and a way of life was famously described by Max Weber as “the disenchantment of the world.” The world was no longer “enchanted”; that is, it no longer bore mystery, spirit, divinity, or holiness. Nature was rendered a utilitarian object, a vast repository of resources, rather than a community of living subjects. Its meaning and value, as object and commodity, were thus separated from the meaning and value attached to human lives. In fact, humans here conferred value on nature, in contrast to an earlier notion that humans discovered its inherent or intrinsic value as cocreation. This setting apart of nature for its unqualified utilitarian use, together with its treatment at the hands of modern economic processes, belonged to a broader process of modernity that Weber called “rationalization.” Rationalized actions and interactions are motivated by and based on considerations of efficiency and calculation. This contrasts with actions and interactions motivated by and based on custom and tradition (as sufficient authority). While rationalized organization of life has taken place in many domains of the human enterprise as a mark of modernity, it has triumphed in economic life above all (Weber). The consequence is devalued and secularized nature, subject to the canons of calculation and efficiency and the ways of corporate business and commodification for market exchange. Nature became “it” rather than “thou,” with the primary relationship to human subjects being that of use.
The rationalized, disenchanted world made possible by fossil fuels and the industrial notion of nature as objective resources allowed a way of life built on two illusions. Modern humans thought that they could bypass the rhythms and requirements of nature that preindustrial populations had to observe and adapt to season in and season out. They could have their own built environment, created in their own image, and soon they rarely even bothered to ask about nature’s demands for regeneration and renewal on its own complex, leisurely, and nonnegotiable terms. Moderns seemingly forgot that every human economy is always and everywhere a part of the oikonomia of nature.
Bypassing nature’s rhythms and requirements for its own regeneration on its own terms made possible the second illusion: modern humans could bring nature under their control and liberate humankind from futility and toil. We now know that planetary processes are not just more complex than we think; they probably are more complex than we can ever think. They certainly are more complex than humans can master and control.
Life lived inside these two illusions—when coupled with massive supplies of stored energy and the powers of modern science and technology tied to the industrial paradigm of extraction, production, and consumption, exclusively for human ends— has had the following consequences for nature’s economy. The rest of planetary nature, beyond human beings, no longer has an independent life, since no precincts of other-than-human nature, from genes to grasslands to glaciers, are exempt now from human impact and change. Humans have become one of evolution’s “forcings” and are among the planet’s weather makers. So dramatic is the shift in relationships between humans and Earth that Earth now belongs to the human story, whereas for all of human history until the modern era, humans belonged to Earth’s story. Nature now belongs to the empire of its most aggressive species. It is not an obedient subject, however.
The uninvited blow to both these illusions of modern political economy—that humans can control nature, and nature’s own rhythms and requirements can be bypassed in favor of human organization and habitat—is accelerated, with extreme climate change resulting in the decline of every major life system. Climate change, itself a consequence of burning fossil fuels on a scale that we now know has destabilized both the atmosphere and the biosphere, is the most far-reaching event to happen to the planet in thousands of years. Present and coming changes to the planet and its economy are comparable to the changes of a major geological era, yet they are happening within the span of a human lifetime and at the hands of humans. The plundering power of the modern global economy has made this possible, as had the consuming power of a population that grew from less than two billion to more than six billion within the course of a single century.
Climate change and ecosystemic degradation have also brought into sharp relief the failure of modern economics to adequately address two areas every economy must: distribution and sustainability.
Distribution. The modern economy sits inside a world first globalized in the wake of Columbus in the Age of Discovery. Here was the first wave by which the economy went global. It did so as the movement of conquest and colonization, commerce and Christianity across the two great oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific. These four—conquest and colonization, commerce and Christian missionizing—were viewed together by conquering European powers as “civilization,” which then took up residence in the form of neo-European societies planted on all continents except Antarctica. As this vast network of settlement and trade eventually became the new economy of industrialized capitalism and socialism, it became the means by which mass wealth was generated in some quarters while mass poverty was generated in others. The benefits of the globalizing economy took the form of unprecedented affluence unequally distributed both within and between nations and regions. Reform movements to address modern social and economic injustice sprang up from the very beginnings of capitalism’s injustice. They continue to this day. Fair distribution has yet to be achieved. The poverty of billions remains, despite unprecedented powers of production.
Sustainability. Attention to sustainability exposes the mismatch of what Wendell Berry calls “the Big Economy” (the modern human economy) and “the Great Economy” (the economy of nature). These economies suffer a fateful mismatch of metabolisms (“metabolism” refers to the physical and chemical processes necessary to sustain life).
Nature’s economy is the first, fundamental, and sustaining condition of human lives and all other lives. Every human economy is always, everywhere, and absolutely dependent on nature’s economy. It is inevitably part of nature’s economy and subject
to its dynamics, possibilities, and limits. Yet the embeddedness of the big (human) economy in nature’s great economy hardly made an appearance in modern economic theory or practice until recently. Brilliant economists, business leaders, and politicians thus worried about economic growth without worrying about water, for example, or without paying attention to a warming atmosphere and encroaching habitat destruction. Species extinction, to choose another example, was never a topic in economic theory, and biodiversity rarely was, despite its indispensable role. These subjects did not fit the worldview and metabolism of dynamic global capitalism, with its outsize appetite, its focus on short-haul gains, its hyperactive product innovation and turnover, its growth-seeking markets, its drive for profits, and its assumption that nature’s value is that of resources capable of commodification for market exchange. Such metabolism works in ways that outstrip the metabolism of nature’s economy, a metabolism that is enormously intricate, without beginning and without end, complex, interlaced, slow, nonlinear, and long-haul. And it was the modern economy’s unconstrained use of fossil fuels that let us change the metabolism of the human economy so dramatically as to escalate production and consumption to levels that are unsustainable for nature. (If Alan Durning is correct, global consumer classes produced and consumed as many goods and services in the half century following 1950 as did people throughout the entire period of history prior to that date [Durning 38].) Yet nobody other than indigenous persons spoke up to say that modern progress cannot be genuine progress if it is progress borrowed against the health of the Earth and the well-being of future generations.
The Present Transition
The mismatch of economic metabolisms, revealed by climate change and degraded life systems, forces the question of whether the current economy of global capitalism can be “ecologized” on a mass, “ecumenical” scale. While the answer is not yet clear, the need for an economic transition out of the fossil-fuel interlude is clear. The “great work” of this and coming generations, to use Thomas Berry’s words, is to effect “the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans [are] present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner” (T. Berry, Great Work, 3). Or, to recall the foregoing treatment of the Christian vision of oikos, the question is whether Earth’s global human economy can be rendered compatible with ecumenical and ecological Earth.
If such compatibility is to be achieved, major shifts in economics and economic ethics are needed.
The aim of economic life will need to shift from maximizing the production of goods and services to a three-part agenda of production, relatively equitable distribution, and ecological regenera-tivity. All economic activity will need to operate within the ecological limits of the planet. This means that all economic activity will be ecologically sustainable at minimum and regenerative at best. “Eco-nomics” replaces economics and ecology by joining both.
The economic paradigm will reject growth and high consumption as the lone indicator of mature economies. This paradigm does not preclude growth as a good, but it does insist that growth be ecologically sustainable or regenerative for the long term, that it reduce rather than increase the wealth and income gaps within and between nations and regions (climate change will exacerbate these inequalities, with those contributing least to climate change probably suffering the most), and that it bolster rather than undermine local communities and cultures to draw wisely from their cultural and biological diversity.
The new economic paradigm will also reject freedom as unrestrained political and market individualism and will cultivate freedom as thriving in community in ways that contribute both to personal well-being and the common good.
The chief obstacles to an effective transition from the fossil-fuel era will not likely be technological. Sustainable and regenerative technologies already exist in part and can be elicited with the proper political-economic incentives. The chief obstacles will be the political, economic, and sociocultural dimensions of ways of life that remain addicted to fossil fuels, fail to recognize the limits of planetary systems, assume that happiness and fulfillment are based on never-ending material consumption of goods and services, and think and invest for short-term rather than long-term ends in a political economy that operates with a metabolism different from that of nature.
An effective transition must also take into account the well-being of future generations, the future generations of both human and other life. Edith Brown Weiss’s discussion of “generational rights” is suggestive as a way to answer the ethical question of what one generation owes the next. She posits three principles for intergenerational equity that can be guiding economic principles. Each generation “should be required to conserve the diversity of the natural and cultural resource base” so that future generations have the means to exercise their values and solve their problems. This is the “conservation of options” principle. Each generation should also be required “to maintain the quality of the planet so that it is passed on in no worse condition than that in which it was received.” This is the “conservation of quality” principle. Each generation should provide its members with “equitable rights of access to the legacy of past generations and should conserve this access for future generations.” This is the “conservation of access” principle (Brown Weiss 202).
In the end, the most basic issue for economics and economic ethics is how we live, and for what; it is at this crucial juncture that moral and religious convictions and commitments are vital to a successful transformation and transition. The answer does not lie in trying to retrieve and replicate the economy and economic ethics of the biblical communities. Theirs was a pastoral world initially and its urbanized versions later. The planet was large and richly endowed, with a small human population. Ours is an industrial and postindustrial planet—“hot, flat, crowded,” humanly dominated and environmentally degraded (Friedman). That said, the oikos conception of Earth, with creation’s integrity at its core, is perhaps more timely than ever, given its understanding of the interrelated domains of ecology, economy, and earth ecumenicity. Certainly, a spirituality and ethic for the long haul is needed, one that receives life as a gift of the Creator, knows our (humus) place in creation, and knows as well the significance of our striving, even in the face of inevitable corruptions, losses, and defeats. Not least, the very purpose of economics in the biblical world remains the same and carries new force on this side of modern economics: to cultivate and meet the material conditions for the continuation of life.
See also Capitalism; Creation Ethics; Ecological Ethics; Globalization; Jubilee; Land; Markets; Materialism; Population Policy and Control; Sabbath; Stewardship; Technology; Wealth; World Poverty, World Hunger
Bibliography
Berry, T. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community. Ed. M. Tucker. Sierra Book Club, 2006; idem. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, 1999; Berry, W. “Two Economies.” Pages 54-75 in Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. North Point Press, 1987; Brown Weiss, E. “Our Rights and Obligations to Future Generations for the Environment.” AJIL 84 (1990): 198-207; Davis, E. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge University Press, 2009; Durning, A. How Much Is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth. Earthscan, 1992; Friedman, T. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution— and How It Can Renew America. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008; Rostow, W The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1990; Swimme, B., and T. Berry. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. Harper Collins, 1992; Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.
Larry L. Rasmussen
Ecumenism is the work and search for the unity of Christian churches. The term ecumenism derives from the Greek word oikoumene (e.g., Luke 2:1; Acts 11:28), which means “the whole inhabited world.” Closely related to this word is the use of the term ecumenical with reference to ancient “ecumenical councils” such as that of Nicea (325) and the “ecumenical” patriarchate (of Constantinople).
Biblical Vision of Unity
The prayer of Jesus in John 17:21 for the unity of his followers based on the unity between the Father and the Son, “so that the world may believe,” is the biblical passage most often used in regard to ecumenism. It highlights the integral relation between mission and ecumenism as well as the trinitarian basis of unity. Another key NT text is Eph. 4:4-6, the most elaborate account of the unity of the church. The idea of the oneness of the people of God is based on the similar OT idea of the oneness of their God (Deut. 6:4).
The NT often speaks of the church’s unity with the help of the term koinonia, usually translated as “fellowship” (Acts 2:42; 1 John 1:3) or “sharing” (Phil. 3:10). It signifies sharing at spiritual, sacramental, social, emotional, and economic levels.
There is a dynamic tension in the NT between the idea of the unity of the one church of Jesus Christ and the plurality of (local) churches. From the beginning of the church there has been a plurality of expressions of Christian faith. The ancient creeds declare faith in one (holy, apostolic, and catholic) church despite rampant divisions (Nicene Creed [381]), a conviction having its ultimate reference point in the eschatological vision of the mutual indwelling of God and God’s people (Rev. 21:3).
Ecumenical Movement
While the roots of ecumenical consciousness go far back in history, exemplified by Cyprian’s Unity of the Catholic Church (third century), the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 marks the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement. The establishment of the World Council of Churches in 1948—“a fellowship of churches” rather than a church—involved a coming together of missionary, doctrinal (Faith and Order [1927]), and socioethical (Life and Work [1925]) initiatives. Much of the ecumenical work also happens through bilateral and multilateral dialogues between churches, other ecumenical initiatives, and grassroots ecumenism in local churches and among individual Christians.
The ultimate goal of the ecumenical movement, “visible unity,” is ambiguous. Among the models of unity the most obvious is “organic unity,” the merging together of churches. Currently, the most promising one is “unity in reconciled diversity.” Whatever “visible unity” may mean, all agree that it does not mean the kind of “world church” that would subsume all churches under one entity. Common witness and service, mutual acknowledgment of ministries, and the sharing of sacramental fellowship are integral parts of the goal of visible unity.
While in its most common senses the goal of ecumenical work is the unity of the Christian churches, there are those who also advocate the idea of the unity of all humankind.
See also Ecclesiology and Ethics; Ephesians; Holy Spirit; Koinonia; Love, Love Command; Reconciliation
Bibliography
Kinnamon, M., and B. Cope, eds. The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices. Eerdmans, 1997; Lossky, N., et al., eds. Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement. WCC Publications, 1991; Meyer, H. That All May Be One: Perceptions and Models of Ecumenicity. Eerdmans, 1999; Pannenberg, W. “Unity of the Church—Unity of Mankind: A Critical Appraisal of a Shift in Ecumenical Direction.” Mid-Stream 21 (October 1982): 485-90; “World Council of Churches.” http://www .oikoumene.org/.
Veli-Matti Karkkainen
Egalitarianism is the belief in the equality of all persons regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or age because all persons are created in the image of God. Unlike in hierarchy, where status and privilege are ascribed based on differences, egalitarianism advocates that all individuals are owed dignity and opportunities to utilize their talents and skills for self-fulfillment and to contribute to the greater good of societies. Commitments to egalitarianism extend into policies and practices that acknowledge and protect human dignity, guarantee fundamental human rights, and provide equal access to economic and social goods necessary for human flourishing. Egalitarianism is confronted with conflicting notions of equality and a recognition that people differ in abilities, skills and talents, and aptitudes. However, egalitarianism challenges the prejudicial nature of these differences, which creates hierarchies that attribute value and privilege to certain persons while excluding others based on differences.
Egalitarianism is informed by a biblical-theological narrative that affirms the fundamental equality of all persons. Humanity’s creation in the image of God is a critical starting point (Gen. 1:27). While there are disputes as to what the image of God is, at its most basic level it implies that God created humans, and that God bestows dignity and value on humanity that must be recognized by all human beings. Egalitarians affirm that men and women are created equal by God, not just in essence but in status, and stand in mutual, nonhierarchical relationships with each other and in their responsibilities to care for the created order (Gen. 1:26-31; 2:18-25). The first humans function as types for God’s intentions in all human relationships. People are equal before God and in relationship to other persons. Moreover, humans are created in and for social relationships and communities, the maintenance of which requires the full participation of all persons in using their gifts and talents for the common good. The first humans were given responsibility to care for the creation with no hierarchical differentiation in status in carrying out their God-given responsibilities (Gen. 1:26-30). Egalitarianism is also informed by overarching themes of the NT, particularly Jesus’ elevation of women, liberation for the poor, and the confronting of divisive racial barriers. Jesus interacted directly with women and addressed women as individuals, including them in the community of disciples (Luke 8:1-3; 10:38-41; John 4:1-26). Jesus involved himself with those on the margins of society, such as Samaritans, prostitutes, disabled persons, and those with diseases that made them social outcasts (e.g., Matt. 4:23-25; 8:1-4; 21:14-17; Luke 7:36-50; 17:11-19; 19:1-9). In the new community of disciples, gender, class, racial, and ethnic barriers were challenged by the example of Jesus and the moral demands of Christian faith for practicing koinonia (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37; 6:1-6; 10:1-22; 15:1-30). Although it appears that the biblical writers sometimes accommodated gender, racial, and class barriers, egalitarians believe that the overall direction of Scripture requires a radical shift in perspective that acknowledges the fundamental equality of all persons, especially in the church, as summarized by the apostle Paul: “There is no longer J ew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
Egalitarianism has been a particularly contested ideal in many churches between hierarchalists and complementarians on the one hand, and egalitarians on the other, usually centered on the relationships between husbands and wives and on women’s roles in ministry. Hierarchalists and complementarians interpret a divinely created and sanctioned hierarchy of men and women in the creation accounts, whereas egalitarians affirm a divinely created and intended mutuality between men and women as the more proper interpretation of the creation narratives in Genesis. In regard to marriage, instead of the subordination of wives to husbands, egalitarians believe that the ideal in Scripture is mutuality (Eph. 5:21). Of particular importance for egalitarianism is the belief that God calls women to use their gifts in ministry, with no restrictions based on gender, for the good of the church.
See also Equality; Gender; Headship; Image of God; Justice; Women, Status of
Bibliography
Bauckham, R. “Egalitarianism and Hierarchy in the Bible.” Pages 116-27 in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives. Westminster John Knox, 2002; Mill, J. S. “The Subjection of Women.” Pages 123229 in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill. Modern Library, 2002; Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1972; Van Leeuwen, M. Gender and Grace: Love, Work and Parenting in a Changing World. InterVarsity, 1990; Webb, W Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. InterVarsity, 2001.
Wyndy Corbin Reuschling
Emancipation involves both terminology and thematic development in Scripture. Theologically, in the OT, emancipation largely pertains to God’s liberation of God’s chosen people related to covenant, land, and relationship in perpetuity (Gen. 12:1-3). Tension, turmoil, and trepidation occur when Israel/Judah disobeys God and divine judgment ensues, wherein Israel winds up in bondage or exile (Judg. 2; 6; 20; 23; Jer. 7; 52). In the NT, Jesus Christ comes as anti-imperial liberator, who as God’s son announces God’s rule and the good news: the resurrected Christ comes to emancipate, to set people free from sin (Rom. 6; 8). To emancipate means to liberate from control, restraint, bondage, involuntary servitude, or another’s power, to set free from controlling influence, traditional mores, or beliefs. To emancipate involves liberation whereby one becomes manumitted from slavery or servitude. In Scripture, emancipation or lack thereof results from divine and/or human choice.
God chooses to exercise his sovereign freedom; that is, God selects and elects, thus emancipates, whom he chooses, for his purposes. For Paul, citing Exod. 33:19, God’s election reflects God’s deepest character of mercy, for divine injustice is an impossibility (Rom. 9:14-15): divine righteousness and divine wrath are two sides of one revelation. Human choice to sin exacts a problematic human predicament, which itself rejects God. Human misconduct leads to human self-destruction. God does not coerce, but instead allows humans to follow their own desires, and the resulting alienation estranges persons from God and neighbor. Where the law informs humankind of sin, only God can emancipate, can provide salvific righteousness.
Sometimes emancipation evolves as deliverance: a response to bondage (Gen. 37; 39-50). At the end of Joseph’s saga, God remains hidden and responds during the exodus event, when God chooses to do so, revealing his radical grace and freedom: the source of divine deliverance of those who suffer, are exploited, oppressed, poor (Exod. 3:8; Ps. 12:5). God emancipates Israel, his elect, from Egypt’s oppressive despot and toward new covenantal relationship with God. Throughout Exodus, God purposefully hardens Pharaoh’s heart and punishes all of Egypt, guilty and innocent alike (Exod. 12:29), problematizing divine liberation; after all, did Israel’s God not also create the Egyptians and Canaanites?
Intriguingly, Scripture does not explicitly state that slavery is wrong, and many cultures have used the Bible to justify involuntary servitude. Biblical laws in Deut. 15:12-18; Exod. 21:2-11; Lev. 25:39-45 provide parameters regarding dynamics of enslavement, especially regarding debt, along with prescriptions regarding the Sabbath Year and the Jubilee Year. Jubilee begins on the Day of Atonement and occurs every fifty years. In Sabbath and Jubilee Years issues of property and family relate to personal liberty and thus to liberty for the nation. Even in Philemon, Paul does not explicitly critique slavery, but rather invites Philemon to treat Onesimus as more than a slave, as a beloved brother (v. 16). Paul sees freedom as an opportunity to serve, even self-sacrifice for others. The price of this sacrifice may be costly, as he connects freedom to the cross. Although this is problematic for those often made subservient, Paul may be suggesting so-called traditionally feminine values for everyone. Personal and communal emancipation calls for living balanced, just lives, being neither victim nor perpetrator. For the faithful, emancipation signifies living as an authentic self for others out of the freedom of being a child of God.
See also Freedom; Jubilee; Liberation; Philemon; Slavery
Bibliography
Birch, B. Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life. Westminster John Knox, 1991; Campbell, W “The Freedom and Faithfulness of God in Relation to Israel.” JSNT 13 (1981): 27-45; Osiek, C. “Galatians.” Pages 423-27 in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. C. Newsom and S. Ringe. Westminster John Knox, 1998; Schenker, A. “The Biblical Legislation on the Release of Slaves: The Road from Exodus to Leviticus.” JSOT 78 (1998): 23-41; Stagg, F. “The Plight of Jew and Gentile in Sin: Romans 1:18-3:20.” RevExp 73 (1976): 401-13.
Cheryl Kirk-Duggan
Emigration See Aliens, Immigration, and Refugees
There is nothing ethereal or otherworldly about the Bible: it depicts God’s relationship with the world, particularly with Israel and the church, in all its messiness and materiality. And so it is no surprise that every human emotion (and presumably every divine emotion, although this is less certain) makes an appearance in the Bible.
For millennia in the West, emotions have been seen as opposed to reason and clear thinking. Recently, however, scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy and neuroscience have begun to press the case for the vital importance of emotions to rational thought and moral decision. Indeed, for these scholars, appropriate emotional responses are necessary for, and in part constitutive of, good moral decision-making.
Many passages in the Bible support the crucial importance of emotions for ethics both for human beings and for God. In Exod. 2, for example, Pharaoh’s daughter is moved by the sight of the infant Moses and delivers him from death. Similarly in the NT, Jesus on several occasions acts out of compassion (Matt. 20:34; Mark 1:41; John 11:33), as does a Samaritan in one of his parables (Luke 10:33). One must be cautious in considering the ethical implications of the biblical material, however. Although many posit that emotions are universal to human experience, the expression of emotion (sentiment) is culturally determined. As such, some expressions of emotion appear with only certain kinds of subjects in the
Bible. For example, men and God are overtaken by anger, whereas women and subordinates are not (van Wolde).
Considerable attention has been focused on the emotions associated with God in the Bible. God’s initial election of Israel, for example, is born of an inexplicable love that cannot be reduced to “reasonable” explanations (Deut. 7:7-8; Hos. 11:1). God’s anger, though troubling to many readers of the Bible, is ethically significant: the divine wrath is closely associated with God’s passion for justice (Fretheim). God’s anger at injustice (a frequent catalyst for divine wrath) reveals the pathos of God—that is, God’s intimate involvement in the world. If God is not angered by the consequences of human sinfulness, then God apparently has little interest in the fate of the world.
See also Affections; Anger; Empathy; Love, Love Command; Moral Agency; Passions
Bibliography
Damasio, A. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Quill, 2000 [1994]; Fretheim, T. “Theological Reflections on the Wrath of God in the Old Testament.” HBT 24 (2002): 1-26; Lapsley, J. “Feeling Our Way: Love for God in Deuteronomy.” cBq 65 (2003): 350-69; Nuss-baum, M. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990; idem. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001; van Wolde, E. “Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions: Anger and Love in the Hebrew Bible.” BibInt 16 (2008): 1-24.
Jacqueline E. Lapsley
Empathy (which entered into English from the German Einfuhlung, “feeling into”) is the emotional appreciation of another’s feelings, thoughts, and experiences, yet without obliterating the line between self and other. It does not have long or deep roots in the philosophical tradition, only appearing relatively recently in nineteenth-century German discussions of aesthetics and in the romantic tradition. Many scholars from diverse fields today, however, such as Martha Nussbaum in philosophy and Antonio Damasio in neuroscience, take empathy to be necessary for good moral decision-making; indeed, it is partially constitutive of rationality. Pity differs from empathy in that it designates a desire to see someone better off, but generally it does not entail entering imaginatively into the subjective experience of another; it frequently involves an attitude of condescension.
Although many people show empathy in numerous OT passages (e.g., Pharaoh’s daughter in Exod. 2:6), it is God’s empathy for his people that is most powerfully on display in the OT. Divine empathy for Israel’s suffering is apparent from the very beginning of the relationship between Yahweh and corporate Israel: God tells Moses to confront Pharaoh because “I have seen the misery . . . ; I have heard their cry . . . I know their sufferings” (Exod. 3:7; cf. 2:25). Later, during the exile, the nadir of Israel’s corporate life, the empathy of God is movingly expressed: “They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. [God] who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water” (Isa. 49:10 TNIV [the NRSV wrongly translates raham as “pity”]). God “feels into” Israel’s suffering and is acting to end it (cf. Isa. 49:13, 15).
The NT continues this attention to empathizing with those who suffer. Jesus feels compassion (e.g., splangchnizomai) for both crowds of people (Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; Mark 6:34; 8:2) and individuals (Matt. 20:34; Mark 1:41; Luke 7:13) in distress on numerous occasions. Sometimes they are in distress because they are leaderless and in confusion (Matt. 9:36; Mark 6:34), sick or afflicted (Matt. 14:14; 20:34; Mark 1:41), or hungry (Matt. 15:32; Mark 8:2). In the parable involving the Samaritan and the victim of an assault and robbery, it is significantly the reviled Samaritan who shows empathy for the injured man along the roadside (Luke 10:33) and is a role model for the listener. Likewise in the Pauline Letters there is a strong emphasis on an empathic identification with the suffering of others, in imitation of Christ. Christian theology draws on the rich and abundant images of empathy throughout both Testaments for its theological reflection on the identity of both God, who cares passionately about the divinely created world, and of human beings, who are to imitate that empathic care.
See also Compassion; Emotion; Love, Love Command; Mercy; Moral Agency; Passions
Bibliography
Jervis, A. At the Heart of the Gospel: Suffering in the Earliest Christian Message. Eerdmans, 2007; Nussbaum, M. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Jacqueline E. Lapsley
If we treat ends as the goods that one pursues and means as the actions that one takes in pursuing them, then two truths have always followed. First, nobody pursuing the project of practical moral reasoning utterly ignores one or the other. Even the fiercest focus on one or the other is softened by the project of putting means-ends reasoning to practical moral use.
Second, however, means and ends sit in tension
with each other: a good end does not justify any
means being used to achieve it, and purposeful inattention to the consequences of an action is tantamount to refusing accountability. People are called neither to treat good ends as justifying any means nor to do right that evil may result.
Scripture attests to an emphasis on means in some places (e.g., the law given at Sinai and Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount) and an emphasis on ends in other places (e.g., David’s claim on the holy bread in 1 Sam. 21:1-7 and Jesus’ teaching that a tree is known by its fruit in Matt. 12:33-37). However, it would be hermeneutically naive to uproot these texts from their larger contexts, theologically distorting to treat any one of them as the lens through which to view all biblical teachings on morality, and, therefore, ethically misguided to use them in defense of a particular method of moral engagement.
In the face of the second truth, many scholars have shaped systems for moral engagement that emphasize one far more than the other. The clearest example of a means orientation is found in the work of Immanuel Kant, who recognized that the desire for a good did not justify it. Founding his moral system on a process of a priori reasoning, Kant emphasized the obligation to act only in such a way that one could will that one’s action could be universalized. And the clearest example of an ends orientation is the thought of John Stuart Mill, who argued that one should always act in such a way as to produce the most good.
Though neither Kant nor Mill developed his system of moral reasoning in particularly theologically astute ways, there have been Christian ethicists whose moral projects functioned in ways analogous to those of Kant and Mill. Paul Ramsey, for instance, used the idea of covenant fidelity to advance a strongly means-oriented approach to Christian ethics, and Joseph Fletcher argued that a Christian always has the obligation to act in the way that produces the most love.
Over the past several decades, ethicists have returned to a focus on the first truth: means and ends interpenetrate each other. This has been due in part to the increased attention that new (or very old) forms of moral inquiry have received: feminist and liberationist ethicists, virtue ethicists, pragmatists, and persons influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr’s notion of “the responsible self” have contributed to new discussions about the complex interplay between means and ends as a way to avoid monistic reductionisms.
See also Consequentialism; Deontological Theories of Ethics; Divine Command Theories of Ethics; Justification, Moral; Responsibility; Teleological Theories of Ethics; Utilitarianism
Mark Douglas
The word enemy most frequently translates ’oyeb in Hebrew, meaning “one who hates.” In the NT, echthros is the only word translated “enemy,” and it is the consistent choice in the LXX, where it occurs more than four hundred times. Not formally defined in the canon, enemy is interpreted by rhetorical or poetic parallel with phrases such as “those who hate us” or “those who persecute you.” It is used of both personal and national enemies.
The love of enemies is both commanded and enacted by Jesus in the NT. The imperative is issued most famously in his Sermon on the Mount, where loving and praying for one’s enemies is offered as the crucial form of imitation that makes one a child of the heavenly Father (Matt. 5:44-45; cf. Luke 6:27-28, 35). Among the traditional “seven last words” of Christ on the cross is the prayer, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing,” recorded in some manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel (23:34). The parable that we call “the parable of the good Samaritan” takes much of its point from the traditional animosity between Jews and Samaritans, making the inclusion of enemies as neighbors to be loved the force of Jesus’ directive, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
However, admonitions to love enemies are not limited to the Gospels or even to the NT. Paul’s instructions for the treatment of enemies in Romans, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink” (12:20), are taken directly from Proverbs (25:21-22), which addresses not only conduct toward enemies but also inward attitudes toward them: “Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble” (24:17).
The general imperative is fleshed out in various stipulations of the law (e.g., “When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back” [Exod. 23:4]) and repeatedly shown in narrative—for example, the reconciliation between Esau and Jacob (Gen. 33:4); the reunion of Joseph with the brothers who had sold him into slavery (Gen. 45:5); the young girl stolen into slavery who advised that Naaman the Syrian go to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy (2 Kgs. 5:2).
Above all other instances is the example of God’s own patient love for enemies, manifested not only in his ever-renewed mercy on unfaithful Israel but also in his readiness to embrace traditional rivals such as Egypt and Assyria (Isa. 19:18-25; Jonah). Finally, Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Rom. 5:8), having made ourselves enemies of God. As forgiven and reconciled people, Christians are made ambassadors of God and are entrusted with the work of reconciliation exemplified in the practice of loving enemies. However, the scope of this practice and its implications for public and political life are perennially contested.
See also Cruciformity; Love, Love Command; Neighbor, Neighbor Love; Sermon on the Mount
Bibliography
Cahill, L. Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory. Fortress, 1994; Jones, L. Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis. Eerdmans, 1996; Stassen, G. Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace. Westminster John Knox, 1992; Yoder, J. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 1994.
Sondra E. Wheeler
Environment See Ecological Ethics
Envy See Jealousy and Envy
Ephesians addresses a more general audience and a less specific situation than any of the undisputed Pauline Letters. By its time, arguments about the place of gentiles in the church had cooled, so the letter’s emphasis on unity is less polemical than what we find in Galatians. The arguments in Ephesians remain so general that many see it as a kind of circular letter. Its emphasis on unity makes Ephesians a letter that focuses on innerecclesial relations.
This ecclesial focus dominates the ethical outlook of Ephesians. The constant theme within its exhortations is conduct in relation to fellow believers. When the letter calls readers to tell the truth to their “neighbors,” the motivation is that “we are members of one another” (4:25). Ephesians does not attend to the effects that church members’ lives have on outsiders. This letter ties proper ethics to proper teaching; living the Christian life helps one maintain correct doctrine (4:13-16). Ethical behavior lies at the heart of Christian existence; the believer’s purpose is to do good works (2:10).
Most of the recommendations in Ephesians about Christian ethics are consistent with
first-century cultural values. Among the few places where it differs are its recommendation of humility as a virtue (4:2) and its commendation of manual labor (4:28). The household code in Ephesians exemplifies its acceptance of cultural structures; it adopts the cultural expectations of first-century household life but gives them Christian groundings. (Ephesians may address households in which the head of the household is a believer, which sets it apart from those addressed in Colossians and 1 Peter.) Ephesians differs from the surrounding culture in the grounds that it proffers more than in the values that it promotes.
Still, Ephesians insists that the church remain distinct from the world. Succumbing to vices contradicts the believer’s status as a participant in Christ (4:21). Believers must stop living as they did when they were “gentiles” or one of the “children of darkness” and must adopt a manner of life consistent with who God is and what God has done for them (4:17-18; 5:6-10). Thus, believers must forgive one another because God forgave them in Christ (4:32), and they must live in love because Christ loved them (5:2).
The emphasis in Ephesians on a distinctive manner of life promotes group solidarity by separating the church from the world. Perhaps Ephesians wants the church to differ from the world by actually living by the shared virtues and avoiding the acknowledged vices. This letter asserts that believers can live by higher standards because God enables them to do so. The number of times Ephesians calls believers saints (“holy ones”) (1:2, 15, 18; 2:19; 3:8, 18; 4:12; 5:3; 6:18 [additional references to holiness appear in 1:4; 2:21; 5:27]) demonstrates the importance that it gives to fulfilling the demand to live righteously. Other Pauline Letters regularly call believers “saints,” but none use this title as often as Ephesians does. Holy living is an essential element of Christian life for Ephesians.
The foundational admonition in Ephesians is “Be imitators of God, as beloved children” (5:1). Believers’ lives should reflect who God is. Calls to imitate a god were not uncommon among first-century moralists. Further, this exhortation fits the grounding of ethics found in OT passages
that urge the people to be holy because God is holy (e.g., Lev. 11:44; cf. 1 Pet. 1:16). Ephesians identifies Christ, particularly his self-giving death, as the clearest revelation of the character of God that believers are to imitate (4:32-5:2).
The partially realized eschatology of Ephesians comes to expression in its ethics. Believers put off the “old person” at conversion; now they must put on the “new person” that is appropriate to this new life. This “new person” is created by God in righteousness and purity (4:22-24). This notion coheres well with the initial and theme-setting exhortation of Eph. 4-6: “Live worthily of the calling with which you were called” (4:1). Living ethically is an essential element of a life that is consistent with what God in Christ has done for believers, whom God has made as “beloved children.”
See also Ecclesiology and Ethics; Eschatology and Ethics; Holiness; Household Codes; New Testament Ethics; Sanctification
Bibliography
Best, E. Essays on Ephesians. T&T Clark, 1997; Darko, D. No Longer Living as the Gentiles: Differentiation and Shared Ethical Values in Ephesians 4.17—6.9. LNTS 375. T&T Clark, 2008; Lincoln, A. Ephesians. WBC 42. Thomas Nelson, 1990; Malan, F. “Unity of Love in the Body of Christ: Identity, Ethics and Ethos in Ephesians.” Pages 257-87 in Identity, Ethics, and Ethos in the New Testament, ed. J. van der Watt. BZNW 141. De Gruyter, 2006.
Jerry L. Sumney
Liberal Western understandings of equality, while rooted in the classical period of Greece, are nonetheless distinctly modern. Articulated by late seventeenth-century philosophers (e.g., John Locke) and given momentum by the revolutionary democratic movements of the eighteenth century, the ideal of the inherent equality of all persons has achieved axiomatic status in Western politics (one person, one vote) and law (equal standing under the law). Yet the notion of equality remains complex and contested. Who is included in the “all men” said to be “created equal” by the Declaration of Independence? The “all” that originally comprised only white, male, heterosexual property owners has expanded only partially and with great struggle. In the early twenty-first century, addressing radical global economic inequalities may be among the most pressing issues concerning whom “all men” includes.
Womanist and feminist ethicists have, in differing but overlapping ways, raised questions: Equal to whom? Whose norms determine the nature of equality? They argue that formally equal legal standing and formally equal access to resources under laws and institutions created by and for men fail to take into account genuine differences (e.g., childbearing and childrearing experiences of women) and thus lead to substantially unequal results (Riggs).
Ethical, philosophical, and political debates also reflect deep differences concerning “what”
ought to be equal, opportunities or outcomes, and what equal opportunities or equal outcomes might look like, especially in the economic sphere. Also contested are how society ought to balance equality with other core ethical values such as efficiency and whether equality is of instrumental or intrinsic value.
As the term is used in modern and postmodern ethical discussion, equality is not a particularly biblical concept. Some scholarly reconstructions posit that gender roles in premonarchical Israelite tribal society or the earliest Jesus movement and house churches were more egalitarian than the biblical texts suggest (Meyers; Schussler Fiorenza), but during the monarchical and postmonarchical periods, when the OT was decisively shaped, ancient Israel was a patriarchal society. Its basic social unit was the bet ab, the “father’s household,” in which authority and status were distributed according to gender, generation, and class (free or slave, patron or client). Biblical laws, proverbial instructions, and narratives largely (though not entirely) encode gender, generational, class, and ethnic asymmetries that both reflect and support the patriarchal social order.
Nonetheless, some of the multiple voices that make up the Bible do provide support for ethical affirmations of human equality. The priestly assertion that God created humankind, male and female, in God’s own image stands as a radical and bedrock challenge to the attribution of unequal ontological status to any group. Paul refuses to validate traditional distinctions among Christians; baptismal unity results in the fundamental equality of Christians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, . . . slave or free, . . . male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
The OT understanding of land both contributes to and potentially corrects modern views of economic equality. In ancient Israel, land represented not only the basic economic resource but also security, freedom, and, in an experiential sense, identity (e.g., 1 Kgs. 21). Efforts to limit economic inequality are visible in the Sabbath laws that mandate the periodic cancellation of debts (Deut. 15:1-11) and limit the term of debtor slaves to seven years (Exod. 21:2-6; Deut. 15:12-18), and especially in the Jubilee laws. Leviticus 25 calls for land sold outside the family to be returned to its original owners every fifty years. Scholars debate whether these laws actually were put into practice, but certainly they do offer a clear vision of economic redistribution.
A NT model of shared resources is found in the book of Acts, which asserts that among believers, “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (4:32 [see also 4:34-37; 5:1-11]).
See also Egalitarianism; Feminist Ethics; Image of God; Jubilee; Koinonia
Bibliography
King, P., and L. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. LAI. Westminster John Knox, 2001; Locke, J. Second Treatise on Government. Ed. C. Macpherson. Hackett, 1980; Meyers, C. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. Oxford University Press, 1988; Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Harvard University Press, 1999; Riggs, M. Awake, Arise, and Act: A Womanist Call for Black Liberation. Pilgrim Press, 1994; Schussler Fiorenza, E. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. Crossroad, 1983.
Carolyn Pressler
Over the last century, eschatology’s influence on ethics has shifted several times in ways that parallel changes in biblical studies. These shifts can be traced in both disciplines’ treatments of “the kingdom of God.” Through the centuries, Christians have differed over the extent to which this kingdom is present or future, earthly or heavenly, and partially or fully actualized. Yet they have often forgotten that God’s kingdom was the major theme of Jesus’ ministry, until the nineteenth-century European “quest for the historical Jesus” rediscovered this fact.
Developmental Eschatology
The questers noticed that Jesus’ sayings pictured this kingdom both developing in history and arriving catastrophically at its end. Living in a Europe dominated by confidence in progress, they considered the latter sayings as primitive fancy but the former as Jesus’ true perspective. Albrecht Ritschl interpreted Jesus’ mission, person, and deity in terms of bringing God’s kingdom. Yet this kingdom of God sounded much like Kant’s moral “kingdom of ends” (where all persons are ends in themselves, not means for others’ ends). In many versions of this developmental eschatology, even Jesus’ radical teachings could be applied to society: those about nonviolence to ending war (Kant’s “perpetual peace”), those on accepting marginalized persons to expanding democracy, and Jesus’ critique of riches and favor for the poor to socialist and labor movements.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the kingdom of God had symbolized America’s destiny ever since the Puritans sought to erect it in the wilderness. Nineteenth-century evangelical revivals sparked numerous social changes—for example, abolition, prison reform, temperance, and suffrage. The millennium (Rev. 20:4-6), which most Americans had expected to arrive shortly after Jesus’ catastrophic return, was increasingly interpreted as a period of rapid worldwide progress that would precede his coming (this scheme was called “postmillennialism”).
By the late nineteenth century, the coming of God’s kingdom on earth became a dominant theme in American Christianity. Walter Rauschen-busch was incorporating German exegesis and theology into a “social gospel” for mainline churches. Here, God’s kingdom was dynamically present and future, but it was entirely earthly, lacking any historical consummation. On both sides of the Atlantic this developmental eschatology envisioned the West leading the way.
Catastrophic Eschatology
Late in the nineteenth century, however, this immanent eschatology received a double blow. In North America, many evangelicals, finding it excessively optimistic, turned to newly crystallized premillennial schemes. The most influential of these, dispensationalism, interpreted eschatological texts literally and noticed that NT “kingdom” language diminishes rapidly after the Synoptic Gospels. Dispensationalists reinstated catastrophic eschatology and insisted that neither Jesus’ teachings nor God’s kingdom could become operative in this evil world. Premillen-nialists downplayed or discouraged social-ethical activism and predicted that world affairs would worsen rapidly, heralding Jesus’ return.
Meanwhile in Europe, Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, and others were interpreting Jesus’ sayings in a far different but still fairly literal fashion. They also held that Jesus’ eschatology was catastrophic, but they considered him mistaken. Jesus intended his teachings only for a brief “interim” before the end, not as ethics for continuing societies. God’s kingdom, then, had no real significance for Christian ethics.
World War I seemed to vindicate both premil-lennialism and this shift in biblical studies. Europe was experiencing a cataclysm like the one that Jesus anticipated. But could some kind of ethics be retrieved even from this eschatology?
The answer was yes, although it was done by prioritizing neither God’s kingdom nor J esus’ teachings but rather the last judgment. As Karl Barth put it, God, first through Jesus and then through the war, had pronounced a decisive no against all human efforts to erect God’s kingdom, especially by the West. Nevertheless, God also pronounced a yes and bestowed a righteousness that humans could partially experience, but it was rooted in eternity and could not undergo continuous historical development. Barth and others largely transferred the judgment, negative and positive, from the historical future into the present and reduced its cosmic scope mainly to personal encounters.
According to Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus’ announcement of time’s end and eternity’s inbreaking had nothing to do with history’s flow. Properly demythologized, it meant that God can, in the present, undo the past that binds us existentially and set us free and open toward our individual futures. Bultmann and Barth insisted that God calls us to moral decisions in specific situations in concrete ways. General rules can never tell us how to decide.
Inaugurated Eschatology
The biblical theology movement. By the 1930s, however, Weiss and Schweitzer’s exegesis had long been under scrutiny. Hans Windisch noticed that some of Jesus’ radical teachings are not apocalyptic but rather are concrete wisdom sayings incorporated into an eschatological framework (e.g., Matt. 5:29-40, 44-45; 6:19-21, 25-31). C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias removed, as later accretions, most narrative and historical features from the Synoptic parables and claimed that Jesus taught not a catastrophic eschatology but rather a “realized” one. By the 1950s, most biblical scholars had concluded that God’s kingdom, for Jesus, was “already” inaugurated but “not yet” consummated. Consequently, his teachings held some significance for continuing historical life.
Many of these scholars, influenced by Barth and neoorthodoxy’s biblical orientation, were developing a “biblical theology.” Biblical theology stressed the unity—better, unity in diversity—of the entire Bible. God, it claimed, is revealed through history, not mainly in moments of encounter, whether existentially or from eternity. Old Testament scholars such as Walther Eichrodt traced the development of a universal eschatological vision, especially through the prophets.
John Bright re-presented biblical history (or Heilsgeschichte) as a whole in his book titled The Kingdom of God. By “kingdom” Bright meant both the earthly process, with its social and political dimensions, and an eschatological vision that inspired but also critiqued the former, sometimes severely. Catastrophic eschatology’s demonic powers became the energy behind sociopolitical forces that killed Jesus. They were defeated by his resurrection, which released the energies of the new age. These are available to the church, though it still struggles against the powers. It can oppose them, in part, through social and political channels, but primarily by “being the church,” a community that actualizes and expresses God’s “already” present but “not yet” fully realized kingdom.
Biblical scholars had developed a third eschatological paradigm that was impacting ethics. Here, the kingdom of God, as in catastrophic eschatology, broke into history by divine initiative, sharply judging all societies. Human effort could not construct it. Jesus’ life and teaching, in their radical thrust if not every detail, shaped its ethics. Christians were to respond to this kingdom and make it tangible, as in developmental eschatology, yet not so much by transforming macrostructures as through their individual and communal lives, in concrete ways and settings, incarnating, by the energies of the new age, alternatives to the old age’s destructive patterns.
Ethics of hope, reversal, and liberation. From the 1970s on, as massive apocalyptic evils increasingly threatened the world, this eschatologically informed ethics enjoyed wide appeal. It is expressive, not simply cognitive. It denounces current evils. It calls for decisions and for commitments to new ways of life. Such an ethic is more concerned with developing moral character and embodying social alternatives than with elaborating general rules or decision-making procedures.
This approach informed the “theology of hope.” For neoorthodox ethics, biblical expressions such as “God’s name” and “God’s word” indicated divine self-revelation in the present. Wolfhart Pannenberg and some biblical colleagues argue that such themes almost always referred to partial, indirect revelations through historical events. It was these events that pointed toward God’s self-manifestation, but only at history’s end, and “proleptically” at Jesus’ resurrection.
Jurgen Moltmann shows that God’s speech in biblical narrative usually conveyed promises, and that a promise-fulfillment schema overarched it. Both Pannenberg and Moltmann stress that God’s words were received not only by faith but also by hope, which propelled their recipients toward the future to overcome whatever opposed it.
Moltmann highlights the opposition between Jesus and his political and religious enemies and the agony of his resulting crucifixion. His social ethics, which also draw on neo-Marxism, critique many social structures and favor the oppressed. Pannenberg, however, emphasizes humankind’s eschatological unity and promotes transformation of current structures.
Ethicists who appropriated this third paradigm were attracted by what Allen Verhey calls “the great reversal” (in a 1984 book so titled) of the old age’s social hierarchies, such as the rich over the poor, men over women, and “the righteous” over “sinners.” Verhey highlights the Synoptic Gospels but traces these themes and many current ethical implications through the NT. Wolfgang Schrage also developed a detailed NT ethic from its internal eschatological vantage point. Thomas Ogletree carefully delineated Scripture’s role in this sort of approach. He suggests that it fosters a “dialectical” ethics: neither withdrawing from society nor seeking its overall transformation (as in the catastrophic and developmental paradigms) but rather living provisionally within its structures and focusing on specific issues.
Liberation theologies, especially from Latin America, include an eschatology that denounces current structures and announces a future released from them. The exodus from Egypt provides a primary biblical paradigm. Jesus exercised a “preferential option for the poor” and proclaimed liberation from all aspects of poverty: degradation and despair as well as economic need. In his death, Jesus identified with the poor in their oppression; his resurrection releases power to renew all of life.
These theologies often incorporate some neoMarxist socioeconomic analysis. They emphasize the systemic nature of oppression and usually conceive God’s kingdom as a worldwide socioeconomic reality opposed by globalizing capitalism. Full liberation apparently would require macrorevolution. But liberation theologies also inspire more limited changes through local base communities.
Recent New Testament ethics. This third paradigm also draws heavily from the apostle Paul. According to Christiaan Beker, Paul highlights Jesus’ resurrection, which inaugurated God’s triumph over the world’s power structures and bestowed the firstfruits of the new creation. Paul’s eschatology includes the dynamic vindication, manifestation, and universal sweep of God’s righteousness but also a continuing dualism against opposition. His eschatology arouses a hope that inspires struggle against injustice, but only according to Jesus’ cruciform pattern. This hope points not toward an endlessly open future but rather toward a real coming triumph. It calls for action but also for receptivity, prayer, meditation, and adoration.
Ever since Windisch, NT scholarship has recognized that many ethical and wisdom sayings appear in eschatological contexts. The highly publicized Jesus Seminar considers these contexts catastrophic and Jesus, once his authentic words are extricated from them, a wisdom teacher. Bruce Chilton and J. I. H. MacDonald, however, return ethics to eschatological contexts by restoring to the parables of the kingdom those narrative features that Dodd and Jeremias removed. So construed, many parables point toward an alternative world or an eschatological future and call for immediate ethical responses. Numerous ethical and wisdom sayings reappear within the eschatological horizon. This ethics is more a matter of creative response to God’s eschatological inbreakings than of precise following of Jesus’ teachings.
For N. T. Wright, however, Jesus’ teachings outline a radically different way of being the true Israel in real-life Palestine, including nonviolence as a response to Roman oppression. John Howard Yoder argues, from an Anabaptist perspective, that Jesus intended these for continuing historical existence.
Although loving enemies and disregarding wealth might seem impractical, they can be practiced in daily life. Individuals, indeed, might find this lifestyle unsustainable. Yet it can be followed corporately, through mutual effort and assistance, in the church, which in turn can render its social implications visible. Yoder identifies expressions of this ethic throughout the NT, not just in the Synoptics—for example, in appeals to Jesus’ way of the cross. However, since evil powers permeate social structures, only through cruciform disciple-ship will God’s kingdom come to light.
Stanley Hauerwas expands many of Yoder’s points, especially that Christian ethics is taught and practiced in the church. Consequently, he adds, ethics are developed and transmitted more through traditions and narratives than through rational argument, and it is more concerned with developing character, or virtues, than with general norms.
Richard Hays’s comprehensive Moral Vision of the New Testament probes the eschatological perspectives of all four Gospels. He begins, however, with Paul, whose outlook he finds highly eschatological, and who, he maintains, alludes to Jesus surprisingly often. Hays wrestles with hermeneutical issues and applies his findings to concerns such as war, homosexuality, and abortion. Hays organizes his findings around three “focal images”: community, cross (or cruciform existence), and new creation, all of which are main themes of inaugurated eschatology.
If Jesus’ teaching is crucial to this third paradigm, one would expect to find numerous ethical treatments of his Sermon on the Mount. David Gushee and Glen Stassen, however, complain that none exists, and they provide a lengthy treatment covering numerous current moral issues. Stassen proposes, intriguingly, that Jesus did not begin by commanding impossible ideals (e.g., one should never be angry [Matt. 5:22]). Instead, Jesus first described a vicious behavioral cycle (covering all of Matt. 5:22) and then outlined practices to transform this cycle (Matt. 5:23-26 [e.g., “Come quickly to terms with your accuser”]).
In conclusion, although differences between the developmental and the catastrophic paradigms, and their partial resolution in an inaugurated paradigm, affect more issues than Jesus’ teachings about God’s kingdom, no other eschatological topic seems more central to ethics. Closely related is the question of whether eschatological sayings concern a wholly future, transcendent, or inner/subjective realm or whether they interconnect with concrete, this-worldly ethical teachings. Inaugurated approaches often connect them by conceiving eschatology not as apocalyptic (as in the previous sentence) but rather as akin to the prophetic. Eschatologically informed ethical texts envision a divinely initiated, radically different future, but one that transforms earthly life.
See also Anabaptist Ethics; Cruciformity; Fundamentalism; Hope; Imitation of Jesus; Judgment; Kingdom of God; Liberationist Ethics; Salvation
Bibliography
Beker, C. “The Challenge of Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel for the Church Today.” JRT 40 (1983): 9-15; Bright, J. The
Kingdom of God: The Biblical Concept and Its Meaning for the Church. Abingdon, 1953; Chilton, B., and J. I. H. McDonald. Jesus and the Ethics of the Kingdom. SPCK, 1987; Hays, R. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996; Moltmann, J. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Trans. J. Leitch. Harper & Row, 1967; Ogletree, T. The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics: A Constructive Essay. Fortress, 1983; Pannenberg, W Ethics. Trans. K. Crim. Westminster, 1981; Pannenberg, W, et al., eds. Revelation as History. Trans. D. Granskou. Macmillan, 1968; Rauschenbusch, W A Theology for the Social Gospel. Abingdon, 1917; Schrage, W. The Ethics of the New Testament. Trans. D. Green. Fortress, 1987; Sobrino, J. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Trans. P. Burns and F. McDonagh. Orbis, 1993; Stassen, G., and D. Gushee. Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. InterVarsity, 2003; Verhey, A. The Great Reversal: Ethics and the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1984; Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Fortress, 1996; Yoder, J. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 1994.
Thomas Finger
1 Esdras See Orthodox Ethics
2 Esdras See Orthodox Ethics Esther
The book of Esther depicts the threatened annihilation of the Jewish population in the ancient
Persian Empire. After the current queen, Vashti, is banished, the Jew Esther is selected as the new queen by King Ahasuerus. Her relative Morde-cai angers Haman, the second in command, who plots in revenge to have all the Jews killed. Esther convinces the king to overturn that decree, the Jews experience victory, and the Jewish holiday of Purim is established.
The book features characters who live by a compromised code of ethics: the negligent and overindulging Ahasuerus, the egotistical and vengeful Haman. When such individuals hold high social positions, personal inadequacies are shown to have the potential for widespread deleterious impact. The well-being of large segments of society (the nation’s wives, its young women, and ultimately all Jews) is sacrificed for the happiness of a few (the king, his premier, and his officials). Prejudice and discrimination are given the royal stamp of approval. Against this, the courage and moral fiber of the characters who, in spite of the personal cost, resist wrongdoing and injustice (Vashti, Esther, Mordecai) are highlighted.
Particularly challenging for interpreters of the book is the violence that it depicts; most question whether such bloodshed is necessary, whether Jewish lives cannot be preserved without the loss of non-Jewish lives. Within the constraints of a story world in which royal decrees are irrevocable, there are seemingly few narrative options. Readers must take care not to allow narrative violence to condone real-world violence. The holiday of Purim is established to celebrate not a bloody victory but instead the people’s relief of no longer living under mortal threat. This remembrance engenders generosity, as the people are charged to practice charity to those in need.
Present-day concerns lead us to utilize the book of Esther for contemporary ethical discourse in matters that lie outside the story level proper. Most significant, we must acknowledge that we read the book after the Shoah as well as other acts of genocide throughout modern history that, unlike in the story, were chillingly successful in their attempts for ethnic annihilation. If twentieth-century gentiles had followed the example of the book’s Persian population and had chosen to side with the Jews and the other persecuted populations, perhaps the massacres of the Third Reich would not have occurred. In addition, concern for gender equality renders problematic the clearly patriarchal and hierarchical social system depicted in the book. Lacking a view of full per-sonhood for women, female worth is measured by how much women “please” men, and despite
Esther’s superior political abilities, final power rests in male hands.
See also Narrative Ethics, Biblical; Old Testament Ethics
Bibliography
Day, L. Esther. AOTC. Abingdon, 2005; Fox, M. Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2001; Goldman, S. “Narrative and Ethical Ironies in Esther.” JSOT 47 (1990): 15—31; Laniak, T. Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther. SBLDS 165. Scholars Press, 1998; Mosala, I. “The Implications of the Text of Esther for African Women’s Struggle for Liberation in South Africa.” Semeia 59 (1992): 129-37.
Linda Day