Motive is intention spurring a person to act in certain ways. It is the more or less rational connection of cause and effect in the minds of agents leading them to seek preferred outcomes and frequently is used in assigning praise or blame for initiating, not preventing, or omitting an action (both morally and legally). Most often, motive is understood as the expression of a reasoning process drawing on values, affections, passions, and/or tastes. Motive is best conceived not using a mere nominal categorization of good versus bad intention but rather as a matter of degrees within those two categories, especially since motives can be “mixed.” For classical Christians, a wrong act without a wrong motive may or may not be defined as a sin, depending on the degree of culpability for knowledge of consequences, but an evil motive is always sinful even without the successful initiation of an act.
In the history of Christianity the most significant debates about motive have centered on whether the prior activity of God has so shaped the hearts and thereby the motives of individuals such that they are not genuinely free to act. If God is the first and final cause and all other causes spring directly and without modification from his prior action, then free self-determination of moral course seems absent. This leads to justice and soteriological questions about what is due each person. For many Christians, some degree of self-motivation seems to be necessary to generally hold a person morally responsible for his or her actions, and to specifically make damnation and salvation just. Responses to those concerns include the following: no one is due heaven; divine justice is defined by consistency with God’s will, not by equitable treatment per se; and moral action can be free even if the motive is not entirely so. Regardless of the position taken on freedom of the will, classical Christianity includes the assumption that sin has tainted all motives to at least some degree, unless the Spirit graciously intervenes.
The author of the Didache asserted that passions can corrupt motivation and that such is un-Christlike double-mindedness. Most consideration of motive in the pre-Constantinian period concluded the same, with conversion sometimes understood as the gracious appropriation of the motive of incarnational servanthood, which in turn directs moral choices toward Christlike purity. For Augustine, the motive to act is determined by the affections, with the affections being ordered or prioritized loves. The responsibility for motivation, then, is pushed back to a prior consideration of the degree of human participation in the acceptance or rejection of God’s gracious reordering of love (a matter on which Augustine seems to shift in his writings). Thomas Aquinas endorsed freedom of the will, allowing that the motives of an individual arise from the internal
rational discourse of the mind as it seeks its own ultimate fulfillment, with the properly motivated Christian seeking his or her created end (telos) of glorifying God.
During the Reformation, Martin Luther spoke of the bondage of the human will, so that all natural motives rise out of spiritual confusion. John Calvin insisted that humans were predestined to serve God’s ends, so that even if motivation might “freely” spring from the inclinations of the heart, those inclinations were so shaped by God that there was no freedom beyond acquiescing to the divine purpose. Anabaptists tended to emphasize the motivation generated by a vision of the kingdom to come that compelled the committed believer to choose the moral standard mirrored in the suffering of Christian martyrs.
Jonathan Edwards emphasized the affections as the source of moral inclinations, with the saved individual motivated by appreciation for divine benevolence and drawn toward God by his beauty, then “willing” in accordance with that attraction. Edwards engaged in the broader secular debates about will and motive as well as responded to the Arminians. Some of the principal secular figures were Spinoza, Hume, and Locke; many of the secularists favored determinism analogous to the machine or a complete epistemological uncertainty, with those holding either position denying a significant role for free motive. The Arminian revivalists, best represented by John Wesley, often argued that motivation arose from the reasonable processes of the mind engaging the will and the affections within the individual, thus a free choice, even while God graciously initiated the change that allowed motivation for the good.
A generation later, Charles Finney asserted that individuals could freely choose God, motivated by their own need for God, and subsequently could work toward living with pure motives in all actions (especially those having to do with justice). In reaction to the Second and Third Awakenings, various strong predestinarian groups developed, such as the Hard-Shell Baptists, that all but removed the concept of self-chosen motivation, even to the extent that some became antimissionary and antievangelistic. As the nineteenth century went on, in reaction to both stagnant traditionalism and to Enlightenment mechanistic philosophy, a position totally contrary to the predestinarian developed as Christian existentialism, with S0ren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky the key figures. The desire to define oneself compels free, radically individualistic choice. Such is motivationally pure only if one “wills one thing”—that is, freely chooses what God chooses for the individual.
At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the concept of motive was increasingly shaped by psychological theories; while some have been similar to existentialism, many are rooted in psychoanalysis, reductionist scientism, and behaviorism, all of which denied a significant role for self-controllable motivation and free will. Revivalist evangelicalism in the twentieth century generally has allowed that individual moral agents have free motives, although corruptingly tainted by sin before accepting Christ. Old-line Protestants, following a more existentialist line, generally have argued that the individuals should “be” themselves, motivated to act in accordance with the true self. Liberationist theologians, while not denying the morality of individual motivation, have emphasized the significance of the social location of the actor as a motivating factor in choice.
Disagreements about the nature of motive arise as texts such as Matt. 18:14; Luke 13:3-5; John 3:16; 2 Pet. 3:9 are juxtaposed with those seemingly indicating not only God’s omniscience but also his implemented sovereignty, such as some of the passages about God hardening the heart, as with Pharaoh, and those in Romans. Jesus stated that actions come out of the heart, indicating the motivation from the inner self (Matt. 12:33-37; 15:10-20). The reference in Matt. 5:8 to “pure in heart” seems to be to pure motive.
See also Affections; Desire; Freedom; Free Will and Determinism; Intention; Moral Agency; Responsibility
James R. Thobaben
In the Bible, murder is the intentional killing of one human being by another outside the boundaries of legally prescribed or communally sanctioned execution or killing. Since humans bear the image of God, the severe guilt from a wrongful death adheres to an individual or community until it is removed through some means of legal or cultic resolution, usually execution of the murderer (Gen. 9:5-6; Num. 35:16-18; Deut. 19:5, 11; 1 Kgs. 2:32). In the case of an unsolved murder, a special ritual involving the community’s elders and a heifer or cow was used to absolve the lingering blood guilt of the nearby community (Deut. 21:1-9).
The central legal prohibition of murder in the OT is contained in one of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17), translated sometimes more narrowly as “you shall not murder” (NRSV) or more broadly as “you shall not kill” (RSV). The Hebrew verb rasah used in the commandment denotes any intentional or premeditated killing of another human that arises out of personal feelings of hatred or malice (Num. 35; Prov. 22:13; Isa. 1:21; Hos. 6:9). Someone who had accidentally killed another person could find sanctuary by living in one of six designated cities of refuge (Exod. 21:12-14; Num. 35:6-32; Deut. 12:1-14; 19:8-10; 1 Kgs. 1:50-53; 2:28-34).
A number of narratives illustrate various dimensions of the prohibition of wrongful killing. God mercifully suspended the death penalty in the Bible’s first murder when Cain killed his brother, Abel (Gen. 4:1-16). The sons of Jacob deceitfully murdered all the Canaanite men of the city in revenge for Shechem’s rape of their sister Dinah (Gen. 34). The young Moses killed an Egyptian foreman who was beating an Israelite slave (Exod. 2:11-15). A young Israelite priest, Phinehas, killed an Israelite man and Midianite woman with a spear in the context of Israelite apostasy with a foreign god (Num. 25:1-18). Taken together, the narratives raise the complex issues of capital punishment, the role of vengeance, violence in defense of the oppressed, and the use of violence in interreligious conflict.
The ways in which violence begets violence are illustrated in King David’s insidious plot whereby
he has one of his own soldiers, Uriah the Hittite, killed in battle in order to cover up his adulterous affair with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11-12). The prophet Nathan announced that God’s judgment on David’s act of violence would be that “the sword will never depart from your house” (2 Sam. 12:10).
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount significantly expanded the commandment against murder to cover not only acts of physical violence but also expressions of anger or verbal insults directed against “a brother or sister” (Matt. 5:21-26). The human propensity toward anger, vengeance, and violence (Gen. 4:23-24) is overcome in the death of Jesus, who refused to inflict violence and vengeance on those who arrested and killed him (Matt. 5:38-42; 26:51-53; Rom. 12:17-21).
See also Capital Punishment; Killing; Revenge; Sanctity of Human Life; Ten Commandments; Violence
Bibliography
Barmash, P. Homicide in the Biblical World. Cambridge University Press, 2005; Miller, P. “Protecting Life.” Pages 221-70 in The Ten Commandments. Westminster John Knox, 2009; Olson, D. “Violence for the Sake of Social Justice? Narrative, Ethics and Indeterminacy in Moses’ Slaying of the Egyptian (Exod. 2.11-15).” Pages 138-48 in The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations, ed. C. Cosgrove. JSOTSup 411. T&T Clark, 2004.
Dennis T. Olson
Israel’s practice of mutual aid was mandated systematically in God’s commands to remit debts every seventh year and celebrate Jubilee every fiftieth year (see Deut. 15; Lev. 25) so that there “be no one in need among you” (Deut. 15:4). Forgiving debts marked community renewal in Israel’s postexilic restoration (Neh. 5). This was Israel’s systematic practice of justice that ensured the community’s shalom.
The Lord’s Prayer includes forgiveness of debts (Matt. 6:12). The early Christian church exemplifies two models of mutual aid. After Pentecost the believers had all things in common (Acts 2:42-45; 4:32-37). A second and more durable model of mutual aid consisted of collecting money from wealthier Jewish-gentile Christian churches throughout Asia Minor and Macedonia for the poorer Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Paul speaks extensively of this relief gift (2 Cor. 8-9), grounding it in “the grace given me by God” (Rom. 15:15). Paul prays that this “offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:16).
Both groups, the J erusalem poor and the gentiles with material resources, give and receive (Rom. 15:25-27). Justin Meggitt says of this mutuality,
Firstly, it was aimed at promoting material well being. It was initially undertaken to achieve a tangible end: the relief of the economically poor in the Jerusalem church. . . . Secondly, it was thoroughly mutual in its character. It was in no sense an individual or unilateral undertaking for any of those involved. Paul emphasises that all the members of the church were contributors as, indeed, were all the communities (we hear of no exceptions). It was not intended to be the work of a few wealthy members or congregations. And it was premised on the assumption of mutual interdependence. It was not a one-off act of charity. The material assistance given was understood as something that would, in time, be returned, when the situation was reversed. (Meggitt 159)
Paul died for this cause (Acts 21:7-14). His relief gift crowned his mission, exemplifying gentile and Jewish unity in Christ.
Mutual aid, with charity, continued in the early church through deacons (Acts 6:1-6). “In A.D. 251, the church in Rome had a massive program of care for the widows and the poor. The church . . . had 1,500 people on its roll for support. Bishop Cornelius was aided by six presbyters, seven deacons, seven more sub-deacons, and ninety-four people in minor roles” (Swartley 32). Church fathers speak of mutual aid and charity, grounded in creation, redemption, koinonia, and justice (see Swartley 29-34).
Mutual aid and charity continued in the church, with growing institutionalized forms. Sixteenth-century Anabaptists practiced mutual aid at the cost of life, especially for those “on the run” to escape persecution (see Jeni Hiett Umble, John D. Roth, and Mary S. Sprunger in Kraybill and Swart-ley 103-67). In the twentieth century, many Protestant denominations, including Mennonites and Brethren, combined mutual aid with insurance (property, auto, and health), which with high cost and exclusions compromised mutual aid, thus raising irresolvable ethical dilemmas.
See also Collection for the Saints; Debt; Generosity; Koinonia; Loans
Bibliography
Kraybill, D., and W. Swartley, eds. Building Communities of Compassion: Mennonite Mutual Aid in Theory and Practice. Herald Press, 1998; Meggitt, J. Paul, Poverty and Survival. SNTW. T&T Clark, 1998, 157-64; Swartley, W. “Mutual Aid Based in Jesus and Early Christianity” Pages 21-39 in Building Communities of Compassion: Menno-nite Mutual Aid in Theory and Practice, ed. D. Kraybill and W. Swartley. Herald Press, 1998.
Willard M. Swartley
Strong anti-Assyrian sentiment coupled with a nationalist fervor has been a source of discomfort and uneasiness among interpreters of this OT book. The book has one overriding concern. It prophesies and even takes delight in the impending fall of Nineveh. The deft use of diverse literary forms such as the partial acrostic poem (where each strophe begins with a letter of the alphabet) in 1:2-8, the “woe” oracle in 3:1-7, and the oracle of salvation in 3:14-20 creates a powerful impact. One is also struck by the prophet’s ability to create sights and sounds through words and images (3:2).
No explicit information is provided on the date of the prophet’s activity. Based on internal clues, one can assume a time frame somewhere between the fall of Thebes in 663 BCE (3:8) and the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE, which the book predicts.
The book opens with a poem celebrating the coming of Yahweh, intended as an assurance to Judah (1:2-15). Yahweh’s wrath and vengeance are directed against Nineveh. The assault on Nineveh is envisioned and rendered with graphic detail and force (2:1-13). Chapter 3 continues the indictment of Nineveh for its deceitful and wanton behavior.
From an ethical perspective, the uneasiness that many experience in reading the book and its message may stem from two things. First, God is portrayed as wrathful and avenging. Second, the divine wrath is directed against Assyria, a foreign nation. Both aspects bristle with theological and ethical questions. How does one reconcile the merciful versus vengeful depictions of God? How does one reconcile the anti-Assyrian stance and tirade expressed here with the more inclusive and merciful perspective in the book of Jonah (Jon. 4:2, 11)? These issues must be sorted out against the backdrop of Nahum’s overall theological frame of reference. Nahum operates with an overarching sense of God’s sovereignty over not just J udah but all nations. Anyone or anything contrary to the purposes of God will not go unchallenged. Forces that promote evil, tyranny, and violence will be brought under divine judgment.
Assyria of antiquity was one such force known for its brutality and ruthlessness toward its enemies. Recognizing this helps to put into perspective Nahum’s tirade. Part of the ethical challenge of the book concerns our responsibility and response to the persistence of evil, tyranny, violence, and injustice beyond our own borders. In our world of complex geopolitical realities and loyalties, a careful consideration and nuanced response may be necessary. The book of Jonah’s emphasis on the merciful and redemptive purpose of God (Jon. 4:10-11) offers an alternative to divine justice and thus a different resolution to evil.
See also Anger; Jonah; Justice, Retributive; Old Testament Ethics; Punishment; Reward and Retribution
Bibliography
Brown, W Obadiah through Malachi. WestBC. Westminster John Knox, 1996; Floyd, M. Minor Prophets: Part 2. FOTL 22. Eerdmans, 1999; Roberts, J. Nahum, Habak-kuk, and Zephaniah. OTL. Westminster John Knox, 1991.
D. N. Premnath
Since Wayne Booth published The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), the idea that ethics is central to our engagement with literature and, conversely, that literature is central to our engagement with ethics has enjoyed renewed life among a wide range of thinkers (to say nothing of the larger discussion of the importance of narrative in the moral life more generally [e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre]). Among them, Martha Nussbaum (Love’s Knowledge; Upheavals of Thought) and Adam Zachary Newton (Narrative Ethics) have articulated quite different but generative ways of thinking about narrative ethics—that is, about the way in which literature, especially fiction, shapes our ethical reflection. Nussbaum, working in the Aristotelian tradition, shows some kinship to Booth but nonetheless makes the distinctive claim that every form of speaking, every style, expresses moral commitments, and readers need to attend to these as much as to moral content.
Newton, by contrast, works out of categories from Emmanuel Levinas (the “Saying” and the “Said”) and is interested in performative ethics, in how the narrative implicates us in what we have heard.
In biblical studies a number of scholars have found Nussbaum’s and Newton’s work stimulating for engaging the Bible’s narrative traditions ethically, among whom Carol Newsom especially stands out. How does the narrative genre of stories inform our ethical engagement with them? In her monograph The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, and as part of a much larger argument, Newsom first offers a Nussbaumian reading of Job 1-2: the moral imagination articulated in the prose tale is one of tremendous beauty and art that sublimely resolves contradictions between Job’s grief and his continuing praise of God. Yet she then offers a Newtonian reading of the same narrative that places readers as ethically implicated observers of a scientific laboratory experiment, with Job as the unwilling object of deep physical and emotional pain for he knows not what purpose. The tension between these readings (in Levinasian language, a tension between the “Saying” and the “Said”), which cannot be resolved, is broken only by the interruption of the wisdom dialogue that erupts in Job 3.
See also Narrative Ethics, Contemporary Bibliography
Newsom, C. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. Oxford University Press, 1999; Newton, A. Narrative Ethics. Harvard University Press, 1995; Nussbaum, M. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Jacqueline E. Lapsley
This article narrates the concerns that produced a narrative turn in Christian ethics, delineates five enduring insights of narrative Christian ethics, and concludes with a sketch of prospects.
The significance of narrative in Christian ethics is complex and contested. For this reason, narrative ethics is neither a method nor a tradition. There is no consensus description of narrative ethics, notwithstanding James McClendon’s confident claim that it is “the discovery, understanding, and creative transformation of a shared and lived story” whose focus is Jesus and his kingdom (McClendon 330). McClendon does represent a powerful trajectory among some Christian ethi-cists of recognizing that the gospel, the Scriptures, the church, and discipleship have essential narrative dimensions that are morally determinative for
Christian life. Any ethic that consciously attends to the moral significance of those dimensions can be understood as narrative ethics.
Development
The most important impetus to rediscover the moral significance of narrative was Karl Barth. His rediscovery of “The Strange New World within the Bible” did not produce a self-consciously narrative method, but his Church Dogmatics was exhaustively engaged with theological redescription of the scriptural story seen through a christological lens. This had three significant effects in Barth that endure in narrative ethics. First, because Scripture’s narrative world knows no disjunction between knowing God and the good, Barth refused to separate dogmatics from ethics. Likewise, narrative ethics is a form of theology. Second, Barth eschewed modernist justifications of theology in favor of dogmatic display of the God who speaks and acts in the biblical story. Likewise, proponents of narrative ethics attend to biblical and ecclesial narratives as a way to display Christian conviction rather than justify it (Hauerwas; McClendon). For them, this attends to truthfulness while avoiding foundationalism; for opponents of narrative ethics, this is the same fideism that they ascribe to Barth. Third, because Scripture narrates a story in which we find ourselves already participants, Barth’s theologizing has the effect of telling us into the story. Likewise, narrative ethics has suggested that the biblical story truly renders the world (Frei), and that through conversion we find ourselves baptized into God’s story (Loughlin). The enduring impact of these three features of Barth’s theology on all subsequent development cannot be overestimated.
Another impetus for interest in narrative was H. Richard Niebuhr’s discussion of “The Story of Our Life” in The Meaning of Revelation. There Niebuhr asserted that in order “to say truly what it stands for,” the church is compelled to tell “the story of its life,” a story that is “irreplaceable and untranslatable” (Hauerwas and Jones 23). Taken together, these claims suggest that Christian ethics is the delineation of how the story of Christ communicates, shapes, illuminates, and guides
Christian community and living instead of the
idealization of “Christ” into various social stances vis-a-vis “culture.” The potential of Niebuhr’s suggestion was largely untapped, however, as most of those who consciously extended his interest in story did so in the vein of a phenomenological analysis of the universality of narrative consciousness (e.g., Crites in Hauerwas and Jones) rather than of a thick description of the Christian story’s catholic particularity.
Theology’s narrative turn (c. 1970) inaugurated a lively and diverse conversation about the significance of story in Christian ethics. Narrative appeared to promise a way beyond the impasse of deontology’s abstract universalism and utilitarianism’s decontextualized decisionism. At its height (mid-1980s), there was a proliferation of publishing on narrative in relation to almost everything: revelation, character, identity, community, virtue, conviction, Christology, and hermeneutics. By the turn of the millennium, enthusiasm for narrative had faded in most quarters (including MacIntyre) but had matured among a particular constellation of ecclesial ethicists (e.g., Hauerwas; McClendon; Spohn; Wells) into five enduring contributions.
Key Achievements
Alasdair MacIntyre begins After Virtue with “a disquieting suggestion” that we have amnesia. This trope helps delineate the five key insights of narrative ethics. When the unfortunate amnesiac awakens at the beginning of the story, he wants to know: How did I get here? What’s going on? Who am I? How should I think and feel about what’s happening? What should I do now? Answering these crucial questions requires both telling stories and engaging narrative skills. The amnesiac can do neither and thus is left bereft and bewildered, unable to (1) historicize the present moment, (2) contextualize situation and decisions, (3) identify and characterize self and others, (4) perceive and feel the situation truly, and (5) enact a hopeful future. Let us consider each of these in turn.
The turn to narrative came in the context of dissatisfaction with Christian ethics enmeshed in quandaries and enamored with universality. A key strategy was to historicize the present moment by telling the story of how things came to such an impasse. In After Virtue and two sequels, MacIntyre narrates how we came to such dire moral straits. Likewise, John Milbank and Hans Frei offered magisterial eclipse narratives (for theology and hermeneutics, respectively). All these thinkers seek to illuminate the dead ends of modernity by narrating the mistakes that got us here.
Although these thinkers are strongly associated with the narrative turn, the viability of narrative ethics does not depend on the convincingness of their stories. Whether MacIntyre, Milbank, and Frei got their history right or not, it remains true that the Christian story situates ethical action, renders moral identity, forms character, and directs Christian life. What their work does demonstrate is the first enduring insight of narrative ethics: narrative is intrinsic to our rationality. It is more basic than either explanation or understanding (Milbank). We rightly have other modes of moral discourse, but none of them finally leaves narrative behind. Immanuel Kant’s effort to throw off self-incurred tutelage for the heady freedom of enlightenment is, covertly, a story about jettisoning story.
A second enduring insight is that narrative has an essential role in human agency. An ethics focused solely on deciding and acting is incomplete or even false, precisely because it ignores the way we situate, orient, and explain our actions within stories that describe “what is going on.” MacIntyre put it famously: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ ” (MacIntyre 216). What makes a given action both intelligible and intentional is that it fits within a narrative account of the situation. Retrospectively, narratives make actions intelligible by fitting them within the interplay of other actions, intentions, and circumstances. Prospectively, narratives are how we imagine and enact intentions. Thus, we continuously read the lives of others, and read and author our own lives, by narrating what is going on; understanding and intending are both narrative skills.
Both claims inescapably raise questions of truth. Any action can be rendered intelligible by multiple stories, some of which are mutually exclusive (as phenomena such as lying and self-deception prove). So recognizing that choices sit within and are made intelligible by stories is insufficient. The goal of narrative ethics is not mere intelligibility, but truthfulness. The good life requires that we be claimed by and live within a truthful story. The criteria of truthfulness will be generated from within the story, not from a so-called objective point outside the gospel (Hauerwas and Jones 184-90). The core of a truthful story is that we are never more than coauthors of our own lives.
Third, narrative identifies and characterizes. Answering the question “Who?” typically begins with a name, but finally it requires a story. For example, Yahweh is the “God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Stories thus differentiate one from another by narrating the unique circumstances and settings of who did what to whom. But more intrinsically, stories display how identity simultaneously changes and persists through time. It takes a story to display adequately the change in identity that conversion occasions, and it takes a story to display adequately the constancy of identity that fidelity and integrity entail. Narrative is the necessary display of both constancy and change in moral identity over time, such that continuity and transformation of identity are simultaneously possible. Narrative renders the changeable persistence of identity through time.
Narrative ethics focuses not on the generic power of story to render identity, however, but rather on the particular display of the identity of God, Israel, church, and the saints. Narrative ethics recognizes the primacy of God’s story for rendering God’s identity truthfully, and thereby for discovering the true or proper identity of disciples, church, and world. Each disciple’s story nests within the church’s story, which nests within Christ’s story. Thus, God’s identity already stipulates fitting goals, choices, actions, and dispositions for church and disciple so identified by, with, and in Christ.
Although God’s full identity encompasses the entire scriptural story, there is a “master story” that is central: for Jews the exodus, and for Christians the paschal mystery—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (Goldberg). Narrative ethics works with a consciously christological hermeneutic of both Scripture and the moral life. The quintessential display of this is Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, a book that irrevocably ties the story of Jesus’ nonviolent fidelity to cruciform, ecclesial discipleship. Thus, the gospel not only identifies God but also thereby convokes and characterizes a peculiar people of God who live conformed to God’s story. For both church and disciple, Christ is our life (Col. 3:4).
Much of narrative ethics attends to the way story displays character. Although character can indicate no more than a flat persona in a plot, it typically indicates that persona’s unique congeries of qualities and traits as well. Character names those perduring yet changeable qualities of desiring, feeling, thinking, and acting that give our personhood enduring and recognizable shape. Thus, narrative ethics dovetails nicely with virtue ethics, since stories are finally necessary to display the full meaning of characteristics such as patience and hope and to show how such qualities take shape in particular lives. Although narrative ethics is not intrinsically wedded to virtue theory, many of its major proponents have favored both (Hauerwas; MacIntyre; McClendon; Spohn). In the end, narrating is more basic than describing or explaining character.
This leads to the fourth insight: narratives not only display our character but also shape it. Indeed, narratives shape moral seeing, feeling, imagining, and acting. This is not just the trite observation that we become who we are through what we do and what we suffer, the story of our life’s actions and passions. It is the deeper insight that the stories we hear, learn, and live function as lenses through which we see God and self and world. Such stories specify appropriate (and forbidden) desires; they tutor our emotions and shape our affections; they carry, convey, and advocate particular goals and goods; they imagine our world and all its interrelations. And thus, they shape the agent who acts in encompassing ways.
Moral formation and imagination can be funded by everything from children’s stories and parables (Spohn) to novels and biography. Although these various genres hold genuine potential for moral reflection, the core of a properly narrative Christian ethics must be the particular stories of the Christian faith rather than a literary type. Thus, narrative ethics’ proper domain will be the Scriptures (Colwell), particularly the story of Jesus (Spohn; Hauerwas), along with narrative display of that story in the lives of the saints (Hauerwas, With the Grain).
The scriptural story, as it communicates patterns of God’s way in, with, and for the world, forms dispositions and fosters imagination, thereby shaping and guiding our perceptions and passions. Stanley Hauerwas has emphasized the development of skills and habits in the church, by and through which we make the story of Jesus our own. William Spohn has emphasized the formation of moral imagination and perception through the interplay of stories of Jesus, virtue ethics, and practices of spirituality. John Colwell argues that what stories do in general—draw us into their world and reshape us—the biblical story does in particular through the promised action of the Holy Spirit.
The final enduring insight of narrative ethics is that it renders a coherent account of how we go on in hope, because it sets our finite stories within the encompassing gospel of divine justice and mercy. Readers follow a story by continually integrating what comes next with their emerging sense of the final ending and shape of the whole; the episodic dimension continually reinterprets and is interpreted by the configural (Ricoeur). As we read so we live, with and from this constant interplay of memory and hope. We perceive, imagine, decide, and act not in isolated moments, but rather with a constant sense of the ending toward which we go and thus of the overall shape of that story that we are becoming. If the story we follow is limited to ourselves or even to our communities, then we confront the twofold futility of a past and future bound in sin and fraught with tragedy. Only when our story is incorporated into Christ’s story is our life redeemed by the comedy of resurrection, reconciliation, and rejoicing.
Samuel Wells has schematized the full story in which we live as a five-act play: creation, Israel, Christ, church, and consummation. This plotting of the story establishes the pure gratuity of the story’s beginning, middle, and end and places both church and disciple in the finite freedom of covenant life. The church risks patient hope and courageous love because it believes that Christ’s resurrection already determines the ending that has not yet fully come. Dwelling in the story of the ascended rule of the risen Servant delivers the church from taking responsibility for the story’s end and binds the church to servant love of neighbor and enemy.
Prospects
Salient criticisms of narrative ethics point to perennial dangers as well as promising developments. One danger is to make story, or a theory about narrative theory, more basic than an encounter with Christ and enlivening by the Holy Spirit. Thus, at its worst, narrative ethics risks reducing God to mere story (Murphy). At its best, however, narrative ethics has discovered the power of worship to narrate a living encounter with the triune God. This liturgical deepening of narrative ethics holds much promise.
The other perennial danger is that attention to narrative may focus on personal understanding rather than ecclesial embodiment. Thus, at its worst, narrative ethics risks valorizing saving knowledge of God’s story for individuals. At its best, however, narrative ethics is mitigating this threat by attention to analogies with performance (Hauerwas, Performing the Faith) and drama (Wells). This dramaturgical deepening of narrative ethics holds much promise as well.
See also Character; Ecclesiology and Ethics; Eschatology and Ethics; Liturgy and Ethics; Moral Formation; Narrative Ethics, Biblical; Teleological Theories of Ethics; Virtue(s); Virtue Ethics
Bibliography
Colwell, J. Living the Christian Story: The Distinctiveness of Christian Ethics. T&T Clark, 2001; Frei, H. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. Yale University Press, 1974; Goldberg, M. Jews and Christians, Getting Our Stories Straight: The Exodus and the Passion-Resurrection. Trinity Press International, 1991; Hauerwas, S. The Hauerwas Reader. Ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright. Duke University Press, 2001, chaps. 5,7—12, 15, 17; idem. Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. Brazos, 2004; idem. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s
Witness and Natural Theology. Brazos, 2001; Hauerwas, S., and L. Jones, eds. Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology. Wipf & Stock, 1997; Loughlin, G. Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology. Cambridge University Press, 1996; MacIntyre, A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; McClendon, J. Ethics. Vol. 1 of Systematic Theology. Rev. ed. Abingdon, 2002; Milbank, J. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Murphy, F. God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2007; Ricoeur, P Time and Narrative. Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1984; Spohn, W Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics. Continuum, 2003; Wells, S. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Brazos, 2004.
D. Brent Laytham
Christianity’s relationship to nations and to nationalism is complex in part because the very notion of “nation” has changed over time. Christians have always had to negotiate their relationship to the ruling powers, of course, but the development of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth century introduced complex new questions concerning the relationship of the people of God to the nations. In recent years that relationship has been a contested question in Christian ethics and has been implicated in an assortment of other important issues, such as war, patriotism, justice, and the law.
Scripture itself portrays a shifting relationship that develops from the early Hebrews and the nations to the Jews in captivity to the early church under Roman rule. The victory of Constantine in the fourth century and subsequent political developments in Roman Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy represented an important change from Christianity’s previous relationship to Roman imperial power. In the Middle Ages the Holy Roman Empire was at once intimately tied to and frequently in tension with papal power. On the heels of the Reformation came the modern nation-state, which was regarded as the solution to the so-called wars of religion. The wars that followed the Reformation began as religious conflicts with political dimensions but became political conflicts with religious dimensions. Further changes in the relationship of Christianity to nations and to nationalism were wrought by the Enlightenment and its appeals to a secular rationality. And recently the rise of globalization has brought still other changes to this relationship. Within each period the “nation” and hence “nationalism” indicate different arrangements. The following material first surveys the scriptural and historical articulations of the nation and nationalism and then outlines the ethical issues that surround contemporary ethical reflection about nationalism.
Scripture
In the OT, Hebrew 'am and goy are the two most common expressions to denote “nation.” Both 'am and goy are used to refer both to Israel and to foreign nations in contrast to Israel. The term 'am is rendered “people” and “nation.” It indicates personal relations and is used to refer to common ancestry and a nation belonging to a deity. The primary aspects of goy seem to include common language, government, and territory. The OT, however, never precisely specifies requirements for Israel’s or other nations’ existence as a goy. “Nation” here should not be confused with modern conceptions. Yahweh promises Abraham that his descendants will become a goy and will be given a land of their own (Gen. 12:2; cf. 17:5; 18:18). Israel’s deity-nation association was uniquely established and maintained independent of the people’s presence in a particular land. Thus, even under Egyptian enslavement the Hebrews are Yahweh’s people (Deut. 26:5), whom Yahweh eventually delivers from slavery (Deut. 4:34-38; cf. Exod. 15:21).
When the OT refers to the Hebrews among the nations, it generally refers to Yahweh’s people as a nomadic people who wandered amid other peoples who worshiped other gods. Upon settlement in the promised land, the Hebrews instituted kingdoms under the rubric of Israel (1 Sam. 8:5, 19). Four successive empires captured Israel, and the Hebrews lived under political captivity (Lev. 26:38; Ps. 106:27; Ezek. 11:16). Strict prohibitions discouraged the nomadic Hebrews from intermingling with the other nations’ allegiances to foreign gods. In the context of Israel and the institution of a theocratic kingship, faithfulness to God is largely expressed by faithfulness as a nation as embodied in the kings of Israel. In captivity the Hebrews oscillate between intermingled cultural life and struggling to remain distinct from their captors (Ezra 9:2). As these political circumstances regarding “the nations” change in the OT, the Hebrews, as Yahweh’s people, also change, and the drama of the OT turns on the faithfulness of God’s people in the midst of various arrangements of relating to political power.
The NT historically takes place within the context of the fourth captivity as Israel simultaneously languishes and thrives under Roman conquest. In the NT ethnos and laos can denote “nation.” As with the comparable OT terms, these terms can have a general sense, referring to all nations including Israel, as well as a specific sense, referring to gentiles in distinction from Jews and/or Christians. Laos more frequently refers to Israel as well as the Christian church as God’s people. When applied to the Christian church, laos takes on a new sense (Rom. 9; Titus 2:14; Rev. 18:4; 21:3). One’s identification with God’s people is redefined from common ancestry via natural birth/Torah observance to common ancestry via spiritual rebirth/baptism into Christ. Paul identifies those who are in Christ as the seed of Abraham, and he emphasizes the importance of the unity of the Christian church as one laos (Gal. 3:26-28; cf. 1 Cor 12:13; Col. 3:11). He critiques what we might call the “nationalism” of those Jewish Christians who refused table fellowship with gentile Christians on the basis of their different natural ancestries to the neglect of their common ancestry in Christ (Gal. 2:11-16).
Church History
In the early years of the Christian church, Christianity related to the Roman authorities as politically disconnected local house churches within a colossal military and political empire. As Christianity developed and grew in numbers and influence, this empire related to the church in varying degrees of persecution and accommodation. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the church and the political state became increasingly intermixed, and their respective boundaries began to blur within the developments of Eastern and Western Christian empires. Augustine’s City of God is only one, though perhaps the most ambitious, of many treatises meant to address this relationship theologically. According to Augustine, the state seeks after goods commensurate to its order and hence can be related to the church around the question of earthly, or what he called “temporal,” goods. However, the state could not procure lasting goods, even as Rome claimed the moniker of “the eternal city.” In this way, Augustine aligned Christians with the state on the question of earthly goods but also postured Christians as pilgrims attached only temporarily to those goods and the state. It was specifically the Roman Empire’s claim of ultimate, universal legitimacy that put it at odds with Christianity, making unconditional allegiance to the empire morally problematic. The fragile relationship between Christians’ eternal home, as Augustine described it, and their temporary sojourn in the earthly city was maintained in many different expressions through the long decline of the Roman Empire and imperial Christendom.
The eclipse of Christian imperial life created room for new political realities as the empire’s decline rapidly expedited new forms of political existence. Most notably, the development of secular space free of religious control answered a rallying cry after the so-called wars of religion. Whether the wars of religion produced or were produced by the emerging secular state is itself internal to the ethics of nationalism, for how one grants nationalism ethical value depends on how one answers that question. In the centuries that followed, the nation-state was born as an idea internal to the most creative of modern inventions. Enlightenment thinkers contrasted the nation-state with a mythical “state of nature” (a place forlorn of the state’s political order) in order to portray the nation-state as not only beneficial but also necessary. Akin to the Roman Empire’s claim of ultimate, universal legitimacy, the nation-state’s selfavowed universality condones any action impelled by national interests as if the continual existence of the nation-state itself becomes a moral justification. It is in this context that the relationship between Christians, whose loyalty remains with God, and the nation-state, which demands loyalty as well, becomes difficult to negotiate. Rather than being situated as wandering Jews “among the nations,” as captive Christians under the Romans, or as imperial Christendom, God’s people today live as citizens of nations, hold “nationalities,” and imagine the world, and their lives within it, as organized around the idea of the nation as a political, economic, and social reality. The advent of globalization, which is only now coming to the fore, names a state of affairs wherein these nations themselves have become organized by forces, such as market capitalism, themselves larger and more powerful than nations; globalization suggests that nations themselves may give way to new realities.
The Ethics of Christian Relationships to Nations
The issue of Christianity’s relationship to the nation and to nations has become contested in contemporary Christian ethics largely due to this rather circuitous history wherein many different ways of relating to political powers ensue. Given this long and complex history, various models of this relationship have been formulated, often deemed “ethical” over against others. However, one would be hard-pressed in suggesting that Scripture and the traditions emanating from church history speak of one model. In this vein, paradigms regarding the ethics of nationalism within the modern nation-state vary to a great degree. Because Christian Scripture and tradition testify to so many different models of nations and relations to the nations, Christian faithfulness can be mapped onto many different approaches.
In recent years, debates have followed on Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas’s rejection
of a paradigm articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr, who believed that the contemporary church could appropriate Augustine’s “two cities” politics in order to situate Christianity to the nation-state in the terms of tragedy. Niebuhr utilized Martin Luther in order to imagine nationalism in what he considered Augustinian terms. For Niebuhr, the church and nation could relate for mutual good, though not without a fair amount of ambivalence regarding those goods. For example, the church’s conceptions of justice could humanize the nation and impel its actions for the sake of justice. However, this also meant that the church recognized the nation, and its tools of coercion, as necessary and “realistic” rather than as good: the nation can do good, if properly encouraged by Christianity, but this does not mean that it is good, since its goods are always, as Augustine said, directed only to the temporal order. In this vein, nationalism named positive favor toward the state but always within bounds; ultimate loyalty did not belong to the state. This clearly is not the blank-check patriotism that obeys the nation by way of a blind faith that unfolds in the most virulent modes of nationalism: imperialism, xenophobia, totalitarianism, and so on. If Niebuhr allowed nationalism, it was a careful nationalism that could never presume crusade-like status or undermine loyalty to God.
Hauerwas followed fellow ethicist John Howard Yoder in affixing Christian discipleship to the issue of pacifism and, through the ethics of war, came to articulate the most sustained critique of nationalism. For Hauerwas and Yoder, the Christian church is not opposed to the nation but is axiomatically contrasted to the world, whose violence indicates its disobedience. The church’s relationship to the nation, then, follows the nation’s ability or inability purposefully to obey God. In this line of thought, when the nation’s rebellion against God expresses itself by way of its anxious violence, then nationalism as favor toward that rebellion names idolatry. Rather than a wholesale disavowal of nationalism, Yoder’s ethics grant space for nationalism if nationalism can be understood as an encouragement of the nations toward greater obedience to God. In contrast, Hauerwas rejected Niebuhrian allowance for nationalism, disavowing the kinds of accommodation that he associated with Niebuhr’s realism and even came to develop a broad critique of the secular theorists who conceptualized the nation-state in the first place. Instead, he named the church as a polis that required its own nationalism rivaling nationalism to the nation-state as a counterallegiance. Today, this argument continues, and Jeffrey Stout’s recent work has attempted to reimagine the nationstate beyond the terms of ethicists such as Yoder or Hauerwas. Rather than positing nation and church as rivals, thinkers such as Stout have tried to imagine the kinds of mutuality, last suggested by Niebuhr, that grant allowance for the Christian church’s positive relationship with and participation within liberal democracies.
See also Civil Disobedience; Colonialism and Postcolonialism; Government; Idolatry; Imperialism; Institution(s); Kingdom of God; Loyalty; Political Ethics
Bibliography
Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973; Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Ed. R. Dyson. Cambridge University Press, 2002; Cavanaugh, W. Theopolitical Imagination. T&T Clark, 2003; Hauerwas, S., and R. Coles. Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian. Cascade Books, 2008; Niebuhr, R. Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Ed. D. Robertson. Westminster John Knox, 1992; Stout, J. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2004; Yoder, J. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 1994.
Lindsay K. Cleveland and Jonathan Tran
The term natural law is widely misunderstood and therefore feared by those reluctant to consider it, as well as often misconstrued and misapplied by many supposed supporters of this ancient ethical tradition. The term natural law has often functioned as a shibboleth dividing Roman Catholic and Protestant ethical approaches to Christian moral living. Catholics, especially in their mag-isterium (the official Roman Catholic Church teaching authority of the pope and bishops), have grounded their approach to concrete moral issues using natural-law theory that one hopes would be both accessible and convincing not only to Christians but also to all men and women of goodwill. Contemporary human-rights discourse also shares a similar objective, even though its own methodologies may vary.
The classic Protestant hesitation with the natural law is that our human reason that we would use to reflect on and apply the natural law in our lives is clouded or corrupted by the fall of our first parents and therefore is a rather untrustworthy aid to ethical discernment. Thus, to rely on the natural law for Christian ethical analysis would be a bit like continuing to use a computer program that one knows has been infected by a virus: the program might still “work” to a degree, but one can never be sure of the results obtained or if other files might in turn be corrupted.
Protestant theologians often thought it sounder to go directly and principally to Scripture for moral guidance, and sola scriptura (Scripture
alone) was advanced as the principal resource for
moral reflection, especially as opposed to a secular natural-law theory and/or church “tradition” that was not somehow contained in the Bible. For their part, Catholics certainly recognized the deleterious effects of sin on humanity, but the traditional Catholic response was that although human reason certainly was affected by the fall, it was not totally destroyed and therefore could be used. Church tradition, especially as interpreted by the magisterium, would serve as a balance and quality control check for overly individualistic and erroneous interpretations of the natural law.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) spoke of the natural law as “law by analogy.” Thus, while it has some of the same characteristics of law, it is not, strictly speaking, a law in the sense of a physical law of nature or a civil law enacted by a legislator. Thomas spoke of the natural law as the human participation in God’s eternal law, and he saw it written directly by God onto our human hearts in our conscience (lex indita non scripta). The natural law is the means by which human beings live out authentically the particular nature that God has given them. Another way of saying much the same thing is to look on the natural law as one aspect of God’s loving providential care of humans—a way to exercise our God-given free will for our own good. In this perspective, then, to follow in conscience the dictates of the natural law simply means trying to be faithful to the fullest expression of true humanity that has been shown us in Jesus Christ. This view echoes Irenaeus’s famous dictum Gloria Dei vivens homo (“The glory of God is the human person fully alive” [Haer. 4.20.7]). Living according to the natural law corresponds to promotion of true human values that at the same time will give God glory and best express God’s will for humankind.
Natura-law theory has two main premises, one ontological and one epistemological. The ontological premise is the assertion that in some real sense there is an objective moral order—a rightness and wrongness of moral actions that contribute to our goodness or wickedness. This moral order exists independently of our individual wishes or desires, and if we wish to be truly happy and flourish, then we must live according to our authentic human nature. In short, the natural law is nothing other than a reflection on this true human nature.
But how do we know precisely what this natural law requires? This involves the second premise of natural-law theory: the assertion that in some way (albeit partial and open to the possibility of error) we can discover this natural law and hold ourselves to it. This is the function of conscience, which is aided by recta ratio (right reason). Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between two types of recta ratio, which he calls “speculative reason” and “practical reason.” Unfortunately, his use of this vocabulary is quite different from contemporary usage of these two words, and probably on this account there is some confusion and misunderstanding on some key points in his natural-law theory. For him, “speculative” does not mean “future conditional,” and “practical” does not mean “utilitarian” or “pragmatic.” Instead, in his view, “speculative reason” aims at the discovery of abstract truth and principles that will be universally valid, whereas “practical reason” works toward applying those principles in the best possible way to a concrete situation. Thomas’s first universal principle of the natural law is Bonum est faciendum et prosequendum et malum vitandum (ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2), which should be translated not as the imperative “Do good and avoid evil,” but rather as the indicative “The good is to be done and fostered and evil is to be avoided.” The correct grammatical mood is crucial, since he sees the natural law as essentially a process of discovery and application in individual conscience through our God-given faculty of reason, not simply as a matter of blind obedience to arbitrary moral laws.
It is all well and good to say “Foster the good and avoid the evil,” but what does that mean in concrete situations? Here Thomas suggests a twin speculative and practical reason-based discovery process of moving from general first-order “universal” principles of the natural law down to concrete applications of these principles. For example, the principle “Drive safely” is an abstraction that is universally binding. Even in fleeing from a catastrophe we would seek to drive as safely as possible, given the circumstances and relative risks. It is this judgment of how fast to drive that is the work of “practical reason.” Other things being equal, we could say that we should follow the posted speed limit, but we recognize quite legitimate circumstances in which it is morally acceptable to exceed that posted limit (e.g., a medical emergency). Thus, the principle “Obey the speed limit” is one based in practical reason, and while it may be generally true, it is not universally valid. This kind of middle-level principle (or middle axiom), Thomas says, is a lex valet ut in pluribus, which means that it is a law (lex) that holds (valet) in most, but not all, cases (ut in pluribus). Yet this middle axiom is also fully part of the natural law.
The last level of moral principles in Thomas’s view of the natural law is what he calls “concrete material norms,” and these are the specific applications of practical reason to a particular situation. If “Drive safely” is a universal principle, and “Obey the speed limit” is a middle axiom, then the specific limit “30 mph” is an example of a concrete material norm. We recognize that “30 mph” is not a one-size-fits-all automotive ethical velocity dictate, and that, depending on time and other circumstances, going faster or slower would be the best moral application of the universal natural-law principle of “Drive safely,” and along with the middle axiom “Obey the speed limit,” even the occasional morally sanctioned violation of the concrete material norm “30 mph” is part of the natural law.
Thus, some aspects of the natural law can and do change according to circumstances, or what Thomas calls “contingency,” and involve the use of the virtue of epikeia—that is, trying to find the most fitting ethical response to a given set of circumstances. Finding this fitting response should not be misunderstood as moral relativism or situation ethics; rather, it is a recognition that the objective nature of the moral order itself shows that the natural law is not an inflexible static law such as the laws of nature or mathematics and thus necessarily will demand different applications for differing circumstances. Most applications of the natural law come through individual conscience-based exercise of a combination of speculative and practical reason, which are expressed in what we call “prudential judgments.” Thus, Thomas recognizes and accepts that different persons can come to different conclusions about what is the wisest and best choice to make in a particular circumstance. Moral decision-making is not like mathematical reasoning. This key point of the natural law is not well grasped by some opponents who do not want to use the natural law in their moral discernment because they misjudge the natural law to be something inflexible that would not take into account true human subjectivity.
But what about the classic objection to the natural law, namely, that our human reason often is weak and too susceptible to error and rationalization? Would it not be better to trust in a safer moral guide such as Scripture rather than to rely on unaided human reason? Thomas recognizes this problematic and clearly admits that while the more general principles of the natural law might be known and accepted by all people of good will, the more we descend to the level of concrete applications, the more our judgments made through practical reason will be affected not only by “contingency” (differing circumstances) but also by “fallibility”—that is, the very real human tendency for error and self-deception (ST I-II, q. 94, a. 4). There is no quick-and-easy fix to this very real problem, and this is where individual and collective efforts at forming and informing our consciences are crucial aspects of living out authentically our human moral lives. Scripture too is an indispensable aid to this process, but history has taught us that the same discernment processes, with the real possibilities of error and self-deception, exist likewise in trying to answer the moral questions of what we ought to do, whether formulated in the terms of a natural-law discourse or a scripturally based inquiry of what God would have us to do.
See also Conscience; Discernment, Moral; Moral Law; Right and Wrong; Roman Catholic Moral Theology; Sin; Teleological Theories of Ethics
Bibliography
Bretzke, J. A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology. Liturgical Press, 2004; Cromartie, M., ed. A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and the Natural Law. Eerdmans, 1996; Crowe, M. The Changing Profile of Natural Law. Martinus Nihoff, 1977; Curran, C., and R. McCormick, eds. Natural Law and Theology. RMT 7. Paulist Press, 1991; Fuchs, J. Moral Demands and Personal Obligations. Trans. B. McNeil. Georgetown University Press, 1993; Gustafson, J. Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement. University of Chicago Press, 1978; Porter, J. Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics. Eerdmans, 1999; Traina, C. Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas. Georgetown University Press, 1999.
James T. Bretzke, SJ
The admonition to “do the right” is part and parcel of biblical ethics (Mic. 6:8). The notion of “natural rights,” however, emerges only in late twelfth-century canonical jurisprudence. The progeny of natural law (see Rom. 1:19-21; 2:14-15), natural rights refer, inter alia, to a subject’s essential powers, liberties, claims, or entitlements. In the complex genealogy of rights, the most influential interpretation, from which our modern human rights derive, views natural rights as subjective claims imposing correlative duties upon others to act or refrain from acting. Natural claim-rights (that is, natural rights that entail responsibilities on others regarding the one holding the right) tell us what is “naturally” right or lawful.
Under the influence of nominalism, modern liberal theories of rights are marked by rationalism, individualism, and voluntarism. In modern social-contract theories, the natural liberties of sovereign selves, rather than divine sanction, become the basis of political legitimacy. How, then, does the modern idiom of natural rights relate to biblical conceptions of divinely mandated justice (mispat) or covenant fidelity (sedaqa)?
Christian and Jewish interpreters typically appeal to the doctrine of the imago Dei (Gen. 1:26-27). Created in the divine image, persons are irreducibly valuable prior to their particular social roles, legal status, ethnicity, race, or gender. Their divinely bestowed dignity is permanent, irreplaceable, and inalienable. Respecting persons equally as moral agents, in turn, enjoins respect for the basic conditions or capabilities of their exercising agency. These capabilities become the basis of natural or human rights, which as such enjoy presumptive priority over other moral and nonmoral claims.
Modern Roman Catholic social teaching, for instance, recognizes not only civil-political liberties or immunities from interference by others but also positive claim-rights to security and subsistence, including basic rights to nutrition, healthcare, shelter, education, and so forth. Guaranteeing such basic rights against standard threats, moreover, imposes duties not only of forbearance but also of structural protection and provision. Although differences persist regarding the “natural” grounding, extension, and implementation of rights’ regimes, a consensus supports what the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) calls our common “faith in fundamental human rights.” Indeed, in the wake of the Shoah, human rights have become a lingua franca, defining the moral and legal minima of justice for religiously pluralist polities like those of the West.
Such polities need not embrace the Bible in their public reasoning. Yet “faith in fundamental human rights” is not, for that reason, disenchanted. In this consensus, distinctive biblical doctrines of creation, covenant, redemption, and neighbor love (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 19:19; Luke 10:27) provide both ultimate justification for natural rights and rich interpretative resources (narratives, parables, tropes, etc.) in redeeming rights claims (e.g., Walter Har-relson’s interpretation of the Decalogue). So too, prophetic biblical injunctions inspire persons such as Martin Luther King Jr. and communities to uphold the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable. Rights let us proclaim the “good news to the poor” today, in our hearing (Luke 4:21).
See also Civil Rights; Deontological Theories of Ethics; Human Rights; Image of God; Natural Law
Bibliography
Harrelson, W. The Ten Commandments and Human Rights. Fortress, 1980; Shue, H. Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1996; Tierney, B. The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625. EUSLR 5. Scholars Press, 1997; Wolterstorff, N. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton University Press, 2008.
William O’Neil, SJ
Necromancy is the act of calling up ghosts of the dead either to appease a troublesome ghost or, more commonly in the OT, to consult a ghost for advice or information that the dead, or at least particular dead, were presumed to have. The practice was common throughout the entire ancient Near East and continued into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and beyond. The Deuteronomic and Priestly law codes strictly prohibited necromancy (Lev. 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deut. 18:10-11), as well as related mourning rites for the dead (Lev. 21:1-5; Deut. 14:1), but those prohibitions seemed to have had little effect on actual practice during most periods of Israelite history. Saul suppressed the practice, as did Josiah’s reform (1 Sam. 28:3, 9; 2 Kgs. 23:24) and perhaps other reform movements, but the practice simply went underground until the political pressure abated. The practice was alive and well in Isaiah’s time (Isa. 8:19), was supported by Manasseh (2 Kgs. 21:6), and reappeared even in the postexilic Judean community (Isa. 57:3-9).
The biblical vocabulary for necromancy suggests that normally it was carried out through the help of an expert medium who could be either male or female (Lev. 20:27). The term ’ob may be related to Hittite a-a-pi, which designates the sacrificial pit used in the necromancy ritual, but in Hebrew the term appears to refer to a ghost who has taken up residence in the medium. Leviticus 20:27 speaks of a man or woman in whom there is an ’ob or yidde'oni. The medium’s control over the ghost is emphasized by the designation of the female medium as a ba'alat-’ob, “the possessor/ mistress of a ghost” (1 Sam. 28:7).
The second term, yidde'oni (from the root yada', “to know”), characterizes the resident ghost or in other texts the medium who controls the ghost as a “knowing one.” It is unclear why the ancients attributed special knowledge to the dead. If one were consulting the dead about conditions in the underworld, the attribution of such knowledge to the dead would be understandable, and if one were consulting a dead prophet such as Samuel, his ability to give a prophetic oracle as a ghost would simply be an extension of the knowledge that he possessed while living. It is likely, however, that the attribution of special knowledge to the dead was the result not of rational reflection but simply a first principle, only secondarily rationalized if at all. Other terms for the ghost are ’ittim (Isa. 19:3 [a false plural loanword from Akk. etimmu, “ghost”]), ’elohim (normally “god” but clearly “spirit” or “ghost” in 1 Sam. 28:13; Isa. 8:19), and hammetim, “the dead” (Deut. 18:11; Isa. 8:19).
We know little about the actual process of necromancy in Israel. By analogy with more detailed descriptions of necromantic rituals in Greek and Hittite sources, we might assume that the Israelite mediums dug a small pit in the ground, set food offerings around or in it to lure the hungry ghosts, and recited incantations to summon up the desired ghost. The recitation of these incantations appears to have been done in a kind of chirping or muttering fashion similar to bird sounds, perhaps because the dead were thought to speak in that manner (Isa. 8:19; 29:4). What role the medium’s resident ghost played in this process and how one isolated the particular ghost to which one wanted to speak from the host of ghosts that might come up for the food offerings is unclear. The most detailed account of necromancy in the Bible is Saul’s summoning of the dead Samuel (1 Sam. 28), but this is a literary account intended to be humorous, and it is hard to know how closely it corresponded with actual practice. Did the paying client actually see and talk to the ghost, or was it only the medium who saw the ghost, described the ghost to the client, and then facilitated the communication between client and ghost? Or, as has been suggested with regard to Greek and Roman necromancy, did the medium simply prepare the site where the client then slept and received the message from the dead by dreams? Or were there, in fact, a range of practices? Without more evidence it is impossible to say.
Why Israel’s religious authorities attempted to prohibit the practice is not as clearly articulated as one might wish, though it is clear that such arcane knowledge was seen as an attempt to bypass the prophetic word, which was the appropriate way to gain directions for life (Deut. 18:9-22). The dead as ’elohim (“gods”) may have also been seen as idolatrous rivals to Yahweh as sources for knowledge (Isa. 8:19-20). Isaiah casts the Egyptian consultation of their idols as parallel to their consulting the dead (Isa. 19:3). But, if we may judge from the surrounding cultures, such interaction with the dead was also dangerous, both for the participants in such rituals and even for innocent nonparticipants. The restless dead could disturb the living, in extreme cases even take possession of the living, and in the surrounding cultures there were rituals for putting these roaming dead to rest. One did not need anyone disturbing (cf. 1 Sam. 28:15) or stirring up the dead who were at rest. Moreover, the potential for using the dead in black magic against the living was a concern in the surrounding cultures, and it may have been a concern in Israel. An obscure passage in Ezekiel refers to women who use divination, wristbands, and veils to hunt down the lives of the innocent (Ezek. 13:17-23). Whether their practice had any connection to necromancy is unclear, but it cannot be entirely ruled out.
See also Divination and Magic Bibliography
Lewis, T. Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit. HSM 39. Scholars Press, 1989; Ogden, D. Greek and Roman Necromancy. Princeton University Press, 2001; Schmidt, B. Israel’s Beneficent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition. Eisenbrauns, 1995.
J. J. M. Roberts
The book of Nehemiah continues the narrative about the reconstitution of Judah that begins in the book of Ezra. The stories of Ezra and Ne-hemiah compose a coherent narrative (Ezra 7-Neh. 13) that begins with the Persian king Ar-taxerxes commissioning Ezra to teach the Torah in Judah and continues with the same king appointing Nehemiah to two successive terms as governor of Judah (Ezra 7:25-26; Neh. 2:5-8; 5:14; 8:9; 13:6-7). The book of Nehemiah consists of four parts: (1) Nehemiah rebuilds Jerusalem and its walls while releasing Judahite debt slaves (1:1-7:72a), (2) Ezra and the Levites lead the people in a covenant renewal ceremony (7:72b-10:40), (3) Nehemiah oversees the repopulation of Jerusalem and the dedication of the city walls (11:1-12:43), (4) Nehemiah later enforces some of the covenant stipulations (12:44-13:31). The narrator interweaves the careers of the protagonists by noting Nehemiah’s support for Ezra’s Torah teaching, on the one hand, and Ezra’s participation in Nehemiah’s dedication of the city walls, on the other (8:9; 11:36).
The collaboration between Ezra (mission in 458 BCE) and Nehemiah (governor beginning in 445 BCE) is a literary construct; yet by making
Ezra and Nehemiah contemporaries in Jerusalem, the narrator portrays them as partners who redefined the postexilic community of Judah by separating the authentic descendants of preexilic Israel from all outsiders. Each leader establishes the community boundaries by a distinctive activity: Ezra teaches the Torah, and Nehemiah constructs the city walls. The synergy of the two endeavors is apparent when the Judahites voice their commitment to disassociate from other peoples within the confines of the walls that they had reconstructed (Neh. 6:15; 9:2; 10:29; cf. 13:3). The identification of the authentic community as consisting of the families of Judah and Benjamin who returned from exile and severed all family ties from the people of the land carries forward a central thesis from the book of Ezra (Neh. 7:6-72a; cf. Ezra 1:5; 2:1-70; 4:1; 6:16, 21; 9:1; 10:9, 11).
A first-person report, the so-called Nehemiah Memoir, highlights the social reforms that Nehe-miah initiated in each term: first, his cancellation of debts and release of Judahite slaves (5:1-13), and subsequently, his securing the tithes for the Levites, closing markets on the Sabbath, and protesting marriages to foreigners (13:4-31). The covenant renewal ceremony in Nehemiah constitutes the climax of the broader Ezra-Nehemiah narrative (7:72b-10:40). The postexilic community defines itself by Torah observance. The choreography of the covenant renewal suggests a movement toward greater egalitarianism within the community even as it becomes more exclusionary toward outsiders. The Torah passes in succession from Ezra to the heads of the ancestral clans and finally to the whole assembly (8:2-3, 13; 9:2-3). The assembly consists of women and children as well as men (8:3; 10:29-30).
The covenant commitments to fallowing the land every seventh year and canceling debts are matters of social justice (Neh. 10:31). The produce of the seventh year belongs to the poor (Exod. 23:10-11). The rule governing indemnity specifically demands the release of pledges that debtors had consigned to their creditors as security for loans (Deut. 24:10). Such pledges could range from a garment to a piece of real estate (Exod. 22:24-26; Neh. 5:3-4). However, the immediate context in Ezra-Nehemiah indicates that the pledge in question is a child who works as a debt slave for the creditor in order to repay a loan that his or her parents had transacted with a creditor (cf. 2 Kgs. 4:1; Isa. 50:1). Such arrangements had precipitated the social and financial crises that provoked Nehemiah to demand the release of Judahite slaves and the cancellation of debts (Neh. 5:1-13). The covenant renewal secured the possibility of indebted Juda-hite families to regain their social integrity as well as the possession of their ancestral properties. The participation of children in the covenant renewal suggests the priority of enfranchising the sons and daughters who had been debt slaves (Neh. 5:5; cf. 8:3; 10:29-30). In this way, the book of Nehemiah touches on the human rights of children.
See also Covenant; Exile; Ezra; Old Testament Ethics Bibliography
Blenkinsopp, J. Judaism, the First Phase: The Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism. Eerdmans, 2009; Duggan, M. The Covenant Renewal in Ezra-Nehemiah (Neh. 7:72b—10:40): An Exegetical, Literary, and Theological Study. SBLDS 164. Society of Biblical Literature, 2001; Grabbe, L. Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah. Vol. 1 of A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. T&T Clark, 2004.
Michael W. Duggan