Exploring Christian Ethics

An Introduction to Key Methods and Debates

Craig Hovey, Craig Hovey

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780281071029
• eBook ISBN: 9780281071036
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Talking about ethics tends to involve talking about what we should or, more often, shouldn't do. We talk about setting limits on actions that, for whatever reason, we think are either wrong or somehow harmful to ourselves or others. The aim of this book, however, is to explore Christian ethics within a wider, more positive framework – one that that views Christianity's moral resources as part of the good news that it proclaims to all creation.

Ethics, says Hovey, need not be characterized primarily by negative prohibitions, limits, and tiresome hand-wringing. Rather, it's about a joyful and worshipful way of living, which flows naturally out of the abundant goodness God's life and character, as revealed in Jesus.

Contents
Introduction

Part 1 What Makes Christian Ethics Christian?
1. The Bible
2. Following Jesus
3. Some Key Theological Themes

Part 2 What Makes Christian Ethics Ethics?
4. Classical Roots
5. Modern Options
6. Contemporary Challenges

Part 3 The Stuff of Christian Ethics
7. Baptism and Identity
8. Mercy and Peace
9. Justice from Above (Order)
10. Justice from Below (Liberation)
11. Sexuality
12. Vulnerable Life
13. Challenges Posed by Science and Technology

1
The Bible

The Bible is clearly extremely important to Christian ethics. But there are reasons that it’s not possible for the Bible to be the sole source of authority. Martin Luther’s famous insistence on the principle of sola ­scriptura – which says that the Bible alone ought to guide doctrine and practice – characterizes the aspirations of many Protestant groups, but it is only an aspiration. In fact, every way of doing Christian ethics also draws on other sources of authority as well.

One such source is the experience of pressing issues and realities that ­people face in a particular time and place: a community’s experiences with power, poverty and wealth, labour, violence, oppression, discrimination, marginalization, persecution and so on. These experiences can shape questions at an often pre-rational level about what is most important for a given community. If the ones asking the moral questions also hold political power, their questions may have to do with how to use power appropriately for the sake of justice, for example. But if the question-askers lack political power, their questions about power and justice will be framed differently and will therefore be likely to lead to different answers. Their notions of power will more probably be ‘from below’, grassroots, collective, non-­sovereign, people-power.

Bible-reading works the same way: it is impossible to remove oneself from one’s political, economic, ethnic, linguistic and other experience and then approach the Bible (or any text) with a clean slate. Rich and poor communities, you can imagine, will inevitably respond differently to Jesus’ statement ‘Blessed are the poor.’ Recent trends in hermeneutics (the science of how we read and interpret) seek to embrace and acknowledge who we are as readers rather than attempt to bracket it. Because bracketing one’s own experience will probably never be entirely successful and will involve a lot of self-deception along the way, I think we should judge the recent trends to be superior to the alternatives. That said, they do generate their own challenges for Christians to articulate how moral authority then flows from any source other than experience. Asked plainly, are some experiences better suited to Bible-reading than others?

The American novelist and essayist Wendell Berry (b. 1934) borrowed an idea from Henry David Thoreau to talk about the Bible as an ‘outdoor book’, a book ‘open to the sky’. To Berry, Thoreau could have been ­describing the Bible when he wrote about ‘a hypaethral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf’.1 Berry means this both metaphorically and literally.

Christians ought to be open to the Bible since it is itself an open book, constantly gesturing beyond its words and pages to a horizon of meaning that cannot be exhaustively contained by our ‘walls’. It experiments with language and ideas, engages in internal debates, raises questions it can’t quite answer. In short, for Berry, the Bible is like the people it seeks to create in its readers: spacious, fearless, full of wonder and hope. Its language is often poetic and playful, at or beyond the bounds of the ordinary meanings of words. And the Bible wants to be read by poets who are willing to use their own words at the boundaries of language. God won’t be nailed down. This is how it is a book ‘open to the sky’.

Berry also means something rather more literal. To speak of an ‘unroofed book’ is to say that some ways of living will be more aligned with the kind of book the Bible is than will others. Outside, we are met by wonders that more naturally exceed our expectations, wonders that our controlled, indoor environments intend to keep at bay.

Of course there are many ways to become better readers of the Bible; spending time outside is only one. The point is not only that where one stands influences how one reads, but also that some places to stand are better than others. Surely poor people will respond to ‘Blessed are the poor’ better than rich people will. (We know this from the Gospels. It is a rare but not impossible thing for the rich to respond faithfully to this declaration. The poor hear it and rejoice if they believe it.) Then again, while ‘better’ may describe a closer harmony between the kind of text the Bible is and the experiences of some readers, it is also worth noting that throughout the centuries and throughout the world, many Christians have not been able to read at all. Literacy, the production of texts and the copying of manuscripts tend to be decidedly ‘indoor’ activities, while the outdoor work of peasants requires no reading. This suggests that the answer to a key question explored below – who is the Bible for? – is not going to be simple.

Apart from the complexity of reading the Bible in the light of varied experiences, the text of the Bible itself presents its own complications. There are tensions within the Bible on important, current moral questions concerning marriage, the death penalty and war. It is seldom possible to give a single answer to any question that asks what the Bible says on any topic. This is as much the case with strictly theological topics such as God, sin, sacrifice and redemption as it is with moral themes. Furthermore, partly because it is a collection of ancient texts, the Bible is simply silent on many of the topics Christians confront today like environmental degrad­ation, abortion and gender identity. More perilous are the times when the Bible seems at first to offer clear moral guidance, but then further study reveals a tremendous lack of clarity.

It is good to notice, though, that the kinds of problems mentioned in the preceding paragraph especially accompany a reading style that asks a moral question of the Bible and then looks for answers within its pages. This, admittedly, has a venerable history among Christians. But let it be said that the questions we bring to the Bible are not its reason for being. It is not only that modern people will ask questions not countenanced by an ancient text. It is also that the Bible often refuses to play our game of question-and-answer by reversing the process. The Bible turns around and asks questions of us: ‘Do you not believe? Do you still not understand?’ It throws us into confusion at exactly the points where we had hoped our confidence would be the highest. The Christian experience, therefore, of drawing meaning out of the Bible turns out to be much more than a scholarly one. It can be a vertigo-inducing task that demands the faith of readers but promises to save them from making idols of their own explanations and certainties. Because what I am describing is an experience and challenge of faith, it will be difficult to capture on pages of printed text; its home is in the person of the Christian and within the faith community. Even so, my goal is to return to this liminal experience of the relationship between reader and text in this section.

The Bible is the Scripture of Christians and its primary purpose is to form the life of worshipping communities. This is most obvious in the Psalms, although it is true of every text. The primary function of a psalm is to be sung; the other texts are equally liturgical and are given to us to be read aloud in corporate worship and to be revered and discerned as the word of God for today’s Church. Christian receptiveness to the meaning of the Bible is also liturgical, requiring preparation of the soul of the individual believer as well as the soul of the community in order to hear the word that God will speak through it. The challenge is to prepare oneself and others corporately to receive the messages of an ‘unroofed book’. But it is important to notice that the Bible itself is also one of the instruments the Church employs to ready the people to hear its message. This means that preparing to use the Bible is not independent of the Bible, which cycles the believing community through the formation to receive it, to its proclaimed message and back again.

The approach taken here is to describe the Bible’s role in Christian ­ethics in a way that allows us to notice when and where it functions to form Christian thinking and living, while also allowing us to see the ways that other sources are also brought to bear on how Christians think about how they should live.

God’s story

There are good reasons to avoid the idea that the Bible is primarily a source of information on moral topics (or any other topics, for that matter). Before it is this, it is crucially a source for formation. It shapes Christian people and Christian communities according to its story, inviting us to locate our lives within it by enlisting us as participants within its narrative. Christians not only read in their Scripture the stories of their forebears in the faith; they also learn to see these stories as stories that include themselves. The Bible gives Christians examples and instructions in how to pray and sing, and it promises to form communities into praying and singing communities that, over time, will come to understand their common life in terms of these practices. Miriam’s song in Exodus 15.21 is a song for all Christians to sing:

Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.

The song recalls God’s deliverance of the children of Israel from Pharaoh’s armies as Moses led them out of Egypt. But because Christians have sung the song about it throughout the ages as though it were also their own song, they have been pressed to look for God’s deliverances in their own times. Social movements for liberation of vast numbers of people (such as the abolitionist movement) have been cast in terms of God’s rescue of Israel. Singing is only one way Christians use the text of the Bible liturgically. (Martin Luther King preached a sermon titled ‘The Death of Evil upon the Seashore’ on the second anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision.) But singing is a very powerful way of accomplishing the self-involving intention of the Bible in the lives of the communities that claim it to be their Scripture.

The point here is that we will go astray from the very beginning if we neglect the rich, formative use of the Bible in real communities in favour of the much flatter, isolated enterprise of hunting for a chapter and verse from the Bible when trying to answer a question. The whole sweep of the Bible’s narrative is the one that, in the wisdom of the early Christians, was taken to be the definitive story of humanity – it’s in the light of this story that they made sense of their lives and also determined that those who came after them would likewise locate their existence.

The Bible was written by numerous different authors in different languages and over hundreds of years. We would do well to think about the Bible more as a library than a single book. Every author has his own way of writing, his own preferred themes to highlight and burning questions to ask. Depending on the time they were written, the intended purpose and audience, and the dominant theology, literary training and temperament of the authors, the various texts display an astounding range of material. Yet for all of its great variety, Christians can nevertheless still think of the Bible as a book since it tells a single story: of God and God’s relationship with ancient Israel, Jesus and the early Christian Church. It is ultimately a single story about God’s love for the whole world and God’s desire to be with the human beings he created and his actions to bring that about. The complexity of the Bible, it must also be said – especially how it is typically laid out non-chronologically – makes it difficult for many readers to grasp the big picture.

In what follows, I couldn’t hope to retell the entire story of the Bible. But I gesture toward some of its most notable contours for our purposes.

God creates the universe out of nothing and because of no compulsion. It is therefore free from needing to make up for any supposed lack in God. As Christian theology has always maintained, God is sufficiency and fullness, meaning that God relates to everything other than Godself (that is, creation) through love. The goodness of creation, including the ‘very good’-ness of humanity (see Gen. 1.31), is God’s declaration and celebration of this love. As with any love, the beloved is free not to love in return, but rather to exercise that freedom for separation. According to the Bible, this is the situation of humanity which claims for itself the goods of creation, including its own freedom. While the Bible tells the story of Adam (Hebrew for ‘humanity’) and Eve (‘living one’) in a way that some have unfortunately thought demanded a literal reading in order to be responsible, one prominent Christian habit since at least the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria has been to look for the deeper meaning:

Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden’ and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life’ of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of ‘good and evil’ by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to ‘walk in the paradise in the cool of the day’ and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual event.2

Origen understood Adam and Eve to be archetypes of all humanity. Abandoning the promises of God is a characteristic human act that explains suffering, death, violence, shame and all kinds of enmity between creatures. Adam’s and Eve’s sin is disobedience and lack of trust in God who had warned of death for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In Chapter 6, we will discuss the ways the twentieth-century ­theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer took this knowledge to be itself the creation of ethics (which hopes to know good and evil). In short, ethics only becomes necessary once humanity takes its leave of God. It replaces trust in God with knowledge of things other than God. God’s intention was a world without the need of ethics, with humanity fully and completely trusting in God’s provision, where human action flows from love rather than fear, and where the decisions that lead to harm (and therefore require ‘ethics’ to avoid) do not come to mind.

Some interpreters have pointed out something else instructive for us here. Adam and Eve do not, in fact, suffer death as punishment for their sin as they had been warned. Furthermore, the first sin is quickly followed by the first murder in which God nevertheless acts to save the ­murderer (Cain) from being killed by others. In these first few chapters of the Bible, God acts to redeem his wayward creation by mitigating punishment and ameliorating suffering and shame. God’s strategy for re-deeming individual humans then gives way to redeeming a whole people – first Noah’s family and then (and from then on) Abraham and his descendants. God elects or chooses Abraham to be the ancestor of a numerous people called Israel (named after Abraham’s grandson Jacob). God makes a covenant or promise with Abraham to bless him with a son when he and his wife Sarah were too old for children, and through their son (Isaac) to build a nation that will, in turn, be a blessing to the other nations (literally ‘Gentiles’).

One of the themes we have already encountered in this book is the fact that all ethics is collective. A Christian ethic is not only an ethic for individual Christians, but is the ‘ethos’ (from the Greek for custom, habit or character) of a whole community since it is primarily seen in its way of living as a community. Here in the story of the Old Testament, it is crucial to see that what we would call the moral expectations of Abraham and his descendants (spelled out in much detail with Moses generations later) are expectations for an entire nation. For now, the nation is being promised and established.

Yet the nation is also routinely imper...

Table of contents

• Exploring Christian Ethics
• Imprint
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 WHAT MAKES CHRISTIAN ETHICS
• 1 The Bible
• 2 Following Jesus
• 3 Some key theological themes
• Part 2 WHAT MAKES CHRISTIAN ETHICS ETHICS?
• 4 Classical roots
• 5 Modern options
• 6 Contemporary challenges
• Part 3 THE STUFF OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
• 7 Baptism and identity
• 8 Mercy and peace
• 9 Justice from above (order)
• 10 Justice from below (liberation)
• 11 Sexuality
• 12 Vulnerable life
• 13 Challenges posed by science and technology
• Bibliography
• Further reading
• Notes