Moral Issues and Christian Responses

Patricia Beattie Jung, L. Shannon Jung

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800698966
• eBook ISBN: 9781451424430
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

I

What Makes Ethics Christian?

1

Foundations

An Opening Case

Think about a decision you may have faced recently—say, whether to allow a friend to plagiarize your work or whether to lie about when you last had your HIV status tested. (It could be a completely different decision of course.) Think about what shaped your decision. What made you decide the way you did? Should those considerations have had such influence?

Introduction

In this chapter, we focus not on an “issue” per se but explore instead what basic sources of moral wisdom give direction to Christians when addressing moral issues. Our “case question” can be considered in at least two ways: what in fact shapes our decisions? And what ought to shape our decisions? We will focus almost exclusively on the latter way of approaching the question.

The question of what is foundational to moral analysis raises a host of difficult and intriguing issues for people of faith. Over the centuries, Christians have appealed to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in their decision making. How these sources are defined has varied across denominations and centuries. Protestants and Roman Catholics have slightly different biblical canons. Tradition for some Christians includes the Book of Common Prayer, while others rely on papal encyclicals or general assembly policy statements. Many look for moral wisdom in the arguments of great theologians and mystics, while others find the images in Christian hymns to be morally formative. To complicate matters further, some Christians claim to rely only on Scripture, while Christians from other denominations may give more authority to a different source of wisdom. What role each of these sources of wisdom should play in determining Christian responses to moral issues is a matter of great complexity and import.

The Bible is a, if not the, central source of moral, as well as theological, insight for all Christians. Its normative impact for Christian is profound. At the same time, what the Scriptures actually say about any particular moral issue, as well as what kind of authority should be ascribed to that testimony, are matters that elicit quite different responses among Christians. Like the interpretation of an experience, scientific data, or philosophical distinctions, determining precisely what the Bible may have to say about a moral issue is a complex enterprise. Whenever one tries to relate the content of a body of literature from thousands of years ago to contemporary issues, the interpreter has to understand the sociohistorical context(s) in which that literature emerged, the type of literature it is, and his or her own context, among other questions. Even if we do not believe what a text meant should predetermine what it means today, we must ask what the moral judgments of the authors might have meant in their context before we can meaningfully relate what they said to our own questions.

A formidable and hotly contested body of scholarship surrounds the discipline of biblical studies. Some argue that “what the Bible says” is literally self-evident, while others conclude that we only ever hear what human, fallible biblical interpreters have to say. Additionally, there remains considerable disagreement among biblical scholars as to what kinds of moral wisdom the Bible brings to the process of moral discernment. Is the story of the good Samaritan any less morally significant than the Ten Commandments? Beginning with Karl Barth’s axiom that the Bible is endlessly “strange and new,” Walter Brueggemann, in our first essay, traces six implications of this premise for his conception of biblical authority and the process of biblical interpretation. Inherent in the Bible is the fundamental revelation of God’s staggering love for all of creation. It is faith in this God that establishes a baseline for the always provisional interpretations of Christians and opens them to imaginative inspiration. The brief article by Phyllis Trible uncovers the way ideologies of our context frequently, if not inescapably, influence our interpretation and application of biblical texts.

Ronald Osborn’s essay about the killing of Osama bin Laden exemplifies how the just war tradition might well inform Christian thinking about military action, including its victories. How are Christians to deal with the death of one of our foes? Osborn concludes that there were elements of the operation that did indeed reflect the just war tradition, while others seemed to violate that tradition. Though it is difficult to grieve such a death, the Christian just war tradition illumines why it is inappropriate to see bin Laden’s killing as part of America’s redemptive narrative.

David Hogue tells us how he learned to stop worrying and love the brain. His article highlights the foundational roles of both reason and experience in Christian ethics. There are sources of knowledge and truth that are not exclusively Christian: among them are reason and the human ability to explore insights about the natural, which includes the human, world. In this article, Hogue recounts his own hesitancy about neurobiology and the fear that neurobiology, especially brain science, would simply reduce religious thought to neurons and nonreflective kinesis. He argues that, in fact, science can be an important ally and source of wisdom in regard to the moral life. God’s activity is revealed in the brain as well as elsewhere in the human body. The Christian theological tradition, which has too often been shaped by a suspicion of science, can be significantly enriched and expanded by the considerations of scientific knowledge.

Broadly human, and explicitly religious, experience can be in agreement with Christian beliefs, and they both surely inform Christian ethics. Feminist writings claim that historically the experience of women has been overlooked as a resource in thinking about moral decisions. A significant body of literature has argued persuasively that the experience of women—African American, Anglo, Asian, mujerista, and Native American—is an important authority when thinking about the foundations for ethics. In the fifth selection of this chapter, womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland appeals to the experience of suffering in all people’s lives, but especially in the experience of black women. She mines particularly their experience of resistance as a resource for developing the womanist perspective on suffering. What is striking about the article is the way it displays how human experiences from a particular social location can illumine for all Christians the place of suffering in the moral life.

While there are many other sources of authority for Christian ethics, these selections point to four of them: the Bible, tradition, experience, and scientific data. Return to your “case question” for a second. Do you have a “sacred” canon to which you turn for insight? What is it? (For some people, the US Constitution sets the parameters for what they believe to be moral.) What role does your own experience or that of others play in your decision? Did sociological or biological facts enter into your decision? Consider your understanding of God, or what functions as a god for you. Did those convictions enter into the particular decision you brought to mind?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Biblical Authority

Walter Brueggemann

The authority of the Bible is a perennial and urgent issue for those of us who stake our lives on its testimony. This issue, however, is bound to remain unsettled and therefore perpetually disputatious. It cannot be otherwise, since the biblical text is endlessly “strange and new.” It always and inescapably outdistances our categories of understanding and explanation, of interpretation and control. Because the Bible is “the live word of the living God,” it will not compliantly submit to the accounts we prefer to give of it. There is something intrinsically unfamiliar about the book; and when we seek to override that unfamiliarity, we are on the hazardous ground of idolatry. Rather than proclaiming loud, dogmatic slogans about the Bible, we might do better to consider the odd and intimate ways in which we have each been led to where we are in our relationship with the scriptures.

How each of us reads the Bible is partly the result of family, neighbors and friends (a socialization process), and partly the God-given accident of long-term development in faith. Consequently, the real issues of biblical authority and interpretation are not likely to be settled by cognitive formulations or by appeals to classic confessions. These issues live in often unrecognized, uncriticized and deeply powerful ways—especially if they are rooted (as they may be for most of us) in hurt, anger or anxiety.

Decisions about biblical meanings are not made on the spot, but result from the growth of habits and convictions. And if that is so, then the disputes over meaning require not frontal arguments but long-term pastoral attentiveness to one another in good faith.

A church in dispute will require great self-knowing candor and a generous openness among its members. Such attentiveness may lead us to recognize that the story of someone else’s nurture in the faith could be a transformative gift that allows us to read the text in a new way. My own story leads me to identify six facets of biblical interpretation that I believe are likely to be operative among us all.

Inherency

The Bible is inherently the live word of God, revealing the character and will of God and empowering us for an alternative life in the world. While I believe in the indeterminacy of the text to some large extent, I know that finally the Bible is forceful and consistent in its main theological claim. It expresses the conviction that the God who created the world in love redeems the world in suffering and will consummate the world in joyous well-being. That flow of conviction about God’s self-disclosure in the Bible is surely the main claim of the apostolic faith, a claim upon which the church fundamentally agrees. That fundamental agreement is, of course, the beginning of the conversation and not its conclusion; but it is a deep and important starting point. From that inherent claim certain things follow:

First, all of us in the church are bound together by this foundation of apostolic faith. As my tradition affirms, “in essentials unity.” It also means, moreover, that in disputes about biblical authority nobody has the high ground morally or hermeneutically. Our common commitment to the truth of the book makes us equal before the book, as it does around the table.

Second, since the inherency of evangelical truth in the book is focused on its main claims, it follows that there is much in the text that is “lesser,” not a main claim, but probes and attempts over the generations to carry the main claims to specificity. These attempts are characteristically informed by particular circumstance and are open to variation, nuance and even contradiction. It is a primal Reformation principle that our faith is evangelical, linked to the good news and not to biblicism. The potential distinction between good news and lesser claims can lead to much dispute.

Third, the inherent word of God in the biblical text is refracted through many authors who were not disembodied voices of revealed truth but circumstance-situated men and women of faith (as are we all) who said what their circumstances permitted and required them to say of that which is truly inherent. It is this human refraction that makes the hard work of critical study inescapable, so that every text is given a suspicious scrutiny whereby we may consider the ways in which bodied humanness has succeeded or not succeeded in bearing truthful and faithful witness.

Fourth, given both inherency and circumstance-situated human refraction, the Bible is so endlessly a surprise beyond us that Karl Barth famously and rightly termed it “strange and new.” The Bible is not a fixed, frozen, readily exhausted read; it is, rather, a “script,” always reread, through which the Spirit makes all things new. When the church adjudicates between the inherent and the circumstance-situated, it is sorely tempted to settle, close and idolize. Therefore, inherency of an evangelical kind demands a constant resistance to familiarity. Nobody’s reading is final or inerrant, precisely because the key Character in the book who creates, redeems and consummates is always beyond us in holy hiddenness. When we push boldly through the hiddenness, wanting to know more clearly, what we thought was holy ground turns out to be a playground for idolatry. Our reading, then, is inescapably provisional. It is rightly done with the modesty of those who are always to be surprised again by what is “strange and new.”

Interpretation

Recognizing the claim of biblical authority is not difficult as it pertains to the main affirmations of apostolic faith. But from that base line, the hard, disputatious work of interpretation needs to be recognized precisely for what it is: nothing more than interpretation. As our mothers and fathers have always known, the Bible is not self-evident and self-interpreting, and the Reformers did not mean to say that it was so when they escaped the church’s magisterium. Rather the Bible requires and insists upon human interpretation, which is inescapably subjective, necessarily provisional and inevitably disputatious. I propose as an interpretive rule that all of our interpretations need to be regarded, at the most, as having only tentative authority. This will enable us to make our best, most insistent claims, but then regularly relinquish our pet interpretations and, together with our partners in dispute, fall back in joy into the inherent apostolic claims that outdistance all of our too familiar and too partisan interpretations. We may learn from the rabbis the marvelous rhythm of deep interpretive dispute and profound common yielding in joy and affectionate well-being. The characteristic and sometimes demonic mode of Reformed interpretation is not tentativeness and relinquishment, but tentativeness hardening into absoluteness. It often becomes a sleight-of-hand act, substituting our interpretive preference for the inherency of apostolic claims.

The process of interpretation which precludes final settlement on almost all questions is evident in the Bible itself. A stunning case in point is the Mosaic teaching in Deuteronomy 23:1–8 that bans from the community all those with distorted sexuality and all those who are foreigners. In Isaiah 56:3–8 this Mosaic teaching is overturned in the Bible itself, offering what Herbert Donner terms an intentional “abrogation” of Mosaic law through new teaching. The old, no doubt circumstance-driven exclusion is answered by a circumstance-driven inclusiveness.

In Deuteronomy 24:1, moreover, Moses teaches that marriages broken in infidelity cannot be restored, even if both parties want to get back together. But in Jeremiah 3, in a shocking reversal given in a pathos-filled poem, God’s own voice indicates a readiness to violate that Torah teaching for the sake of restored marriage to Israel. The old teaching is seen to be problematic even for God. The latter text shows God prepared to move beyond the old prohibition of Torah in order that the inherent evangelical claims of God’s graciousness may be fully available even to a recalcitrant Israel. In embarrassment and perhaps even in humiliation, the God of Jeremiah’s poem willfully overrides the old text. It becomes clear that the interpretive project that constitutes the final form of the text is itself pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgment of Sources
• Introduction
• What Makes Ethics Christian?
• Sexual Ethics
• Prejudice and Discrimination
• Issues of National and Global Priority
• Economic Justice
• Issues of Life and Death