The Ethical Vision of the Bible

Learning Good from Knowing God

Peter W. Gosnell

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780830840281
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830864799
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What ways of distinguishing right and wrong are encouraged within biblical writings? How did various bibical authors offer different yet complementary motivations for promoting ethical action and discouraging unethical behavior?The Ethical Vision of the Bible equips readers with an interest in deepening their understanding of biblical ethics to listen carefully to the variety of ethical emphases found within the Bible itself.Focusing especially on Torah (the Law), Proverbs, the Prophets, the Gospels and Paul, this book enables the reader to trace key ethical patterns as they develop from the flow of thought of these biblical texts in their own contexts. Frequent summary overviews, suggestions for further reading, and reflectionquestions at the end of every chapter make The Ethical Vision of the Bible ideal for students and others.

1

What Is Biblical Ethics?

Defining Ethics

What makes for good behavior? What makes for bad? How can people decide what is good and what is bad? And why should anyone care in the first place? People from an assortment of cultures spanning a variety of eras have asked these kinds of questions. Thinking people pursue answers to such questions to help them make sense of the world they live in. These happen to be the questions of ethics.

What is ethics? That word refers to the basic ways that people use to distinguish right from wrong behavior. The discipline of ethics aims to assess the rightness and wrongness of people’s activities. It also offers motivations and reasons for why a person should choose to do what is right and avoid what is wrong.

Consider a basic interaction between a child and parent:

“Mom, why do I have to brush my teeth?”

“Because I told you to.”

There is a system in place here. It is a command-like system. A person should perform an activity not because of any rightness or wrongness of that activity, but simply because an authority has ordered it. According to that system, one should never question authority. It is a system that usually works based on the control of one person over another. Parents can often get away with that kind of interaction until their children come under influences outside of the home. As children grow up in many of the world’s societies today, they begin to learn that authorities can be blocked. Parental appeals to their own authority become dissatisfying and ineffective.

So, consider the following upgrade:

“Mom, why do I have to brush my teeth?”

“To keep your teeth healthy. If you don’t, they’ll rot and fall out.”

Now a new element has been added—consequences. If people perform well, they benefit; if they perform badly, they can be harmed. The interaction now appears to be fairly reasonable. But compare the explanation from the preceding parent with those following:

“Because if you do, I’ll take you to the zoo tomorrow.”

Or

“Because if you don’t, I will spank you.”

These also are consequences, but something is a bit off. The consequences do not seem to be tied to the behavior. There is no genuine connection between tooth brushing and the zoo, or tooth brushing and spanking. Rather, the interaction appears disturbingly manipulative, perhaps symptomatic of a flawed relationship. The parents here appear to be on subtly weak ground. In one case, the parent is bribing the child. In the other, the parent is threatening the child.

Ethics provides the rationale for performing certain behaviors. If the reasons for performing a behavior make sense, the system makes sense. If they do not, the system begins to falter.

Ethics involves another important element. The two scenarios may be instructive in the area of parenting, but are they really dealing with ethics? Brushing teeth may be polite. It may be healthy. But is it right in the same way that one would consider helping a person in need would be, or is failing to do it wrong in the same way that murdering someone would be? Brushing teeth reflects social upbringing, to be sure. It has health consequences, certainly. Refusing to do so when asked to may indicate troublesome attitudes that themselves do come into the sphere of ethics—rebelliousness, stubbornness, selfishness. But people would hardly call someone who fails to brush teeth an unethical person merely because he or she happened not to perform an act of personal hygiene.

So what else does ethics involve? We are talking, ultimately, about how someone is guided to become a good person who performs good deeds. That would involve matters such as how people treat others or how they treat themselves. It would more fully involve how one treats the world around oneself.

The following scenario swerves more fully into the world of ethics:

“Alicia, please share your toy with Junie.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to be a good friend to her. She ought to enjoy coming to visit you.”

Here we are dealing with behavior that affects people’s expression of their humanness. We are observing Alicia’s parent instructing her about right and wrong behavior that affects another person.

That kind of interaction, even between parent and child, shows a regard for behavior that goes beyond the bounds of mere politeness. It reflects a concern for others. It ultimately reflects a concern for what kind of person the child should aim to become and the kinds of things she should be doing as that sort of person. In this scenario Alicia is being urged to advance good, or well-being, on her world. She is also being urged not to advance harm in her world. That basic pattern will serve as the working definition of what ethics involves for this book. In other words, ethics involves championing behavior that advances good or hinders harm in one’s world.

People who aim to be ethical people are good people. We like good people. Good people do what is right. They refrain from what is evil. We like associating with people who are kind to us, who give to us, who care for us. Conversely, we don’t like people who are nasty to us, who take from us, who harm us. So, what does it mean to be good? Why should we do good? Answers to those questions will reveal the kind of ethics we are applying.

Biblical Ethics

In this book we are considering what the collection of writings known as the Bible contributes to the world of ethics. What is considered right and wrong behavior according to biblical writings? What thought patterns do writings in the Bible encourage in helping their readers distinguish right from wrong? What reasons and motivations do biblical writings offer for why their readers should perform what is good and refrain from what is bad?

In addressing such questions, let’s first note an important difference between what some would call “Christian ethics” or “religious ethics” and what we are exploring here in this book. Christian or religious ethics might address the question, What do the tenets of the religious faith contribute to distinguishing right from wrong on life’s issues? Or, more personally, Since I call myself a Christian, how should I behave as a Christian over this issue? These are great questions. They launch the inquirer on a prescriptive task that looks to the religion, including the Bible as Christian Scripture, to advise about or make behavioral demands for the present moment.

Biblical ethics should also inform those kinds of questions. But before we can determine how, we must first try to discern what the biblical texts appear to be communicating.1 Note, biblical texts, not simply biblical statements. We’re aiming to learn to observe the sustained lines of reasoning offered by individual biblical writings or clusters of related writings. Instead of imposing our interests on them—What does the Bible say about X?—we want to discern the issues that the words of individual writings appear to be designed to address. The biblical ethics we are pursuing here is largely a descriptive task. We will aim to understand what the Bible’s writings themselves promote ethically, exploring them with a regard for their literary, cultural and historical contexts. What we discover through this kind of biblical ethics should then be the basis of conversation between Bible readers, who can help each other understand more deeply what to do with the kinds of ideas disclosed by this sort of investigation. Our primary pursuit in this book is to observe the ways of distinguishing right from wrong that are encouraged within biblical writings, and what rationale and motivations those writings offer for performing right activities and avoiding wrong ones. Based on those, people can begin to discuss the prescriptive role these texts can have in their lives now, no matter the culture.2

Since much of Christian ethics is interested in using the Bible, how is what we are doing here different? Our task will not be to use the Bible as a source of moral statements, but to describe the Bible’s ethical vision, how its writings themselves shape the readers’ views of moral right and wrong. For example, some Christian thinkers are interested in exploring the implications of humans being made in God’s image, a point made twice in the early chapters of Genesis, as we’ll soon see. “If humans are said to be in God’s image,” the reasoning goes, “then I should always treat other humans as fellow image bearers.” That’s not a bad line of reasoning. But it is not strictly biblical in the way we are considering here. How so? Because that line of reasoning is never explicitly found or encouraged by any words in biblical writings. In fact, the last use of the expression “image of God” in the large first part of the Bible, the Old Testament, is in Genesis 9. Biblical writings appeal to the concept differently. Those writings instead follow other identifiable, sustained lines of reasoning that offer consistent and persistent ways of thinking about right and wrong. Learning to trace those lines is the point of this book.

In some religious contexts people are told, prescriptively, to do one certain kind of activity or refrain from others “because the Bible says so.” Such people could then go so far as to say that such a reason makes their ethics biblical. Though that religious approach may appeal to the Bible, it also tends not to reflect consistently what the writings themselves communicate and should also not be confused with the biblical ethics we are pursuing here. It rather tends to assume that the Bible is a collection of moral injunctions and stories that declare and demonstrate what is right and wrong for the faithful. According to that view, those who want to be considered faithful should do what the Bible says, without hesitation. Though, as we’ll see, biblical writings expect their words to be taken seriously, the words of those writings present a much richer set of ideas than the rationale of rote obedience allows for.

Further, the Bible’s words shouldn’t be pressed into service to communicate ideas foreign to them. If we impose assumptions from our culture onto what the Bible’s words communicate in their original settings, we introduce distortions. For example, we may want a biblical ruling on when human life begins definitively, but if we assume that biblical writers know exactly what we may know about human conception, we would be introducing ideas foreign to the biblical texts. The female ovum was not discovered until the early nineteenth century. Appeals to the Bible for such uses tend to reflect what religious authorities claim about biblical texts more than what those texts themselves may actually be advancing. They do not reflect biblical ethics but rather a form of religious ethics that appeals to biblical texts, sometimes validly, other times not.

As we explore biblical texts here, we will discover that those texts together do not really speak with one voice. The expression “the Bible says” reflects a religious attitude, but it does not always reflect accurately what we find biblical texts advancing. There are varieties of thought within the Bible because the Bible itself is a collection of writings produced over a wide time span and addressing varieties of cultures, even as many of those writings also show a high degree of consistency in disclosing an unfolding divine program.

Though that will lead us to consider a variety of ethical approaches in the Bible, we should also recognize one constant to all biblical texts: people’s ethics flow from their relationship with God. To begin to explore that point, let’s briefly return to the illustrations in the opening section of this chapter. Some people assume that God in the Bible is like an obnoxiously strict parent. Right is defined purely in terms of what God says. One should do what is right because God said so. Period. No questions asked.

Such rationale would be legitimate to consider if biblical writings actually communicated those thoughts in that way. And, if that were the case, they could be severely criticized for encouraging nothing better than “Do this or else!” Biblical writings would not be worthy of deep ethical examination, disclosing instead a harsh, authoritarian religion.

Now, suppose instead other assumptions that, for example, God manipulates people into behaving a certain way by threatening them with tough consequences, such as punishment or hell, or bribes them with good consequences, such as heaven or at least good things in life—the Santa Claus god who “knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good, for goodness’ sake!” And in return, if people bribe or manipulate that god enough by promising to behave a certain way, maybe god will be fooled into thinking they are better than they know they really are, deep down, hoping to avoid bad outcomes and attain good ones. Again, such a system would not be worth examining ethically, whatever unbiblical, personal religion it might disclose.

Many writings in the Bible do talk about God’s undeniable authority and about rewards, punishments and heaven and hell. But biblical writings do so in ways that defy uninformed, popular-level assumptions. When examining the Bible’s words in their actual contexts, readers will make surprising observations that may defy their assumptions about the sense of religion advocated by the Bible’s varied writings. For example, eternal rewards and punishments, concerns with life after death, even hell avoidance and heaven attainment are generally side issues in the Bible. (When we explore the Gospel of Matthew, though, we will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What Is Biblical Ethics?
• 2 From Disorder to Order: Ethics in Torah 1
• 3 Mercy, Covenant and Instructing Law: Ethics in Torah 2
• 4 Holiness and Love in the Covenant: Ethics in Torah 3
• 5 Wisdom and Consequences: The Book of Proverbs
• 6 Prophets: Ethics or Morality?
• 7 Reversal and Exemplar: Jesus and the Kingdom in Luke
• 8 Perfection, Mercy and Imitation: Jesus and the Kingdom in Matthew
• 9 Transformation in Practice: Paul and 1 Corinthians
• 10 Transformation Explained: Paul and Romans
• Concluding Thoughts: What Can We Do with All of This?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for The Ethical Vision of the Bible
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press