This was originally published as a comment on this blog on 27 April 2006. The author asked: 'How, though, can the Bible be used to help towards ethical understanding?'
As a rhetorical device, let’s take your comment to the extreme, and start by thinking about what would happen if we could not use the Bible at all as an ethical textbook.
In practice, this would me that when we read an ethical exhortation in the Bible, such as ‘women should cover their heads in church’, that does not mean that women today should do so. If we decide that women should cover their heads, we would therefore do so not because the Bible says they should, but because we’ve reached that conclusion ourselves, using whatever method (derived from the Bible or not).
I used to think much the same, that the Bible was good for seeing how the apostles (say) ‘did’ ethics, the way they addressed the questions that faced them, but not for telling us how to behave. We can read the text, work out their method, and use that same method to generate ethical guidelines that are relevant for us today.
However, I’m not sure that that is entirely correct. I was never really happy with it as a really robust way of ‘doing’ ethics anyway. So here goes.
Being in part a Barthian I think that we should aim in our lives to behave as much like Jesus (the perfect human) as possible. We have to be careful here, because we’re never going to achieve that, but I think it’s a good starting point. Intellectually and theologically it makes sense. As Barth argues, if we want to know what it is to be human, we should look at Jesus, not at ourselves. Perhaps ethics then becomes a set of guidelines to help us think and act as true humans, to help us be as much like Jesus as possible.
In terms of personal piety, it also makes sense. Christianity is not about knowing about God through some musty old codices, it’s about knowing God himself. I think Jesus makes that clear in lots of what he says, in John and the other gospels. The popularity of the ‘WWJD’ bracelets (in America particularly) shows how helpful this concept can be. We do know Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, and so being constantly reminded to do as he would do forces us (at best) to go through life prayerfully, surely a good starting point for every-day Christian ethics.
The apostles also had much the same idea. What they said to the fellow Christians about right and wrong stemmed directly from this idea of imitating Jesus, even down to the way they upheld some parts of the law and not others. So why can’t we simply take what they said and plonk it down in the 21st Century?
The first thing that might stop us doing this is if people themselves have changed since the New Testament was written. If people are fundamentally different now to how they were then, we can’t simply take what was written to people then and say it to people now. But I think that people have not changed one jot. People are still motivated by the same sinful tendencies – greed, lust, envy, idolatry – that they have always been. Jesus is still the only perfect example of humanity – Romans 3.23 can still be said today, and for the same reasons.
But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, human culture has changed hugely over the past two thousand years, so our Western world today is almost totally unrecognisable to Jesus’ middle-Eastern world two thousand years ago. It’s almost a cliché, the point is made so often. And it is a good point to make historically – we do indeed live in a different world.
But it isn’t a very good point when we’re talking about ethics, unless one is a post-modernist. You said in your blog that the current trend is against meta-narratives, which I agree. The good old hermeneutic of suspicion means people don’t trust anything, especially if it claims to explain (nearly) everything. But a meta-narrative is exactly what the Bible presents us with. The word ’story’ is getting quite trendy these days (the dumbed-down version of narrative), but that really is what the Bible gives us – the story of God, the world and people. It even begins at the beginning and ends at the end – a meta-narrative if ever I saw one.
So that means we are in the same ’story’ that Jesus was (is) in, the same story that Paul was in, and so on. Tom Wright splits the Bible’s meta-narrative into various ‘ages’ – I expect you’ve read about it, Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, the Church (post-Pentecost), new Creation. They mark decisive turning points in the narrative where something changes dramatically. (Arguably the ‘Israel’ age could be split in two, perhaps pre- and post-monarchy, or pre- and post-Sinai.)
For ethics, this means that what is said in one age does not necessarily apply in another – but equally, because there is one meta-narrative, being in a different age to an ethical injunction does not necessarily mean we should ignore it. A classic example is perhaps the way Jesus treated the food laws. They applied to Israel absolutely (they had to obey them) but not to us, in the age of the Church. People can still follow them if they wish, but it is no longer a requirement. The same for circumcision.
It isn’t that we know better than people in the ‘Israel’ age, we are simply in a different place in the narrative, a place that happens to be after Jesus told us we can eat whatever we like, a place that happens to be after Paul said it does not matter if we are circumcised or not – we are justified by God’s grace.
However, as Paul showed in his letters, and as Jesus taught, certain things from the law were not simply for Israel, but for all ages. The command not to kill, or to have other gods before the Lord; I think sexual ethics fall in that bracket as well, because of what Paul says in his letters. Don’t sleep with your sister, or your mother-in-law, your sheep, another person other than a spouse, another person of the same gender. Just because the letters were written to specific churches does not mean they do not apply universally – just because God told the Israelites to have no other gods but Him does not mean that law applies only to them.
The first difficulty then is, how do we decide which bits of the law still apply and which don’t? Paul didn’t go through the whole law, saying ‘this bit, not that bit’ etc. I’ve just thought of it, maybe it doesn’t work, but perhaps the laws that don’t apply are concerned with outward signs and ritual cleanliness.
Laws concerned with outward signs of belonging to Israel or ‘cleanness’ are no longer binding, because we belong to Jesus by faith, and we are ‘clean’ by grace. That would seem to be in keeping with what is said in the New Testament. That would include the food laws, sacrificial laws, tithes, circumcision, national identity, and other ‘random’ laws about what clothes we should wear. If a woman is having her period she shouldn’t be banned from church etc.
The rest of the law, governing personal and communal morality, still applies. That includes the ten commandments, and other laws concerning our behaviour towards God, each other and people outside our community. Looking after refugees is a duty, giving financially is a duty (although how much is not necessarily important – the widow’s mite is a good example – giving has to be self-sacrificial or there’s no point). Sexual laws are important – just look at what happens to society when sex breaks out of its proper place.
I admit, this is perhaps a weak point in my argument. I’m open for other ideas, but I think the general concept is ok. It isn’t that we shouldn’t follow the law, it’s simply that we no longer need to.
Secondly, what about the stuff Paul says about women and worship (head coverings, not speaking in church etc). These need to be looked at carefully, and we need to decide how they apply today. We need to look at why Paul said these things – because they are a fundamental part of ethics, or because a particular situation demanded them?
Take the head coverings, for example. A woman displaying her hair in public is no longer a sign that she is a prostitute. Wearing a tiny skirt, high heels, a skimpy top and lots of make-up perhaps are these days. When Paul forbade women from speaking, he was referring to the prophetesses of Diana who were disrupting church services in Ephesus (if I remember correctly from my commentaries).
It may seem like selective reading of the Bible, and I suppose it is, but the criteria for selection are not arbitrary.
Thirdly, how do we face ethical situations not covered by the Bible? Abortion? Euthanasia? Given the way the emphasis has so far been on answering ethical questions by seeing what the Bible says about them, we would seem to be stuck. What if someone wants to die? Is it still wrong to kill them? When is a foetus a person, with rights?
This is where my original position comes in useful. We need to look at the way Paul (especially, but also other New Testament writers, and Jesus himself, where possible) addresses ethical problems. We need to analyse his method, look at his concerns, and use them in our own analyses.
For example, Paul was very concerned about the outward appearance of the church, that people would be turned away not because of the church itself, but because they are offended by the message of the gospel. He was also concerned that there was proper order in church services, that things didn’t descend into chaos. He emphasised the importance of not leading others astray by our actions, however right they may be.
Jesus often spoke about the importance of life over death, of light over darkness. Reading his teachings makes it difficult to accept the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument, which seems to suggest that, in some circumstances, doing evil is the only option. Pragmiatically, it’s a great argument, and gets you out of many holes, but I just don’t see it. We aren’t Jesus, granted, but we do have his Spirit, who helps us greatly.
Again, this is perhaps a weak point in my argument, because I haven’t developed it enough, but I think the basic position is there and can be built on.
My overall concern was to find a way of building an ethical framework that is Biblical, relevant and robust enough to cope with new situations not covered in the Bible. What do you think?
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