Green - New Testament and Ethics - A Book-By-Book Survey

Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013. – 176 p.

ISBN 978-0801049361

 

For a long time, study of the Bible and study of Christian ethics (or moral theology) were regarded as separate enterprises. This is true to such a degree that those of us who want to study the two together, Scripture and Christian ethics, face a series of important questions. These questions cannot forestall our work, though, because of the importance of the Old and New Testaments for Christian ethics. The church that turns to the Bible as Christian Scripture does so on account of its belief that the Bible is authoritative for faith and life, for what we believe and what we do. Working out the shape of faithful life before God, then, necessarily involves interacting with, learning from, and sometimes struggling with the church’s Scriptures.

 

Affirming the nonnegotiable relationship of the Bible to faithful life is only the beginning, however. A cascade of issues immediately follows as we seek to flesh out how the Bible might function authoritatively in theology and ethics. Indeed, the church’s history serves as a warning in this regard. This is because the Bible has been used to support immorality and injustices of many kinds—for example, the marginalization and abuse of women, the institution of slavery, a constellation of racist practices, and the persecution of the Jewish people. The Bible has been badly used and misappropriated—sometimes scandalously through its being commandeered to serve the aims of those in power and sometimes simply through unskilled reading. In such cases as these, it seems that we need protection from the Bible, or at least from its interpreters. It is easy enough, then, to recognize the importance of raising and addressing some methodological issues.

 

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Galatians

Victor Paul Furnish

 

In this letter Paul expresses astonishment that certain unnamed teachers who seem to have insinuated themselves into his Galatian churches are persuading some members of those congregations to abandon the gospel that he had proclaimed to them. He is concerned, especially, that those gentile believers have been deceived into thinking that they must submit to various requirements of the Jewish law, including circumcision and the kosher table. The apostle seeks to refute this false teaching by asserting the divine origin of his law-free gospel and reminding the Galatians of its central affirmations.

 

Paul emphasizes that he proclaims Jesus Christ as the crucified Son of God (2:20–21; 3:1, 13–14), and that Christ’s saving death has inaugurated a “new creation” (6:15) that believers experience as rectification (“justification” [2:16, 17, 21; 3:24; 5:4]) and freedom (2:4; 5:1, 13). Because “God shows no partiality” (2:6), this is “good news” for gentiles as well as for Jews (2:7–10; 3:28; 6:16).

 

What Paul means by the new creation, rectification, and freedom is expressed more concretely in a series of images. Believers are no longer enslaved to the “present evil age” (1:4), the law (3:23), the “elemental spirits of the world” (4:3), or their own desires (5:16–17). Having been “baptized into Christ,” they are also “clothed” with him (3:27) and adopted as God’s children (3:26; 4:1–3). They are therefore, even as gentiles, “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (3:14–20, 29). Moreover, as “children of [God’s] promise” (4:28), they have received God’s Spirit (3:2, 5, 14; 4:6), by whom they are enabled to live out in the present the rectification already accomplished and to await with hope its ultimate fulfillment (5:5–6, 16–18, 22, 25; 6:8).

 

The explicit ethical appeals of this letter, which are concentrated in 5:13–6:10, are anticipated in the declaration that what matters most is not “circumcision” or “uncircumcision”—one’s relationship to the law—but “faith made effective through love” (5:6 NRSV mg.). For Paul, faith is elicited by God’s love as it has been revealed in the faithfulness of God’s Son, “who loved . . . and gave himself” for others (2:20). And faith is expressed concretely as believers become agents of God’s love in the world. Accordingly, the appeals in 5:13–6:10 highlight several ways in which the selfless love of Christ ought to be active in the lives of those who belong to him. Paul seems to be thinking especially of the perilous situation in the Galatian churches, where disputes about circumcision and other Jewish practices were turning Christian against Christian (5:15, 26 [note also, in 5:19–21, the inclusion of vices such as “strife,” “quarrels,” “dissensions,” and “factions” in his listing of “the works of the flesh”]).

 

The introductory appeal (5:13) urges the Galatians not to use their freedom to serve their own interests (literally, “the flesh”), but, paradoxically, to bind themselves to one another “through love,” as “slaves” are bound in service to their masters. Over against those who hold that gentile believers must adopt Jewish practices, Paul declares that the whole law is summed up in the one commandment to love the neighbor (5:14 [cf. “the law of Christ” in 6:2]). His summons to “live by the Spirit” (5:16–25) is also a call for the outworking of faith in love, for he regards love as the first and all-inclusive “fruit of the Spirit.” No less important, his concluding appeal (6:10) to “work for the good of all” enlarges the field of love’s service to include even those who stand outside the “family of faith.”

 

Three significant convictions inform and support the ethical appeals in this letter. (1) What matters most is not one’s adherence to religious rites and rules, but the “new creation” that God has inaugurated through Christ’s death on the cross (6:14–15) and “faith made effective through love” (5:6). (2) Those who have been “baptized into Christ” understand that one’s true identity is not contingent on religious, ethnic, social, or sexual status (3:27–28), but on one’s standing before God and in Christ (e.g., 2:19–20). (3) Life before God and in Christ is simultaneously life in the Spirit, through whose empowering presence believers are guided in the ways of love (5:16–25). These same convictions, variously developed and expressed, are evident throughout all of Paul’s letters.

 

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