Gushee - Stassen - Kingdom Ethics - Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen - Kingdom Ethics - Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

The church confesses that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. He is God incarnate. He is the Savior. He is the Lord of the church and of the world. He is the center not only of Christian faith but also, Scripture asserts, of the universe itself, the one through whom all things were made: “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). Christianity is a nonsensical enterprise apart from Jesus, its central figure, its source, ground, authority, and destiny.

Here is the problem. Christian churches across the theological and confessional spectrum, and Christian ethics as an academic discipline that serves the churches, are often guilty of evading Jesus, the cornerstone and center of the Christian faith. Specifically, the teachings and practices of Jesus — especially the largest block of his teachings, the Sermon on the Mount — are routinely ignored or misinterpreted in the preaching and teaching ministry of the churches and in Christian scholarship in ethics. This evasion of the concrete ethicalteachings of Jesus has seriously malformed Christian moral practices, moral beliefs, and moral witness. Jesus taught that the test of our discipleship is whether we act on his teachings, whether we “put into practice” his words. This is what it means to “buil[d our] house on rock” (Mt 7:24).

We believe that Jesus meant what he said. And so it is no overstatement to claim that the evasion of the teachings of Jesus constitutes a crisis of Christian identity and raises the question of who exactly is functioning as the Lord of the church. When Jesus’s way of discipleship is thinned down, marginalized, or avoided, then churches and Christians lose their antibodies against infection by secular ideologies that manipulate Christians into serving the purposes of some other lord. We fear precisely that kind of idolatry now.

We write to redress this problem. Our purpose is to reclaim Jesus Christ for Christian ethics and for the moral life of the churches. We intend to write an introductory interpretation of Christian ethics built on the “rock” — the teachings and practices of Jesus. And in the process we also intend to recover the Sermon on the Mount for Christian ethics. We think that the Christian life consists of following Jesus — obeying his teachings and practicing the way of life he taught and modeled. Jesus taught that as his disciples obey him and practice what he taught and lived, they participate in the reign of God that Jesus inaugurated during his earthly ministry and that will reach its climax when he comes again.

So we are attempting to write an introduction to Christian ethics that focuses unremittingly on Jesus Christ, the inaugurator of the kingdom of God. When we surveyed the available textbooks in Christian ethics, we were amazed to find that almost none learned anything constructive from the Sermon on the Mount — the largest block of Jesus’s teaching in the New Testament, the teaching that Jesus says in the Great Commission is the way to make disciples and that the early church referred to more often than any other Scripture. Something was very wrong. Now we are pleased to think we are part of a trend to recover the way of Jesus for Christian discipleship. Recently, and from three different traditions, Dallas Willard has published The Divine Conspiracy, William Spohn has published Go and Do Likewise, and Allen Verhey has published Remembering Jesus. It is with great enthusiasm that we welcome these three elegantly written books, each of which takes the way of Jesus seriously. We are part of the same cause, and we hope all four books foretell a movement and will work together like a team of four horses pulling in the same direction.