Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ETHICS

A term drawn from Greek philosophy, “ethics” denotes an effort to present norms of behavior in a systematic way that shows their internal, rational coherence. Not all biblical writings concerned with norms of behavior represent a strictly ethical stance in this sense. Many passages treat the norms simply as separate and distinct rules (e.g., much of the Torah) or bits of wise advice (e.g., Proverbs) with only minimal interconnections. Ethical thought is significant, however, in contexts such as Leviticus (with its focus on purity as the ritual expression of holiness), the prophets (with their call for justice as the primary human response to God’s loving-kindness), the Gospels (e.g., in the summary of the law), and Paul (who subordinates the specifics of the law to faith and love). Such broad themes as covenant, eschatology, and discipleship may also serve as organizing principles.

Given the inherently unsystematic character of the Bible, biblical ethics often turns out to be a dimension less of the text itself than of its interpretation. Biblical commandments and proverbs and bits of wisdom may have had no need to explain themselves, but later readers often want to understand the reasons behind them in order to interpret and apply them in their own very different contexts. They need to make decisions balancing the relative importance of potentially conflicting commands or to interpret what a commandment framed in terms of a pastoral society might mean in terms of, e.g., an industrial one. Biblical ethics, then, is an inevitable, but always somewhat hybrid offspring of the biblical texts themselves.

In developing such ethical reflection, perhaps the obvious first step is to establish a hierarchy among commandments — a process that is already well under way within the Scriptures. Exod. 20 and Deut. 5, , e.g., give special emphasis to the Ten Words or Commandments, perhaps suggesting that they provide a key to the commandments as a whole. Certain of the prophets insist on the duty of justice as more important than other commandments (e.g., Amos 6; Mic. 3; Jer. 7). Jesus fixes on two commandments — to love God with your whole self (Deut. 6:5) and your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18) — as the two principles on which “hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; cf. Luke 10:25-28).

Paul, in a related but distinctive way, singles out love as the preeminent value that determines the relevance of other commandments: “The one who loves has fulfilled the rest of the law. . . . Love is the fullness of the law” (Rom. 13:8-10). Paul also gives faith a similar role: “Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). In the Johannine literature, one finds something similar in the central place given to the commandment “to love one another” (e.g., John 15:12; 1 John 2:7-11).

By raising just a few principles to the highest level and making the other norms of behavior dependent on them or subordinate to them, one could link apparently independent norms of behavior to one another. Thus a famous story about Rabbi Hillel: when a Gentile insisted that Hillel teach him the whole Torah while he stood on one foot, Hillel patiently replied with the Golden Rule and then added, “Go and learn,” implying that the Golden Rule was the key to something much larger and more complex (b. Šabb. 31a). Alternatively, one could relativize the “lesser” rules as being further from the central principles and therefore less important. Thus, Mark’s Jesus, by refocusing on “purity of the heart,” relativizes physical purity and makes it effectively optional (Mark 7:1-23).

The ethical thought of ancient rabbinic Judaism focused on halakhah, the rules of behavior found in the written Torah interpreted by the tradition of the oral Torah. Authoritative interpretations emerged from lively rabbinic debate over the meaning of particular texts — with other texts drawn in for comparison. Certain specific modes of argument, working by deduction and analogy, were recognized as legitimate. Rabbinic Judaism tended to preserve significant portions of the debate itself as well as the conclusions. It thus exhibited a dialectical quality that is still characteristic of rabbinic discourse — a quality that values the interpretive process along with the end result.

Ancient Greek-speaking Judaism followed a different procedure, as seen, e.g., in its preeminent representative, Philo of Alexandria (roughly contemporary with Paul). Philo’s ethical reflections tended to resemble more the contemporary Greek philosophical discourse of Middle Platonism and Stoicism. Even when interpreting scriptural texts, Philo usually explained them in terms of basic ethical axioms giving rise to specific norms of behavior. The mainstream of early Christianity followed this pattern rather than the rabbinic one, and it has continued to be dominant in later Christianity. Christian ethics has typically been a systematic undertaking, more a subdivision of theology than of biblical interpretation; and it has tended to prize the final answer often to the neglect of the debate from which it emerged.

In contemporary biblical scholarship, ethical analysis of texts usually includes an effort to show how the norms expressed in the text fitted into the ethical systems, explicit or implicit, of the culture in which the text was written. The relevance for modern ethics may then be sought in a dynamic comparison of texts and contexts. Such comparisons may yield widely divergent results, ranging from a negative critique of the biblical text as representative of an oppressive cultural norm (so, e.g., in feminist or some liberationist hermeneutics) to the reclaiming or reuse of a text to give new direction in changed circumstances.

Bibliography. L. W. Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex (Philadelphia, 1988); T. W. Ogletree, The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics (Philadelphia, 1983); W. Schrage, The Ethics of the New Testament (Philadelphia, 1988); W. C. Spohn, What Are They Saying about Scripture and Ethics? rev. ed. (New York, 1995); P. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. OBT 2 (Philadelphia, 1978); A. Verhey, The Great Reversal (Grand Rapids, 1984).

L. William Countryman

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ETHICS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)