Amazing Rando
February 20th 2006, 09:11 PM
As an assignment for my Biblical Ethics class, I was assigned to create my own list of the "Top Ten" ethical teachings or principles in the New Testament. It's a subjective activity, designed to get us digging into the moral vision of the New Testament for ourselves. Thus, without further ado, I present my essay on what I see as the top ten principles for Christian ethics. I welcome feedback to my own list as well as your own "Top Ten" lists, should you feel motivated to create one. :teeth:
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As I sat down to write this essay last night, I began in a rather haphazard manner of pulling various important ethical teachings and collecting them. But I noticed a common, underlying theme when I attempted to expound on them, which of course ended up with me repeating myself ad nauseum. So here I am, making a fresh start. My ten New Testament ethical principles all fall under the common theme of servanthood. Essentially, New Testament ethics, or what God desires from us as the people of God, can be summed up with the following principle: God’s people are to be above all servants, first of God, then of our neighbors. While this theme of servanthood of God and neighbor is overbroad, in this essay I will attempt to identify ten corollary and derivative ethical teachings that help put meat on the bones of this central theme. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Love the body of believers.
The key ethical focus of the Johannine literature is encapsulated in Jesus’ pithy statement in John 13:34: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” While Christians are directed to take an attitude of agape toward everyone, loving our brothers and sisters in Christ takes on a heightened level of importance in the Bible, not least because of its prominence in the gospel and epistles of John. The purpose of this love command is explicitly stated in John 13:35- it’s so that outsiders will know we belong to Jesus. Thus, the way we treat our brothers and sisters is crucial to the way outsiders perceive the Jesus movement as a whole. The example of how to love one another is provided by Jesus himself. The teaching comes shortly after Jesus’ enacted parable of washing his disciples’ feet. The connection between the two is too clear to deny. Our love for each other is thus to be characterized by servanthood, humility, and true affection, not just begrudging, duty-bound charity. Also see John 13:34-35, 15:9-17; 1 Thess. 4:9-10; Rom. 12:9-13, 13:8; 1 Peter 1:22, 4:8, etc.
2. Love your neighbor, including the religious, cultural, and social “other.”
While love for the new family we have entered in Christ is paramount and has a special place of importance in any discussion of Christian ethics, Scripture is clear that our love must be extended to everyone- particularly including those we would rather Jesus had not instructed us to love. The Lord summed up the entire intent of the Mosaic Law into two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor (Mark 12:29-31; cf. Rom. 13:9-10, Gal. 5:14, James 2:8). The uncomfortable part of this teaching lies in the fact that we are to love even those who we would most rather not. When asked by a teacher of the law the important clarifying question, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus responded with the didactic parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). To good Jewish ears, this would have been shocking- not only was Jesus commanding love for total strangers, he was also casting a member of the hated Samaritan race as the example par excellence of love in action. Perhaps most shockingly of all, Jesus also extends the obligation to love to even one’s enemies (Luke 6:27-36). He sees love as the only true and lasting solution to the conflicts of the world, as well as the only faithful response to God’s own loving initiative.
3. Do not seek revenge.
As an important corollary to the difficult call to love one’s enemies, Christ also declares that we must renounce the prerogative of revenge. While this principle technically falls under the domain of several other NT ethical teachings, this teaching is central enough in the canonical Christian witness that it deserves special attention here. Jesus taught nonretaliation as a key and concrete way to love one’s enemies in Matthew 5:38-42. We are to respond to insults, threats, violence and coercion not in kind, but with grace, perseverance, and in fact, blessing! For the Christian, not only is physical violence excluded as a response to evil, but so are the root sins of anger, resentment, jealousy, and the like. This is by no means inaction, for pious, sedentary inaction is also an unacceptable option for faithful Christians. On the contrary, our response to evil and insults is to be “blessing” (1 Peter 3:9), proactively doing good to and for our persecutors rather than hating or harming them (Luke 6:27-28), and even meeting the needs of our enemies (Rom. 12:20). In doing so, we will not “be overcome by evil,” but will “overcome evil with good” (Rom 12:21).
4. Live for the well-being of the community of faith.
The church is the reconstituted people of God, formed around the memory and continuing presence of Jesus Christ, and the entire New Testament bears witness to the critical function served by the church as witnesses to God’s faithful action in the world. As such, the health and well-being of God’s people are of the utmost importance. In his discussion of Paul’s approach to pastoral conflict resolution in the churches, Richard Hays notes that the church represents “a way of life that surrenders freedom and prerogatives for the spiritual well-being of others” and that the “operative norm here is relinquishment of self-interest for the benefit of others” [The Moral Vision of the New Testament, 42] This can be seen clearly in Paul’s pastoral letters to his churches. First, Paul counsels that we “make up [our] minds not to put a stumbling block or obstacle” in the way of our ‘weaker’ brothers and sisters (Rom 14:13 and surrounding discussion; cf. 1 Cor. 8:9-13). Second, Paul himself surrenders the ‘right’ to make his living from the gospel for the good of the community (1 Cor. 9:1-27). He does this so as not to be a “burden” to the community who did not have much in the way of material resources (2 Cor. 12:11-16; cf. 1 Thes. 2:6-9; 2 Thes. 3: 7-10). Third, Paul recognizes that some unrepentant members of the community pose a danger to the church’s very existence, so he counsels expelling them from the fellowship for the good of the community, rather than allow them to become a cancer and so kill the church from the inside (e.g. 1 Cor. 5:1-13; cf. Matt. 18:15-17).
5. Willingly subordinate yourself to all authorities.
Christians experience an extraordinary amount of freedom from the cares and worries of the world, yet Scripture repeatedly admonishes us not to abuse this freedom found in Christ (1 Cor. 8:9, Gal. 5:13). We are to willingly allow ourselves to be subordinated to authorities of all kinds, as long as doing so does not force us to violate our Christian conscience. These authorities include the governing authorities (Rom. 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17), church authorities (1 Peter 5:5), and family authorities (Eph. 5:21-6:9). However, our subordination to these human authorities extends only so far as to the point where they do not conflict with our ultimate authority- God. This principle is illustrated most graphically when the apostles are ordered by the Sanhedrin to stop preaching the name of Jesus but refuse to do so, saying “we must obey God rather than any human authority!” (Acts 5:29- the NRSV’s linguistic paraphrase accurately captures the spirit of the apostles’ defiance in this case). There will inevitably be times when the demands imposed upon us by human authorities will run counter to the life of faithfulness God demands of us. When this is the case, the only faithful option is of noncompliance- we must remember where our true citizenship lies (Phil. 3:20) and be prepared, as the apostles were, to endure the consequences of obeying God rather than human authority.
6. Pray without ceasing.
One of the keys to the countercultural nature of the church is prayer. Prayer connects us directly with the presence of God and enables us to both bring our concerns to our Master and learn what it is he requires of his servants. Jesus modeled for his disciples how to pray in the light of the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:9-13), and taught them that prayer must not be a show of public piety, but an act of sincere, private devotion before God (Matt 6:6). Prayer can be corporate as well as individual, written as well as spoken. Paul opens many of his letters to the churches with thanksgivings to God and prayers for the well-being of the faith community (e.g. Phil. 1:3-11), and urges them to pray for him in return (e.g. Col. 4:2-4). He also communicates the necessity of being in a constant attitude of prayer, enjoining the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes. 5:17).
7. Put sin to death.
It almost goes without saying that the faithful Christian community is to abstain from sin entirely. Jesus emphasized the grievous nature of sin as an affront to God and to Christian dignity by declaring hyperbolically that if our hand or our eye causes us to sin, we are to cut them out (Matt 18:8-9). We are to have nothing to do with sin- in the New Testament, there is nothing even close to a rationalization for sinning as the “lesser of two evils” or for the sake of pragmatism, expediency, or “realism.” We are to “put to death” everything in our being that belonged to our old life of sin and worldly lusts, and “rid [ourselves] of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from [our] lips” (Col. 3:5-10). Since the grace of our Lord abounds in us and frees us from the guilt of our sins, shall we “go on sinning so that grace may increase,” as some accused Paul of preaching (Rom. 6:1)? By no means! We have died to sin- therefore we must not live in it any longer (Rom. 6:2). Sinning for the sake of some “greater good” is still sinning, and you will hard-pressed to find a more un-Christian moral philosophy than that.
8. Persevere in faith, even through suffering.
The Christian life is no cake-walk. Jesus told his disciples that they would experience all sorts of forces that oppose the ambassadors of Christ, not the least of which would be human opposition, which would entail beatings, hatred, and even death (Mark 13:9-13). In the midst of this opposition, Jesus calls us to persevere, and to endure suffering with gratitude. He takes the revolutionary step of pronouncing those who suffer for his sake “blessed” (Matt. 5:10-12), and declares that by “standing firm, [we] will gain life” (Luke 21:19). The apostles faced persecutions and suffering not with resentment or worry, but rather by “rejoicing” (Acts 5:41, cf. Rom. 5:3). By joining Christ, we also join the nature of his mission- suffering servanthood for the sake of others. But by persevering as he did, we also share in his reward, for “blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).
9. Take the “farsighted” approach.
When we adhere to the gospel’s proclamation of life in Jesus, we look beyond death and embrace the big picture of God’s story as revealed in Scripture. We come to realize that for God’s family, death is not the end, and suddenly, the way we live our lives is revolutionized. Jesus exhorts us to not fear those who can only kill our bodies, but after that are powerless on the contrary, only God is to be feared (Luke 12:4-5). Living in obedience to God means being willing to lay down our lives for others as Jesus did (John 15:13), and trusting in God for ultimate vindication and redemption, even if we do not see the results of our faithfulness within our own lifetimes (Rev 6:9-11). This confidence is expressed most fully in Romans 8, where Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). A life lived in this assurance will mean that we no longer fear death, for even this “last enemy” has been defeated (1 Cor. 15:26). How would living a life fearless of death change your outlook on being faithful to Jesus Christ?
10. Put your faith into action.
The goal of the gospel of the grace of Christ is not some “easy-believism” which allows us to rest comfortably on our laurels and be sedentary Christians. Rather Christ died for us, so that we might die for others. Faith requires action, and faith without such action is counted as “dead” (James 2:17, 26). We are to respond to Christ’s faithfulness with faithfulness of our own, and serve our God and our neighbor with our whole hearts. In this way, John writes to his church that Christ’s giving his life up for us necessarily requires a faithful response on our part:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:16-18).
Following Jesus is costliest decision one can ever make, for it involves dying to oneself and one’s own prerogatives and desires. It means living as a servant of the living God, and becoming a “slave of all” just as Jesus himself has done for us (Mark 10:44-45). Thanks be to God, who not only demands such a life of his people, but enables us to live it through his gracious gift of the Holy Spirit.
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As I sat down to write this essay last night, I began in a rather haphazard manner of pulling various important ethical teachings and collecting them. But I noticed a common, underlying theme when I attempted to expound on them, which of course ended up with me repeating myself ad nauseum. So here I am, making a fresh start. My ten New Testament ethical principles all fall under the common theme of servanthood. Essentially, New Testament ethics, or what God desires from us as the people of God, can be summed up with the following principle: God’s people are to be above all servants, first of God, then of our neighbors. While this theme of servanthood of God and neighbor is overbroad, in this essay I will attempt to identify ten corollary and derivative ethical teachings that help put meat on the bones of this central theme. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Love the body of believers.
The key ethical focus of the Johannine literature is encapsulated in Jesus’ pithy statement in John 13:34: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” While Christians are directed to take an attitude of agape toward everyone, loving our brothers and sisters in Christ takes on a heightened level of importance in the Bible, not least because of its prominence in the gospel and epistles of John. The purpose of this love command is explicitly stated in John 13:35- it’s so that outsiders will know we belong to Jesus. Thus, the way we treat our brothers and sisters is crucial to the way outsiders perceive the Jesus movement as a whole. The example of how to love one another is provided by Jesus himself. The teaching comes shortly after Jesus’ enacted parable of washing his disciples’ feet. The connection between the two is too clear to deny. Our love for each other is thus to be characterized by servanthood, humility, and true affection, not just begrudging, duty-bound charity. Also see John 13:34-35, 15:9-17; 1 Thess. 4:9-10; Rom. 12:9-13, 13:8; 1 Peter 1:22, 4:8, etc.
2. Love your neighbor, including the religious, cultural, and social “other.”
While love for the new family we have entered in Christ is paramount and has a special place of importance in any discussion of Christian ethics, Scripture is clear that our love must be extended to everyone- particularly including those we would rather Jesus had not instructed us to love. The Lord summed up the entire intent of the Mosaic Law into two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor (Mark 12:29-31; cf. Rom. 13:9-10, Gal. 5:14, James 2:8). The uncomfortable part of this teaching lies in the fact that we are to love even those who we would most rather not. When asked by a teacher of the law the important clarifying question, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus responded with the didactic parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). To good Jewish ears, this would have been shocking- not only was Jesus commanding love for total strangers, he was also casting a member of the hated Samaritan race as the example par excellence of love in action. Perhaps most shockingly of all, Jesus also extends the obligation to love to even one’s enemies (Luke 6:27-36). He sees love as the only true and lasting solution to the conflicts of the world, as well as the only faithful response to God’s own loving initiative.
3. Do not seek revenge.
As an important corollary to the difficult call to love one’s enemies, Christ also declares that we must renounce the prerogative of revenge. While this principle technically falls under the domain of several other NT ethical teachings, this teaching is central enough in the canonical Christian witness that it deserves special attention here. Jesus taught nonretaliation as a key and concrete way to love one’s enemies in Matthew 5:38-42. We are to respond to insults, threats, violence and coercion not in kind, but with grace, perseverance, and in fact, blessing! For the Christian, not only is physical violence excluded as a response to evil, but so are the root sins of anger, resentment, jealousy, and the like. This is by no means inaction, for pious, sedentary inaction is also an unacceptable option for faithful Christians. On the contrary, our response to evil and insults is to be “blessing” (1 Peter 3:9), proactively doing good to and for our persecutors rather than hating or harming them (Luke 6:27-28), and even meeting the needs of our enemies (Rom. 12:20). In doing so, we will not “be overcome by evil,” but will “overcome evil with good” (Rom 12:21).
4. Live for the well-being of the community of faith.
The church is the reconstituted people of God, formed around the memory and continuing presence of Jesus Christ, and the entire New Testament bears witness to the critical function served by the church as witnesses to God’s faithful action in the world. As such, the health and well-being of God’s people are of the utmost importance. In his discussion of Paul’s approach to pastoral conflict resolution in the churches, Richard Hays notes that the church represents “a way of life that surrenders freedom and prerogatives for the spiritual well-being of others” and that the “operative norm here is relinquishment of self-interest for the benefit of others” [The Moral Vision of the New Testament, 42] This can be seen clearly in Paul’s pastoral letters to his churches. First, Paul counsels that we “make up [our] minds not to put a stumbling block or obstacle” in the way of our ‘weaker’ brothers and sisters (Rom 14:13 and surrounding discussion; cf. 1 Cor. 8:9-13). Second, Paul himself surrenders the ‘right’ to make his living from the gospel for the good of the community (1 Cor. 9:1-27). He does this so as not to be a “burden” to the community who did not have much in the way of material resources (2 Cor. 12:11-16; cf. 1 Thes. 2:6-9; 2 Thes. 3: 7-10). Third, Paul recognizes that some unrepentant members of the community pose a danger to the church’s very existence, so he counsels expelling them from the fellowship for the good of the community, rather than allow them to become a cancer and so kill the church from the inside (e.g. 1 Cor. 5:1-13; cf. Matt. 18:15-17).
5. Willingly subordinate yourself to all authorities.
Christians experience an extraordinary amount of freedom from the cares and worries of the world, yet Scripture repeatedly admonishes us not to abuse this freedom found in Christ (1 Cor. 8:9, Gal. 5:13). We are to willingly allow ourselves to be subordinated to authorities of all kinds, as long as doing so does not force us to violate our Christian conscience. These authorities include the governing authorities (Rom. 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17), church authorities (1 Peter 5:5), and family authorities (Eph. 5:21-6:9). However, our subordination to these human authorities extends only so far as to the point where they do not conflict with our ultimate authority- God. This principle is illustrated most graphically when the apostles are ordered by the Sanhedrin to stop preaching the name of Jesus but refuse to do so, saying “we must obey God rather than any human authority!” (Acts 5:29- the NRSV’s linguistic paraphrase accurately captures the spirit of the apostles’ defiance in this case). There will inevitably be times when the demands imposed upon us by human authorities will run counter to the life of faithfulness God demands of us. When this is the case, the only faithful option is of noncompliance- we must remember where our true citizenship lies (Phil. 3:20) and be prepared, as the apostles were, to endure the consequences of obeying God rather than human authority.
6. Pray without ceasing.
One of the keys to the countercultural nature of the church is prayer. Prayer connects us directly with the presence of God and enables us to both bring our concerns to our Master and learn what it is he requires of his servants. Jesus modeled for his disciples how to pray in the light of the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:9-13), and taught them that prayer must not be a show of public piety, but an act of sincere, private devotion before God (Matt 6:6). Prayer can be corporate as well as individual, written as well as spoken. Paul opens many of his letters to the churches with thanksgivings to God and prayers for the well-being of the faith community (e.g. Phil. 1:3-11), and urges them to pray for him in return (e.g. Col. 4:2-4). He also communicates the necessity of being in a constant attitude of prayer, enjoining the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes. 5:17).
7. Put sin to death.
It almost goes without saying that the faithful Christian community is to abstain from sin entirely. Jesus emphasized the grievous nature of sin as an affront to God and to Christian dignity by declaring hyperbolically that if our hand or our eye causes us to sin, we are to cut them out (Matt 18:8-9). We are to have nothing to do with sin- in the New Testament, there is nothing even close to a rationalization for sinning as the “lesser of two evils” or for the sake of pragmatism, expediency, or “realism.” We are to “put to death” everything in our being that belonged to our old life of sin and worldly lusts, and “rid [ourselves] of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from [our] lips” (Col. 3:5-10). Since the grace of our Lord abounds in us and frees us from the guilt of our sins, shall we “go on sinning so that grace may increase,” as some accused Paul of preaching (Rom. 6:1)? By no means! We have died to sin- therefore we must not live in it any longer (Rom. 6:2). Sinning for the sake of some “greater good” is still sinning, and you will hard-pressed to find a more un-Christian moral philosophy than that.
8. Persevere in faith, even through suffering.
The Christian life is no cake-walk. Jesus told his disciples that they would experience all sorts of forces that oppose the ambassadors of Christ, not the least of which would be human opposition, which would entail beatings, hatred, and even death (Mark 13:9-13). In the midst of this opposition, Jesus calls us to persevere, and to endure suffering with gratitude. He takes the revolutionary step of pronouncing those who suffer for his sake “blessed” (Matt. 5:10-12), and declares that by “standing firm, [we] will gain life” (Luke 21:19). The apostles faced persecutions and suffering not with resentment or worry, but rather by “rejoicing” (Acts 5:41, cf. Rom. 5:3). By joining Christ, we also join the nature of his mission- suffering servanthood for the sake of others. But by persevering as he did, we also share in his reward, for “blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).
9. Take the “farsighted” approach.
When we adhere to the gospel’s proclamation of life in Jesus, we look beyond death and embrace the big picture of God’s story as revealed in Scripture. We come to realize that for God’s family, death is not the end, and suddenly, the way we live our lives is revolutionized. Jesus exhorts us to not fear those who can only kill our bodies, but after that are powerless on the contrary, only God is to be feared (Luke 12:4-5). Living in obedience to God means being willing to lay down our lives for others as Jesus did (John 15:13), and trusting in God for ultimate vindication and redemption, even if we do not see the results of our faithfulness within our own lifetimes (Rev 6:9-11). This confidence is expressed most fully in Romans 8, where Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). A life lived in this assurance will mean that we no longer fear death, for even this “last enemy” has been defeated (1 Cor. 15:26). How would living a life fearless of death change your outlook on being faithful to Jesus Christ?
10. Put your faith into action.
The goal of the gospel of the grace of Christ is not some “easy-believism” which allows us to rest comfortably on our laurels and be sedentary Christians. Rather Christ died for us, so that we might die for others. Faith requires action, and faith without such action is counted as “dead” (James 2:17, 26). We are to respond to Christ’s faithfulness with faithfulness of our own, and serve our God and our neighbor with our whole hearts. In this way, John writes to his church that Christ’s giving his life up for us necessarily requires a faithful response on our part:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:16-18).
Following Jesus is costliest decision one can ever make, for it involves dying to oneself and one’s own prerogatives and desires. It means living as a servant of the living God, and becoming a “slave of all” just as Jesus himself has done for us (Mark 10:44-45). Thanks be to God, who not only demands such a life of his people, but enables us to live it through his gracious gift of the Holy Spirit.