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In December 2019, I took part in the Living Faith day, in Dorridge in the UK Midlands. This is my paper from that day, on the subject of "Christian Ethics and Social Justice". It went really well, and I shared my script and slides here while we were waiting for the videos to be produced. You can now see the full talk on YouTube


Unless specified, all scripture quotations taken from the Revised English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1989. All rights reserved.

 Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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The Bible Story Nerd

Hi all. I’m Dan Abson, and I’m a Bible story nerd. So at first I was surprised when I was asked to talk to you about ethics, and justice, and the gospel - that is, the ‘good news’ of, and for, humanity. Shouldn’t I be talking to you about the importance of narrative and literary theory when reading the Bible? Well, I am going to do that too, but when I really think about it, I realise that I spend most of my time talking about ‘people stories’: not just the lives of characters in the sweeping narratives of the Bible, but also the world of the communities whose experiences of God shaped each biblical book. I believe that that inspired wisdom can shape our lives, and our world.

That kind of power comes with responsibility though, so the task of reading and interpretation is not to be taken lightly, or without self-awareness. As Nathan Kitchen said, the Bible was written “for us, not to us.”

When we looked at the creation account in Genesis chapter one, we were trying to “bridge the historical distance” between ourselves, and the ancient Near East. In understanding how any part of the Bible is tied to a particular ancient place, time, and situation, we can identify those parts of the story that tell us something timeless about God and the created world - and about the place of human beings in that world. Like I said, total story nerd!

‘Biblical’ Ethics

Now, it’s sometimes said that we shouldn’t do so much Bible study because it’s too academic. To that, I say the problem isn’t that we spend too much time studying the Bible - it’s often the case that we don’t take the Bible seriously enough. You see, there’s a reason why this is a talk about ‘Christian ethics’ and not ‘biblical ethics’. When we acknowledge that the books of the Bible come from different times, places, and situations, we should also accept that the Bible doesn’t have just one moral or ethical code.

The same law - the same Torah - that advocates love of neighbour also says that no Ammonite or Moabite may enter the congregation of Israel, to the tenth generation. The most repeated command in Torah is to care for the stranger; but Torah also commands the Israelites of the Exodus to prosecute a systematic genocide of the peoples of Canaan on religious grounds in order to take over their land.

How are we to reconcile competing moral and ethical obligations and claims like these? You might find it surprising, but I think that the Bible itself provides an answer to that question. Take the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Ruth, for example.

Ezra-Nehemiah is set during the time of the Persian empire, when the Judean exiles are permitted to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and the city walls. When Ezra the priest arrives to dedicate the second temple and reinstitute Torah observance, he is horrified to hear reports that the people of Israel, even priests and Levites, had - shock, horror - married non-Israelites. Ezra’s starkly nationalistic response, supported by various passages in Deuteronomy, concludes with all the Israelites taking an oath: to restore their relationship with God, they deport their foreign wives with their children.

The parallel passage in Nehemiah also quotes that ban on Ammonites and Moabites from Deuteronomy, and goes on to record an even more severe sanction:

When the people heard the law, they separated off from Israel all who were of mixed blood.


Is racial purity really a ‘biblical ethic’?  Well, obviously it is: we just read it in the Bible. But does that make it a truly Jewish or Christian ethic? Let’s allow the book of Ruth to respond.

Ruth is a well-known story of love, loyalty, and family, set during the time of the Judges. But the book of Ruth that we have was probably written at the same time as Ezra-Nehemiah, and its full impact only becomes clear when it’s read in that same post-exilic context, when national and religious identity was in such a state of crisis that the Judeans - themselves an oppressed, ethnic minority - are flirting with ideological isolationism and racial purity.

Ruth is one of those Moabites, but she shows immense loyalty and kindness to her immigrant Israelite mother-in-law. Ruth herself becomes an immigrant in following Naomi back to Israel; she converts to the worship of Yahweh, is welcomed into Israelite society, and marries a wealthy Israelite farmer who redeems her adoptive family name. That’s explosive enough, given the rulings of Ezra and Nehemiah on the subject of foreigners and foreign wives, especially Moabite ones:  but a tiny little detail at the end of the book, which we might read merely as a postscript, makes an even more striking social and political statement.


So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel!” … [They] gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David.


If Boaz had followed the hardline purity ethic of Ezra and Nehemiah, King David himself would never have been born! The king without whom there would be no nation to keep pure, no temple to rebuild, no glory days of Israelite sovereignty to recall; no covenant to renew. And this was God’s own doing!

So what do we do when the Bible tells us about, or even actively teaches us, competing ethical standards? We should try to understand why there is conflict within the text, but ultimately we can’t agree with both Ezra and Boaz. The challenge of the biblical canon is that sometimes we have to choose. The good news is that the people of God have always been making choices like that.

Making Choices

When we come to the subject of Christian ethics, we’re rightly going to put Jesus front and centre. Jesus was a first century Galilean Jew, and he engaged the Jewish scriptures in a very Jewish way. Itinerant rabbis like Jesus were part of the tradition of the Pharisee movement, and while Jesus himself criticises some of its leaders for their hypocrisy, the Pharisaic tradition of interpretation in which Jesus teaches is not a legalistic or literalistic one.

For example: Torah contains at least 36 laws that prescribe capital punishment. By the time of Jesus, this sentence could only be  pronounced by sanhedrin, a Jewish court of at least 23 judges.  But the teachings and debates of prominent rabbis that are preserved in the Mishnah show that there was a spectrum, or even a trajectory, of interpretation. Execution per religious law was expected to be infrequent. Once in seven years? Maybe even once in seventy; maybe never at all. Only a couple of hundred years later, Rabbinic Judaism, the successor to the Pharisee movement, had adopted this latter position - that execution should never be sanctioned.

How can we justify disagreeing with a law from Torah? Well, because of the many passages in scripture that prioritise the sanctity of life. Even this passage from the Noahide Law in Genesis 9, which on the surface of it is a description of a capital crime, contains the seeds of this interpretation. In fact, there’s a tradition of reading this verse as an imperative not to literally execute murderers, but for humans to administer justice over other humans who commit such crimes. After all, if taking a human life is a violation of the God in whose image humans are made, then how can Torah require us to kill? As “Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel remarked: ‘They would also multiply murderers in Israel.’”

Jesus uses language, interpretation, and debate in this same way. You might have already noticed “not seven times but seventy times” in that quotation from Mishnah which is a Rabbinic idiom for “a lot of times”. Jesus uses it in a similar teaching, when Peter asks about forgiving one’s brother. Torah details many laws about recompense for wrong, but Jesus advocates a different way - as do many other scriptures. He chooses mercy over vengeance.

On another occasion, when Peter acknowledges Jesus as Messiah, Jesus uses Rabbinic language to speak directly to the Christian’s responsibility to make these same kinds of choices. In the sayings of the Rabbis, “binding” and “loosing” is all about forbidding and permitting, which the Revised English Bible picks up in its translation.

“...what you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in heaven, and what you allow on earth shall be allowed in heaven.”


This saying, as well as being an example of Rabbinic idiom, confronts us with the reality of our Gospel life: just like Jews following the Hebrew Bible, Christians will be faced with different situations, in different times or places, where they will need to make ethical and moral decisions based on their own growing faith and conscience, not on prescribed legislation.

The apostle Paul, an actual former Pharisee, takes the same approach. In order to preach to his fellow Jews, he has Timothy circumcised; but when some Jewish Christians had called for him to circumcise fellow preacher Titus, Paul refused.

To take another example, the Paul who writes in 1 Timothy 2, “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man”, spends his closing salutations in Romans 16 extolling the women who were teaching and leading in the Roman church, and in other Mediterranean churches:  Phoebe the deacon, who appears to be the messenger - and therefore the first public reader - of the letter itself; Prisca the preacher, almost always mentioned before her husband Aquila in Acts and the letters; Junia the apostle; and others. .

The Bible opens for us a dialogue in which we are expected to participate, a trajectory that we might follow as our knowledge of the world, and our understanding of our God, grows. And yet we tend to hold back from engaging topics considered taboo or controversial. The ways in which our theology leads us to treat children, women, neurodiverse people, or LGBTQI people in our churches; how we address issues like science, politics, healthcare, disability, economic injustice, racism: these are subjects that we still shy away from.

And we have no excuse for asserting that social justice is not the concern of the Christian, given all of the many scriptures that focus on exactly that; but at the same time, I’m not here to advocate for what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”. We are not abrogating our responsibilities to God so that we can do whatever we want without fear of consequence. We are called to make positive choices in the world for the good of all of creation. What makes the Gospel of life in Christ Jesus ‘good news’, if not its promise to give birth to a better world?

So the big question, then is: how do we make those choices? We’re not always looking at a clear-cut moral decision. When we’re faced with choices like Ezra-Nehemiah versus Ruth and Boaz, we’re looking at two distinctive visions for the community of the people of God. When we read Paul-to-Timothy versus Paul-to-Rome, we might be looking at different responses to different situations. How can we follow that path of wisdom?

A Human Gospel

Well, here’s what Jesus says about telling wrong from right.

“You will recognize them by their fruit. Can grapes be picked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit.”


This might appear circular, but it should make us realise that we have a lot riding on our definition of “good”. Is something good purely because it is objectively true? Or do we measure goodness solely according to what we understand of what pleases God?

Here’s another saying of Jesus:

“You are salt to the world. And if salt becomes tasteless, how is its saltness to be restored?”

At least in that original time and place, salt is good simply because it makes food taste better. Jesus is making the point that we are responsible not just for how the Gospel tastes, but how the world tastes with the Gospel in it. And the implications of that tap directly into our deepest and most firmly rooted personal and theological insecurities. Because we are afraid.

We are afraid that we can’t tell what pleases God, and there is some truth to that. We may well see God in the pages of scripture, scour them for answers, and still come up short: either selecting some of those answers to arrange into a simple and reassuring set of rules to follow; or becoming frustrated when all we find are more questions.

When we do see God in the Bible, we should be ready to take its testimony seriously; because the Bible consistently tells us to also look outside of itself.

God created human beings in his own image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.


We’ve looked at this today, and considered its radical meaning in the ancient Near East where humans were slaves of the gods, or bit-players in the story of the gods. Humans are made in the image of God: “in this world, we are as God is”, as it says in 1 John 4. We cannot truly see or touch God, but we can see one another. The ‘golden rule’ - do to others as you would have others do to you - is not just an optimistic aphorism. The truest way that we can reach out and touch God is in acting to benefit other humans: they are, after all, the image of God in this world.

And herein is our biggest fear of all: we are afraid to work towards human flourishing in the name of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because we are afraid that to be human is to be broken. We are afraid that we are fallen, that we are inherently guilty or sinful; that we need Jesus to fix our brokenness and to plead before heavenly God for mercy on our behalf. We may be so afraid, that we believe that our own thoughts cannot be trusted. But my friends, we believe other things too.

We are followers of Jesus, and we believe that in trying to emulate his example we are developing our own conscience. When are we planning to use that transforming conscience? Are we ready to take Jesus seriously when he says that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”?

Christadelphians are unitarians, and we believe that our Lord and saviour, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah of the most high God is a human being just like us. How can we believe that humanity is broken by nature when we are rooting ourselves in Jesus specifically because his perfect human life shows us the purest image of God?

Don’t get me wrong, sin and evil are very real. But the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus - not to mention the writings of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament - show us that sin is not a part of our lives by nature, but by responsibility. Perhaps it’s become too easy to be glib about the human capacity for inhumanity, but that popular aphorism reveals an awareness of this deeper truth: that suffering and injustice is caused not by humans being human, but by humans being inhuman. To whom do we look for our definition of what it means to be human? Do we look up to Jesus, or do we look back to Adam?

On an individual level, we are responsible for our sinful choices and their consequences. But there’s a bigger picture here that goes beyond the sins of individuals. Every Bible story about wrongdoing and sin - from Adam and Eve in Genesis, all the way through to the kingdom of the beast in Revelation - teaches us graphically that humans are both responsible for, and at the mercy of, oppressive and unjust systems, perpetuated by humans who wield power for selfish, unjust, and - yes - sinful ends.

The inspired writers of both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles characterise those oppressive and unjust systems using all kinds of literary motifs: it is the snake in the garden, the hostile army at the gates, the false prophet propping up the tyrannical king; it is the beast and the dragon, the satan and the demon, the mob crying out, “Crucify him.”

The way of Jesus is not to overturn those systems in social or political revolution. But throughout the scriptures the people of God are called upon to live within those systems, to co-opt the social and political order and turn it to a new purpose.
From Joseph, Moses, and Daniel, to Jesus, Paul, and the Revelator, the story of the people of God is the story of a people following the moral arc of the universe, which bends towards the justice of God.

“Good” is not good just because it isn’t evil. And as I’ve hopefully started to show, “good” is also not good only because it meets some kind of divine aesthetic standard for human behaviour. “Good” is good because… it’s actually good! For oneself and others, for the community and the wider society, the “good” of the Good News builds up and holds together; and it spreads outwards into the world.

We are not helpless or hopeless as we wait for the better world to come, the Kingdom of God guaranteed by the risen Jesus. But we do have a responsibility to act, to choose to show “what is good, acceptable, and perfect”; to be transformed by renewing our minds and thereby transform the world around us.



References

Harper, Lisa Sharon (2016). The Very Good Gospel. Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook.
Amazon

Kirk, J. R. Daniel (2011). Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?: A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Amazon    Logos    Olive Tree

Kirk, J. R. Daniel (2016). A Man Attested By God: The Human Jesus Of The Synoptic Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Amazon    Logos (pre-pub)    Olive Tree

Shroyer, Danielle (2016). Original Blessing: Putting Sin In Its Rightful Place. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Amazon

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