see also Ethics

The Decalogue in the Sermon on the Mount by Dan Lioy (Studies in Biblical Literature, V. 66: Peter Lang Publishing) first investigates the biblical concept of the law. He then conducts a thoroughgoing analysis of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. He gives particular attention to the connection between these two great bodies of biblical literature. The result is a comprehensive study that argues for the enduring relevance of the moral law. This volume is appropriate for personal study and is also suitable as a college and seminary text.

More than ever the horizons in biblical literature are being expanded beyond that which is immediately imagined; important new methodological, theological, and hermeneutical directions are being explored, often resulting in significant contributions to the world of biblical scholarship. It is an exciting time for the academy as engagement in biblical studies continues to be heightened.

This series seeks to make available to scholars and institutions, scholarship of a high order, and which will make a significant contribution to the ongoing biblical discourse. This series includes established and innovative directions, covering general and particular areas in biblical study. For every volume considered for the series, we explore the question as to whether the study will push the horizons of biblical scholarship. The answer must be yes for inclusion.

In this volume, Dan Lioy examines the relationship between the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. Noting the unsettledness in biblical scholarship regarding this relationship, the author explores the influence of the Decalogue as a way of understanding the role of the moral law in the contemporary Church. While the author orients this argument to an evangelical audience, it is equally clear that both the arguments and conclusions will have widespread relevance in all aspects of scholarship. Certainly the direction in which the author drives will have to be reckoned with.

The structure of the Sermon indicates that the moral law was at the heart of Christ's lengthy discussion. He stressed that He came to fulfill the law, not abolish it (Matt. 5:17). As the greatest expositor of the Torah, Jesus upheld the moral law, showing obedience to all of its commands and demonstrating its original intent by His teaching. Christ's profound statement regarding His relationship to the moral law makes it clear that the Decalogue was not irrelevant for the church. In fact, based on what He asserted in verses 18–20, it was determined that He expected His followers to practice and teach all that was written in the Decalogue. Christ also expected His people to heed the least important command found in the law and to teach others to do the same.

The assertion that Christians are obligated to obey all the moral law because of the relationship between the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount is further reinforced in the series of statements recorded in Matthew 5:21-48. In this passage, Jesus contrasted His ethical teachings with those of the legalistic traditions of the Jews. The Savior maintained that it was a sham to keep some of the laws externally, yet violate them internally. By making direct and indirect allusions to the Decalogue, Jesus discussed some of the ways He expected His followers to obey all of the moral law.

An analysis of Matthew 6:1–7:12 provides further support for the conclusion that Christians are obligated to obey all of the moral law. In this passage Jesus dealt with a variety of biblical and theological subjects that appeared in the Decalogue. As He discussed each topic, the' Savior indicated how all of the moral law was to be heeded properly. Christ focused on specific aspects of the law that some in His day had misapplied and that needed to be handled correctly. Jesus instructed His listeners not to perform righteous acts so as to gain attention from people. He explained how these good deeds were to be performed and what rewards would flow from doing them. Jesus' intent was to indicate how His disciples could properly obey all of God's moral law.

An analysis of Matthew 7:13–27 provides additional support that Christians are obligated to obey all of the moral law. In this passage Jesus dealt with a variety of biblical and theological subjects that appeared in the Decalogue. The research indicated that when the followers of Christ are rightly related to the law, their lives will be filled with joy, purpose, and eternal hope. The antithesis of this is that those who are improperly related to the law will experience sorrow, futility, and despair in their lives.

Some might argue that Christians are only duty bound to obey part of the moral law. This conclusion, however, cannot be supported by the biblical evidence. When Christ declared that He came to fulfill the law (Matt. 5:17), He did not place any qualifiers or restrictions on the nature of His fulfillment. He also did not water down or reduce the obligation of His followers to heed the moral law. Even the least of the commandments was binding (vs. 18). In fact, whoever was guilty of rejecting the least important command in the moral law would be considered least important in God's kingdom. The corollary was also true. Whoever practiced and taught even the smallest in-junction of Scripture would be considered great in the divine kingdom (vs. 19). Thus Christians are duty bound to obey all of the moral law, as it is ex-pressed in the Decalogue.

This conclusion need not be based solely on the relationship between the Sermon and the Decalogue. This assertion can also be upheld on theological grounds. For instance, God's moral law is absolute, perfect, unchanging, and eternal in nature. The Lord and His holy character, as reflected in His universal moral law, is the abiding standard for how people of all ages should live (cf. Matt. 5:48; Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 4:13; Col. 3:10; 1 Pet. 1:15–16). This means the moral law is relevant for Christians, regardless of the age or society in which they live.

Theory And Practice In Old Testament Ethics by John Rogerson, edited by M Daniel Carroll R. (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series: T. & T. Clark Publishers, Ltd) John Rogerson has developed his Old Testament ethics from the perspective of the convictions of his Christian faith (note especially the last two essays of this volume). He has tried to demonstrate faithfulness to the God of the Bible and to the spirit of its ethical teaching, even as he has explored ways to be intellectually honest with both the historical and textual data and the challenges of modern life. In addition, for him, ethical reflection and practice cannot be exercised apart from the world, so it is necessary to interact with society—both by working through other ancillary disciplines to enrich Old Testament ethics itself and in order to speak to and act on today's social problems more effectively. His coordination of natural morality, the imperatives of redemption, and the structures of grace are his attempt to make the biblical text relevant today and is foundational to his significant contribution to Old Testament ethics.

For him, biblical ethics is not just an academic exercise; it is a call to a certain kind of lifestyle and to concrete social and political commitments. This is not true of all who write in the field of Old Testament ethics)

Professor Rogerson lives without a car because of a concern for the environment and as a protest against the fact that the daily loss of life and serious injuries in road accidents on British (and other!) roads is accepted as a normal fact of modem life. From 1964 until five years after his arrival in Sheffield in 1979 he was an active leader in the (Boy) Scout Association in order to work with young people; for him, these organizations are upholders of the moral values `of my station' within British society. He himself was a member of the scouts as a boy and young adult. Professor Rogerson and his wife Rosalind are vegetarians and use `green' electricity, since it is generated by renewable natural resources. Some years ago they purchased a larger home in order to care for aging parents and another ailing family member; they now house university students and make them part of the family. They also are members of the Green Party and volunteer for activities as time permits.

These and other commitments have grown out of his life experience and Christian faith. In this volume's final chapter Rogerson recounts a bit of that pilgrimage. This Preface supplements what is told there with more details in order to gain greater insight into his interdisciplinary interests and his desire to integrate biblical study with theological and ethical concerns. What follows is not intended to lift Professor Rogerson up as a moral exemplar—something with which he would be very uncomfortable—but rather to reveal the origin of several features of his thinking that are foundational to the essays reproduced in this book.

Having discovered Christian faith as a young man and being interested in dedicating his life to church ministry, Rogerson started the ordination process at the

University of Manchester. In those days (the 1950s-60s) the usual process was to go to university and then move on to two years at theological college. Rogerson first became interested in ethics during his studies for the B. D. at Manchester, and in his second year he took a course in moral philosophy. From Manchester he went to Ripon Hall at Oxford. There he did two years of theological studies, but he also was fascinated with languages and took classical and medieval Hebrew, classical Arabic, as well as Ugaritic as a special subject.

At that time he should have been ordained, but his tutor, G.R. Driver, was able to secure him a scholarship to spend a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1963-64). While there Rogerson did a lot of exploring of the land, an interest that is evident in the publication of an atlas. It was a much less violent place then, so he was able to travel freely all over the countryside (putting to use his background as a scout in all kinds of unforeseen ways!). While in Jerusalem he studied linguistics with Chaim Rabin, and this led to an interest in social linguistics and eventually to social anthropology. He quickly recognized that these disciplines could help him and others understand the context of the Old Testament world. In particular, his reading of the social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard showed him how it is possible to go to a totally different culture and mediate it into one's own. In other words, background studies of the Bible, which would need to be informed by these and other disciplines, were clearly important.

While in Jerusalem he was appointed to a post at the University of Durham. Rogerson returned to England and was ordained in September 1964, just before he began'his first term of teaching there. Various strands of his experience during the years at Durham helped him to begin to formulate an approach that would wed a pastoral and theological focus with a critical methodology. To begin with, for the first three years he was a lecturer in theology and a curate of a local congregation of the Church of England. In time, Rogerson became a full-time lecturer, but he maintained (and continues to maintain) his commitment to preaching and church involvement. Second, during his tenure at Durham Rogerson was able to put into practice what he had learned from a writer who had earlier deeply influenced his passage into Christian faith, the Methodist Leslie D. Weatherhead. Weatherhead saw the importance of clarity in method and recognized the value of interdisciplinary work (he appealed to psychology and English literature). Weatherhead also held to some of the critical views of his day, but was at the same time a great preacher and evangelist. Here, in other words, was an example of the possibility of combining Christian piety and ministry with intellectual integrity. Third, while he was researching his book on myth (1968-69),4 Rogerson came upon the nineteenth century German Old Testament scholar W.M.L. de Wette. At this time he was also travelling regularly to Germany to do research and attended some Lutheran services. Within that tradition Rogerson discovered a theological perspective not well known in England: the special emphasis on the Fall and the grace of God and the Law-Gospel distinction. The latter allows for holding together in healthy tension acritical perspective of the Biblical text and Christian faith, a tension embodied in de Wette and others. This contact also spurred him on in his study of German. He realized that to be a first-rate Old Testament scholar he would need to be as fluent in German as he was in English. This conviction would soon bear fruit for his ethics in another unexpected turn of events.

With the move to the University of Sheffield to be Professor and Head of the Department of Biblical Studies in 1979, the concern for ethics sprang up again. At that time, Rogerson belonged to a German academic book club and acquired coincidentally a volume by E. Meinberg titled Das Menschenbild der modernen Erziehungswissenschal. This book, along with the work of Jürgen Habermas, triggered for him the key question for Old Testament ethics: What does it mean to be human? The thinking of Habermas and others of the Frankfurt School have continued to inform his thinking in ethics.

These various brief vignettes, along with the opening list of moral stances, help explain the multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary nature of Professor Rogerson's Old Testament ethics. It strives to be grounded in the exegesis of the biblical text (the interest in languages), informed by the realities of the ancient and modern worlds (background studies, the social sciences), articulated in a way that can engage broader ethical discourse (philosophical ethics), and deeply theological, pastoral, and practical.

The work in Old Testament ethics by John Rogerson has been extensive, but scattered. This volume was conceived as a means to gather these materials in order to enrich the discourse that is now going on in the field. The selection represents a timeframe spanning from 1982 to 2001, and the essays in each major part are arranged chronologically. The dates of previously published pieces are available in the Acknowledgments; the dates and places of presentation for each unpublished piece is noted in an initial footnote to the title.

Understanding Old Testament Ethics: Approaches and Explorations by John Barton (Westminster John Knox Press) How can we best understand the different ways that ethical issues are addressed in the Hebrew Bible? And how might that understanding usefully inform ethical decision making in our own day?

These are the two key questions explored by John Barton in part 1 of this study, in which he looks at how the Bible's narratives, as well as its collections of laws, oracles, and wisdom writings, all contribute to our understanding of the whole. In part 2, he focuses on the moral vision of the Prophets—especially Amos, Isaiah, and Daniel—providing the reader with the fruits of his research in ethics in the prophetic literature over the last few decades.

The result is a book that enables students of the Bible, ethics, and other theo­logical disciplines to grasp firmly the main issues at stake in current scholarly debate about the ethical legacy of the Old Testament. At the same time, the reader will gain a thorough appreciation of Professor Barton's own groundbreaking research in this field and how his studies have advanced our understanding of the ways in which the prophets, sages, and storytellers of ancient Israel expressed their visions of God's justice and goodness—both for their own time and for generations to come.

Excerpt: All this is part of the Old Testament's assumption that human beings are responsible agents, not the playthings of God or the gods. The consequences of human action are not presented as random and unpredictable but as fol­lowing certain moral patterns, most often a pattern involving just deserts. Yet in a longer perspective there is also considerable moral ambiguity in what hap-pens. The fact that David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then mur­dered her husband does not constrain the actions of his children: Amnon's rape of Tamar is an act for which he is entirely to blame, not one that is David's fault, and his subsequent murder by Absalom is seen by the latter as just retri­bution, not as an act of random violence, and one for which he takes full responsibility. Yet it is impossible for the reader not to feel a sense that family history is repeating itself in a new form: these are the kinds of action we might expect from David's sons. The next scene in the drama is morally more con-voluted. David brings Absalom back from exile at the bidding of Joab via the wise woman of Tekoa: surely a good action, certainly presented as such by her. Yet it is because he comes back from exile that he is able to build up a follow­ing and thus, in due course, to rebel against David, an act that results in his own death. From the point of view of the narrative structure, this death may be seen both as a delayed punishment for his murder of Amnon—by pardon­ing him David sets in train events which in fact lead to the revenge David refrains from taking!—and also as one of the mechanisms which enables the plot to end with the accession of Solomon, in whose path he might otherwise have stood. Just deserts here mingle inextricably with inscrutable divine prov­idence and with the unintended bad consequences of good acts. Though each individual action is susceptible to moral analysis as right or wrong, the com­bination of many such actions produces an unreadable and complex web of good and evil. The moral simplicities of the Chronicler, for whom good peo­ple do good things and are rewarded with good fortune, and bad people do bad things and are duly punished, is lacking from these earlier narratives.

The Old Testament's moral vision is thus more complicated than it might appear, certainly more complicated than most people think it is. Basic to it, I have argued with Otto, is a certain concept of human dignity, in which the choices human beings make really matter. They are not God's puppets in a the­atre whose audience is other divine beings, with their own concerns to which humans are irrelevant; they are instead partners with the single God in the only drama God is interested in, the drama played out on earth by created beings. This concept gives the human race both a greater glory and a greater respon­sibility than it usually had in the cultures that surrounded Israel. It is not sub­ject to random divine acts and hence need not live fatalistically; on the other hand, it is accountable for its own sins, which cannot be laid at the door of some malevolent divine power. Hence both the hope and the fear we encounter in the Prophets: hope, because good moral choices are worth mak­ing; they are not nullified by an indifferent universe containing malign pow­ers who snuff us out at will; but also fear, because wrong choices ensure bad consequences and the anger of a God who cannot be bought off. But along-side its high moral tone the Old Testament is also aware of the ways in which even good human actions can go sour, as reflected in the realism of its classic narrative texts. These texts achieve a certain tour de force, combining a belief in God's moral government of the world and the importance of good human judgement with Ecclesiastes's awareness that `time and chance happen to all'. Both Judaism and Christianity have inherited that combination, and neither finds it easy to live with.

One of the commonplaces of biblical study is that the Old Testament lacks anything that could be called moral philosophy, and if by moral philosophy we mean the kind of theoretical discussion of ethics to be found in, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the dialogues of Plato, then the point is obviously cor­rect. There can, however, be what may be called philosophical narratives—narratives, that is, which are a means of handling moral themes. Martha Nussbaum has shown that the novels of Henry James fall into this category, and earlier critics had said the same of Jane Austen." A more obvious exam­ple would be Voltaire's Candide. In these very diverse cases the object is not only to entertain, though it is that, but to engage the reader in the narrative in such a way that moral or philosophical issues which might otherwise remain abstract or unfocused present themselves much more sharply and call forth a response. My suggestion is that the Old Testament stories I have been dis­cussing fall into a similar category. Certainly they were told as entertainment: they are full of subtly developed characters, interesting incident, well-shaped plots. Certainly also some may contain historical recollection: I do not sup-pose that the story of David is composed out of whole cloth, for surely the incidents it relates are rooted in actual events of the early monarchic period. But the author's purpose in each case is to explore human moral choices and thus to illuminate the moral life of his or her readers. If we want to name a genre to which the stories of Joseph and David belong, Voltaire's expression conte philosophique has much to commend it: not exactly `philosophical tale', but `story with a serious purpose'.

We tend to take it for granted that the Old Testament is largely about theo­logical and ethical matters; that is what we expect of a work that has become canonical within Jewish and Christian tradition. We also take it for granted that it contains large tracts of prose narrative, though comparison with other cultures may remind us that this does not really go without saying: prose nar­ration of this degree of sophistication is not easily found in the eastern Mediterranean world at such an early period. The narrative, however, is quite varied in character and ranges all the way from conveying historical informa­tion by mere lists (genealogies and the like) to presenting human persons in the rounded and interesting way that marks the stories in Genesis and the books of Samuel. My suggestion is that the latter kind of narrative, at least, was conceived as a vehicle for presenting insights into the moral life of human subjects in such a way that the reader would be challenged and stimulated to thought and action. Simply put, the function of the completed stories of David and Joseph is to present the reader with the same existential challenge that the stories-within-a-story told by Nathan and the woman of Tekoa present to David himself. These little stories and the effect they have on David show clearly that the literary culture of the time was one in which storytelling as a way of provoking moral response did indeed exist, and they give us a clue that the whole long narrative of which they form a part may have been intended to function in the same way for their readers. At both the `micro' level of those two parables within the story and at the `macro' level of the framing narrative, the object is to lead the reader or hearer to find analogies between the story and his or her own life and to draw appropriate conclusions. Narrative thus becomes a prime locus for moral discourse, though—characteristically for the Old Testament—at a practical rather than a theoretical level.

Can we use moral reflection expressed in this oblique style in our own con­structions of moral obligation and reactions to moral dilemmas? The tempta­tion for preachers in both Jewish and Christian traditions has been to reduce the narratives to a series of moral exempla, stories with `a moral' in the man­ner of Aesop's fables. But this is really an attempt to neutralize the fact that a narrative structure was preferred by the writers, as though what they had to say by that means could be replaced by a moral platitude. It ignores the com­plexity we have seen to characterize the stories. The challenge of a story like that of David is to live with integrity in a world in which it is not possible to predict the exact outcome of moral or immoral action because there are somany other factors involved: chance or luck, the presence or absence of other persons who are also moral agents, and perhaps also the involvement of a God who is a free agent, not merely the guarantor of a moral calculus.

Legal texts lay down what is to be done to a person who commits certain prohibited acts; and though in a way it is a simple matter to list and categorize such material, a great deal more insight into the moral system of ancient Israel can be gained, as Otto has shown so well, by trying to grasp the underlying principles of legal codes, what we have been calling their moral vision. The aphorisms that comprise the wisdom literature are often more slippery, but even so it is possible to build up a profile of the good and wise person they envisage by contrast with the sinner or the fool. The task is harder with nar­rative texts, which allow the complexities of human motivation and conduct to become apparent and resist any reductionistic treatment. Nevertheless, I believe that we come away from reading such narratives as the stories of David or Joseph with a clear picture of what it is to be a moral agent, one that is more nuanced than we could acquire by any other means. I believe that among those who wrote the narrative literature of ancient Israel were some who had realized that human ethical enquiry needs to be anchored in specific cases, and that it is only through the richness of storytelling that we come to understand what it is to be human and to make informed choices in a world which is only partly predictable.

 

 

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