May 22nd, 2003

The Third Halifax-Portal Lecture 2003

Introduction

The great nineteenth century English Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, was once asked to defend the Bible against various charges. “Defend the Bible?” he retorted, “I’d rather defend a lion! The Bible doesn’t need defending. It can defend itself.”

But the title of my talk tonight certainly suggests such a defence. My subtitle asks, “Is the Good Book still good for a watching world?” (By ‘a watching world’ I mean people outside the Church. Of course, they are not ‘watching’ Christians all the time, as if they followed us around and scrutinised our every move. Such people might even be offended if we imagined that about them. However, many people do remain aware of us; and when our leaders face various accusations or say something difficult, it certainly seems that there remains a high level of interest in Christians and their communities.)

The question in my subtitle is meant to convey two kinds of concern about the Bible. These concerns are often expressed by the watching world, and we also find them expressed by some within the Church.

Perhaps you took my reference to ‘the Good Book’ to be a little sneering. Once upon a time, for example in mid-twentieth century USA, ‘the Good Book’ was an unambiguously fond reference to the Christian Bible. Here, it was thought, was a book that is good in every way. But today, to call the Bible ‘the Good Book’ is generally to be sardonic or even sarcastic. Usually, we are being invited to sneer along with the speaker or writer of the phrase, for we are meant to understand that the Bible is a no-good book. It teaches gender differentiation. It has been used to justify wars, slavery and racism. It endorses authority, and asks for obedience. It opposes liberal sexual practice. In an attempt to diminish its influence over the West, some have even described it as ‘hate literature’, by which they mean that actually, the so-called ‘Good Book’ has always been bad.

This, then, is the first kind of concern about the Bible: perhaps the ‘Good Book’ cannot be good for people. Perhaps it is a bad book.

The second kind of concern is less radical, and worries about the utility, or usefulness, of the Bible for the watching world. Although it might be a good book in some respects, the doubt is over whether it can be of much use for anyone who is not a Christian. Lisa Sowle Cahill, Professor of Christian Ethics at Boston College, divides this concern into four problems:

[T]he issue of the authority of the Bible for ethics entails at least four problems. Stated succinctly, these are whether the message of the Bible is unitary or fragmented; whether the biblical message about ethics is unique; whether the Bible can ground moral rules and offer concrete guidance; and whether the moral message of the Bible has sense and significance outside of Christianity. [1]

Let me restate these four smaller concerns, in a different order and with the emphasis upon ethics:

1. Is the biblical ethic unique?

People do seem to discover true and right things without the Bible. Those who compare religions like to point out, for example, that something like the ‘Golden Rule’ (“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets”, Matthew 7:12; “Do to others as you would have them do to you”, Luke 6:31) is found in every religion. Perhaps the Bible is not needed for ethics in any unique sense.

2. Is the biblical ethic unitary or fragmented? [2]

Everybody agrees that the Bible has many human authors. Surely it follows that these various authors have different views on right and wrong, and that the overall ethical message of the Bible is diverse (at best), or fragmented (at worst). Those who believe that one divine author inspired the work of the several human authors must work to show how the Bible’s ethic is unitary, not fragmented.

3. Is the biblical ethic of any use for the watching world?

Many modern people hold that religious dogmas can exert force only upon adherents of the religion, and are irrelevant to non-adherents. They seek an ethic that is free from religious authority, including biblical authority. Christians often agree, explicitly or implicitly, leaving the Bible to one side in ethical debates even if its teachings have helped to form their own position.

4. Can the biblical ethic offer any concrete guidance?

For some, the Bible is long on principle, but short on praxis. For others, it is so far distant from us in time and culture that it can have little to say to modern capitalist, post-industrial societies.

In this lecture, I will focus upon these four problems. In this way, I hope that answers to the two bigger concerns will emerge. (I have included footnotes and a bibliography to help you follow up some of my assertions.)

Before I begin, you might be wondering what we mean by ethics. Although it is a boring sounding word, ethics actually concerns aspects of everyday living that are so continually with us that they operate ‘beneath the radar’—a bit like oxygen or gravity, perhaps. Have you ever felt offended? Or cheated? Or guilty? Are there important decisions where you don’t know what to do? Is there an ongoing situation in your life where something seems wrong, but try as you might, you can’t straighten it out? Ethics studies all of these experiences, and more. Ethics concerns what to do, how to live and what is right and wrong. Everyone thinks about this, whether they realise it or not.

The thirteenth century Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, noticed that everyone thinks about ethics; and yet he still believed that the Bible has a unique role in the matter. Here a postcard-sized version of his thought about how it all works.

1. Is the biblical ethic unique?

For Thomas Aquinas, we are surrounded by various kinds of law. We often think of ‘law’ as a bad and oppressive thing, but for Aquinas, ‘law’ included friendly and helpful instruction from someone who wants us to prosper. Here are the various kinds of law that surround us: [3]

1. There is a deep structure and order to the universe, and God’s wisdom directs everything. We humans are a part of this order. We are made in a way that fits the universe, and in it, we grow into what we are meant to become. This is the eternal law: the ordered structure God has given to everything.

2. But humans can only see the parts of this order which are relevant to them. Our minds have been made capable to comprehend our ‘corner’ of God’s ordered universe. Humans can recognise, understand and participate in their nature and purpose. This is the natural law: our ‘personal participation’ in the eternal law.

3. But whether or not we do well at seeing the natural law is a debatable point. So God ‘republishes’ parts of it by a special revelation, found in the Bible. This ‘republication’ is the divine law: the Word of God unveils a moral order that was always there.

4. Humanity makes laws to govern itself. Such laws might be trivial (e.g. driving on the left). But people are not very good at inventing laws (since human laws are often unjust). This human (or ‘positive’ or ‘civil’) law is only good when in harmony with divine, natural and eternal law.

For Father Servais Pinckaers O.P. of the University of Fribourg, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica clearly teaches that people need God’s Spirit and his Word (i.e. his divine law) if they are properly to understand the natural law. But Aquinas’ teaching is sometimes ‘decapitated’: the main stress is laid upon unaided human participation in natural law, and the necessary action of God’s Spirit and Word is ignored. Such ‘decapitation’, says Pinckaers, removes “the entire Gospel capstone of St. Thomas’s moral teaching.” [4]

Protestants are traditionally pessimistic about humanity’s ability to comprehend natural law, whereas Roman Catholics have tended to be more optimistic. But whatever we make of that debate, Aquinas’ account helps us to see how the Bible might be ‘unique’ for ethics. It is not ‘unique’ in the sense that people must read the Bible before making a true ethical deduction. People sometimes discover their part in God’s eternal law (even if they don’t call it that). But if Aquinas is right, then the Bible offers a unique way of seeing what surrounds us. In the Bible, God unveils (or reveals) the order of things, effectively ‘decoding’ the tangled complexities of life in the world.

Or as Lisa Sowle Cahill says, Jesus “rearranges” the familiar realities of ethics into “a new pattern.” [5] She was only referring to Jesus incarnate teaching. But we shall find that what she has said is also true in a much deeper and more general sense.

2. Is the biblical ethic unitary or fragmented?

In discussing Thomas Aquinas on divine law, I glossed over something. Aquinas thought that divine law is found in the Old Law (i.e. the Pentateuch, or the law of Moses) and in the New Law (i.e. Jesus’ teaching, e.g. the Sermon on the Mount). But this ‘admission’ about Aquinas’ teaching raises at least three questions.

a) Is the law of the OT just too different from Jesus’ teaching? That both are found in the Bible might not mean anything.
b) What about the rest of the Bible? It contains more material than Aquinas has mentioned.
c) Why all this stress on ‘law’? Even if Aquinas did mean it as ‘friendly instruction’, it still sounds difficult and oppressive.

The first two questions are about whether the Bible has one ethical message, or many. The third question looks a little different. But it is not so different if we consider, say, the U.S. Old Testament reconstructionists. They want to see a full return to Old Testament law as American civil law, to which other Christians reply, “but surely that’s contrary to the teaching of Jesus/Paul/the Bible.” So even the third question is about whether the Bible has more than one ethical message. Is it possible to think of there being one ethical message to the Bible?

Of course there is a diversity of material in the Bible, but tonight I want to suggest that all this material contributes to a theme that unites the whole Bible. We have a clue to this theme when Servais Pinckaers referred to the “Gospel capstone” of Aquinas’ teaching. We have another clue when the Apostle Paul says that “Christ is the end of the law.” (Romans 10:4) Jesus Christ is the ‘full-stop’, or ‘completion’, or even the ‘final purpose’ of Old Testament law. Something about Jesus unites his teaching with that of the Old Testament. Something about Jesus ‘finishes’ the law’. Something about Jesus might even explain the other material in the Bible.

Archbishop Peter Jensen has recently written on this ‘something’ in The Revelation of God. [6] He finds it to be the gospel—the great news that through the sacrificial death, resurrection and ascension of his Son, God has declared Jesus to be the Lord. The Lord Jesus has done everything necessary for sinful people to receive God’s gracious favour and complete acceptance, both now and eternally. People receive this gracious favour simply by trusting the Lord of this gospel, Jesus Christ, who will faithfully bring God’s promises to completion.

But this brief summary of the gospel raises two more questions:

d) If “God has done everything necessary”, what basis for ethics remains? Surely such a ‘gospel’ merely invites a lazy disinterest in doing what is right.
e) How can this ‘gospel’ account for all the different material in the Bible?

Let us consider the last question first. My brief summary of the gospel is just that: a brief summary, which emerges from a careful reading of the whole Bible. The gospel is certainly said in different ways throughout the Bible, depending upon when it is said and upon what kind of biblical literature we are examining.

So for example, in the Old Testament the gospel is seen in the re-establishment of a Kingdom of God, who gathers a new people after humanity’s revolt against God in Genesis 3. A series of covenants, where God promises to commit himself to the people he has generously adopted, culminates in a ‘new covenant’ where Jesus Christ is Lord. Really, the Bible is the record of God’s covenant promises to his people. As such, every corner of it reflects or points to or expounds the gospel, even if Christ’s supreme place in that gospel only becomes clear in the Bible’s later pages. Hence all the parts of the Bible are unified:

[A]t least from the time of the patriarchs, God’s people have been bound to him through the words of promise called covenants; they have never been without the word of God; they have never been without his rule through his word; and these words may be found in the Scriptures. To see the Bible as merely a human artefact, a testimony to the human experience of the divine, but without the authority of God, is to misunderstand its nature.  [7]

Sadly, time forbids me to show in more detail how the gospel can be seen as the unifying element to the Bible, and Jensen’s book repays close reading. [8] What, then, of the other complaint, that such a ‘gospel’ erodes any basis for human effort?

Interestingly, the gospel has been well stated and somewhat understood if it elicits such a complaint. This can be seen when Paul is forced to anticipate the question after an extended discussion of the gospel. Paul twice poses the complaint as a rhetorical question: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (Romans 6:1). “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15).

The stunning news of God’s free and gracious favour unmasks a common human assumption about Christian ethics. People assume that the only possible motivation to do right is in order to gain God’s favour and avoid his displeasure. It therefore follows that to remove this motivation removes any reason to ‘be good’. That is, to say that God freely gives forgiveness and acceptance to sinners removes, it is thought, their only motivation for doing good. If people have been freed from God’s condemnation, they will run about doing evil as it pleases them.

But in the logic of the gospel, the reverse is actually the case. People are somehow freed to discover new and interesting ways of living. Paul speaks of a kind of “conduct” which is “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” The gospel can shape who we are, and what we do.

In the gospel, we now discover that the order of creation is actually upheld, sustained and ruled by Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:3). The knowledge of Jesus conveyed by the gospel therefore gives to us what is needed to understand that order, and we are freed from the difficult business of speculating upon what might constitute natural law. This new knowledge assists our personal ethic in enough ways to fill a lifetime of discovery. A few examples must suffice.

Negatively, the necessity for good news unmasks that humanity is not innocent as it goes about its daily concerns and personal projects. People generally consider themselves to be somewhat innocent in their daily affairs. We are often willing to use others to advance our own interests and projects. Often we don’t notice how we do this, even though we feel hurt and angry when others use us. In this way, each person contributes a trickle of evil to form the tributaries and then torrents of evil that characterise our world, and which elicit God’s wrath. The gospel unveils how much we are in need of good news.

But positively, the gospel goes on to unveil several aspects of the One at the heart of the universe. [9] The gospel shows God to be just (cf. Romans 3:25-26). It also shows him to be loving, merciful and forgiving (e.g. Titus 3:3-7; cf. Micah 7:18; Daniel 9:9). It shows his intention to bless people with freedom from slavery for adoption as his children (Romans 8). It shows his promise to give new, resurrected life to his people (1 Corinthians 15; cf. Romans 8:23-24).

To conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of this gospel, then, would include the same kind of commitment to justice, the same intention to love, the same operation of mercy and forgiveness in broken relationships, the same openness to the inclusion of others, and the same commitment to life. Unsurprisingly, we see all of these and more in the various commands and exhortations of Scripture.  [10] (See the appendix to this lecture for an example of the gospel ethic at work in a particular passage of Scripture.)

Many people have their first encounter with Christian ethics when someone conveys to them a command from the God of the Bible. This might be a negative experience at the time, because it cuts across those self-interested habits that elicit God’s wrath. But over the course of many years, Christians often find themselves to experience a growing agreement with, and even a love for, the ethical statements in the Bible which they found to be quite hard at first. This seems to reflect a feature that is promised of the new covenant—that God will grant a heartfelt willingness in relation to his law (Jeremiah 31:33-34).

So not only is the intelligibility and unity of the Bible found in the gospel, we also find that the gospel has ample resources to ‘decode’ moral order and shape Christian behaviour. We can begin to see why Lisa Sowle Cahill pointed to a deep truth when she said that Jesus “rearranges” the familiar realities of ethics into “a new pattern.” [11] As Archbishop Jensen writes:

The gospel speaks of love, wrath, forgiveness, faith, repentance, sin and death. These are all common human experiences; in each case the gospel takes our inadequate understanding of the experiences and gives us new and powerful wisdom about it. The reinterpretation is often so intense that it constitutes a revolution, a conversion of thought and practice. When we see the love of Jesus Christ, for example, a new and radical concept of love enters our culture and our persons. It is not that we had never before experienced love; rather, the love of Christ transcends and transforms our human loves: ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). The same observation can be made about our concepts of justice, parenthood or death. In these and many other human experiences, we see the gospel first intersecting with the experience, and then challenging it with a new version of what that experience can and should mean. [12]

But surely such a conclusion brings with it the frank admission that the ethic of the gospel is of no use to a watching world, since in the Bible’s account of this watching world, it is ‘watching’ precisely because it refuses to submit to Christ or to accept his gospel with faith and repentance. Can the Bible be of any use at all for, say, the modern liberal order? Can the Bible assist our social ethic in any way?

3. Is the biblical ethic of any use for the watching world?

Christians certainly show a tendency to think that it cannot. In mounting arguments in the public forum, Christians are almost entirely reliant upon empirical and sociological data, and upon arguments that predict the outcomes of various proposals and practices. There may certainly be a place for such argumentation. But a lack of confidence in the place of the Bible has conspired with clumsy or self-interested examples of its use to ensure that it is rarely mentioned by Christians outside of their church communities.

But consider what has called those communities together in the first place. The long-standing institutional arrangements of churches might obscure what was glaringly obvious in New Testament times: that it is the gospel which gathers people together into church communities.  [13] And Professor Oliver O’Donovan (Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford) has comprehensively shown that historically speaking, the gospel-ethic of such church communities has decisively shaped the watching world. In a deceptively slim book which also deserves our closest attention, [14] O’Donovan shows how the Lord’s Church has acted as a kind of ‘pilot project’ of divinely ordered community. The Church’s way of being a community has ‘rubbed off’ on the West.

· The freedom of liberal order springs from gospel freedom where, by the Spirit of God and baptism, slaves were made brothers to their masters, and slavery itself became irrelevant when all were ‘slaves’ to Christ. The watching world craved the freedom from coercion it saw in churches.

· The merciful judgments of liberal order spring from the God who is able both to show justice and to reconcile with people. The watching world craved the merciful justice it saw in churches.

· The natural right of liberal order, where all are found to be equal, springs from God’s vindication of his good, created order in the Resurrection of his Son. The watching world craved the equality it saw in churches.

· The liberal order’s freedom of speech springs from the gospel possibility that all, regardless of their social status, may pray and prophecy in the new age of the Spirit. The watching world craved the free speech it saw in churches.

In this way, the Bible has given us the modern liberal order, through its influence on people over millennia. [15] The Church and churches of his Son are political entities which have these four features. Churches exhibited these features to surrounding communities, and tyrants and monarchs were forced (sometimes kicking and screaming) also to give such good things to the communities they governed. The best practice of Christ’s church brings with it the best possibilities for the best kind of liberal order. Where Christ rules his people justly and mercifully by his freedom-giving Word, human societies cannot help but follow.

It is possible to overstate O’Donovan’s thesis by ignoring the many embarrassing lapses by leaders and members of flawed church communities that litter history. But those lapses do not invalidate his thesis, since the Lord uses the same gospel by which he forms churches also to call churches to repentance. O’Donovan has said in an interview that he was intrigued by ‘Christendom’, that great swathe of European history where Christian thought dominated theories of government. “You have all kinds of practices going on out of Christendom, many of them intensely criticized within Christendom.” Anyone who has “a good criticism of Christendom” “will probably find they’ve got it from the thinkers of Christendom”. [16]

That is, much of what people take to be good, non-religious secular ethics actually originated when someone applied the logic of the Christian gospel to a situation. For example, John Locke (1632-1704) wrote a series of profoundly influential treatises called On Toleration. These have done much to give the modern West its conception of tolerance. But Locke’s logic is gospel logic: people shouldn’t use coercion to enforce belief, he argues, because in the Bible, the gospel proceeds by preaching and persuasion; and to conduct oneself in a manner worthy of this same gospel entails love toward neighbours. Locke’s biblical exposition has proven so deeply attractive that ‘tolerance’ (albeit a distorted copy of gospel-‘tolerance’) is now bedrock for secular Western society.

4. Can the biblical ethic offer any concrete guidance?

But even so, I seem only to have shown how the Bible has an indirect effect on the watching world. Can it offer more concrete guidance? Are its gospel-principles enough to translate into practices? And, is it so far distant from us in time and culture that it can say little to modern capitalist, post-industrial societies? Jensen seems to think that both of these concerns are simply overstated:

[M]uch of the ethical material of the Bible comes to us in the threefold form of axioms (‘Love God’), principal commands (‘Do not steal’) and case law … The application of such material to everyday life is an everyday business: we all do it one way or another. The flexibility that we need to show in new situations does not constitute abandoning the original, but demonstrates the power of the original to shape the present. The new ethical dilemmas that face us, arising, for instance, from remarkable developments in biology and genetics, are not beyond the ethical norms of the Scriptures. But, if the nature of the biblical revelation is to be trusted, the ethical insights will not come in a flash of revelation, but will arise from scriptural teaching carefully, corporately and patiently applied.  [17]

Let us say a little more about this patient application.

The gospel unveils a logic of relationships, [18] a glimpse of which we saw above in reference to justice, love, mercy, forgiveness, inclusion and life. O’Donovan highlights a problem, and hints that the gospel might contain the solution:

I decline to call myself anti-liberal [but] I do believe that today’s liberalism is a deep problem. Part of the problem is the way it conceives the relationship of individual to society. … The economization of politics is a very clear sign of this. It is based on a projection that the individual is atomic and self-possessive. It is as though I possess myself as a supreme bit of property. I own myself in this ultimate way, and I own my life, and every kind of social interrelation is a sort of negotiation between self-owned, self-possessive barons, each with their barony trying to do trade-offs. This fails to get the real genius of human sociality right, the way we are actually created with and for one another from the ground up—something I think Christians have always been rather good at asserting.
Christianity can offer ‘relational thinking’ to the watching world. Despite its deep dependence on the ethics of the gospel, such thinking will be entirely accessible and interesting to many people, regardless of their religious persuasion. This is already being been done quite extensively in the works of Australian Christian ethicist Michael Hill, and UK corporate and government theorist Michael Schluter. [19]

In The How and Why of Love, [20] Hill shows that the Bible’s attention to the nature and purpose of human beings gives form and content to the concept of love. Proper expressions of love can combine to create communities of mutual love relationships. Such relationships represent a vast improvement over two other kinds of relationships generally found among people, which Hill calls ‘threat relationships’ and ‘exchange relationships’.  [21] Repentance and forgiveness can heal and restore broken relationships, moving them from threat or exchange toward mutual love. Communities of mutual love relationships are ‘interrelational’, avoiding the excesses of individualism or collectivism. Hill shows how a gospel-ethic (also called ‘evangelical ethics’) can help us forward in several areas of moral complexity. It can also assist to ‘retrieve’ something good from those difficult situations where someone refuses to repent of wrongdoing.

Michael Schluter is the chairman of two independent but complementary foundations. The Jubilee Centre is an overtly Christian think-tank, which reflects upon the Bible to discover elements of relational thinking. Informed by this reflection, the Relationships Foundation consults with health authorities, correctional facilities, corporations and other institutions. One service offered by them is the ‘relational audit’, where key dimensions of various relationships are examined. After the consultation, improved relationships often translate into enhanced effectiveness for the organisation. No explicit appeal to Christianity or the Bible is made by the Relationships Foundation, but neither does it try particularly hard to hide the source of its ideas. [22]

The ethic of the Bible, then, is particularly well-suited to many of the difficulties faced by modern society, and little is to be gained by hiding our indebtedness to it.

Sometimes, it is true, biblical ethics is inimical to practices and proposals in our society. This has been true for different issues in every age. On the Christian account of social reality, life between the Church and the watching world sometimes occasions deep clashes between them. Augustine liked to picture two ‘cities’, an earthly one and a heavenly one, whose citizens occupy the same plots of space at this time and are mixed indistinguishably together in every earthly State. That there are these two communities finds extensive expression in the Bible.  [23]

Though there are many great nations throughout the world, living according to different rites and customs, and distinguished by many different forms of language, arms and dress, there nonetheless exists only two orders, as we may call them, of human society: and, following our Scriptures, we may rightly speak of these two as cities. The one is made up of men who live according to the flesh, and the other of those who live according to the spirit. Each desires its own kind of peace, and, when they have found what they sought, each lives its own kind of peace.  [24]

When the kinds of ‘peace’ sought by the cities differ sharply enough, there will be conflict. So when the Romans sought peace by viewing gladiatorial bloodsports, this occasioned frequent and energetic appeal to the Bible to show Romans the bankruptcy of their practice, and to call them (by means of the gospel) to the real and lasting peace of the heavenly city. So also throughout Evangelium Vitae: the Pope’s constant appeal to the Bible’s ‘gospel of life’ against the prevailing ‘culture of death’ models for us all an effective use of gospel-ethics for a watching world.

Conclusion

“Defend the Bible? I’d rather defend a lion! The Bible doesn’t need defending. It can defend itself.” I agree with Spurgeon, although this might seem difficult after the rather long defence of the Bible I have just mounted.

I have argued that the biblical ethic is unique, unitary, socially useful and quite practical. Unique to the Bible is its particular ‘decoding’ of moral experiences and moral order. The unitary theme of the Bible, the gospel, brings intelligibility to the diversity of its ethical material. The biblical ethic is so useful to the watching world that modern liberal order emerged from it, and the Bible’s ethic is so practical that it can offer something like ‘relational thinking’ while also being able to confront various social practices.

When Spurgeon said that the Bible can ‘defend itself’, he obviously meant that it has to be read. I have certainly found that the more I read the Bible in the company of a community who love the gospel and its Lord, the less worried I am about the Bible and the more gratifying and clear do I find its message to be. I suspect that many here have also found something like this.

Perhaps this matter of reading contains the real answer to the question I posed at the start of this lecture.

The Bible certainly remains a good book for the watching world. But the watching world is less and less aware of the powerful good news that lies within its pages. This is partly due to the understandable reaction of people who, gripped by their own concerns, find the first call of the gospel to cut across them unpleasantly. But perhaps it is also partly due to us, who have allowed their reaction to silence our use of the Bible and to embarrass us about its gospel.

But the Bible, its gospel, and its gospel-ethic doesn’t belong finally to the Church. It is the property of God, who calls people to himself through it. The Church is serving the world, not itself, when it refers to the Bible, because through the Bible’s gospel comes the chance for people to decode difficulties and conundrums within their politics, their working relationships, their close relationships and even within themselves. We show it to them in the way that one beggar offers another beggar food.

So rather than sidelining the Bible in our debates with a watching world, my hope is that we become adept at outlining its arguments, explaining its gospel trajectory, and laying before people the dream for humanity that God has recorded, through human authors, within its pages.
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Appendix: An example of the ‘gospel ethic’ of the Bible

The passage 2 Peter 1:5-7 is sometimes thought to represent a ‘ladder’ of increasing perfection. But closer examination of the passage shows that each term in the list conceptually corresponds to the divine person and work that has been outlined in verses 1-4. This shows how the biblical ethic, far from being a slavish attempt to secure God’s favour, is rather an enthusiastic set of responses to God’s favour.

The ‘faith’ to be supported is already given (v1); ‘goodness’ (ajrethv) parallels divine excellence (ajrethv, v3); ‘knowledge’ increases the knowledge that has already been given (v3); ‘self-control’ responds to the divine release from ‘corruption’ due to ‘lust’ (v4); ‘endurance’ is a response to promises (v4); ‘godliness’ reflects ‘participation’ in the divine nature’ (v4), and ‘mutual affection’ follows from the participants (koinwnoiV) being an interrelated group, not merely a set of individuals. The ‘ladder’ is in fact a mirror, a pattern of fitting response to what has been revealed in the gospel of verses 1-4. This logic is laid out a in a different way on the opposite page. We can represent the passage graphically as follows:

Interestingly ‘love’ (ajgavph)—with no obvious correspondence to what precedes—seems to reflect the way biblical love is typically a ‘unitary orientation’ which sums up and directs a variety of responses that include self-control, endurance, knowledge and mutual affection. In the biblical ethic, ‘love’ indicates a very deep and total commitment to the good of the other, even if that commitment sometimes takes the form of self-control, endurance or knowledge. Not all ethical systems would understand such virtues to be an aspect of love for others.

Peter’s recipe to avoid ineffective unfruitfulness in the knowledge of God

(see 2 Peter 1:1-11)

What has happened to me?

… You have received a precious faith, through the righteousness of our God and Savour Jesus Christ. And God’s divine power has given you everything needed for life and godliness.

What do I do now?
… For this very reason, to avoid being ineffective and unfruitful in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, you must make every effort to support your faith in the following ways:

1. Add goodness, because the one who called us did so because he is glorious and good.
2. Add knowledge to your goodness, because knowing him brings grace and peace, and it shows how his power gives all we need for life and godliness.
3. Add self control to your knowledge, since his goal is to free and rescue us from the corruption that is in the world because of lust.
4. Endure for as long as it takes to see his precious and very great promises become fulfilled (which is a certainty, since he is glorious and good).
5. Work at godliness, since he intends that you share in his own divine nature.
6. Include mutual affection and love in your godliness, since you will participate in the divine nature with many others.

To lack these things is to be nearsighted and blind, and forgetful of the past sins you are cleansed from.

But possessing these things increasingly will make you effective and fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble. For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.

Endnotes
1. Lisa Sowle Cahill, “The Scope and Limits of Character Ethics,” in Character and Scripture, ed. William P. Brown (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 8.

2. To speak of ‘the biblical ethic’ might seem to presume an answer to the question of whether it is unitary or fragmented. By ‘biblical ethic’ I mean, in the first instance, the various ethical material within the Bible. I will stay with the phrase for convenience.

3. The following summary is drawn from a reading of the Summa Theologica and from Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995). Pinckaers summarises as follows:

These different laws were dynamically interconnected, beginning with the eternal law, descending through natural to human law, and ascending again toward God to reach their summit in the [divine] Law, the most perfect possible participation in the eternal law that can be found on earth and the closest approximation to our final goal. [Pinckaers, Sources 181.]

4. Pinckaers, Sources 171; cf. 171-73. So e.g. modern law students study the so-called ‘Treatise on Law’ (Summa Theologica 1a2ae.90-97), which expounds natural and human law, but stops short before the climax of Thomas’s argument—his teaching on the work of the Spirit, the place of God’s Word and the need for God’s grace (Summa Theologica 1a2ae.98-108 & 109-114).

5. Cahill, “Scope and Limits,” 16.

6. Peter Jensen, The Revelation of God (Leicester: IVP, 2002).

7. Ibid. 83.

8. For another helpful approach to the overall ‘shape’ of the Bible, see Mark Strom, Days Are Coming: Exploring Biblical Patterns (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989).

9. I deliberately allude to Peter Jensen, At the Heart of the Universe: What Christians Believe (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994). This is the Archbishop’s previous book.

10. So e.g. for justice, see Romans 13:1-5 or James 2:1-4; for love, see Mark 12:31 or Luke 10:27 or John 13:34-35 or Romans 13:9-10 or 1 Corinthians 13 or Galatians 5:14 or James 2:18 or 1 John 3:18 (etc.); for mercy and forgiveness see Matthew 6:12-15 or Matthew 18:21-35 or Mark 11:25 or Luke 6:37b or Luke 17:3-4 or Colossians 3:13; for inclusion, see Romans 15:5-7; and life, see (obviously!) Exodus 20:13, which is maintained throughout Scripture, and which is perhaps also reflected in commands to assist in the daily sustenance of life (e.g. James 2:15-16).

11. Cahill, “Scope and Limits,” 16.

12. Jensen, Revelation 110.

13. This is most evident in the NT language of ‘calling’, where God is seen to be ‘calling out’ to people by his gospel, inviting and requiring them to turn to him in trust. Such language often appears in the epistles as a descriptor of each church community: e.g. Romans 1:6-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-2,9,24,26; 1 Peter 2:9; etc. See especially 2 Thessalonians 2:14.

14. Oliver M.T. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
15. O’Donovan is not alone in saying that the modern western order is a child of Christianity. The point is acknowledged in various ways by a range of thinkers, ranging e.g. from nineteenth century anti-Christian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to John Hopkins University historian and political philosopher Francis Fukuyama.

16. Interview with O’Donovan, 9th November 2001; available at http://www-stu.calvin.edu/chimes/2001.11.09/ess1.html (accessed May 2003).

17. Jensen, Revelation 277.

18. Cf. Jensen: “the gospel also offers freedom for relationship, the freedom that so relates us to God, the ruler of the world, that we are released from our bondage to the things of the world. It is a freedom that creates community.” [Ibid. 256.]

19. Interview with O’Donovan (see footnote 16, above).

20. Michael Hill, The How and Why of Love: An Introduction to Evangelical Ethics (Kingsford: Matthias Media, 2002).

21. Hill will explicate these two kinds of relationships in his forthcoming book on marriage.  My thanks to the author for allowing me to preview his manuscript.

22. For a light primer on relational thinking, see M. Schluter and D. Lee, The R-Option (Cambridge: Relationships Foundation, 2003).. For a more extensive application of relationship thinking to society and politics, see M. Schluter and D. Lee, The R-Factor (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993).. The Relationships Foundation can be found in the internet at http://www.relationshipsfoundation.org . The Jubilee Centre can be found at http://www.jubilee-centre.org .

23. Cf. Ps. 119:19-20 & v54; Mt. 5:13-16 (perhaps); Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 6:14-18 (but noting ‘entanglement’ as a given in 1 Cor. 5:10); 2 Cor. 10:2-3; Eph. 2:19; Phil. 3:20; 1 Pt. 1:1,17; 2:9-11; Heb. 11:13. [For further exploration/comment: M. Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter,” Ex Auditu 10 (1994).; Bruce W. Winter, Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens (Grand Rapids, MI. & Carlisle, Cumbria: Eerdmans & Paternoster, 1994).]

24. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R.W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 581 (XIV.1)

Bibliography of sources
Many of the books listed are available at Moore Books (ph. 9577-9966 fax 9550-5393)

Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “The Scope and Limits of Character Ethics.” In Character and Scripture, edited by William P. Brown, 3-17. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Hill, Michael. The How and Why of Love: An Introduction to Evangelical Ethics. Kingsford: Matthias Media, 2002.

Jensen, Peter. At the Heart of the Universe: What Christians Believe. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994.
———. The Revelation of God. Leicester: IVP, 2002.

O’Donovan, Oliver M.T. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Pinckaers, Servais. The Sources of Christian Ethics. Translated by Mary Thomas Noble. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995.

Schluter, M., and D. Lee. The R-Factor. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993.
———. The R-Option. Cambridge: Relationships Foundation, 2003.

Strom, Mark. Days Are Coming: Exploring Biblical Patterns. Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989.

Volf, M. “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter.” Ex Auditu 10 (1994): 15-30.

Winter, Bruce W. Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens. Grand Rapids, MI. & Carlisle, Cumbria: Eerdmans & Paternoster, 1994.

Andrew Cameron
Halifax Portal Lecture, May 2003
Bruce Smith Lecturer in Ethics and Philosophy
Moore Theological College
Anglican Diocese of Sydney

The Halifax Portal lectures are held every year and are sponsored by the Anglican and Roman Catholic Bishops of NSW.

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