The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

by Richard B. Hays

Indeed, careful exegesis heightens our awareness of the ideological diversity within Scripture and of our historical distance from the original communities (in ancient Israel and the earliest churches) to whom these texts were addressed. In other words, critical exegesis exacerbates the hermeneutical problem rather than solving it. That is why seminary students sometimes come away from Bible courses puzzled and alienated. As Oliver O’Donovan once remarked, interpreters who think that they can determine the proper ethical application of the Bible solely through more sophisticated exegesis are like people who believe that they can fly if only they flap their arms hard enough.

Love is sometimes singled out as the great imperative at the center of the New Testament’s witness. This proposal can, of course, claim the precedent of Mark 12:28–34 and 1 Corinthians 13. Nevertheless, for reasons that will emerge in the course of this investigation, I want to argue that the concept of love is insufficient as a ground of coherence for the New Testament’s moral vision.

While conducting a three-day class on Romans for a pastors’ school, I had insisted that Paul’s letter to the Romans should not be read as a tract about personal salvation; rather, Paul’s central concern in the letter is to explicate the relation of Jews and Gentiles in God’s redemptive purpose while insisting that the gospel does not abrogate God’s faithfulness to Israel. On the last day, one of the pastors said, “Professor Hays, you’ve convinced me that you’re right about Romans, but now I don’t see how I can preach from it anymore. Where I serve out in western Kansas, Israel’s fate isn’t a burning issue for my people, and there’s not a Jew within a hundred miles of my church.” The objection deserves a thoughtful answer.

The living out of the New Testament cannot occur in a book; it can happen only in the life of the Christian community. It is possible, however, to indicate how the interpretations and proposals put forward in this book might issue forth into action.

Thus, the cross becomes the ruling metaphor for Christian obedience, while the resurrection stands as the sign of hope that those who now suffer will finally be vindicated by God.

What is God doing in the world in the interval between resurrection and parousia? According to Paul, God is at work through the Spirit to create communities that prefigure and embody the reconciliation and healing of the world.

The basic problem with the desire of Jewish Christians to maintain Torah observance was, according to Paul, not that it engendered “works righteousness” but rather that it fractured the unity of the community in Christ.49 John Barclay has well summarized the ethical issue at stake: “The problem here is not legalism (in the sense of earning merit before God) but cultural imperialism—regarding Jewish identity and Jewish customs as the essential tokens of membership in the people of God.”

Daniel Boyarin, in an important and provocative study of Paul, describes Paul’s vision of community as “particularist universalism.”51 It should not be forgotten that the community whose unity Paul passionately seeks is not the human community as a whole, nor is it a pluralistic community within the polis. It is, rather, always the particular community of the church. To be sure, Paul hopes for the ultimate triumph of God’s grace over all human unbelief and disobedience (Rom. 11:32, Phil. 2:9–11). Until that eschatological consummation, however, Paul speaks only to the community of faith. He articulates no basis for a general ethic applicable to those outside the church.

The constant factor is that he imagines God’s eschatological salvation in corporate terms: God transforms and saves a people, not atomized individuals. Consequently, the faithful find their identity and vocation in the world as the body of Christ.

Because God’s manner of revelation is characterized by hiddenness, reversal, and surprise, those who follow Jesus find themselves repeatedly failing to understand the will of God. If God’s self-disclosure takes the form of riddle and enigma, there can be no place for smugness or dogmatism in ethical matters. Those who think they have the rules firmly in hand are those who suffer from hardness of heart

By reducing the urgency of Jesus’ expectation of the end and by pushing the day of judgment into an indefinite future, Luke in effect creates an infinitely expanding historical “middle” in which the role of the church is paramount. As Joseph Fitzmyer puts it, Luke has sought “to shift Christian attention from an exclusive focus on imminence to a realization that the present Period of the Church also has place in God’s salvation history.”37 This making room for the church in history is one of Luke’s most important contributions to New Testament theology and ethics.

Some unsympathetic interpreters of Luke-Acts, seeing it as a nostalgic and triumphalist piece of propaganda for emergent “early Catholicism,” have in effect argued that in these texts early Christian eschatology has been allowed to “crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet.”41 But the foregoing discussion has sought to show, instead, that Luke has rendered an “orderly account” that gives the community of faith a firm foothold in time and history. What happens to a dream deferred? It becomes, in Luke, the sustaining vision for a community setting out on a long and joyful pilgrimage.

For Luke, Christian existence cannot be understood as a matter of the individual’s isolated momentary encounter with God. Rather, for Luke, the community of those who confess the name of Jesus Christ stands within the great unfolding story of God’s redemptive faithfulness. God’s people have come from a past superintended by providence; they are going toward the end securely promised within God’s plan. This temporal locatedness provides the security (asphaleia) that Luke promises his readers in the Gospel’s prologue. Thus, Luke-Acts is to the church as the Aeneid is to Rome.

precisely because the community is identified as Israel, standing in typological correspondence to the Old Testament narratives, it must understand itself as participating in a journey, an exodus to a promised destination not yet reached. Such a journey entails suffering, risk, and sacrifice; there will be unanticipated turns of fortune, and the community must remain open to follow God’s leading along the way. This vision of the church’s life is far more conducive than Matthew’s to flexibility and innovation. But the journey is of course neither aimless nor unmapped. Jesus, the great prophetic leader “like Moses,” has led the way, and the community must follow the way he has marked out—hence, Luke’s characteristic description of the Christian movement as “the Way”

the church in Luke-Acts is not a defensive community withdrawing from an evil world; instead, it acts boldly on the stage of public affairs, commending the gospel in reasoned terms to all persons of goodwill and expecting an open-minded response.

Luke, like Matthew (but for a different reason), entertains no dark doubts concerning the capacity of believers to do the will of God, nor does he wrestle with any complex issues of religious psychology. Repentance is required, to be sure, in order to receive God’s forgiveness and blessing (Acts 2:38). But where the Spirit is poured out on the church, it sweeps the believers along as though in a great river of obedience, praise, and mighty works. Empowered by the Spirit, the community can dare and hope great things, seeing visions, dreaming dreams, turning the world upside down. (The idea that Acts sanctions a pallid and stultifying

Because the language of liberation has been so widely appropriated in the interest of various political causes, it is important to specify what Luke does and does not have in mind. The book of Acts gives no evidence of the apostles seeking to reform political structures outside the church, either through protest or by seizing power. Instead, Luke tells the story of the formation of a new human community—the church—in which goods are shared and wrongs are put right. In this way the apostolic testimony to the resurrection is made effectual. The question that Luke-Acts puts to the church—then and now—is not “Are you reforming society?” but rather “Is the power of the resurrection at work among you?” The community’s sharing of its material resources so that there is no needy person among them is the most powerful sign of the Spirit’s liberating work.

at the level of deepest theological conviction, the Word made flesh affirms the goodness and significance of creation. All creation breathes with the life of the Logos, apart from whom there is no life (1:1–4). This conviction finds subliminal expression in John’s masterful use of elemental, earthy symbols to articulate the Word: water, wine, bread, light, door, sheep, seed, vine, blood, fish. The truth of the Logos is manifest only in and through the medium of these symbols. No other New Testament writing so vividly visualizes the eternal in, with, and under the ordinary. The effect of such archetypal imagining is that the ordinary is transfigured.

The temptation to project upon the figure of Jesus our own notions of the ideal religious personality is nearly irresistible.4 As Martin Kähler sagely observed almost one hundred years ago, the critic who reconstructs a “historical Jesus” inevitably becomes a “fifth evangelist,” cutting and pasting the tradition so as to articulate a new vision of Jesus for his or her own time.

The whole shape of the tradition indicates that Jesus—in contrast to other figures in Jewish history of the era, such as Bar Kochba—persistently refused to claim that he was the Messiah (cf. John 10:24). His whole message entailed a rejection of the violence and nationalism implied in the popular understanding of that title. Yet his words and deeds incited in the people a vivid expectation that he might, after all, be the one who would deliver Israel. There is a deep irony here. One might almost see Jesus as a victim crushed between the jaws of opposing historical forces.

They also saw his resurrection as the proleptic realization of the final triumph of God’s kingdom in history, the foreshadowing of the general resurrection of the dead: as lightning is to thunder, so Jesus’ resurrection is to the consummation of all things.

Hal Lindsey’s popular book The Late Great Planet Earth, originally published in 1970, is an excellent example of this approach.7 By identifying the Soviet Union with the Beast from the abyss, Lindsey promoted hard-line Cold War politics in the name of evangelical Christianity. The book sold more than seven million copies,8 but its reading of Revelation was summarily disconfirmed by the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s. There was nothing surprising about this outcome, of course; ever since the second century, interpreters who have adopted similar reading strategies have experienced similar disappointments. Whether the Beast was identified with the pope or Cromwell or Napoleon or Hitler or Gorbachev, the result has been the same: history goes on, and the ardent predictions of the interpreters are consigned to the junkyard of exegetical curiosities. Yet history’s inexorable disconfirmation of all such attempts never seems to discourage new generations of readers from thinking that now at last the pattern of events concealed in Revelation’s mysterious symbolism is coming to light in the present time.

If God allows the monster to wage war on his people and conquer them, what must God’s people do? They must allow themselves to be conquered as their Lord had done, so that like their Lord they may win a victory not of this world…. [T]he church must submit without resistance to the conquering attack of the monster, since only in this way can the monster be halted in its track. Evil is self-propagating. Like the Hydra, the many-headed monster can grow another head when one has been cut off. When one man wrongs another, the other may retaliate, bear a grudge, or take his injury out on a third person. Whichever he does, there are now two evils where before there was one; and a chain reaction is started, like the spreading of a contagion. Only if the victim absorbs the wrong and so puts it out of currency, can it be prevented from going any further. And this is why the great ordeal is also the great victory.

“Revelation constructs a world of vision that challenges the symbolic discourse of Rome’s hegemonic colonizing power.”30 No one can enter imaginatively into the world narrated by this book and remain complacent about things as they are in an unjust world. This means that Revelation can be read rightly only by those who are actively struggling against injustice. If Revelation is a resistance document, its significance will become clear only to those who are engaged in resistance. It is no coincidence that the most powerful modern readings of Revelation have come from interpreters in socially marginalized positions who were seeking to call the church to countercultural resistance movements: for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., William Stringfellow, and Alan Boesak.31 Something very strange happens when this text is appropriated by readers in a comfortable, powerful, majority community: it becomes a gold mine for paranoid fantasies and for those who want to preach revenge and destruction. Thus, as Schüssler Fiorenza insists, “Revelation will elicit a fitting theo-ethical response only in those sociopolitical situations that cry out for justice.”

We must let the individual voices speak if we are to allow the New Testament to articulate a word that may contravene our own values and desires. Otherwise, we are likely to succumb to the temptation of flipping to some comforting cross-reference to neutralize the force of any particularly challenging passage we may encounter.

When we begin to seek the unity of New Testament witnesses—whether in general or on a particular issue—all of the relevant texts must be gathered and considered. Selective appeals to favorite prooftexts are illegitimate without full consideration of texts that stand on the opposite side of a particular issue. The more comprehensive the attention to the full range of New Testament witnesses, the more adequate a normative ethical proposal is likely to be.

However acute the tension between two different witnesses may appear, it must not be resolved through exegetical distortion of the texts. The individual witnesses must be allowed their own voices. A classic example of such distortion is the reading of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount through Pauline lenses (or, rather, Pauline lenses as interpreted by the Reformation): in such a reading, the rigorous demands of the Sermon on the Mount are treated as impossible commandments designed to drive sinners to recognize their absolute need of grace. In such a reading, Matthew’s voice is suppressed, and the Sermon on the Mount becomes an instrument of a particular Reformation construal of Pauline theology.5 Such flattening of the individual witnesses is to be rejected.

For example, Romans 13 and Revelation 13 are not two complementary expressions of a single principle or a single New Testament understanding of the state;6 rather, they represent radically different assessments of the relation of the Christian community to the Roman Empire. Nor can we average them out and arrive at a position somewhere in the middle that will allow us to live comfortably as citizens of a modern democratic state.

Thus, the primary sphere of moral concern is not the character of the individual but the corporate obedience of the church. Paul’s formulation in Romans 12:1—2 encapsulates the vision: “Present your bodies [smata, plural] as a living sacrifice [thysian, singular], holy and well-pleasing to God And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (RH). The community, in its corporate life, is called to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes in the world.

view of the reservations expressed by some theologians about the use of the cross as a paradigm for Christian ethics, an additional word of clarification is necessary in order to avert misunderstanding.15 The image of the cross should not be used by those who hold power in order to ensure the acquiescent suffering of the powerless. Instead, the New Testament insists that the community as a whole is called to follow in the way of Jesus’ suffering. The New Testament writers consistently employ the pattern of the cross precisely to call those who possess power and privilege to surrender it for the sake of the weak (see, e.g., Mark 10:42–45, Rom. 15:1–3, 1 Cor. 8:1–11:1).

The church is, in Paul’s remarkable phrase, the community of those “upon whom the ends of the ages have met” (1 Cor. 10:11, RH).

The relationship of reason to the New Testament as an authority is sometimes problematical. That is so not because the New Testament is unreasonable but because reason itself is always culturally influenced. One important insight of philosophical reason in the late twentieth century has been the recognition that we have no access to a universal objective “reason.”8 Rationality is a contingent aspect of particular symbolic worlds. Consequently, when we ask about the relation between Scripture and “reason” as sources of authority, we are in effect seeking the best way to coordinate the cultural logic of the New Testament writings with the cultural logic of our own historical setting.

What appears to be commonsense political ethics to the majority of Protestant churchgoers today is actually a popularized version of Niebuhr’s Christian realism.

Niebuhr understands the ethic of Jesus to be a radical ideal concerned only with the individual’s attainment of complete moral perfection.4

When…liberal Christianity defines the doctrine of non-resistance, so that it becomes merely an injunction against violence in conflict, it ceases to provide a perspective from which the sinful element in all resistance, conflict, and coercion may be discovered. Its application prompts moral complacency rather than contrition, and precisely in those groups in which the evils which flow from self-assertion are most covert. This is the pathos of the espousal of Christian pacifism by the liberal Church, ministering largely to those social groups who have the economic power to be able to dispense with the more violent forms of coercion and therefore condemn them as un-Christian.11

On the other hand, the biblical portrayal of God as the redeemer and transformer of human life plays a smaller role in Niebuhr’s constructive ethic. For this reason, Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom Niebuhr had been a significant influence, finally came to believe that his account of the New Testament’s symbolic world was unbalanced: I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man’s sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace.38

Niebuhr had little concern with the church as a distinctive institution; in fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that his theology lacks an ecclesiology. His writings address the individual Christian not as a member of the church but as a citizen of the democratic social order. Thus, the fruits of Niebuhr’s ethic would be manifested in the guiding influence of Christians in positions of secular political responsibility. The corporate identity and life of the Christian community are not major themes in his work. Correspondingly, a community shaped by Niebuhr’s vision would be far more concerned with pursuing political efficacy than with defining and maintaining its own confessional identity. Such a position might have made sense in the America of Niebuhr’s time, in which the cultural vestiges of Christendom still persisted. As the culture of Christendom crumbles, however, the supposition that Christians can or should take responsibility for guiding the social struggle appears increasingly quaint and presumptuous.

According to Barth’s theology, God has claimed human beings as his covenant partners by his powerful act of self-revelation; indeed, God is to be known only in his action, for God is the One whose being is in his act.42 Consequently, the truth is never to be found in universal abstractions but always in the particular, in God’s concrete self-disclosure in Jesus Christ.

We must not overlook them. We must not wrest nor misinterpret them. We must understand and respect them quite literally. We cannot dismiss them simply by admiring or ridiculing them as the product of a heaven-storming idealism and then placing them in a corner and observing very different rules of life…. The sayings of the Gospel are among those of which it is said that “they shall not pass away.” For they do not merely express the well-meant exaggeration of humanitarianism, nor do they simply constitute a special rule for good or particularly good Christians. They declare the simple command of God which is valid for all men in its basic and primary sense, and which is thus to be kept until further notice. They do not refer to a peak of enthusiasm to which the obedient must finally climb: they refer soberly and realistically to a basis from which they must continually start and to which they must continually return in obedience. They give us the rule, whereas the rest of our discussion can deal only with exceptions.20

The primary and supreme task of Christian ethics in this matter is surely to recover and manifest a distinctive horror of war and aloofness from it…. Christian ethics cannot insist too loudly that such mass slaughter might well be mass murder, and therefore that this final possibility should not be seized like any other, but only at the very last hour in the darkest of days. The Church and theology have first and supremely to make this detached and delaying movement…. Hence, the first basic and decisive point which Christian ethics must make in this matter is that the state, the totality of responsible citizens, and each individual in his own conduct should so fashion peace while there is still time that it will not lead to this explosion but make war superfluous and unnecessary instead of inevitable.86