Old Testament Ethics for the People of God Quotes

“for God, doing justice means particularly attending to the needs of the weak and poor, it makes us question whether the traditional understanding of justice as ‘strict impartiality’ is really at all appropriate in the biblical context. On the contrary, it is so clear that the LORD is especially attentive to the needs of the marginalized (see Deut. 10:18–19) that it would seem to be the very nature of justice, on God’s terms, for humans also to have such a prioritized concern.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Failure to honour God in the material realm cannot be compensated for by religiosity in the spiritual realm.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“The power imbalance between male and female, the fear between God and humans and the enmity between humans and nature, are all described in Genesis 2 and 3 as originating not in the nature of things as God intended them to be, but rather in the collusion of Adam, Eve and the serpent, who together deny the goodness and sufficiency of the garden and distrust the good intentions of the creator.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“This feature of Israelite law stands in sharp contrast to many ancient law codes where certain thefts by certain people were punishable by death. Indeed, it contrasts with British law until fairly recent times (people were hanged for sheep-stealing in Britain until the nineteenth century). On the other hand, as mentioned above, theft of a person for gain (kidnapping) was a capital offence in Israel (21:16; Deut. 24:7). Stealing a human life was different from stealing property.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you ‘get there’ very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“To argue that because Old Testament law does not prescribe explicit penalties related to infringement of its economic legislation, therefore modern civil authorities are excluded from any form of intervention in the economic marketplace betrays both the inadequacy of theonomism’s preoccupation with penalties and also, in my view, its ideological bias towards unfettered, free-market economic capitalism.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“One can detect, therefore, a difference between Luther’s and Calvin’s handling of the law that is almost as much psychological or intuitive as theological. Whereas Luther often sees what the law prohibits, in order to emphasize its role as a ‘killer’ from which one must flee to the grace of the gospel, Calvin looks for what the law promotes, using it as a model or primer that he applies to all kinds of issues of Christian living in the world of his day. When either of these approaches (both of which can claim New Testament precedent) is taken to extremes, they can, of course, become unbalanced in opposite ways. Thus, the danger of Lutheranism is a slide into practical Marcionism or antinomianism, while the danger of Calvinism has always been a slide into legalism. But neither of these extremes can be charged against Luther or Calvin themselves.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is instructive (and sometimes properly humbling) to give thought to that great stream of tradition within which we stand, rather than fondly imagine we are the first generation to face the challenge the Old Testament sets before us as Christians.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Words matter deeply to the authors of Proverbs, for they see words as powerful vehicles of good or evil, just as much so as actual deeds.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“The order of the commandments thus gives some insight into Israel’s hierarchy of values. Roughly speaking, the order was God, family, life, sex, property. It is sobering, looking at that order, that in modern society (in its debased Western form at least) we have almost exactly reversed that order of values. Money and sex matter a lot more than human life, the family is scorned in theory and practice, and God is the last thing in most people’s thinking, let alone priorities.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Our psalmists were not Judaizers, nor were they Calvinists, Arminians, Theonomists, Dispensationalists, Legalists or Antinomians. They were worshipping believers, members of a people who knew themselves to be in a unique covenant relationship with the LORD their God, redeemed by God’s saving grace, and privileged to have been given a land to live in and a law to live by. Let us, then, do our best to understand and appreciate the law through their eyes.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“The Ten Commandments can be seen as given in order to preserve the rights and freedoms gained by the exodus, by translating them into responsibilities.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“the economic sphere is like a thermometer that reveals both the temperature of the theological relationship between God and Israel (angle A), and also the extent to which Israel was conforming to the social shape required of them in consistency with their status as God’s redeemed people (angle B).”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Treating all this great collection of texts merely as the expendable container for independent universal principles we can express more simply and tidily denies the character of the Bible as God has given it to us, and might even seem to render Bible reading a waste of time. Regarding the biblical texts about Israel as providing us with a paradigm preserves their historical particularity and forces us to observe all the non-reducible hard edges, all the jarring tensions and all the awkward corners of earthy reality within them.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“This means we do not ignore the particularity of biblical commands (and apply them to our own day as if they were timeless universals). Nor are we paralysed by their particularity (and thus unable to apply them to our day at all). We rejoice in their particularity because it shows us how the will of God was expressed in their context, and we take them as our paradigm for our own ethical construction.21”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Since the primary manifestation of Yahweh is Israel itself, any misconstruction of Israel entails a misconstruction of Yahweh.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Yahweh intends that Israel be a nation of sisters and brothers in which there will be no more poor (cf. Deut. 15:4). This in itself makes clear that, according to the bible, the poor of Egypt are to become, through the Exodus, a kind of divinely-willed contrast-society . . . In fact, the new society that Yahweh creates out of the poor Hebrews through the Exodus is not only in contrast to the Egyptian society they have left behind, but beyond that it is in contrast to all other existing societies in their world [it is thus a task directed not just at Israel’s good but to the good of all humanity].”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“An Israelite could not have sung the familiar song ‘God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, he’s so good to me’ (though the words echo the Psalms) without being reminded also of its ethical consequence: ‘God asks me to show that goodness to others.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“God’s revelation was not a mystic secret for the initiated, but a light to guide every member of God’s community.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is a mistake to suggest that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the Old Testament taught that salvation came by keeping the law whereas in the New Testament it comes by grace. That is precisely the distortion of the Scriptures that Paul was combating.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is vitally important that we pay attention to the narrative framework in which the Old Testament laws are set.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God