Kingdom Ethics Quotes

“The best way to be prolife is to deliver people from the causes of abortions. See to it that potential mothers will have help raising their children or giving them a family through adoption. Make it possible for people to raise their babies and not to have to drop out of school, not to have to give up on a future. Help them have confidence that they can cope.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“Jesus came preaching, “The reign of God is at hand; repent, therefore, and believe the good news.” The good news of what God has for us is so good that the contrast with present actuality convinces us we need to repent; the good news is so forgiving that we are freed to be honest about where we need to repent; the judgment involved is so serious that we need to be serious about repentance. Therefore, a key move in a Christian ethics patterned after Jesus is to listen carefully to criticisms and learn from them. Christian ethics is continuous learning, transformational repenting, making corrections and growing in Christ.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“Here in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was saying that we are blessed because we are experiencing God’s reign in our midst and will experience it yet more in the future reign. Each Beatitude begins with the joy, the happiness, the blessedness, of the good news of participation in God’s gracious deliverance. And each Beatitude ends by pointing to the reality of God’s coming reign: in God’s kingdom, those who mourn will be comforted, the humble will inherit the earth, those who hunger for righteousness will be filled, mercy will be shown, people will see God, peacemakers will be called children of God, and the faithful will be members of the kingdom of God. And this experience was already beginning in Jesus.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“Guelich argued that the Beatitudes should be interpreted not as wisdom teachings but as prophetic teachings. Wisdom teachings emphasize human action that is wise because it fits God’s way of ordering the world and therefore gets us good results. Prophetic (or eschatological) teachings emphasize God’s action that delivers (rescues, frees, releases) us from mourning into rejoicing. Is Jesus saying, “Happy are those who mourn, because mourning makes them virtuous and so they will get the reward that virtuous people deserve”? Or is he saying, “Congratulations to those who mourn, because God is gracious and God is acting to deliver us from our sorrows”? The tradition of ideals or wisdom (1) speaks to people who are not what the ideals urge, and (2) promises them that if they will live by the ideals they will get the rewards of well-being and success. The Beatitudes are not like that. (1) They speak to disciples who already are being made participants in the presence of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ—we already know at least a taste of the experience of mourning, mercy, peacemaking and so on. And (2) they do not promise distant well-being and success; they congratulate disciples because God is already acting to deliver them. They are based not on the perfection of the disciples but on the coming of God’s grace, already experienced in Jesus, at least in mustard-seed size (Mt 13:31; 17:20; Mk 4:31; Lk 13:19).”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“We believe that the Bible makes room for both celibate singleness and faithful monogamy as equally legitimate expressions of human sexuality for those who would follow Jesus (Grenz, Sexual Ethics, chap. 9). In light of the whole of the biblical witness there is no reason for proclaiming one or the other the higher way. This is a matter within the range of Christian liberty and God’s calling in view of the gifts of each particular person in each particular context. The contemporary church is full of all kinds of people: never-married, married, divorced, remarried, widowed and so on. Neither marriage nor singleness should be viewed as a requirement for ministry leadership. Among the laity are those who are single for life or single for a time in life. Clear instruction is available in the Bible for those in this wide variety of life situations and callings, and singles should not be “singled out” for second-class Christian status.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“The church has historically believed that Jesus was unmarried and celibate, and the New Testament records one cryptic teaching in which he appears to endorse the celibate life (Mt 19:10-12). Meanwhile, the apostle Paul endorsed celibate singleness as preferable to marriage in terms of one’s freedom for “unhindered devotion to the Lord” (1 Cor 7:35), and made clear that this was his own situation in life (1 Cor 7:7). While Peter and other apostles were clearly married, the apparent celibate singleness of the two towering figures of the New Testament has cast a long shadow over Christian moral teaching about sexuality. It provides a much stronger affirmation of the vocation of singles than traditional culture does. Churches need to affirm singles and not make singles second-class members unless they want to make Jesus and Paul second-class members of Christian tradition (see Clapp, Families at the Crossroads).”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“For Jesus, what belonged to God? Everything. Jesus was a Jew, not a dualist. He knew God is the Lord over everything. His teaching in Matthew 22:17-21 is an ironic Hebrew parallelism (Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, 121-4). The second member of the parallelism, “Render to God the things that are God’s,” means “render everything to God.” It gives an ironic twist to the first half of the teaching: God has sovereignty over Caesar; we render to Caesar only what fits God’s will.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate their “independence”—an important part of the American ethos shaped by the narrative of U.S. history, which tells how America was founded in a revolutionary war. And Texans commemorate the Battle of the Alamo as almost a sacred story of the birth of Texas. American history is often taught largely as a history of wars (Juhnke and Hunter, Missing Peace). American television and children’s video games are filled with violence. These societal practices certainly influence moral character; the American homicide rate is far worse than in other comparable countries.”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“The Old Testament is characterized by the affirmation of God’s sovereign kingship. God is sovereign as Creator and Sustainer of the earth and all that dwell therein; as Judge; as Redeemer of Israel; and in relation to all nations and peoples. Yet the created turned against their Creator. The earth reels under the consequences of human rebellion. Human life is characterized by violence, injustice, unrighteousness and misery. Israel itself was shattered by cataclysmic wars, most notably the war with Babylon that destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, displaced the royal family and ended in the exile of her leading citizens, forcing Israel into a seemingly endless period of occupation at the hands of pagan armies—in Jesus’ time, the Roman legions. Thus the later Prophets are redolent with a deep yearning for salvation, in the deepest and most holistic sense of that word. In Isaiah, it is based on God’s forgiveness, and it is eternal. It includes deliverance from oppression and injustice, from guilt and death, from war and slavery and imprisonment and exile. It includes peace and justice and forgiveness. The promise is that salvation is coming—for Israel and ultimately for the world, for societies, for families and for individuals. This is where the hope of a Messiah is located in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Old Testament hope of salvation is not merely for an eternal salvation in which our disembodied souls are snatched from this vale of tears. Nor is it merely for physical justice while fellowship with the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is ignored. To the extent that Christians adopt any kind of body/soul, earth/heaven dualism we simply do not understand the message of Scripture—or of Jesus. God’s salvation is the kingdom of God, and it means that—at last—God has acted to deliver humanity and now reigns over all of life, and is present to and with us, and will be in the future. The New Testament will bring a greater emphasis on eternal life, but it will not negate the holistic message of deliverance. The only possible response to this good news is great joy!”
― Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context