Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Politics and the Kingdom of God

Session Two: Standards of Ethical Authority

The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Let us pray.

Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and the comfort of your Holy Word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Introduction
There are these fair sized lizards where we vacation in Florida — probably North American Green Anoles — that I’ve been trying to catch for decades. I can get close, but they always elude me. And then it dawned on me not long ago just why I can’t catch one; I don’t really want to. I can’t imagine that it would be good for either of us for me to wrap my hand around a lizard — one with teeth — who doesn’t really want to be caught. The first requirement for successfully catching a lizard seems to be a desire, an intent, to really do it.

Like catching lizards, the first step in developing and living a Christian ethic is actually wanting to do so. Many of us, myself included, like the idea of it, but we are a bit afraid of the reality of it, and a bit hesitant to engage the hard work necessary for it. Old habits engendered by the Fall and the false, rival stories that have formed us, die hard. But, we are called to it, and Christian faithfulness and obedience require it. And, we pray for it: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Today, we will take another step toward developing a Christian ethic by examining the sources of authority for that ethical standard. How do we find right and wrong in a fallen world, which, of course, includes the fallen political system that governs us? What are the standards of authority?

The Standards of Ethical Authority
Let’s start with two basic questions.

How does a Christian determine right and wrong?

What are the authoritative sources of Christian ethics?

Let’s begin with the second question: What are the authoritative sources of Christian ethics? Where do we look for Christian standards of right and wrong?

Scripture
The Church, until relatively recently, has considered Scripture to be the ultimate authority for faith and practice, for what to believe and for how to live out that belief in the world. Scripture is the governing ethical authority for the Christian; that is the historical and ecumenical conviction of the Church, and it is the conviction that Anglicans hold, or should hold. Our first and last appeals are always to Scripture. But, Scripture does not always speak directly or unambiguously to each moral issue we encounter. Are there other sources of ethical authority to which we might look in such cases?

Tradition
We do not have to draw solely upon our own limited resources, or even our own reading of Scripture. The Church embodies an unbroken tradition from the calling of Abram until today. This tradition expresses the mind of the Church – formed by the Holy Spirit – on many moral issues. When Scripture seems silent or perhaps unclear, we may ask if the Church has spoken on the issue. Of course, the Church itself is not always of one mind and voice. What if the Church is divided? Then, we might consider the Vincentian Canon, a method proposed by St. Vincent of Lerins (d. 455) for discerning Christian truth. He proposed that we accept as true “that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” Essentially, the hallmarks of truth are ubiquity, antiquity, and unanimity. How does this work? If an ethical standard is isolated to a small region and is not widespread throughout the church, it is suspect. If it is novel, appearing only recently in time, and not found throughout Church history, it is suspect. If it is embraced only by the few and not by the many, it is suspect. We look for tenets that have been believed throughout the Christian world, throughout the Christian age, and throughout the Christian body. This isn’t a perfect test, but it is helpful.

Let’s take the issue of the blessing of same-sex marriages, for example. How does the practice fare under the Vincentian Canon? It fails every test that St. Vincent proposes. The practice is isolated to small parts of the Western Church; it fails the test of ubiquity. The practice is novel; nowhere do we find it in the history of the Church. It fails the test of antiquity. The Church is divided over the practice. It is more nearly correct to say that one small group in the Church has divided itself from the universal Church over this practice. It fails the test of unanimity. So, even if Scripture were not clear on the issue of same-sex marriage (and it is), the Tradition of the church is quite explicitly opposed to the practice.

Christian Community
Because a moral worldview is best discerned and lived out in community, the Christian community itself – the parish, the diocese, the province – serves as an important source of ethical insight, formation, and embodiment. The Holy Spirit works collectively as well as individually. We can take this a step further. In our particular tradition, the parish is governed by a rector, the diocese by a bishop, and the province by the college of bishops. We have a hierarchy of authority within our community that speaks – as necessary – to moral issues. Though we must always act in accordance with our own understanding and conscience, we also submit ourselves to the formative power of the community and its leaders to inform our understanding and to shape our conscience.

We might add other sources of ethical standards to our list, but these three are of first importance: Scripture, Tradition, and Community. In primary position among the three is Scripture.

If Scripture speaks directly and unambiguously to a moral issue, it also speaks authoritatively.

As an aside, in Anglicanism we sometimes hear “the three-legged stool” proposed as an authoritative ethical standard: Scripture, Reason, and Tradition. Some even go further and offer the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience. While there is some validity to both of these suggestions, in modern practice they have typically been misapplied to pit Reason, Tradition, and Experience against the clear teaching of Scripture. “Yes, I know what Scripture says…but my reason (or my experience) leads me to a different conclusion.” While we do acknowledge the need for other authorities to inform our ethical discernment, Scripture, if it speaks to the issue, is always the prime authority. We may never negate the teaching of Scripture based upon these other sources of authority.

This conviction leads us to consider two essential questions:

How does Scripture speak ethically? What modes of instruction does it employ?

How do we read, interpret, and apply the ethical content of Scripture faithfully and effectively?

We begin with the various ways Scripture provides moral instruction.

Modes of Appeal to Scripture (adapted from The Moral Vision of the New Testament)

Richard Hays, in his book The Moral Vision of the New TestamentI, identifies four modes in which Scripture speaks to us (instructs us) ethically:

• Rules: direct commandments or prohibitions of specific behaviors

• Principles: general frameworks of moral consideration by which particular decisions about action are to be governed

• Paradigms (examples): stories or summary accounts of characters who model exemplary conduct (or negative paradigms: characters who model reprehensible conduct)

• A Symbolic World (ethos/worldview): an overarching framework of thought and practice that represents the character of God, the human condition, and the narrative or worldview in which God’s people live and move and have their being; the general understanding and “spirit” of the community

Let’s very briefly consider examples of each of these modes.

Rules
“You shall not commit adultery” is a rule; it is a clear prohibition of a specific behavior. We might extend the concept of adultery to include many forms of marital unfaithfulness, but it must include the basic notion of illicit sexual relations. If a married man comes to me for pastoral counseling and tells me God has spoken to him and endorsed his extramarital affair, I am certain – beyond any doubt – that he is wrong and is either deluded or self-serving. I can point him to this rule.

Principles
“Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” is a principle; it does not command or prohibit a specific behavior, but rather gives a general responsibility that has to be fleshed out in detail. When I examine or consider a particular behavior I must ask myself: Is this allowed or compelled under the principle of loving my neighbor? My neighbor’s dog has been using my lawn as his toilet and I have complained several times to no avail. So one day I decide that the next time this happens I will simply take the neighbor’s dog to the pound. After all, the Bible gives no rule against taking a dog to the pound. But, this would certainly violate the principle of love for neighbor. The principle covers many specific behaviors without specifying each one as a rule does.

Paradigms/Examples
There is another question we could have asked about loving one’s neighbor: Who is my neighbor? You know that Jesus was asked that question. To answer it he didn’t give a specific commandment about everyone who falls into the category of neighbor, nor did he state a principle of neighborly identity. Instead, he gave a paradigm, an example of someone who acted as a neighbor: the Good Samaritan. Rather than restrict the category of neighbor by commandment, he broadened it by example. This is often the case with paradigms; they open outward instead of collapsing inward.

Ethos
Ethos is just the way of being of a people, the cultural standards that govern their life together. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas was asked to testify before congress about Christian ethics and abortion. He said this — not an exact quote: We Christians do not murder our children. Here he was speaking not from rules or principles or paradigms, though he probably could have. He was speaking about the Christian ethos in which children are a gift from the Lord, image bearers of God. He was speaking about a way of being and culture in which the murder of babies is simply unthinkable.

Summary
So, Scripture speaks to us, provides ethical instruction, in several modes/ways: rules, principles, paradigms, and ethos. To say that Scripture is silent on a moral issue simply because it does not contain an explicit positive commandment or a negative prohibition regarding the issue is to ignore the many ways that Scripture can and does address moral issues. We, perhaps, tend to put the greatest weight on rules because they are explicit and clear. But, Richard Hays actually argues that, of the four modes of Scriptural authority we have mentioned, rules constitute the weakest type because they are typically so precise and limited in scope. Principles, paradigms, and ethos broaden outward to encompass many more behaviors and are therefore more broadly applicable.

Let’s summarize what we have discussed this far.

Scripture is the primary (ultimate) ethical authority for Christians. If Scripture speaks directly and unambiguously to a moral issue, it also speaks authoritatively.

Scripture speaks in several modes: rules, principles, paradigms (examples), and ethos/worldview. In moral discernment we must consider all the modes in which Scripture speaks, not just rules.

When Scripture does not speak to an issue or doesn’t speak unambiguously, we may look to secondary authorities: Tradition and Community. But, these may never be used in such a manner as to conflict with or negate Scripture.

Focal Images
My eyes are not so very good. When I want to read Scripture — or anything for that matter — I need my glasses, these lenses that provide focus and clarity. Even with my glasses, some things in Scripture are still not clear, still not in focus. St. Peter felt the same way as his comment on St. Paul’s writings shows:

There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability (2 Pe 3:16b-17).

This brief verse and a half is remarkable in what it says.

• Peter finds Paul difficult to understand, or at least Peter knows that others find Paul difficult to understand.

• Peter includes the writings of Paul as Scripture. Even at this very early stage, the Apostles and other contributors to the New Testament were conscious of the weight of their words.

• We must take care not to be led astray in our reading of Scripture, which implies that there are ways to read Scripture well and truly: “to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life,” as Cranmer has us pray.

What we need are some lenses that better focus our reading of Scripture, particularly when we are reading Scripture for ethical formation. Richard Hays has identified three set of such lenses that the New Testament authors offer us; he calls them focal images because they bring the New Testament images into better focus: Community, Cross, and New Creation. Because I also want to include the Old Testament as a source of ethical authority, I have expanded his list to include three Old Testament images as well: Creation, Covenant, and Exodus.

Old Testament Focal Images

Creation

Covenant

Exodus

New Testament Focal Images

Cross

Community/Family/Koinonia

Coming Kingdom

Any ethical reading of Scripture is enhanced and clarified by engaging with and honoring these focal images.

Creation
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,” we say in Nicene Creed. All things come from God and are subject to him. Creation prior to the fall expressed his will perfectly. Creation after the fall is subject to futility and longs for its freedom from corruption (cf Rom 8). Creation will be restored in the new heavens and the new earth. Recall how Jesus appealed to the focal image of creation in his discussion of divorce: Moses permitted divorce – because of the hardness of your hearts (fall) – but from the beginning (creation) it was not so. When considering the issue of same-sex marriage, we might use this focal image of creation. What does God’s original creation tell us about human relationships, complementarity of the sexes, and the purpose of marriage?

One other important note about the focal image of creation: it implies that all the world – with its cultures and governments – belong to God. The question is sometimes posed to Christians, “What right do you have to insist that your morals be reflected in the laws that govern those who don’t believe as you believe?” Our answer is simply that God is the Creator of the universe and that all authority – certainly in moral matters – belongs to him. Our appeal is to creation and to the Creator.

Covenant
God called Abram and made a covenant with him, that through Abram and his offspring God might redeem and renew the world and bless all peoples. God chose to work through a people made holy by his presence among them. The chief human responsibilities in the covenant were faithfulness to God and obedience, which implies holiness. So, as we look at any moral issue there are covenant questions to ask: Along which path lies the greatest faithfulness to God? Along which path lies obedience? Along which path lies holiness?

Exodus
More than by anything else, Israel was shaped by the experience of slavery and Exodus. The Exodus event formed Israel’s ethos and Law. One example is particularly significant, that of Sabbath observance. God gives Israel two reasons for Sabbath-keeping; one reason draws upon the focal image of Creation, and the other upon the focal image of Exodus. Let’s look at each.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Ex 20:8-11).

Notice here the appeal to creation. God, by his own actions and by his blessing, built the Sabbath day observance into the fabric of creation. The Sabbath reminds man that he is the image bearer of God: not a human doing but a human being. And, because that is true for all creation, no one among God’s people works on the Sabbath: male, female, servants, sojourners, livestock. Servants are given the Sabbath because they too are part of creation. This is the appeal to the focal image of creation. Now, let’s consider the second account of the Ten Commandments is Deuteronomy.

Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that you male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD you God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day (Dt 5:12-15).

This reasoning for Sabbath observance appeals to the focal image of the Exodus. Why do you keep the Sabbath? Because, as free people, as people God delivered from slavery, you can and you must keep the Sabbath, in honor and memory of God’s saving action on your behalf. In Egypt you couldn’t keep the Sabbath; in freedom you must. But there is more here. You must give your children, your slaves, the sojourner, and even the animals the Sabbath, because you know what it was like to be a slave, to be treated like an animal (or worse), and to have no time to rest and worship. Sabbath-keeping is an issue of justice, compassion, and worship. So, an appeal to the focal image of the Exodus must include matters of freedom, justice, compassion, and worship.

In summary, the three Old Testament focal images I propose are Creation, Covenant, and Exodus. The New Testament focal images proposed by Richard Hays are Cross, Community, and Coming kingdom.

Cross
Here I will let Richard Hays speak:

Jesus’ death on a cross is the paradigm for faithfulness to God in this world. The community expresses and experiences the presence of the kingdom of God by participating in “the koinonia of his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10). Jesus’ death is consistently interpreted in the New Testament as an act of self-giving love, and the community is consistently called to take up the cross and follow in the way that his death defines… . The death of Jesus carries with it the promise of the resurrection, but the power of the resurrection is in God’s hands, not ours. Our actions are therefore to be judged not by their calculable efficacy in producing desirable results but by their correspondence to Jesus’ example (MVNT, p. 197).

That last sentence is particularly important: we do not base our moral decisions upon practicality (what is most likely to work), but upon how nearly they image the cross of Christ.

Hays continues:

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).

He concludes by saying:

It is precisely the focal image of the cross that ensures that the followers of Jesus – men and women alike – must read the New Testament as a call to renounce violence and coercion (MVNT, p. 197).

So, the focal image of the cross leads to these type of questions:

Is this the way of self-giving and self-sacrifice?

Is there any element or threat of violence or coercion in this moral action?

Community/Family/Koinonia
In this focal image, Hays shifts the focus from the individual to the community (the church, not as a hierarchical organization, but as the visible, incarnational body of Christ):

The church is a countercultural community of discipleship, and this community is the primary addressee of God’s imperatives. The biblical story focuses on God’s design for forming a covenant people [a clear reference to the OT focal image of covenant]. Thus, the primary sphere of moral concern is not the character of the individual but the corporate obedience of the church… . 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… . The coherence of the New Testament’s ethical mandate will come into focus only when we understand that mandate in ecclesial terms, when we seek God’s will not by asking first, “What should I do,” but “What should we do?” (MVNT, pp. 196-197)

The church may sometimes do together what the individual cannot do alone. And, when I ask what the church’s response to a moral issue should be, that initially removes the pressure from me and allows me to see the issue more clearly. Then, I can consider what my role is in corporate obedience. Importantly, the church provides the necessary spiritual, emotional, and physical support necessary for individual obedience.

We also have to add this note, which was vitally important in the first century and is perhaps even more so now. The Christian Community — the Church, the Koinonia — is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic global body defined solely by our unity in Christ.

Matthew 12:46–50 (ESV): 46 While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. 48 But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” 49 And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

For St. Paul this notion of unity — for him it was unity of Jews and Gentiles — was the litmus test of the Gospel. If Jews and Gentiles could not accept one another in Christ, could not sit at the Lord’s Table together, then they put lie to the Gospel; they stripped it of its power. As long as we think of the Church only in local terms — only in terms of people like us — we have failed to view life through this focal lens. That means that we must consider seriously what our responsibilities are to the global church, to all our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Christian migrants massed at our Southern border are my brothers and sisters. The Christians being bombed in Gaza are my brothers and sisters. The Christian children in sweat shops around the world working in inhumane and dangerous conditions so that I can have cheap products are my brothers and sisters. And so on. This focal lens broadens our views; it keeps us from becoming myopic.

Coming Kingdom / New Creation
In the Lord’s prayer we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The people of God are to live in the Kingdom of God proleptically – bringing the fullness of the Kingdom of God backwards from the future into our present. N. T. Wright summarizes this approach with a question and a challenge.

Question: What would it look like if God were in charge of this situation/decision/activity, etc.?

Challenge: Now, live that way, because, in the ascension, Jesus has been enthroned and is now LORD over all creation.

In and through Jesus, God became King. The Kingdom has come, though not yet fully. This puts us in conflict with the kingdoms of this world which are still in rebellion against the rule of God. Many of our moral dilemmas can be clarified by this focal image by considering how this dilemma would be addressed in God’s coming kingdom, i.e., in God’s righteous rule. How would immigration be handled in God’s kingdom? Would there even be borders or immigrants at all, and, if not, what does that say about Christian response to governmental policies? What about living wage in the Kingdom? What about redemptive violence in the Kingdom? And so forth. This is a particularly powerful focal images because it moves us from how things are, to how things will be, and how we should strive for them and exemplify them even now.

Summary
So here we have six focal images which help us focus our reading and understanding of Scripture: Creation, Covenant, Exodus, Cross, Community, and Coming Kingdom. Taken together with the fullness of Scripture (in all the modes it speaks), tradition and the Vincentian Canon, and the Church as the Spirit-filled community, these focal images move the discussion beyond our own cultural stories, beyond our nationalism, beyond our narrow self-interest, toward faithfulness and obedience to God in moral matters. These are the things that will renew our minds so that we are not conformed to this world but transformed into the likeness of Christ.