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The New Testament
and Ethics
Communities of Social Change
Lisa Sowle Cahill
Exactly twenty years ago . . . , James M. Gustafson published a
magisterial article on Scripture and ethics that was to become a standard
point of departure for discussions of the topic, at least in the United States.1
1vven as his essay reveals that the problem then tended to be construed in
ierms of how the Bible could furnish the ethicist with definite moral rules,
principles, or ideals, it moves the discussion toward a more communal and
practical understanding both of biblical authority and of the interworking of
biblical and other sources in forming the Christian moral perspective.
Gustafson appreciates both that the biblical materials “are directed to par
ticular historical contexts” and that today “the vocation of the Christian
community is to discern what God is enabling and requiring man to be and
to do in particular natural, historical, and social circumstances.”2 In that
process, Scripture is not a sufficient or solely authoritative source of judg
ments, although it is deeply informative of them .3We would be likely to add
now that Scripture and other sources, such as tradition, experience, the
empirical sciences, and philosophy, are not even fully distinguishable from
one another. Especially when the emphasis is on communal formation and
1. James M. Gustafson, “The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Methodological
Study,”
Interpretation
24 (1970): 430-55 . Reprinted in James M. Gustafson,
Theology>and
Christian Ethics
(Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1974), 121-45, cited here.
2. Gustafson,
Theology and Christian Ethics,
134, 145.
3. See also Pheme Perkins, “Scripture in Theology,” in
Faithfid Witness: Foundations of
'Theologyfor Today’s Church
, ed. Leo J. O ’Donovan and T . Howland Sanks (New York: Cross
road, 1989), 122.
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