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Narrative Character of Christian Sot ini M lilts
turc arc, in part , the resul t of at t empt s to ignore or avoid the necessi ty of a
commun i t y in which it is intel l igible for scr ipture to funct ion author i tat ively.
2. The Scripture as a Moral Problem
James Gustafson has observed that “ in spite of the great interest in
ethics in the past thirty years, and in spite of the extensive growth of biblical
studies, there is a paucity of material that relates the two areas of study in a
scholarly way. Writers in ethics necessarily make their forays into the Bible
without the technical exegetical and historical acumen and skills to be secure
in the way they use biblical materials. But few biblical scholars have provided
studies from which writers in ethics can draw.”6 Likewise, Brevard Childs
suggests that “ there is no outstanding modem work written in English that
even attempts to deal adequately with Biblical material as it relates to
ethics. ”7
No doubt the problem of specialization is a real one, but our current
inability to use the scriptures ethically involves more fundamental conceptual
and methodological issues. For, as we shall see, appeal to scripture is not
equivalent to appeal to the text in itself, and it is the latter, rightly or wrongly,
which is the subject of most current scholarly effort.8 1am not suggesting that
critical analysis of the development of the biblical text is theologically ques
tionable, but that often it is simply unclear what theological significance such
work should have. However, for Christian ethics the Bible is not just a
collection of texts but scripture that makes normative claims on a community.
The confusion surrounding the relation of text to scripture has not re
sulted in ethicists (and theologians) paying too little attention to current
scholarly work concerning the Bible; rather their attention is far too uncritical.
It has been observed that there is finally no substitute for knowing the text,
and it is often unfortunately true that theologians and ethicists alike know the
current theories about the development of the text better than the text itself.9
As a result, claims about an ethic being biblically informed too frequently turn
out to mean that the ethic is in accordance with some scholar’s reconstruction
of “biblical theology,” e.g., the centrality of covenant or love in the Bible.10
And ironically, as James Barr has shown, the very notion of “biblical theol
ogy” distorts the variety of biblical material by failing to take the text se
riously.1
The conceptual issues raised by the ethical use of scripture involve not
only how we should understand scripture, but also how ethics should be
understood. We often have a far too restricted understanding of the “ethical. ”
For example, Childs asks “How does the Bible aid the Christian in the