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The MoraI Authority of"Scripture
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making of concrete ethical decisions,” without considering whether “ethics”
is or should he primarily about “decisions?” 12 Consequently, attempts to
explicate the “ethics” of* scripture have tended to concentrate on those
aspects Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, Wisdom books, the com
mand to love—that fit our intuitive assumptions about what an “ethic” should
look like. But this manner of locating the “biblical ethic” not only confuses
the questions of the ethics in the scripture with the ethical use of scripture, but
has the unfortunate effect of separating and abstracting the ethics from the
religious (and narrative) contexts that make them intelligible.
Gustafson has often observed that how authors use scripture is deter
mined as much by how they define the task of Christian ethics as how they
understand the nature and status of scripture.13 Birch and Rasmussen have
also suggested that once the moral life is understood as not only involving
decisions but also how actions mold the character of individuals and of a
community, the narratives of scripture are as important as the commandments;
the Psalms afford the most explicit moral teachings.14But pictures die harder
even than habits and many persist in thinking that a biblical ethic must be one
that tells us “what to do in circumstances X or Y. ” When ethics is equivalent
to advice, issues of interpretation or community need not arise.
In fairness it should be said that the persistence of the idea that the Bible
is some sort of “revealed morality” 15has been deeply ingrained in our culture
by the church itself. Moreover it is an idea shared by conservative and liberal
alike as they appeal to different parts of scripture in support of ethical posi
tions that they have ironically come to hold on grounds prior to looking to
scripture. Thus claims about the moral significance of scripture are used to
reinforce decisions about ethics derived from nonscriptural sources.
Though they may appear to be radically different, those who would
have us obey everything in the scripture that looks like moral advice—e.g.,
that women should keep quiet in church (1 Cor. 14:34-36)—and those who
would have us act according to the more general admonitions—e.g., that we
should be loving (1 Cor. 13)—share many common assumptions. Both look to
scripture as containing a revealed morality that must or should provide guid
ance. And each, often in quite different ways, has a stake in maintaining that
the “biblical ethic” be distinctive or unique when compared with other
ethics.16
The assumption that to be ethically significant the Bible must contain
some kind of ‘‘revealed morality ’’ not only creates a nest of unfruitful prob
lems but finally betrays the character of the biblical literature. The very idea
that the Bible is revealed (or inspired) is a claim that creates more trouble than
it is worth. As Barr has pointed out, “the term
revelation
is not in the Bible a
common general term for the source of man’s knowledge of God, and some of