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N iim ifivT ( liaraiilc r <»f C lirislinn Sot hil l llit«
n
the main cases found are esehatologieal, i.e., they look forward to a revealing
of something
in thefuture.
Perhaps this suggests another way of thinking. The
main relation of revelation to the Bible is not that of an antecedent revelation,
which generates the Bible as its response, but that of a revelation which
follows upon
the existent tradition, or, once it has reached the fixed and
written stage, the existent scripture. The scripture provides the frames of
reference within which new events have meaning and make sense.”17
The problem of revelation aside, however, the view that the Bible
contains a revealed morality that can be applied directly by the individual
agent, perhaps with some help from the biblical critic, flounders when consid
ering the status of individual commands. For some moral aspects of
scripture—such as the
Haustafeln
(household codes: Col. 3:18-4:1; Eph.
5:21-6:9; 1 Pet. 2:13-3:7)—strike many today as not only morally irrelevant
but morally perverse. The common strategy for dealing with such statements
is to dismiss them as the product of the limitations of the early church’s
culture, which had not yet been sufficiently subjected to the searching trans
formation of the Gospel. But that strategy suffers from being too powerful, for
why should the
Haustafeln
be singled out as culturally relative and texts more
appealing to modem ears such as ‘‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in
Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) be exempted?
Besides moral positions that simply strike us as wrong, scripture also
contains commands that many feel are too “ idealistic” to be workable. The
admonition not to resist “one who is evil” (Matt. 5:39) may work at an
interpersonal level, but most Christians assume that it makes no sense as a
social policy. Attempts to “explain” such statements as “ ideals,” or as “ law
that provides consciousness of sin,” or as requiring esehatologieal interpreta
tion result in a feeling that we really do not need to treat them with moral
seriousness after all.18
Thus attempts to formulate a “biblical ethic” result in the somewhat
embarrassing recognition that the “morality” that is said to be “biblical” is
quite selective and even arbitrary. Various strategies are used to justify our
selectivity, such as appealing to “central” biblical themes or images, like
love. No doubt love has a central place in the Bible and the Christian life, but
when it becomes the primary locus of the biblical ethic it turns into an
abstraction that cannot be biblically justified. Indeed when biblical ethics is so
construed one wonders why appeals need be made to scripture at all, since one
treats it as a source of general principles or images that once in hand need no
longer acknowledge their origins. In fact, once we construe Christian ethics in
such a way, we find it necessary to stress the “uniqueness” of the “biblical
concept of love covenant,” or some other equally impressive sounding no
tion.