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Narrative C haracter of C hristian Social K t lilis
Yet I contend that the position developed here does help us better
comprehend the more straightforwardly moral portions of scripture. It keeps
us from turning commands found there into isolated rules or principles that are
assumed to have special status because they are in the Bible. Rather it pro
poses that Christians (and we hope others) take them to heart (and mind)
because they have been found to be crucial to a people formed by the story of
God. Such commands stand as reminders of the kind of people we must be if
we are to be capable of remembering for ourselves and the world the story of
God’s dealing with us.
To take the prohibition of adultery, it does not claim to be intelligible in
itself, but draws its force from the meaning and significance of marriage in the
Jewish and Christian communities. Marriage in those communities derives
from profound hope in and commitment to the future, witnessed by the
willingness and duty to bring new life into the world. Moreover for those
traditions family and marriage have special significance as they are also an
expression of the relation these people have with their God. The prohibition
against adultery does not therefore derive from a set of premises concerned
directly with the legitimacy of sexual expression, though without doubt it has
often been so interpreted, but from the profoundest commitment of the com
munity concerning the form of sexual life necessary to sustain their under
standing of marriage and family.
Nor does the prohibition against resisting evil derive from an assump
tion about violence as inherently evil, but rather from the community’s under
standing of how God rules his creation. For how can a people who believe
God is Lord of their existence show forth that conviction if they act as if the
meaning of their existence, and perhaps even history itself, must be insured by
the use of force? The nonviolence of the church derives from the character of
the story of God that makes us what we are—namely a community capable of
witnessing to others the kind of life made possible when trust rather than fear
rules our relation with one another.
I do not assume that all the moral advice and admonitions found in
scripture have the same significance or should positively be appropriated.
Each must be evaluated separately and critically. Of course, before we decide
that certain aspects of scripture are no longer relevant—e.g., the
Haustafeln
—we must make sure we understand them through an exegesis as
accurate as we can muster. And we must remember that a set of historical-
critical skills will not guarantee an accurate reading. Our analysis will also
depend on the questions we learn to put to the text from participating in a
community which acknowledges their formative role.
The command for wives to be subject to their husbands, for example,
comes only after the admonition that everyone in the church must be subject to
the other out of “ reverence for Christ ” (Eph. 5:21). It does not say that wives