Kingdom Ethics, 2nd ed.: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

By David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen

"Kingdom Ethics is arguably the most significant and comprehensive Christian ethics textbook of our time.” — Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom, North Park Theological Seminary

Christian churches across the spectrum, and Christian ethics as an academic discipline, are often guilty of evading what Jesus actually said about moral life, focusing instead on other biblical texts or traditions.   This evasion of Jesus has seriously malformed Christian moral witness—which Jesus said is tested by whether we put his words “into practice.”

David Gushee and Glen Stassen’s Kingdom Ethics is the leading Christian introductory ethics textbook for the twenty-first century. Solidly rooted in Scripture—and uniquely focusing on Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount—the book has offered students, pastors, and other readers a comprehensive and challenging framework for Christian ethical thought. Writing to recenter Christian ethics in Jesus Christ, Gushee and Stassen focus on the meaning of the Kingdom of God, perennial themes of moral authority and moral norms, and all the issues raised by the Sermon on the Mount—such as life and death, sexual and gender ethics, love and justice, truth telling, and politics.

This second edition of Kingdom Ethics is substantially revised by Gushee and features enhanced and updated treatments of all major contemporary ethical issues—including updated data and examples, a more global perspective, gender-inclusive language, a clearer focus on methodology, discussion questions for every chapter, and a detailed new glossary.

Kingdom Ethics is for readers anywhere wanting a robust, comprehensive understanding of Christian ethics that is founded on the concrete teachings of Jesus and will equip them for further exploration into the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467446105

David P. Gushee

  David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia. He also serves as chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre, both in Amsterdam. His many other books include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obligation.

Book preview

9780802874214.jpg

"In Kingdom Ethics David Gushee and the late Glen Stassen have served an entire generation of students in Christian ethics. This second edition continues to challenge our thinking about many of the enduring social issues of our time. It remains focused on an ethics of Jesus based primarily on the Sermon on the Mount and traces out the implications of Jesus’s teaching for our contemporary setting. In this substantial revision Gushee tackles these issues in ways that will challenge some conventional Christian thinking. The text, in places, will prove controversial to some readers. This edition of Kingdom Ethics will nonetheless drive all who read it to pursue greater depths of theological reflection and faithfulness in Christian discipleship on important matters facing our world."

— Patrick T. Smith

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

"Kingdom Ethics does indeed ‘reclaim Jesus Christ for Christian ethics and for the moral life of the churches,’ allowing his teachings and practices — in particular the Sermon on the Mount — to set the agenda and structure. This second edition pays even more attention to global Christianity and well deserves to be used across cultural boundaries as a compelling model to construct a faithful and relevant Christian ethic."

— Joon-Sik Park

Methodist Theological School in Ohio

Kingdom Ethics

Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

Second Edition

David P. Gushee & Glen H. Stassen

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan

First edition © 2003 Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee,

published by InterVarsity Press

Second edition © 2016 David P. Gushee and the Estate of Glen H. Stassen

All rights reserved

Published 2016 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Gushee, David P., 1962- author. | Stassen, Glen Harold, 1936-2014, author. | Stassen, Glen Harold, 1936-2014. Kingdom ethics.

Title: Kingdom ethics : following Jesus in contemporary context /

David P. Gushee & Glen H. Stassen.

Description: 2nd [edition]. | Grand Rapids, Michigan : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000210 | ISBN 9780802874214 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN 9781467446105 (ePub)

eISBN 9781467445719 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian ethics. | Jesus Christ — Ethics. |

Sermon on the mount — Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BJ1251 .S8132 2016 | DDC 241 — dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000210

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter six appeared in an earlier form as Recovering the Way of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 2002. Used by permission.

Chapter eight is largely adapted from David P. Gushee, The Sacredness of Human Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), ch. 3. Used with permission.

In chapter twelve, the section Global Women’s Rights Issues is adapted from David P. Gushee, The Sacredness of Human Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 382–87. Used with permission.

In honor of Glen Harold Stassen (1936–2014)

Contents

Illustrations

Preface to the Second Edition (2016)

Preface to the First Edition (2003)

Acknowledgments in the First Edition

Part I:

Methodology for Kingdom Ethics

1. Jesus Began to Proclaim

The Reign of God

2. Blessed Are You

Virtues of Kingdom People

3. Law and Prophets

Authority and Scripture

4. Moral Structure in the World

The Form and Function of Moral Norms

5. Doing, Not Dualism

The Transforming Initiatives

of the Sermon on the Mount

6. The Greatest Commandment

Love

7. Weightier Matters of the Law

Justice

8. So Much Value

The Sacredness of Life

9. Extracting Logs, Examining Fruits

Learning to Be Faithful

Part II:

Core Moral Issues in Kingdom Ethics

10. Salt, Light, Deeds

The Church’s Public Witness

in an Unbelieving World

11. Violence Close at Hand

Criminal Justice

12. God Made Them Male and Female

Patriarchy, Gender, and Jesus

13. Adultery of the Heart

Sexual Ethics in the Meantime

14. What God Has Joined Together

Marriage, Divorce, and Children

15. Let Your Yes Be Yes

The Ethics of Truthful Speech

16. Peacemaking, Cheek Turning, and Enemy Love

The Ethics of War

17. Thy Kingdom Come

Prayer, Trust, and Following Jesus

18. Treasures on Earth

Economic Ethics in the Kingdom Way

19. Even the Birds of the Air

Creation Care and the Kingdom

20. Judgment, Humility, Dogs, and Swine

Overcoming the Sin of Racism

21. Curing Every Disease

The Way of Jesus and Contemporary Bioethics

22. A House Built on Rock

The Way of the Kingdom

Glossary

Bibliography

Author Index

Subject Index

Scripture Index

Illustrations

Figures

Figure 4.1. Levels of moral norms70

Figure 4.2. Unified ethical modes80

Figure 4.3. Ethical map for a total way of life84

Figure 9.1. The four dimensions of moral agency

(the Four-Box Diagram)173

Tables

Table 2.1. The Beatitudes echo Isaiah 6124

Table 2.2. Paul’s virtues parallel the Beatitudes37

Table 3.1. Key words in Matthew 5:16–20 / Matthew 7:15–2758

Table 5.1. Traditional righteousness / Jesus’s teaching

in Matthew 5:21–2694

Table 5.2. Threefold pattern in Matthew 5:21–2695

Table 5.3. Threefold pattern in Matthew 5:38–4298

Table 5.4. Threefold pattern in Matthew 5:43–48101

Table 5.5. The fourteen triads of the Sermon on the Mount102

Table 21.1. Types of euthanasia (standard account)436

Preface to the Second Edition (2016)

Over twenty years ago, when Glen Stassen and I began writing what became Kingdom Ethics, we could not have imagined that the book would eventually gain the wide national and international readership it has come to enjoy. Authors never really know how people will respond to their books. As we tuned up for an envisioned second edition, we were so grateful that, in the ten years since Kingdom Ethics had been released, it had sold more than 30,000 copies in English and been translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Our originally intended US evangelical audience had widened to include many nonevangelical readers as well as a significant part of the global Christian family. The book functioned as a textbook in Christian high schools, in Bible schools, in colleges, universities, and seminaries; but, as we hoped, Kingdom Ethics also had been received as a significant normative account of Christian ethics.

This was all terribly exciting to us, and we were deeply grateful for the opportunity to help shape the moral vision of global Christianity through this book. But the continued wide use of Kingdom Ethics created responsibilities on our part to ensure that the book remained the best and most useful tool that it could be. We knew by 2010 that the book’s age was beginning to show. This was inevitable, because scholarship is dynamic, the world changes, and Christian ethics, while having permanent elements, is also deeply contextual. We concluded that the book could not continue much longer in print without significant updating. This also would give us the opportunity to improve the book in ways that readers, reviewers, and friends had asked of us during the first decade of its life.

After plans were well along for the second edition, but before any but the tiniest bit of new text had been drafted, Glen Stassen fell ill with cancer. He died on April 26, 2014, leaving me with the sole responsibility for undertaking the revision. I dedicated myself to accomplishing this task by the summer of 2015, in his honor. I finally decided that the best way to do so would be to pull together a revision team consisting of young scholars trained by Glen, me, or both of us: one might call them kingdom ethicists. I am thrilled that the following young scholars agreed to work with me to accomplish this revision: Jacob Cook (ch. 9, moral agency — a substantial rewrite), Aaron Hedges (ch. 4, moral norms, partly rewritten by Aaron with some illuminating new graphics he developed), Justin Phillips (ch. 11, criminal justice, also substantially rewritten), Laura Rector (ch. 14, notably the expanded attention to children), Kyle Stokes (chs. 18–19, ecology and economics), Isaac Sharp (ch. 20, on race, with some revisions suggested by Reggie Williams), and Jordan Yeager (ch. 21, a consolidated and expanded treatment of bioethics, with new reproductive-­technology and contraception sections drafted by Jordan). Ruth Santos-­Ortiz painstakingly reviewed our usage of the biblical languages. Kyle Stokes, who from 2014 to 2015 served as my administrative assistant and researcher, assisted me with bibliographical and scholarship updates on chapters 2, 3, and 6. Special thanks go to Isaac Sharp, who served as my closer, reviewing everything in near-­final draft and helping me finish the work, including revising the bibliography and finalizing the glossary. While final responsibility for the new edition remains my own, each member of the revision team made significant contributions.

This second edition intends seven different types of changes that, taken together, should make for a stronger, more useful, more contemporary work:

1. Updated data, examples, scholarship, and issue discussion.

2. More gender-­inclusive language.

3. More attention to the wider world, and to global Christianity, and much less of a US focus.

4. Greater stylistic and presentational simplicity and unity, assuming less background knowledge on the part of the reader, and doing more to help that reader understand what we are talking about.

5. Much greater attention to consistent application of the methodological commitments of the volume, through introduction and consistent notations related to use of twelve key method elements (KMEs) to guide students and teachers and make the methodology we are proposing clearer.

6. Discussion questions at the end of every chapter.

7. A glossary of key terms, begun originally with the assistance of David Mathis of McAfee School of Theology but now vastly expanded by me (David). Glossary terms will be introduced in bold print, the only terms so identified. Along with the discussion questions, the glossary should prove very helpful to both students and teachers.

This revision is constrained by two major factors. The most practical is that the book is already quite lengthy. The textus receptus of the first edition of the book came in at 227,393 words. I wanted to end up with a second edition that wasn’t any bigger. (And succeeded!)

The second matter is more subtle. Revision of a textbook that has proven useful to so many must retain substantial continuity with its first edition so that its friends will still recognize it. But the book must change where fresh thinking and fresh evidence require change. It is my hope that longtime friends of Kingdom Ethics will see both the continuity and the changes they think are important — and, more importantly, will see how those changes cohere with the ethical methodology we offer here. But in writing about matters as sensitive and often controversial as those in this book, I cannot hope that every word of this second edition will please everyone. Glen and I discussed a large number of substantive changes before he died. But inevitably, responsibility for the final shape of the second edition rests on my shoulders.

The core commitments that we brought to the first edition I bring to the second one. I still seek an ethic focused on Jesus Christ, on the reign of God that he proclaimed and inaugurated, and on his authoritative teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. I still want to be deeply biblical, with an even broader canonical sweep and even fuller integration of a Hebraic-­prophetic contextualization of the ethics of Jesus. I still want to reflect the evangelical Christian commitments that Glen and I shared with each other and with hundreds of millions of other Christians around the world, while drawing even more widely on the resources of the broader Christian church and academy, and while writing in a way that welcomes all kinds of readers to the table.

But readers might notice some subtle changes, and it only seems fair to offer a few clues. The passage of over a decade provided ample opportunity for both of us to undertake new research, activism, and teaching on a number of pressing social issues. Insights gained from these experiences will become readily apparent here. For example, Glen and I became heavily involved after 2005 in the issue of US torture against suspected terrorists, a practice that involved allies around the world. Lessons learned from this bitter fight became transformative. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008, changing the landscape for the discussion of race in unexpected ways. The homosexuality or LGBT issue developed in dramatic and unexpected ways both domestically and globally, both in the churches and in cultures. The economic meltdown of 2007–2008 exposed systemic problems in global and US capitalism — and plunged millions into economic hardship. And so on.

Theologically, Glen and I agreed that the first edition of Kingdom Ethics sounded a little too optimistic about the extent to which the social transformation offered in Jesus’s kingdom proclamation had become visible in either the world or the church. We agreed that the book needed a more visible theology of sin, greater clarity about how the in-­breaking of the kingdom of God always involves costly confrontation with sin, and more recognition that the victories gained for the kingdom are often tiny, mustard seed wins rather than sweeping transformations. We agreed that the Christian churches are far too often seduced by the powers and ideologies of this world, to the point that the churches sometimes actually end up opposing rather than participating in the actual work of the kingdom of God. We wanted to diagnose how and why that happens and be as clear as possible about a kingdom ethic as a minority and resistant ethic. We wanted to identify great examples of those who come through for Christ, those who stand fast against ideological seduction, as well as terrible examples of those who do not, and to wrestle with how sometimes it is non-­Christians rather than Christians who better seem to get the kingdom and to live into its commitments. So maybe the second edition has come out a bit edgier, a bit more confrontational, with deeper realism about the sin that so easily entangles us, about the terrible obstacles to God’s reign (even in the churches), and about the costs of seeking God’s kingdom.

With deep gratitude, I want to thank James Ernest and Eerdmans for publishing this second edition of Kingdom Ethics.

The New Structure of the Second Edition

The book has been reorganized into two sections, covering methodology and issues. The methodological section is more substantial than in the first edition, covering nearly 90,000 words and nine chapters. The remainder of the book offers reflections on various moral issues addressed by Jesus or demanding attention in our present day. These have been reordered to more closely follow the structure of the Sermon on the Mount:

10. Salt, Light, Deeds: The Church’s Public Witness in an Unbelieving World (Mt 5:13–16)

11. Violence Close at Hand: Criminal Justice (Mt 5:21–26)

12. God Made Them Male and Female: Patriarchy, Gender, and Jesus (Mt 19:4, 12)

13. Adultery of the Heart: Sexual Ethics in the Meantime (Mt 5:27–30)

14. What God Has Joined Together: Marriage, Divorce, and Children (Mt 5:31–32; 19:3–9)

15. Let Your Yes Be Yes: The Ethics of Truthful Speech (Mt 5:33–37)

16. Peacemaking, Cheek Turning, and Enemy Love: The Ethics of War (Mt 5:38–48)

17. Thy Kingdom Come: Prayer, Trust, and Following Jesus (Mt 6:1–18; 7:6–11)

18. Treasures on Earth: Economic Ethics in the Kingdom Way (Mt 6:19–21, 24)

19. Even the Birds of the Air: Creation Care and the Kingdom (Mt 6:25–34)

20. Judgment, Humility, Dogs, and Swine: Overcoming the Sin of Racism (Mt 7:1–6)

21. Curing Every Disease: The Way of Jesus and Contemporary Bioethics (Mt 4:23–24)

22. A House Built on Rock: The Way of the Kingdom (Mt 7:21–27)

The chapters on sowing the seeds of peace (ch. 8 in the first edition) and new frontiers in biotechnology (ch. 12 in the first edition) have been abandoned.

I hope that the end result of these revisions is a text that even more fully achieves the purposes of the first edition: an ethic as if Jesus matters, an ethic based on the Sermon on the Mount, an ethic that reflects the teachings of Jesus and forms disciples who participate in the advance of God’s reign.

Preface to the First Edition (2003)

The Problem:

The Evasion of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount

The church confesses that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. He is God incarnate. He is the Savior. He is the Lord of the church and of the world. He is the center not only of Christian faith but also, Scripture asserts, of the universe itself, the one through whom all things were made: He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col 1:17). Christianity is a nonsensical enterprise apart from Jesus, its central figure, its source, ground, authority, and destiny.

Here is the problem. Christian churches across the theological and confessional spectrum, and Christian ethics as an academic discipline that serves the churches, are often guilty of evading Jesus, the cornerstone and center of the Christian faith. Specifically, the teachings and practices of Jesus — especially the largest block of his teachings, the Sermon on the Mount — are routinely ignored or misinterpreted in the preaching and teaching ministry of the churches and in Christian scholarship in ethics. This evasion of the concrete ethical teachings of Jesus has seriously malformed Christian moral practices, moral beliefs, and moral witness. Jesus taught that the test of our discipleship is whether we act on his teachings, whether we put into practice his words. This is what it means to buil[d our] house on rock (Mt 7:24).

We believe that Jesus meant what he said. And so it is no overstatement to claim that the evasion of the teachings of Jesus constitutes a crisis of Christian identity and raises the question of who exactly is functioning as the Lord of the church. When Jesus’s way of discipleship is thinned down, marginalized, or avoided, then churches and Christians lose their antibodies against infection by secular ideologies that manipulate Christians into serving the purposes of some other lord. We fear precisely that kind of idolatry now.

We write to redress this problem. Our purpose is to reclaim Jesus Christ for Christian ethics and for the moral life of the churches. We intend to write an introductory interpretation of Christian ethics built on the rock — the teachings and practices of Jesus. And in the process we also intend to recover the Sermon on the Mount for Christian ethics. We think that the Christian life consists of following Jesus — obeying his teachings and practicing the way of life he taught and modeled. Jesus taught that as his disciples obey him and practice what he taught and lived, they participate in the reign of God that Jesus inaugurated during his earthly ministry and that will reach its climax when he comes again.

So we are attempting to write an introduction to Christian ethics that focuses unremittingly on Jesus Christ, the inaugurator of the kingdom of God. When we surveyed the available textbooks in Christian ethics, we were amazed to find that almost none learned anything constructive from the Sermon on the Mount — the largest block of Jesus’s teaching in the New Testament, the teaching that Jesus says in the Great Commission is the way to make disciples and that the early church referred to more often than any other Scripture. Something was very wrong. Now we are pleased to think we are part of a trend to recover the way of Jesus for Christian discipleship. Recently, and from three different traditions, Dallas Willard has published The Divine Conspiracy, William Spohn has published Go and Do Likewise, and Allen Verhey has published Remembering Jesus. It is with great enthusiasm that we welcome these three elegantly written books, each of which takes the way of Jesus seriously. We are part of the same cause, and we hope all four books foretell a movement and will work together like a team of four horses pulling in the same direction.

Plan and Structure of the Book

We intend in this book to let Jesus, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, set the agenda for Christian ethics. This simple decision has surprisingly concrete consequences. Many current introductions to Christian ethics — not to mention current moral advocacy efforts in the churches — focus their primary attention on issues that Jesus did not discuss, while ignoring several that Jesus did continually address. While we acknowledge the need to consider present-­day concerns that were nonexistent in Jesus’s time, as far as possible we will try to allow Jesus’s teachings to set our agenda. We want to focus our attention on what Jesus taught was essential to Christian discipleship. We think this is the best way to be a Christian — a Christ follower. Such an approach also constitutes a check against the intrusion of present-­day ideologies and the distorted agendas they promote.

Yet this is not simply a book on the Sermon on the Mount, but a book on Christian ethics. And further, we are not basing the biblical parts of the book only on the Sermon on the Mount: we regularly ground the interpretation in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament, and regularly look to the rest of the New Testament for confirmation. In fact, we see the background of Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom of God in the deliverance passages of the prophet Isaiah, which bring far richer content to our understanding of the reign of God in Jesus’s teaching. This particular grounding in the Hebrew Scriptures is one of the guiding insights of the book, and is why this book is called Kingdom Ethics.

The book is divided into seven sections. Section 1 attempts to situate the ethic Jesus taught by considering the meaning of the kingdom of God, for this idea stood at the heart of his proclamation and self-­understanding. Our approach to Christian ethics offers a sharp focus on God’s reign, a focus we think well justified given Jesus’s own proclamation. This discussion then lays the foundation for our treatment of the issue of character, beginning with a kingdom-­centered rethinking of the Beatitudes and moving to a consideration of contemporary character ethics.

Section 2 considers the perennial themes of moral authority and moral norms in Christian ethics. All approaches to ethics, Christian or not, must offer some account of what will count as authoritative in determining moral truth and of how such truth is packaged and communicated. In this section, we attempt to show the way in which Jesus dealt both with moral authority and with the shape and function of moral norms. This section will be our most obviously methodological — and yet the entire work is intended as a demonstration of a certain methodology in Christian ethics.

All remaining chapters deal with issues and themes raised by the Sermon on the Mount or suggested by the Sermon in relation to contemporary moral challenges. Section 3 focuses on various issues of life and death; section 4 considers sexual, gender, and marriage ethics; section 5 explores the great themes of love and justice; section 6 looks at relationships of justice and love by exploring truth telling, race, economics, and creation care. Finally, section 7 concludes the volume by considering Jesus’s teachings on prayer, politics, and moral practices.

Each chapter is in one way or another grounded in a portion of the Sermon on the Mount, but the Sermon does not form the exclusive basis of the ethic that is developed there, and we do not attempt to organize the book as a straightforward exposition of the Sermon. As in any worthy introduction to Christian ethics, we attempt to present the most relevant biblical texts, themes, and motifs related to the issues under discussion. Because we are trying to stay as close as possible to the ethics that Jesus taught, we attend especially to those Old Testament texts that most strongly influenced Jesus’s teaching and to New Testament materials that reflect the Sermon on the Mount and other Jesus sayings as passed on to the early church. But we do consider the whole of the canon as authoritative for Christian ethics and do our biblical work accordingly.

Reasoned and Spirit-­illuminated reflection on tradition, experience, and social scientific data, among other resources, also offers insight on most moral issues we face, and plenty of that kind of moral archaeology can be found here as well. To claim as we do that Christian ethics must be built on the rock, Jesus Christ, and on his teachings is by no means to claim that the rest of the Bible should be abandoned or that no other source of knowledge is relevant.

To make the book more readable, we have avoided footnotes and incorporated the notes in parentheses within the text, often with a shortened title even on first reference. A bibliography for further reading at the end of the book identifies the publication information for the books to which the parenthetical notes refer. We hope the discussion is interesting enough, and controversial enough, to lead you to want to read further.

Authorship, Agenda, and Audience

We always appreciate it when authors tell us who they are, what their agenda is, and whom they are trying to reach. So we here briefly offer the same courtesy to our own readers.

Glen was raised a North American Baptist in Minnesota. He is now Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. He took up that position in 1996, after twenty years of teaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as at Duke University, Kentucky Southern College, and Berea College. David was raised a Roman Catholic in Virginia and became a Southern Baptist through a conversion experience at the age of sixteen. He is now Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University, located in Jackson, Tennessee. David began teaching at Union in 1996, after three years on the faculty of Southern Seminary and three years serving as managing editor of the publications of Evangelicals for Social Action and guest teaching at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This project was born during three overlapping years at Southern Seminary (1993–1996). David, originally a student of Glen’s, returned to Southern to join him as his partner in the two-­person Christian ethics faculty. Glen had the original idea for the book in 1995, and later David joined the project. We were both excited about our sense of calling to retrieve Jesus’s teachings and redemptive actions for Christian ethics. Circumstances change in ways none of us anticipate. In 1996 David moved to Union, where he has developed a program in Christian ethics within the Christian studies department, and Glen moved to Fuller. From a distance of two thousand miles, with the aid of e-­mail, we completed our work — though it took a bit of time!

Our agenda is to write an excellent introduction to Christian ethics grounded in the teachings of Jesus. We have aimed for a book that can be used in college and seminary classes. However, by introducing several new kinds of arguments we also hope to advance the ongoing conversation about Christian ethics among professional practitioners of our discipline. And we have tried to write with sufficient verve to attract the thoughtful general reader as well.

Those interested in theological/political labels and categories may find this book hard to pin down. We think we are offering a Christian ethics that seeks to follow Jesus’s lead as faithfully as possible. As such, it is simply Christian ethics. We are writing for all Christians who have an interest in following Jesus and want to recover, or deepen, what that means.

Our publisher is an evangelical Christian publishing company, and as authors we are certainly comfortable with that theological label. We happily embrace the authority of Scripture and the tenets of orthodox Christian faith, and have written this work on that basis. Both of us, though, relate widely to an array of Christian communities both in North America and abroad, and attempt to avoid ideological pigeonholing. We hope that anyone interested in the moral teaching of Jesus Christ and the contemporary moral witness of the Christian church will find much here that is of value.

The informed reader will likely notice the theological/ethical traditions and figures that seem to influence us most heavily, but it is good to be explicit about this as well. Both of us are Baptists — the kind of Baptists who connect both to the Anabaptist and to the Reformed strands of the Baptist tradition, as well as to the Great Awakening, revivalist, and Pietist heritage of North American Baptist life. The Anabaptist strand offers especially strong emphasis on the teachings of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. The Reformed strand develops creational and covenantal themes, and has always emphasized the Hebrew Scriptures and the sovereignty of God over all of life, not only over the church or a narrow religious part of life. The revivalist and Pietist strands stress the role of heartfelt personal commitment to Christ as Savior and Lord, and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. These themes are all critically important in our approach. Thus our approach seeks to be faithfully and concretely Trinitarian in, we hope, a fresh way.

We also both find the historic black church tradition in the United States to be extraordinarily congenial and confess its deep influence on our thinking, especially in its emphasis on incarnational ethics and on justice. Recent years have found us impressed by the Pentecostal/charismatic wing of the church; its thinkers are beginning to offer important insights for Christian scholarship, some of which we incorporate here. Glen has been intimately connected with the Protestant churches of Europe, especially Germany, for many years; that influence is felt here. Finally, having been trained in mainline seminaries and universities, both of us are well acquainted with Catholic and mainline theological and social ethics and have studied closely the towering figures of those traditions. Thinkers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and H. Richard Niebuhr have clearly left their mark on this work.

All of this is to say that the Christian ethics we offer here is nourished by the grand tradition(s) of the church as a whole, with certain strands particularly prominent — in large part because of their recognition of the centrality of Jesus for Christian ethics. Our primary loyalty is to Jesus as Lord and Savior, not to traditions about him, but we are happy to draw on the best of those traditions where they are most insightful.

Finally, we want to emphasize to our readers that our voices intertwine throughout the work. David (sometimes using Glen’s research) wrote the first draft of this preface and of chapters 4, 10–15, 18–20, and 22–24. Michael Westmoreland-­White wrote the first draft of chapter 21. Glen wrote the first draft of all other chapters, except chapter 5, which was jointly drafted. Each of us interacted thoroughly with each other’s draft chapters; the final product is genuinely our mutual work. For the sake of clarity, on those few occasions when we wish to offer a personal opinion or story in a chapter, we will identify the individual author by the first name. All future first-­person references in that chapter will refer to the same author. Normally, however, we will speak in the coauthor we voice. But both of us accept full responsibility for every word you will read here. We invite you along as together we explore Christian ethics as following Jesus.

Acknowledgments in the First Edition

Glen Stassen

A deeply felt thank you to Sondra Ely Wheeler, Christine Pohl, and Beth Phillips, for their incisive comments and for friendship that goes well beyond the call of duty. To Larry Rasmussen and Jim Ball for help on environmental ethics. To Alan Culpepper, Richard Hays, Willard Swartley, David Garland, Marianne Meye Thompson, Donald Hagner, David Scholer, Christian Wolf, Gerald Borchert, Seyoon Kim, and Rick Beaton for comments on the pivotal work on the Sermon on the Mount and the Isaianic context for the kingdom of God, without implying that they take responsibility. To Michael Westmoreland-­White for research help, encouragement, and criticism at countless points, and for writing the first draft for the chapter on creation care and the topic index. To Tammy Williams and Jeff Phillips for research assistance on violence. To the remarkably competent Susan Carlson Wood for the bibliography. To the Restaurant Theology Group and the Just Peacemaking Theory interdisciplinary group for insights, mutual enrichment, and support. To Abbott Timothy Kelly and the monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani; Monsignor Alfred Horrigan; Bellarmine College; Bethel College; Berea College; Calvin College; Eastern Mennonite University; Judson College; Spalding University; Texas Lutheran College; Wheaton College; Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary; the Baptist Theological Seminaries in Buckow, Sofia, Prague, Sioux Falls, Chicago, and Taejun; and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary for their invitations to lecture and dialogue on these themes. To former students — my overwhelmingly heartfelt source of professional pride — for all their encouragement that this recovery of the Sermon on the Mount for our living, and this grounding of the way of Jesus and the reign of God in the prophecy of Isaiah, are the way out from the churches’ accommodation to Babylon’s ideologies. To Dave Gushee, for channeling the waterfall, sharing excitement in the process, and representing all my terrific former students.

David Gushee

Thanks go to former students Joshua Trent for invaluable research help and Autumn Ridenour for dialogue about each chapter. To Greg Cales and Michael Westmoreland-­White for help on the truth-­telling chapter. To Audrey Chapman, James Huggins, and John Kilner for help on the biotechnology chapter. To the numerous students who have spoken with me about their experiences as children of divorce. To Nevlynn Johnson for numerous dialogues related to racial justice and reconciliation. To George Guthrie for dialogue about New Testament studies. To Second Presbyterian Church, Methodist Theological School in Ohio, the Evangelical Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion, and my own students for listening to this project as it developed. Very special thanks from both of us to Christine Pohl and Sondra Wheeler, who read through and engaged with the entire manuscript in various stages. To Glen Stassen himself, for the years of teaching and mentoring, and for choosing me as his partner in this project.

Part 1

Methodology for

Kingdom Ethics

The chapters in this section establish the biblical and methodological framework for our treatment of Christian ethics in this book. The embodied drama of the contested reign of God lies at the heart of the biblical record. Jesus came preaching and incarnating the long-­promised and desperately awaited kingdom of God, originally and still the hope of Israel, and through Israel the hope of the world. For his trouble he was welcomed and scorned, adored and executed. We have chosen to ground our discussion of the Christian moral life right here, in God’s reign, as Jesus proclaimed and embodied it, but against the entire background of Jewish eschatological hope. This is not an uncontroversial choice. Our first chapter offers careful discussion of Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God and teases out implications for Christian ethics.

This kingdom focus opens up new vistas on a number of methodological themes and issues in Christian ethics. In the remainder of this section, we offer chapters on character, scriptural authority, the nature of moral obligation, the Sermon on the Mount and its signature transforming initiatives, and the cardinal ethical norms of love, justice, and the sacredness of life. The last chapter in this section offers a revision and expansive discussion of a schematic diagram developed long ago by Glen related to how moral decision-­making occurs; I now believe this grid can function both diagnostically and prescriptively for Christian ethics, and hope to show that here. During the course of these nine methodological chapters, twelve key method elements (KMEs) for Christian ethics will be identified. These will then surface again and again in the second half of the book, in which moral issues are discussed. Notice that Scripture, especially the Sermon on the Mount, grounds the entirety of our presentation. That, at least, is our intention.

1

Jesus Began to Proclaim

The Reign of God

Jesus began to proclaim, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Matthew 4:17

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Mark 1:14–15

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." . . .

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. . . . I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.

Luke 4:16–19, 21, 43

Scholars agree with what any of us can see in the Gospels: Jesus came announcing that the kingdom of God was at hand (Mt 4:12–17; Mk 1:2–3, 14–15; Lk 4:14–21, 43). As New Testament scholar Gordon Fee says, The universal witness of the Synoptic tradition is that the absolutely central theme of Jesus’ mission and message was ‘the good news of the kingdom of God’ (Kingdom of God, 8). And it is not only the Synoptic writers who make the kingdom of God central; the theme echoes throughout the New Testament, even in varying formulations and emphases in writers as diverse as Paul and John. But scholars as well as everyday Christians have been puzzled about what Jesus meant when he spoke of the kingdom, and it has often played little real role in Christian life. What exactly did Jesus himself understand by the reign of God? What did this language mean to Jesus’s hearers in the first century? What frame of reference would they have had when they heard him say these words? We believe this is where Christian theology and ethics must begin their work.

The Meaning of the Kingdom for Jesus’s Hearers

Jesus comes preaching the good news of the kingdom of God. But curiously, the term kingdom of God is seldom used in the literature that has survived from the first century, except for the New Testament. Hence it is not easy to establish its meaning for people in Jesus’s day. Surely, if he wished to be understood, Jesus would have used a term that made sense to his hearers in first-­century Palestine. Yet in none of the kingdom material collected by J[oachim] Jeremias from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha [important Jewish intertestamental literature] . . . is the kingdom announced (Chilton, God in Strength, 277n). So where does this language come from?

The Centrality of Isaiah for Jesus’s Kingdom Vision

We argue that seven clues point us to the Old Testament book Isaiah as the primary place, though not the only place, to look for the background of Jesus’s teaching on the kingdom.

1. Jesus and the Jewish Hope for Salvation. The New Testament scholar W. D. Davies has provided the first clue. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God is to be understood, as is made evident in the rest of the N[ew] T[estament], in the light of the expectations expressed in the [Old Testament], and in Judaism, that, at some future date, God would act for the salvation of his people. . . . The ethical aspirations of the [Old Testament] and Judaism, the Law and the Prophets, are not annulled; they are fulfilled (Mt 5:17–18). This means that Jesus consciously accepted the ethical tradition of his people. . . . E.g., it has been possible to claim that in the figure of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) Jesus could have found the most profound emphases of his ethical teaching (Setting of the Sermon, 167–68). Contrary to some who situate Jesus mainly in a first-­century Greek (Hellenistic) context, we believe it is critical to root Jesus in his own Jewish context (Spohn, Go and Do Likewise, 20–23). The kingdom of God is a Jewish idea, through and through, rooted in the embodied drama of Israel and God’s relationship with Israel. It is certainly not Greek or Roman — which is one of the reasons why it has often been submerged in eras in which Christians did not want to be reminded of the Jewish roots of our faith. This suggests that if we really want to understand what Jesus himself was saying when he used kingdom language, we need to study the Hebrew Bible (a version of which became our Christian Old Testament) for passages and themes that might help us understand. But which parts of that vast collection of Jewish sacred texts?

2. The Kingdom and Isaiah. In the specific New Testament passages where Jesus announced the kingdom of God, he seems to have used terms that come particularly from the prophet Isaiah. Bruce Chilton writes that in each of the passages which substantively record Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God, Jesus referred to the prophet Isaiah in Aramaic translation/paraphrase. In each case, . . . Isaiah has been seen to be of especial importance as preserving material which seems to have been a formative influence on the thought and language of [Jesus’s] announcements (God in Strength, 277; see also, Chilton, Galilean Rabbi, 129–30, 277). The New Testament passages are Matthew 8:11; Mark 1:15; 9:1; Luke 4:18, 19, 21; and 16:16. Chilton finds words and phrases in Jesus’s kingdom proclamations that most likely come from Isaiah 24:23; 25:6; 31:6; 40:10; 41:8–9; 42:1; 43:5, 10; 45:6; 49:12; 51:7–8; 53:1; 59:19; 60:20–22; and 61:1.

3. Kingship as Deliverance in Isaiah. Many passages in Isaiah do indeed speak of the kingship or sovereignty of God and the coming reign of God. God is sovereign and God is king, over Israel and over the world. But in Isaiah these affirmations almost always take the sense of God’s delivering the oppressed and bringing holistic salvation. God is a king who delivers, rescues, and saves people in need of such delivering, rescuing, and saving. And that is what we see in Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom: delivering the oppressed and bringing holistic salvation. The kingdom of God seems especially to have to do with God’s specific actions to rescue and deliver suffering people, beginning with but not limited to the covenant people Israel. The kingdom coming is an act in the drama of salvation history in which God intervenes to rescue those who are being crushed by unjust power. It is a liberating message, especially directed at those whose faces are ground in the dust by the powerful — those who live on what has been called the underside of history. Those who most desperately need this kind of holistic deliverance are the ones most ready for it; indeed, some have argued that they are the ones whose account of what God is doing in the world is most to be trusted. This theme of a kingdom coming to those on the underside of history is so important that it will be incorporated as key method element 2 below. It is one reason why many Christians who come from social locations of poverty and oppression are so deeply attracted to a kingdom-­of-­God vision (Espín, Idol and Grace).

4. Kingdom of God in the Isaiah Targum. Did you notice Bruce Chilton’s reference above to Jesus referring to the Aramaic rendering of Isaiah? This offers us another entry point. In Jesus’s day the use of Hebrew was something like the use of Latin in the Catholic Mass in the 1950s. It was no longer generally understood by the people, who spoke Aramaic (part of the late composition Daniel is actually written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, by the way). Therefore, Jesus taught in Aramaic. In worship services a translator, called a meturgeman, would paraphrase the Hebrew Scripture passage into the language of the people. He did not give a literal translation but paraphrased it so that it would make the most sense to the hearers. Out of this practice a written version in Aramaic finally came together in the fourth century AD. It contains paraphrases that were used in Jesus’s day mixed with material from the following three centuries. These documents are called the targumim, or Targums. Those scholars trying to understand Jewish life in these centuries pay attention to the Targums.

In the Isaiah Targum four passages speak directly of the kingdom of God, and one speaks of the kingdom of the Messiah. We cannot be sure which parts accurately reflect the words used in Jesus’s time, although scholars like Chilton do make some likely assessments (Galilean Rabbi, 57–61 et passim; Isaiah Targum, xxiv et passim). Regardless of when they were composed, these texts do indicate the context where the rabbis thought they could use the phrase the kingdom of God as a fitting paraphrase. The fact that it is in the Aramaic version of Isaiah that we find the kingdom of God is highly suggestive, particularly in light of the rarity of the phrase in other first-­century literature.

The Targum for Isaiah 24:23 paraphrases The Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion as "The kingdom of the Lord of hosts will be revealed on the Mount of Zion. Isaiah 31:4 says, The Lord of hosts will come down to fight upon Mount Zion, and the Aramaic paraphrases this as The kingdom of the Lord of hosts will be revealed to settle upon Mount Zion. Isaiah 40:9 says, Here is your God, and the Targum says, The kingdom of your God is revealed. Isaiah 52:7 says, Your God reigns, and the Aramaic paraphrase says, The kingdom of your God is revealed, while the Targum for Isaiah 53:10 says, . . . shall see the kingdom of their Messiah." This latter passage is well known as a salvation text: the suffering of God’s servant is an offering for sin by which the servant’s offspring will prosper and be made righteous. Chilton’s study indicates that the Targums of Isaiah chapters 24, 52 and 53 likely come from the early Tannaitic period, during or close to Jesus’s time, and that chapters 31 and 40 are mixed — partly early and partly later (Isaiah Targum, xxiv, and notes on the particular passages).

What seems clear is that all these passages announce that God is being revealed, being disclosed before our very eyes. But Jewish piety so highly revered the revelation of the Lord and the Lord’s name that the Targum did not want to say directly, God is revealed. Instead it said, The kingdom of God is revealed. This means that the kingdom of God was understood as referring to the self-­revelation of God through acts demonstrating God’s dynamic reign. Furthermore, all five of the kingdom passages announce God’s intervention to deliver or save us. And they praise God or express great joy that God is revealed as saving us. Chilton observes, Especially in the Targum of Isaiah, the language of the kingdom is employed to render passages that in the Hebrew original speak of God intervening actively on behalf of his people. . . . The emphasis is on the dynamic, personal presence of God — not on the nature of God in itself, but on his saving, normally future activity (Pure Kingdom, 11–12; Chilton and Evans, Studying the Historical Jesus, 268).

5. Isaiah at Qumran. The Dead Sea Scrolls also help us discern what Jesus might have meant when he spoke about the kingdom of God. They are our most abundant source of literature from the period when Jesus lived. These scrolls show that Isaiah was much in use and well known in Jesus’s time — more so than any other biblical book. The index of biblical quotations in Dupont-­Sommer’s edition of Qumran writings has one reference to Genesis, two to Exodus, eleven to Deuteronomy, four to Psalms, one to Jeremiah, three to Ezekiel, and fourteen to Isaiah (Dupont-­Sommer, The Essene Writings from Qumran, 422–24). Isaiah, one might say, was in the air, even over by the Dead Sea.

6. Mark and Isaiah. The Gospel of Mark, which almost all scholars agree is the earliest Gospel, cites and alludes to Isaiah more than any other book, and alludes to Isaiah more than to all the other Old Testament prophets combined. In Mark, Isaiah is the only prophet named (Mk 1:2; 7:6); Isaiah shares many common motifs with Mark; a Spirit-­filled figure who brings a new message of deliverance to an Israel that suffers from spiritual blindness and deafness (Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus, 26–28, 60). Here we see another rather stark link between Jesus and Isaiah, suggesting that the Isaiah-­Jesus connection was not just in their messages, but also in their prophetic actions.

7. Isaiah as Background to Jesus. The seventh clue will come from seeing the actual fruitfulness of Isaiah as background for Jesus’s teaching and actions. We shall see this in the next section and in many of the following chapters. The extent to which Isaiah stands as background to Jesus’s kingdom ministry will become quite clear.

Seven Marks of God’s Reign

We turn now to the prophet Isaiah to ask more specifically about the characteristics of the deliverance that Isaiah prophesied, a deliverance that may amount to the kingdom of God as Jesus preached it. We ask, which passages in Isaiah rejoice that God will reign to deliver his people? Seventeen passages do: Isaiah 9:1–7; 11; 24:14–25:12; 26; 29:17–24; 31:1–32:20; 33; 35; 40:1–11; 42:1–44:8; 49; 51:1–52:12; 52:13–53:12; 54; 56; 60; 61–62. These passages of God’s deliverance describe what the kingdom of God means in Isaiah — the biblical book to which Jesus probably referred when he proclaimed the kingdom. The next logical question is: Do some characteristics of God’s reign recur consistently in these passages? Are there some themes that clarify the content of God’s kingdom?

Deliverance, which is what salvation means, occurs in all seventeen passages in Isaiah; righteousness/justice occurs in sixteen of the passages; peace in fourteen; joy in twelve; God’s presence as Spirit or Light in nine (and God’s dynamic presence is implied in all seventeen). These five characteristics of the reign of God are remarkably consistent in the deliverance passages. We may conclude that these are characteristics of God’s delivering action as described in Isaiah. In addition, healing occurs in seven passages. Return from exile, restoration of outcasts to community, and the rebuilding of the covenant people Israel in their land occur in nine passages, more if we link the healing theme to the outcast theme, as we should. Therefore, these also seem to be key ingredients in the reign of God as prophesied by Isaiah.

For one example, let us look at Isaiah 9:2–7:

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness —

on them light has shined.

You have multiplied the nation,

you have increased its joy;

they rejoice before you

as with joy at the harvest,

as people exult when dividing plunder.

For the yoke of their burden,

and the bar across their shoulders,

the rod of their oppressor,

you have broken as on the day of Midian [deliverance].

For all the boots of the tramping warriors

and all the garments rolled in blood

shall be burned as fuel for the fire [peace].

For a child has been born for us,

a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders,

and he is named

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

His authority shall grow continually

and there shall be endless peace

for the throne of David and his kingdom.

He will establish and uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time onward and forevermore.

The zeal of the L

ord

of hosts will do this.

Five major themes are clearly emphasized: light (symbolizing God’s presence), joy, deliverance, peace, and justice. All these characteristics mark the reign or kingdom of God, which itself is suggested in authority rests upon his shoulders in verse 6, and his authority and his kingdom in verse 7.

Now consider Isaiah 60:17–19:

I will appoint Peace as your overseer

and Righteousness as your taskmaster.

Violence shall no more be heard in your land,

devastation or destruction within your borders;

you shall call your walls Salvation,

and your gates Praise.

The sun shall no longer be

your light by day,

nor for brightness shall the moon

give light to you by night;

but the L

ord

will be your everlasting light,

and your God will be your glory.

For the third example, consider Isaiah 35:5–7 and 8, 10:

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water. . . .

A highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Holy Way;

the unclean shall not travel on it,

but it shall be for God’s people;

no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. . . .

And the ransomed of the L

ord

shall return,

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Here we see the themes of healing the blind and lame, return from exile, deliverance (ransom), and joy. These themes recur throughout Isaiah. We aim to show that Jesus saw these characteristics as essential to the kingdom of God and thus central to his own ministry — and the work of all who would be his followers. We shall see that paying attention to Isaiah, whom Jesus so often cites, helps us notice what Jesus proclaims. Jesus himself confirms these as marks of God’s reign. In this book we will operate from the working hypothesis that seven marks of the kingdom were important to Jesus and should be important to his followers: deliverance/salvation, justice, peace, healing, restoration/rebuilding of community, joy, and the experience of God’s presence. Of course, other key marks, or other ways of stating these seven marks, could be offered.

The Distracting Issue of Kingdom Timing

Some preachers and scholars have mainly focused not on what Jesus himself likely meant by kingdom of God but on the timing of the kingdom, either from Jesus’s own perspective or from ours, two thousand years later. In technical terms, one could say they have focused on the eschatology, not on the ethics, of the kingdom. Their focus is whether the kingdom in Jesus’s proclamation or in our own understanding today is to be understood as already present, or whether it is a future transformation far beyond our present experience, or somehow both or neither. Some argue that Jesus taught what has been called realized eschatology, in which the reign of God has come in all of its fullness either in his coming or with the giving of the Holy Spirit. Others push the kingdom off entirely into the future, perhaps locating it at the time of Jesus’s second coming to the earth at the end of the age. That is certainly the voice of the Isaiah texts we cited — all promise a future social transformation and deliverance from God. Is this what Jesus intended to say? Of course, many other Christians essentially have stripped the historical dimension out of kingdom proclamation, making it a timeless or entirely personal matter — or have stopped talking about the kingdom altogether, either its timing or its content!

Realized eschatology fails to account for numerous New Testament passages about the kingdom that speak of its future consummation. Nor does it reckon with the terrible sinfulness, brokenness, and misery that still characterize human life. Surely the kingdom is not yet realized. No one who embraces a realized eschatology remains in contact either with the original Jewish eschatological hope or with the world as we actually find it. And yet an entirely future kingdom fails to account for the celebration of the in-­breaking dawning of God’s reign that characterized Jesus’s preaching and his ministry. Jesus did not simply claim (like Isaiah) that God would one day deliver his people; he claimed that God’s reign was actually in process of realization in his [Jesus’s] coming. Here was someone who proclaimed that the time of mourning was now at an end; the bridegroom had arrived — the kingdom of heaven was near or at hand (Fee, Kingdom of God, 8, 10). In this sense Jesus offered an apocalyptic word — and practice. He demonstrated and proclaimed that in his particular moment and work God was unveiling long-­hidden divine plans and initiating the long-­promised salvation of the world.

The best answer on the issue of timing, then, is to view the kingdom, at least as Jesus understood it, as "both a future event and a present reality (Fee, Kingdom of God," 11; Witherington, Imminent Domain, 2). God’s reign has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ at precisely the opportune time, but its ultimate consummation remains a future event. (This is sometimes called inaugurated eschatology.) There is reason both for joyful celebration at the initiation of God’s long-­promised salvation and for heartfelt yearning for its final consummation, when mourning and crying and pain will be no more (Rv 21:4). The preponderance of scholars now also concludes that kingdom of God refers both to the present beginning and to the much bigger dramatic overcoming in the future. (Some argue for exclusive emphasis on one or the other end of the polarity, and there are different ways of putting the two ends together; see the sevenfold typology in Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 208.) Those who choose to share this kind of eschatology, then, will understand themselves as living in the time between the times — the eon (of uncertain duration) between the inauguration and consummation of the reign of God.

Inevitably, Christians have differed on this eschatological timing issue for a variety of reasons, including individual temperament, social location, and historical events in any given era. For example, those who rediscovered the kingdom of God during the Social Gospel days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes spoke as if the consummated kingdom was very near at hand, notably through the efforts of good democratic Westerners/Christians. But after 1914–1945 (World War I, Depression, fascism, World War II, genocide, atomic bombs), those still speaking of God’s reign were more inclined to emphasize how much it had not yet been consummated. Indeed, it became far easier to reject any idea that God’s reign was in process of realization. Many became fixated on end-­times scenarios when Jesus would finally return and set things right. This and only this would be the kingdom of God. But the later twentieth century and early twenty-­first century have seen a revival of inaugurated kingdom-­of-­God eschatology in many Christian circles, perhaps especially among evangelicals who have sloughed off a second coming mania that so often cuts the nerve of any kind of moral effort — quite unlike what the parousia meant for the earliest followers of Jesus (Gray, Biblical Doctrine of the Reign of God, 357).

Performing the Kingdom

Jesus said no one knows when the kingdom will come in the full, future sense (Mt 24:36; Mk 13:32); the

Reviews for Kingdom Ethics, 2nd ed.

[stephendr_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Rarely have I been so utterly dissapointed by a book as I was by Stassen and Gushee's take on what it means to follow "Jesus in Contemporary Context". I expected something valuable and came away thoroughly frustrated. For a much better interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount see Martyn Lloyd-Jones. The great mistake of this book is that it treats sections of the Sermon on the Mount as impossible ideals. The writers insist that "Jesus offered not hard sayings or high ideals but concrete ways to practice God's will and be delivered from the bondage of sin." In fact, the authors openly confess that their aim is to "rescue the Sermon from the antitheses interpretation as perfectionistic prohibitions." Because men and women in our generation have failed to live up to the "hard teachings" of the Sermon, the authors have offered an alternative that makes the Sermon on the Mount a whole lot more manageable - so manageable a non-believer could do it. This, of course, is where their 'tridactic' theory (traditional righteousness, vicious cycle, transforming initiative) falls apart. The entire point of the law (as given in the Old Testament and restated by Christ) is to empty men and women everywhere of all their self-sufficiency. It is like a schoolmaster whose very purpose is to lead us to Jesus. The law does, in fact, demand the impossible. But this, of course, is the wonder of the gospel: that in Christ we can not only be free from the condemning power of the law (which insists that we are guilty), but frees us also to do and to delight in the law. Yet, this is precisely why we need regeneration. Only 'new creatures' can delight in a standard that demands perfection and what they cannot ever hope to accomplish in their own strength.It is deeply distressing that the authors would choose to accomodate the message of Scripture to a contemporary context rather than calling men and women to those very standards that God Himself demands. Yes, the Church has often failed and much of that failure is the fault of nominal Christianity, but don't lower the standards and change the message to satisfy and comfort an impoverished and compromised Church. Call us rather to repentance. Insist, that we were made and meant for so much more, and tell us what the gospel can do not only to pardon and forgive but also to create and transform.