Converting Christians to the Jesus Ethic

By Russell Pregeant

Most Christians believe that their views on social and political issues are biblically based. But are they really? Sometimes, Pregeant suggests, an exclusive emphasis on Jesus' death and resurrection crowds out the role of Jesus as teacher and example. This obscures the way in which authentic Christian faith cuts against the grain of many of our contemporary cultural values. The result is that some Christians unknowingly allow those secular values to undermine the potential of the gospel to challenge the injustices in our economic system and other aspects of our lives together. The author therefore invites the reader to an in-depth encounter with Jesus' ethical teachings and related biblical materials as a way of recovering that dimension of Christian discipleship. And the irony is this: some readers might find that even though they think of themselves as countercultural, they are in some ways quite captive to values that are actually counterbiblical. There is, however, a remedy for this--conversion of Christians to the Jesus ethic!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666749526

Russell Pregeant

Russell Pregeant is Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Chaplain Emeritus at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, and was frequently Visiting Professor in New Testament at Andover Newton Theological School. He is the author of several books, including Reading the Bible for All the Wrong Reasons (2011) and Encounter with the New Testament (2009).

Book preview

PROLOGUE

All In at Any Cost? A Scene in Ancient Galilee

A crowd has gathered around the teacher. You can barely hear his voice, but on the fringes of the gathering you hear the buzz. From Nazareth, I think—a carpenter. Some seem puzzled: "What did he say? What did he mean by that?" Others nod their heads in approval. At some points, they laugh out loud, and you wonder why. In any case, the listeners seem to relish whatever is said. Most of them, that is; a few walk away—some angry, others simply uninterested. There are other things to tend to, you guess.

You have heard of this man. There has been talk of him in the village for days now. One person heard him in Capernaum, another in Chorazin. They say he is stirring things up, talking about a great upheaval that is coming—that some will like it and others will not. You wonder: Does he think the restoration of Israel is at hand, that God is about to throw the Romans out? Is he a prophet, like Isaiah or Amos? You edge closer, so that you can hear: Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, he says; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.¹ Now you understand the puzzlement. At first you laugh: what a stupid merchant, you think,"to sell everything! What will he live on? He has no more goods to sell! But then, as you walk away, you begin to think. He said that the kingdom of heaven is like that. What on earth could he mean? What does it have to do with a really foolish merchant who gave up everything he had for just one pearl?"

The illusion fades: you are not an ancient Galilean, but once again a Christian in the twenty-first century, far removed from that ancient setting. And, of course, you have heard that parable, named by tradition the pearl of great price, many times—so many that it has lost its punch for you. But just because for that very brief time you felt that you were there, face-to-face with the flesh-and-blood Jesus, the story seemed to get hold of you in a different way. For the first time, it dawned on you just how outrageous it is. And for the first time it occurred to you that maybe Jesus meant it to be outrageous, which is why some of those who heard it laughed out loud.

Some of the stories called parables in the New Testament are actually allegories: each element in an allegory stands for something outside the story with which the hearer would be familiar. This is not the case, however, with the pearl. The first line says that the kingdom is like a merchant,² but it would make no sense to see this person as representing the kingdom. And although we might naturally think that the pearl that he finds plays that role, this really isn’t how this type of parable works. It is the story as a whole that tells us something about the kingdom. It does so, however, not by pointing us to anything we already know. It invites us to use our human imaginations, getting our attention with its vividness or strangeness.³ It thus provokes us to puzzle out its meaning for ourselves. And this story is not only strange, but quite ridiculous. As New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine points out, the merchant was looking for many pearls but ended up with only one. To possess it he has divested himself of absolutely everything he owned, which means that he can no longer function as a merchant. He will have to rethink his entire life and value system. And it is precisely here, in this odd situation in which the man finds himself, that the parable challenges us. It upsets the normal standards by which most people live and society is organized.

By the standards of the status quo—whether first-century Galilee or twenty-first-century America—the merchant has acted in a reckless manner. The merchant, however, sets up alternative standards not determined by society, but determined by something else, whether his own desires or a heavenly prompt. He really is countercultural. He defines his treasure in his own terms. He is able to recognize what to him has true value, and he can do what he needs to do in order to obtain it. The pearl the merchant obtains is not simply the best of the lot, the one among the many. It is qualitatively different, singular, exemplary; it points beyond the concept of pearl to something new, something heretofore unseen and unknown. There is a transcendent quality, a mystery, to this pearl. And so the parable provokes.⁴

We human beings, as Levine points out, are constantly searching for something, but always remaining in some degree discontented. The merchant in the story, however, has broken the cycle, removing himself from the endless round of seeking. He has found the one thing worth going absolutely all in for—the one ultimate concern that transcends all others, the one aspect of life that makes all of life meaningful and worthwhile.⁵ And that is precisely the challenge that this enigmatic parable presents to us. That is how it provokes. So, ask yourself: "What is the one concern to which I can actually dedicate my life unconditionally?"

There are many salespersons out there with many conflicting recipes for life. Among those recipes is the Christian gospel. But how many of us who profess that gospel can truly say that we are all in for it? Such a commitment is easy to make on the abstract level. The purpose of this book, however, is to ask whether we are really living that out in the concrete decisions that we make and the specific values that we embrace in the world of public affairs. How reckless, how countercultural are those decisions? What is our truly ultimate concern as judged by our deeds? To what extent are our interpretations of what the gospel demands based upon the biblical faith, and to what extent are they simply reflections of the culture in which we live?

Before we can respond meaningfully to any of these questions, we will need to address a more fundamental one: what does the gospel actually demand of us? And to answer that we will need to enter once again the world of ancient Galilee and listen to the teacher whose words have intrigued so many through the centuries. What strange and unexpected things might he ask of us? Are we willing to let him provoke us in order to release us from that endless round of seeking?

1

. Matt

13

:

46

–

47

.

2

. The Greek text actually has a person, a merchant.

3

. From the classic definition by C. H. Dodd, Parables of Jesus,

5

.

4

. Levine, Short Stories by Jesus,

160–61

.

5

. Levine, Short Stories by Jesus,

161

.

INTRODUCTION

Why This Book?

Seriously? Do you really mean that Christians need converting to the Jesus ethic? Such is the question that I imagine you, the reader, might well want to ask. My answer is, yes, that is what I think; and that is why I write this book. But please let me explain. To begin with, I do not mean all Christians. And let me be clear that I do not mean those casual Christians who treat their commitment to Christ as just one among various loyalties that make up our lives, something deserving of a little attention here and there but nothing to get too worked up about. If I were addressing Christians of this type, I would begin by referring them to two diagrams a seminary professor of mine, Herndon Wagers, drew on a chalkboard many years ago. Both were pie charts, circles with segments marked off like the slices of a pie, with each slice representing a part of our lives. On the first chart, one of the slices was labeled faith and others were named family life, work, leisure activities, and so on. On the second, however, there was no slice labeled faith, because this label was reserved for the center of the chart. The point was that true faith is not merely one aspect of our lives alongside other dimensions—not just another slice of the pie. It belongs rather at the very center of our lives as the final arbiter of all the values that try to claim us; it is the focal point that gives life meaning and purpose.

What might seem surprising is that the Christians I want most to address in this book are some among those who get it right—that is, who do try to put God first and let their faith inform all other components of their lives. They understand that the first diagram is a recipe for idolatry, a violation of the first commandment: You shall have no other gods before me (Exod 20:3). And I hasten to add that I am talking about serious Christians who ground their moral decisions, as I do, in a specifically biblical understanding of right and wrong—not those who treat the Bible as a relic from an outmoded past. On certain matters, however, these serious Christians make decisions that seem to me to stand in sharp contradiction to what biblical faith actually demands of us. And the certain matters I have in mind are the social and political issues we face in our society today. My hope is that this common allegiance to the gospel of Jesus Christ, as biblically defined, will provide enough common ground for a conversation among folk who share a basic faith but draw different conclusions from it when it comes to public policy.

The Importance of the Jesus Ethic

When I was a graduate student in biblical studies, another professor of mine, Leander Keck, posed a provocative question in relation to the letters of Paul, and it has haunted me ever since. Did it matter to Paul, he asked, "what kind of a person God raised from the dead?"

There is no doubt that the theme of Jesus’s death and resurrection is central to the New Testament and thus to Christian faith. I find, however, that many Christians stress this theme to the near exclusion of any emphasis upon the role of Jesus as teacher and example. I thus have to wonder whether they would accept the gospel even if it were a totally unrepentant mass murderer who hung on the cross and was raised from the dead. Unless we understand the resurrection of Jesus as God’s endorsement of him, not only as Messiah/Son of God, but as a particular kind of human being who stood for and embodied particular values, we empty the Christian message of all moral content whatsoever. Following Jesus, as the Gospels present it, is about more than formally affirming his status as Son of God and savior. It also means embracing the values on the human level that Jesus taught and lived out. Only then does it make sense to say that he saves us from sin. So, unless we are content to understand salvation as mere escape from perdition, rather than actual transformation of our lives, it becomes important not only to believe in Jesus as the Christ but to follow him by allowing his ethic to shape our thoughts and actions. That, I am convinced, is what it means to be not only a Christian believer but also a disciple of the Jesus we name as the Christ.

Let me be clear, however, that by emphasizing the moral content of the gospel I am by no means recommending a doctrine of salvation by works. I believe that Christian redemption comes through the grace of God, which we receive by faith. This redemption, however, is more than mere forgiveness for past sins and a free ride for the future. In the first place, the term faith, as we find it in the letters of Paul, is not a synonym for belief. That is to say, it is not the merely intellectual acceptance of the proposition that Christ died for our sins. It is rather, in the words of John Cobb and David Lull, an encompassing way of being in the world and not simply an interior attitude of belief or trust.⁶ As such, it is a total giving of one’s whole being that includes within itself at least the drive toward moral action. In fact, many scholars argue that in many passages the Greek word (pistis) is better translated as "faithfulness, a term that clearly implies right action. In the second place, the Christian concept of salvation, in contrast to similar notions in the Greco-Roman culture in which it grew up, involved something quite different from mere escape from danger. Theologian Kathryn Tanner puts the matter well: To be saved therefore does not mean, as it so often did in Hellenistic and Roman culture, to be preserved from harm, to be guarded, protected, shielded, from a threatening danger so as to remain in one’s existing condition; it does not mean to be kept safe so as to remain in the condition one was in previously. What it means is rather to have a radically transfigured self, beyond anything possible for one as a mere finite creature. To be saved is to be elevated beyond oneself, so as to participate in the very life of God, to share in the very properties of God’s own life—eternal life."⁷ But what, we may ask, are the characteristics of a person who is thus transformed? Insofar as the moral life is considered, I should think, these characteristics are those laid out in the Jesus ethic.

So, what, more precisely, do I mean by the Jesus ethic? As what I said above should indicate, it has to do primarily with what Jesus taught and the values he embodied in the course of his life. I actually use the term a little more broadly than this, however, because Jesus’s words and deeds come to us in the context of the whole biblical witness. His moral teachings reflect both the legal materials in the Hebrew Bible and the oracles of the prophets, and they reverberate throughout the letters of the New Testament, not just the Gospels. They must also be understood in connection with the overarching story of God’s plan to redeem the world that permeates the Bible as a whole. It will therefore be necessary at many points to elaborate on his words and deeds with excursions into the broader biblical witness. I nevertheless find it important to define my task specifically in terms of the Jesus ethic. This is primarily because for Christians the witness to Jesus as the Christ is the very center of Scripture, the standard by which we interpret all else. But it is also because I find that it is partly the distortion of Jesus’s teachings that allows so many who