Different ways in which the Bible is used in developing Christian ethical positions

At the ELCA Conference of Bishops, meeting in retreat March 2, 2001, Walter F. Taylor Jr., professor of New Testament studies, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio talked about the Use of the Bible in Making Ethical Decisions. Which of the 6 views of the Bible fits your view best?

Even though I have just finished saying that I don't have enough time, I do want to take the time to suggest various models for using the Bible in making ethical decisions. As Professor Fretheim and I compared notes a couple of weeks ago, we noted how often we are asked to talk about texts but how seldom anyone asks us to deal with how people today might move from texts to modern ethical decisions. Because I think that is such an important issue and because it is so often ignored, I want to begin with that topic.

Everyone who reads the Bible comes at that reading task with underlying presuppositions. No one comes to the reading of the Bible totally fresh or totally without preconceived notions of what s/he will find. Usually those presuppositions are unstated. Indeed, most people have no idea that they have any presuppositions. In fact, the person who says, "I just read the Bible at face value and believe and try to do what it says," is operating with a whole host of presuppositions.

What I want to do briefly is ask what some of the presuppositions are when people read the Bible, especially when they read the Bible to obtain ethical direction. What are different ways in which the Bible has been used in developing Christian ethical positions--or not used, as the case may be? I would like to suggest six basic models. Part of the scheme comes from Victor Paul Furnish. [3]

A. Sacred Cow

In Hindu India, the cow is sacred. It cannot be touched, harmed, or restricted. Furnish uses this example and label to talk about our first view of the relationship of the Bible and ethics. In this view the Bible is viewed as a written deposit of God's truth valid in very specific ways for all times and places. Everything in the Bible is eternally and universally binding. The Bible's ethical statements are not to be touched, disturbed, and certainly not in any sense explained away. They are to be taken at face value. [4]

The Bible thus supplies the content not only for the church's doctrinal teachings but for ethics as well. The Bible, then, is viewed as a book of revealed morality. That is, God revealed details of the right way to live, and what God revealed was to be valid forever. So an equation sign is put between the Bible and today. In this view, what the Bible says about family life and human sexuality should be the standard for Christians today.

B. Traditional

In this view, human nature is viewed as fundamentally constant from century to century and culture to culture. Thus cultural variables shade but do not provide the primary shape of ethical norms. The ethical norms of Israel, therefore, since they are part of God's will, became part of the ethical identity of Jesus and the early church. Such ethical norms and prescriptions are valid for modern Christians, says this position, as long as they are filtered through the fundamental theological and ethical commitments of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus prescriptions concerning family life and human sexuality remain valid for the Christian community unless they are clearly opposed by Jesus or the rest of the New Testament witness or unless they represent cultural peculiarities (e.g., concern for sexual relations between men and menstruating women).

C. Neo-Traditional

This view is very significant today. It agrees with the presuppositions of the traditional view. The major difference is that the neo-traditional view insists that we have, in fact, often misunderstood the Bible. Traditional interpretations are therefore often misleading, for the Bible really says things quite different from what we thought the Bible said. When correctly understood, the Bible serves as the source and norm of the church's ethical values. The trick is in understanding the Bible correctly. This position has been of crucial importance in the decision of the Lutheran Church to ordain women, for example. This position maintains the authority of the Bible, but argues that previous interpretations so misunderstood the biblical witness that the freedom of women to be leaders in the Christian community was ignored. A proper understanding of the texts thus opens new possibilities.

D. Source of Principles

For Christians who take this position, the authority of the Bible for ethics does not rest in its specific moral instruction on particular problems but rather in its revealing of over-arching norms, values, and ideals that are binding on the Christian life. These norms, values, and ideals need to be translated or applied by today's Christian community, so say the proponents of this position, since the biblical material was produced in specific cultures that no longer exist. For certain readers of the Bible, this position can be close to the traditional or neo-traditional, but for many who take this position the principles are much more general. Many in this camp would take the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") as a principle; other readers of the Bible today take "love" as a basic ethical principle. But often such folks become nervous when specific ethical directives from the Bible are applied to life today, especially in the area of human sexuality.

E. Source of Identity and Dialogue Resource

This title is a bit cumbersome, but I include this model as a way to recognize the provocative book of our emeritus colleague from Southern Seminary, Paul Jersild. In his book, Spirit Ethics, Professor Jersild proposes a model for how to do ethics in the post-modern world. The function of the Bible is chiefly to provide a major source of identity for the Christian community in its self-understanding and in its understanding of God. He adopts a reader-response model in which the Bible, essentially, says what the church says it says. The Bible becomes a resource for the dialogue between the church and the pluralistic society in which the church finds itself, but he is most restive about current application of any ethical directives from the Bible. Although application of his basic approach does lead to rather traditional positions on euthanasia and assisted suicide, when he comes to homosexuality he places major weight on contemporary experience and scientific developments, with the Bible in effect being subordinated to them.

F. White Elephant

A final position is what Furnish labels the "white elephant." A white elephant is something that is expensive but useless. In this view, the Bible is an antiquated and out-dated relic of a long-ago past that has no relevance to today. It is to be discarded because it is too old; because its New Testament authors were too excited about the coming of the end of the world; because it was written by men; etc. Ethical positions are to be developed totally apart from the Bible, with the only use of the Bible being to provide the most general outlines of the story of God with God's people.

As you look at these six positions, you will see that I have arranged them in a certain order. The order runs from taking the Bible and plunking it down into today without any attention to original context (the sacred cow position) to denying the Bible any relevance for ethical decision-making at all (the white elephant position). In between are the other four positions.

These approaches are crucial when people come to reading the Bible, for they already program how the reader will deal with the ethical material in the Bible. In addition to what I have outlined, how much the reader uses historical understanding of biblical times and the Bible itself, and/or how much the reader uses contemporary sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches to understand the Bible also have a great deal to say about how the person will read the biblical text.