What do Paul and Jesus mean when they refer to sexual immorality? What is the Bible condemning when it condemns injustice? How do we define what is sinful speech? If you hope that the New Testament alone will enlighten you about these things, I'm sorry. You will never obtain what you seek. Anyone who bases his or her morality exclusively or mostly around New Testament passages is set up for ignorance, uncertainty, and subjectivity.
The New Testament is extremely vague much of the time when it comes to specific ethics. For instance, several passages in the New Testament condemn malice, revenge, and lust. Now, almost any conclusion about the definitions of these words will share at least a superficial overlap with the other conclusions. But the New Testament itself rarely defines terms like lust or malice at all, much less with the kind of precision necessary to deduce a coherent and extensive moral system. How do we know who is correct? Some people will condemningly pull up Matthew 5:28 at the slightest hint of physical or sexual attraction and others will be alright with their spouses flirting with other people. All of them can appeal to Matthew 5:28 as being compatible with or supportive of their positions, but who is actually right? Some Christians oppose all capital punishment because they believe that to approve of it is to approve of revenge, which the Bible condemns (Romans 12:19). Again, who is actually right? Furthermore, what does "eye for eye" mean? Jesus' reference to it in Matthew 5:38-39 alone is not going to tell anyone what the phrase even signifies to begin with. Is it literal or is it figurative language for proportionality? What crimes was this formula prescribed for? The New Testament offers no illumination.
Many people are familiar with the phrase "love your neighbor as yourself." But what does this even mean? Good luck learning that from just the New Testament! Some people argue that it means that the only moral obligation we have towards other people is to love them (whatever that actually means); some say it means we should not judge because judging other people is morally erroneous; others say it means that all slavery and capital punishment are wrong; still others say that it means that we should judge people and risk their irritation in order to present salvific truths to them, while others say it means something else entirely. Of course, the phrase originally appeared in Leviticus 19:18 in Mosaic Law, a law that prescribes execution for slave traders (Exodus 21:16) but codifies consensual forms of slavery (Exodus 21:1-6), sometimes called indentured servanthood. It is also a law that says to lawfully execute anyone who commits bestiality (Exodus 22:19) or strikes his or her parents (Exodus 21:15), which some people will subjectively feel is too harsh, while also saying to never degrade someone by giving him or her more than forty lashes (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), which some people may feel is too lenient or too cruel. See, these issues are far too nuanced and complex to ever be understandable based on the New Testament alone. The things people will likely conclude from the phrase "love your neighbor as yourself" will scarcely if ever conform to the actual Biblical meaning of that phrase. Clearly the obligation to love other people did not mean that adultery isn't a capital crime (Deuteronomy 22:22) or that we should not morally judge each other. Thus, to argue that loving one's neighbor means opposing the death penalty for adultery or not morally criticizing others is to argue for an irrational conclusion.
Basing ethics solely or mostly on New Testament principles inevitably sets people up for unanswerable questions. How do we know, for instance, what, if any, forms of warfare, monarchy, self-defense, slavery, torture, or capital punishment are morally right and wrong? Don't expect the New Testament to bestow grand moral revelations about these matters, because most of these things aren't even mentioned in it! It is no surprise that many who believe that New Testament ethics somehow improve upon, supersede, or negate Old Testament moral obligations conclude that God was not ultimately concerned directly with eradicating the slave trade or extreme torture from the 1st century world and was more concerned with the subjective inner condition, thoughts, and attitudes of individuals than he was about abolishing imperialistic militarism, nationalism, emperor worship, gladiator fights, slave abuse, sexist social structures, institutionalized sadism, and a cruel legal system from the Roman Empire. Though many will not outright articulate it like this, this is exactly what someone who thinks that the moral emphasis of and standard for God's people changed in between testaments truly believes. This is ultimately what anyone believes who thinks that God released people from the judicial and moral standard of Mosaic Law in favor of a more introspective, heart-based ethical system.
There are many examples of the resulting subjectivity when Old Testament clarity is abandoned or forgotten. The New Testament vaguely refers to sexual immorality in a manner that, on its own apart from the Old Testament, is impossible to interpret objectively. Without the clarity and specificity of Mosaic Law and the Old Testament, people can read into the phrase "sexual immorality" whatever they personally find offensive or subjectively irritating in the realm of sexuality. Similarly, any New Testament condemnation of "impure speech" will at best only be partially clarified by the New Testament itself. Knowing Ephesians 5's prohibition of impure speech without knowledge of what God classified as verbal sin in the Old Testament will only produce people who arrive at all sorts of subjective, fallacious conclusions about what language is immoral and in what context even though they cannot all be correct simultaneously. It always amuses me how many Christians claiming to want to honor God dismiss Old Testament ethical revelation to various conflicting degrees (when Jesus taught otherwise in Matthew 5:17-19), ignore what God said about upholding revealed obligations and not adding to them (Deuteronomy 4:2), set aside revealed obligations in favor of non-obligatory man-made rules (Matthew 15:3-9), and then submit to a kind of shifting cultural relativism that arbitrarily condemns amoral practices like profanity, social nudity, being alone with the opposite gender, drinking alcohol, and listening to secular music.
Now let's move on to justice and criminal punishment. The most the New Testament ever clarifies about justice is that righteous governments will bring terror to the wicked and will not target the upright. That is all Romans 13 details. As an aside, Romans 13 is severely misinterpreted all the time. The issue of terrestrial justice is rarely brought up at all (because God already dealt with it in a very specific manner). So, as long as the government is a terror to criminals, it can implement whatever tactics and penalties its leaders desire? Is justice relative to the sole objective of bringing terror to evildoers? What sins are punishable crimes and which ones are not? What crimes should be capital and which ones should not be? What distinguishes just punishments from cruel and abusive, immoral punishments? What courtroom procedure is morally mandatory and what is not? The New Testament cannot help anyone answer these questions!
I hope that readers understand after reading this that the New Testament is not a sound foundation for ethics apart from the Old Testament it so commonly quotes. However, there is no rift or contradiction between the two testaments. They both illuminate the same God, a god whose nature never changes (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17, Hebrews 13:8). Jesus did not come to abolish the legal system and interpersonal obligations he himself revealed in the Old Testament (Matthew 5:17). The standard for objective morality did not improve or change between the testaments, because morality is part of God's nature and his nature does not change. The reason God did not address so many moral issues in the New Testament is because he either already dealt with them in the Old Testament or because he grants us complete personal freedom in those areas as our consciences dictate (Romans 14:14). Churches and individual Christians who emphasize New Testament ethical teachings over those from the Old Testament exchange specificity for vagueness and clarity for ambiguity, forgetting that the entire Bible is relevant and useful (2 Timothy 3:16), although the New Testament lacks a great deal of clarity and definition when it is separated from the Old Testament foundation it builds upon. The New Testament without the Old Testament is little moral help at all in many areas. This is simply a fact.
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