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" (Coll: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 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' 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' 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' time, as far as possible we will try to allow Jesus' 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' teaching about the kingdom of God in the deliverance passages of the prophet Isaiah, which brings far richer content to our understanding of the reign of God in Jesus' 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 one 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' 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 two 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 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 three focuses on various issues of life and death; section four considers sexual, gender and marriage ethics; section five explores the great themes of love and justice; section six looks at relationships of justice and love by exploring truth-telling, race, economics and creation care. Finally, section seven concludes the volume by considering Jesus' 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' 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' 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' 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, sorne 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 (e.g., "I, David" or "I, Glen"). 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.
The above was the Preface to Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context by Glen H. Stassen & David P. Gushee.
