Walking on Water - Banquo’s Dream by Makoto Fujimura, 2012
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by people. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill is not able to hide. No one, when lighting a lamp, places it under a basket, but upon a lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In this way, let your light shine out before humanity in order that they would see your good works and glorify your Father who is in the heavens.
Matthew 5:13-16
If you saw my last post, you already know where my head is in all this. I believe that Christians are called to be in and of the world. I’m being a tad provocative on purpose. I know what the original statement, “We’re called to be in the world, not of it,” is supposed to mean, namely that we are called by God to live in the world as Christians but not to live according to the “spirit of the age” (cf. Eph. 2:1-7), or as some might now it, zeitgeist. There’s actually something to this saying in its original form that I would agree with. The “spirit of the age,” in Ephesians, is a personal, intelligent, evil being or beings that are set on destroying humanity through wickedness, violence, and in turning them against God and his good world and order. So, if that’s what a person means by that statement, then I am for it, but I don’t think that’s what people hear, not what they really hear when the statement is said.
Because of a long history of misunderstanding the writings of the New Testament (if I may be so bold to make the claim) and the ever growing divide between the numinous and the material (think spirit/soul/mind and the body) throughout the history of Western thought,1 Christians of various stripes live in the temptation to consider this world and our lives in it as not really that important. We are supposed to, in this way of thinking, obey the rules laid out in Scripture, but that is unto manifesting or maintaining2 one’s “salvation.” Our righteous deeds aren’t really seen to be doing for anything other than serve as obedience to God. Obeying God is a good thing, and Scripture is quite literally full of examples of the consequences of not obeying God, but I don’t think obedience is the point of obedience. It should also be said that good works can serve as a testimony of our salvation (cf. John 14:15; 1 John 5:2), but that’s not what they’re for. It is what our good works are for that I want to explore in this post.
Salt & Light
I’ve talked about this in a previous post, so I won’t get to far into it here, but when Jesus was calling his disciples the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he was talking about their impact on the world around them. When I was young, when I heard these verses taught on Sunday morning or at youth group, the salt and light passage had one goal: salvation. Technically, I think that’s correct, but what my pastors meant by salvation and what I believe was in the mind of the New Testament writers was different. What was meant by “salvation” in the mouths of my Evangelical, Pentecostal leaders was, essentially, not going to hell, but instead to heaven to be with Jesus. There is a certain beauty in that simplicity, and as with most things, I think it’s correct to a degree, it’s just not a big enough picture. Being “saved” absolutely means that we are delivered from judgment and eternal destruction by the grace of God made manifest to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
I believe the Biblical ideal for salvation includes, deliverance from destruction, a loving and personal relationship with God, the resurrection of the body, and also the creation of the kind of people, God’s covenant people (i.e. Christians) who work to make the world “as it is in heaven.” Meaning, they work for justice in economics, society, and politics. They work for equality and equity between classes, genders, and racial/ethnic groups. They work to feed and clothe those who can’t feed and clothe themselves. They share resources and time and relationship with one another and with their neighbor. They are good to their enemies and seek reconciliation and peace instead of vengeance. They are a praying people. They are a discerning people. They care for and are conscientious of their relationship to the land and to the other creatures with whom they live. All this to say, they seek the common good of all people, not just other Christians, and the flourishing of human culture and al living things in the world.3
There are many interpretations of the phrase “salt of the earth,” and it’s difficult to choose between them all, but because of Jesus’s larger discussion, I believe he has salt’s use as a preserving agent in mind. Because of sin, the world is always on the verge of chaos and destruction, but Jesus has called his people to preserve the world from destruction by doing good works. More on this in a moment. As the light of the world, Jesus is calling his people to be a beacon of hope and a guiding light. The proverbial “city on a hill” in Jesus’ time was Jerusalem. That ancient city symbolized so much for the 1st century Jew. It was the place where God’s temple sat, meaning it was the city where God lived. It’s sustained existence was a testimony of God’s promise and an assurance that God would continue to keep his promises. It was a place of pilgrimage, where people would journey, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks and months, just to be able to worship in the Holy City. Being a city on a hill, then, meant that God intended for his people to demonstrate God’s presence in the world through his people.
That is why after all this, Jesus says, “Let your light shine out before humanity in order that they would see your good works and glorify your Father who is in the heavens.” Christian good works mean something more than a stamp of divine approval. Yet, because they are a stamp of divine approval, they demonstrate to the world that God has placed his stamp of approval, not just on this group of people called Christians, but on the whole world. How? Because at one time, we too followed the spirit of the age, but have been delivered by God through Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:1-10). When we were in sin, or if we’re honest, when we’re in sin, we contributed and contribute to the destruction and chaos of culture and the world. But a new world is possible. In fact, a new world exists already and is reverberating backwards onto this one through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.
The Sermon on the Mount, and Christian ethics more broadly, are the way that new world of the Kingdom begins to bloom within this old age of sin. In his commentary on Matthew, Stanley Hauerwas envisions the Sermon on the Mount as the envisioning of a new community that lives in the life that Jesus made possible through his salvific work.4 What I might add to this is that this vision for humanity, i.e. the vision of humanity as a community of love and friendship under the Fatherhood of God was present at the beginning with the creation. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Jesus makes this life possible again,5 and he does this by conquering sin and opening the way for the Holy Spirit to live inside humanity as in a temple.
The Sermon on the Mount as Ethics
This reality, meaning the Sermon on the Mount as the possibility of a new kind of community, is why I subtitled this post “Christian Ethics and the World of Tomorrow.” What we’re called to by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is to live forward into the Kingdom of God that is promised in some fashion from Genesis to Revelation. What the Sermon does is show us what people who live in the Kingdom of God look like when they live in this age, in this world. I believe the Kingdom of God is a real time and place that is coming in the future at or after the return of Jesus, but it is also a kind of reality, a kind of existence, and a way of life. So, when God’s people live empowered by the Spirit of Jesus, when they love and worship God as revealed in Jesus, when, because of that love and worship, they live in a certain way, it looks like the kind of life Jesus details in the Sermon on the Mount.
This is where Christian ethics come in. The Sermon certainly has commands, and Jesus means for us to obey the commands when they’re there, but if you pay attention, this are not simple “do this, don’t do this” rules. What they do is teach us a kind of wisdom, a way of life, that manifests certain ways in certain situations. I like to think of the way Jesus presents his teaching here in little narrative pockets, as if to say, “If one of my disciples were to find himself or herself in this kind of situation, this is how they would respond.” As an example, let’s look at Jesus’ words on retaliation.
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other as well.
Matthew 5:38-39
Jesus gives a command here, “if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other as well,” but the “if” makes this a conditional statement. Maybe that’s obvious, but what I think it’s showing us is that we are called to live, not simply by a list of rules, but as the kind of people who are listening to the Holy Spirit and can discern how to act as disciples of Jesus in every situation. Jesus’ disciples are the kind of people who, when attacked or insulted, don’t seek revenge, but seek to bear the sin of their enemy and to love them and pray for them (Matt. 5:43-48). In turning the other cheek whether metaphorically or literally (Jesus means both), what the Christian does is manifest the good Kingdom, she brings the “world of tomorrow” where all things are in harmony with God, where justice and truth reign, into the present. In turning the other cheek, she prophecies a world where vengeance is not necessary.
In this way, the Sermon is not just a list of commands, but the seeds of a Christian ethics. Obviously, a lot more happens in our daily lives than what Jesus covers in the Sermon. None of the people Jesus was talking to were dealing with a global climate crisis, cellphones, the internet, automobiles, democracy and voting, border crises (as we know them), or industry. Jesus is conspicuously quiet on the use of drugs. Can Christians use marijuana? If so, what are the limits? Are there limits? So much of contemporary life is not addressed by Scripture. How could it be? The New Testament was written two thousand years ago, and the Old Testament is so much, well, older. Yet, the fundamental issues of human life, about how humans act in a good and holy way, are the same. We still live in relationships with other people, with other creatures, and with God.
It might be better to think about the Sermon on the Mount (or the Sermon on the Plain found in Luke 6) in terms of ethics rather than commands. Again, it’s not that there are not commands to be found here. Jesus means what he says, but if we think of them more like examples or seeds from which Christian ethics grow, we’ll be more aligned with how Jesus meant us to hear his teaching. This is wisdom literature, not law.
Christian Ethics as the Way of Jesus
Merriam-Webster defines ethics as “a set of moral principles: a theory of moral values,” or “the principles of conduct governing an individual or group.” While I, under the tutelage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer6, have some issues with this definition, for now, it will suffice. Another way to talk about ethics is to think of them as the way we live and produce “the good,” or the good life. This is why earlier in this post I talked about flourishing. Ethics is supposed to be the study of how we as humans do the good life, how we create flourishing in our communities. I will continue to stress to the point of annoyance that our communities include the non-human creatures, plant and animal,7 as well.
If you were to go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, and search “ethics,” you’ll notice something interesting. There is no entry for “Ethics” as such. Every entry under that query has ethics qualified with some adjective. When I pull up the list, it begins with Virtue Ethics, then Feminist Ethics, Business Ethics, African Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Chinese Ethics, Deontological Ethics, Social Networking and Ethics, and Internet Ethics. That’s only the first page. These adjectives are crucial to understanding what ethics are and what they’re for. There is no such thing as a “universal ethics,” where the word “ethics” could be used on its own to signify. Every culture, every sub-culture, every group has a vision of what the good life is and what flourishing looks like, and though there is often a lot of crossover, they’re never quite the same. In other words, “ethics” must always have an adjective. In our case, what we’re looking at is Christian ethics.8
Another way to look at this is that ethics, whatever adjective qualifies the noun, is a vision of the good life that is rooted in concrete moments in history. Those moments may transcend the life of a single individual, before and after, and sometimes a generation, but they are necessarily tied to the world as it is with some vision toward the world as it can be. A Christian ethics must take seriously the world as it is, and that has very specific ramifications for those of us in the United States or wherever we may live. Yet, the whole of Christian ethics is colored by the reality of the Incarnation of the Son of God; it takes seriously the reality and presence of Jesus Christ, both in history and in his living presence in the Church. In a different book, Hauerwas says Christian ethics hold “to the importance of its qualifier, because the peace [which is Hauerwas’ interpretation of “the Good” through the Gospel] Christians embody, and which they offer the world, is based on a kingdom that has become present in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.”9 This is all to say that Jesus Christ, Jesus the Son of God, Jesus who lived, suffered, was crucified, died, rose again, and ascended into heaven is himself the vision and standard of “the good,” of the good life, and he himself is the way of flourishing for humanity and for the life of the world.
Understanding this help us to see the role and importance of the four Gospels. If Jesus himself is the telos, the vision of the good, then it’s imperative for Christians to be familiar with his life and his teachings, which are found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This isn’t to make the rest of the New Testament or the Bible second place, but to remind us that, for Christians, the Gospels are the heartbeat of the canon. It’s by them that we understand the rest of the New Testament. It’s also by listening to Jesus’ life and his teaching that we learn how to live as Christians in our own time and in our own place. Both in Discipleship and in Ethics, Bonhoeffer was adamant to remind us that Christian discipleship and Christian ethics must be lived out in concrete situations, meaning in our day to day lives, in every situation: “The ‘world’ is thus the domain of concrete responsibility that is given to us in and through Jesus Christ.”10
Now we return to the idea that Jesus has called us to be in and of the world. Just like God placed Adam and Eve in a garden east of Eden, i.e. a specific place, so we have been placed in our own locations, both socially and geographically, and it is in those places that we have been called to be the image of God. The role of the image of God in the world is to manifest God’s good rule and his vision of flourishing and the common good. This vision is against the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, but is is for the world. Bonhoeffer continues, “Christianity must be used polemically today against the worldly in the name of a better worldliness…”11 There is a kind of worldliness that is ruled by the sinful passions of the flesh, and there is “better worldliness” that is ruled by the life of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, and Christians are called to the latter. We learn this “better worldliness” through the Sermon on the Mount, and as we read it and live it, it will begin to shape our imagination and we will live this kind of life in all the ways the Sermon never addresses.
In and Of the World
Let me attempt to tie all this together. As Christians, as disciples of Jesus Christ the Son of God, we are called to live toward the Kingdom of God, we are called to embody the kind of life Jesus would live right here and now, to the best that we can. In living this “better worldliness” in the concrete and very real situations of our lives (our families, our jobs, our churches, our friendships, etc.) we testify to the goodness of Jesus, we testify that we truly believe in Jesus. By that I mean we believe, not just that we will go to heaven when we die, but that we believe in his life and his teachings, we believe he was serious when he said that turning the other cheek, giving to those who ask, loving our enemies, forgiving those who have wronged us, loving our neighbors rather than lusting after them, not hoarding, not being greedy for wealth, that humility and prayer and simplicity is actually a better life than the life of greed, wealth, and power that society offers to us at every moment.
This call to follow Jesus is not just a call to live that kind of life in the new age when everything has been made right by Jesus, but to live it here and now when things are not right. If we don’t believe that the way of Jesus is good for this life, then I would dare to say we don’t think it’s a good way of life in any age. But if we do trust Jesus, if we do trust him when he says this is a good life, then we can embrace and live it in the world, and so be salt and light. This, then, is why I advocate for Christian ethics, because it is as Christians that we follow the way of Jesus, and it is as Christians that we testify by our ethics, by our lives, that we believe in a better way of life than the way of war, power, and riches. If we could be audacious enough to live the way of Jesus, just maybe, those who do not trust in Jesus would see our good works, and glorify our Father in heaven.
It would quite literally take a book to cover this history in any kind of detail.
Whether you’re some version of Calvinist, Armenian, or generally just not Reformed.
There has actually been some work done, especially in Reformed circles, on the Christian’s contribution to human flourishing. I think of the work of Tim Keller generally and the book Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper's Stone Lectures, edited by Jessica and Robert Joustra. But a consistent myopia in this circle is that flourishing and the “common good” are almost exclusively relegated to human flourishing and the common good of humanity. A more indigenous, and I think more Christian, understanding would include the common good of all creation and the flourishing of all life.
Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, of Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009).
There is also the intriguing idea, beginning with Origen and moving through the likes of Maximus the Confessor, Sergei Bulgakov, and David Bentley Hart (i.e. Eastern Orthodox thinkers) that creation and the creation of humanity begins with Adam and Eve and is on a forward trajectory toward perfection, of which the Incarnation of the Son of God in the man Jesus Christ is the non-temporal climax. That would mean the fall is not really a set-back, but part of the process of creation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Ilse Tödt and Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 6 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009). The very first sentence in his famous book, Ethics, Bonhoeffer says, “Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand—from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do somethine good?’ Instead, they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: what is the will of God?” This is important for his whole thought on Christian ethics. His concern is that, much as I’ve been saying here, through the actions of Christians, the “reality of God shows itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality.”
My friends Beau and Kristen would want me to emphasize the presence of mycelium (fungus) and bacteria as part of our communities as well, and they’re right to do so.
Even in this, further qualifiers could be added, as there are different visions of the good life and flourishing within different Christian camps. As there are liberal and conservative Christians, socialist and capitalist Christians, there are different visions. In this post, I hope to give an introduction to a Christian ethics that is faithful to the life of Jesus and his teaching prior to other adjectives I might use of myself (like socialist, environmentalist, etc.).
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Ilse Tödt and Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 6 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009).
Ibid. Emphasis mine.