Contextualizing the Faith by A. Scott Moreau

Author:A. Scott Moreau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Missions;Christianity and culture;REL045000;REL108000
ISBN: 9781493415687
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Ethics: A Biblical Example

A somewhat startling reality to American Christians is that in the New Testament Epistles the vast bulk of the emphasis is on how Christians are to treat each other in the church—not on how Christians are to treat those outside the church. A refrain throughout the Epistles is the term “each other”—and it consistently describes some aspect of how Christians should behave in relation to each other. For example, we are to serve (Gal. 5:13); honor (Rom. 12:10); love (Rom. 13:8; 1 John 3:11, 32; 4:7, 11); forgive (Eph. 4:32; Col. 3:13); encourage (1 Thess. 5:11; Heb. 3:13); agree with (1 Cor. 1:10); submit to (Eph. 5:21); be kind to (Eph. 4:2; 1 Thess. 5:15); live in peace with (1 Thess. 5:13); spur on (Heb. 10:24); be humble, gentle, and patient with (Eph. 4:2)—the list is extensive. We are likewise given several prohibitions: don’t lie to (Col. 3:9), bite or devour (Gal. 5:15), provoke or envy (Gal. 5:26), slander (James 4:11), grumble against (James 5:9), or pass judgment on (Rom. 14:13). Perhaps this is best summed up by the simple phrase “Live in harmony with one another” (Rom. 12:16; 1 Pet. 3:8). This is group-level ethical living practiced by individuals.

One of the messages of Ephesians is that the heavenly authorities (angels and demons) will learn of God’s plan when they observe Jews and gentiles united with each other as a single body in the church (Eph. 2:11–3:10). Jesus declared that others will know we are Christians by our love (John 13:34–35). As that reality is fleshed out in the New Testament, the primary focus is on our love for each other. Certainly this does not exclude our love for unbelievers, but that is not the primary focus in the New Testament. According to John Nugent, professor of Old Testament at Great Lakes Christian College, “Scripture teaches us to love fellow believers—not all humans in general. The evidence is so clear and overwhelming that it is hard to believe it is not common knowledge” (2016, 90). If Nugent is correct, what are some implications for contextualizing ethical “churchness”?

Bernard Adeney’s brilliant and challenging book Strange Virtues (1995) explores cross-cultural ethics, and I am deeply indebted to his thinking through significant issues in ways far more deeply than I am able to do in this chapter. In digging into this example, as he points out, “the commandments of Scripture must be understood for what they meant to people in a specific time and place before we can begin to understand what they might mean in our time and place” (82). Though Adeney is specifically referencing the Old Testament commandments, his admonition applies equally to the one-another commands. To flesh this out, consider that when I, as a twenty-first-century Anglo-American, read Jesus’s and John’s commands to “love one another,” my instinctive thought is of love as a positive emotional response to someone rather than the unconditional commitment behind the Greek word. I instinctively think having this love means I need to feel good about fellow believers.

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