All Things Reconciled

Essays on Restorative Justice, Religious Violence, and the Interpretation of Scripture

Marshall

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781606087893
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The modern restorative justice movement, perhaps one of the most important social movements of our time, was born in a Christian home to Christian parents, specifically to Christian peace workers striving to put their faith into action in the public arena. The first major book on the subject was written primarily for a church audience and drew deeply on biblical themes and values. But as restorative justice has moved into the mainstream of criminological thought and policy, the significance of its originating spiritual impulse has been minimized or denied, and subsequent theological scholarship has done little to probe the relevance of restorative perspectives for doctrine and discipleship.In this collection of essays, Christopher D. Marshall, a biblical scholar and restorative practitioner who has devoted his career to exploring the relationship between the two fields, considers how peacemaking Christians can honor the witness and authority of Scripture, including its apparently violence-endorsing strands, as they strive to join in God's great work in Christ of "reconciling to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross" (Col 1:20).

1

The Use of the Bible in Ethics

A Starting Point for a Restorative Reading of Scripture

Christians often disagree on moral and political issues, but they usually agree that Christian ethical judgments ought to be demonstrably consistent with the teaching of Scripture in general and with the message of the Christian gospel in particular. They accept that in wrestling with difficult moral questions, believers have a duty to reflect carefully on what the Bible has to say about the matter, much like the synagogue congregation in Berea that “welcomed the message very eagerly and examined the Scriptures every day to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Even as levels of biblical literacy in churches continue to plummet, and the extent of engagement with the biblical text in most Sunday sermons is modest at best, there remains an instinctive feeling among the faithful that the Bible is important, and that even the declarations of bishops, cardinals, and church leaders need ultimately to be tested against Holy Writ.

What is less clear is how to do this. How should the Scriptures properly function in Christian ethical reflection? How are the sometime discordant voices of the biblical writers to be rightly appropriated when considering contested moral issues, including those to do with the nature of justice? This is the starting point for any attempt to develop a biblical theology of restorative justice.

Sources of Ethical Guidance

The Components of Christian Ethics

Ethics may be understood as the systematic study of the moral principles, values, and obligations that guide human behavior. While “morality” concerns the evaluation of such behavior as right or wrong, good or bad, “ethics” is the theoretical analysis of the major ingredients that shape and validate these moral judgments.1 “Christian” ethics is the attempt to understand and justify moral obligation in relation to the will of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all. This makes Christian ethics a distinctive enterprise.2 That is not to say that the content of Christian moral values is radically different from the content of non-Christian values. There are important differences,3 but Christian attitudes to what is right and wrong are often widely shared by non-Christians. The distinctiveness of Christian ethics lies primarily in the way Christians understand the ultimate origin and sanction of these values. At the heart of Christian ethics lies an appeal to revelation. Christian ethical judgments are governed ultimately by belief in the self-disclosure of God’s own moral character and will, pre-eminently in the person and work of Jesus Christ, not by the dictates of human reason, affections, volition or environmental conditioning.

In the attempt to clarify the ethical corollaries of divine revelation, Christian ethics draws on five main sources of guidance.

Scripture

The Bible serves as the primary record of God’s self-disclosure in the events of salvation-history, as apprehended by the community of faith. Inasmuch as it presents God as a righteous Being who requires righteousness of his creatures, the Bible is profoundly concerned with ethics. According to biblical tradition, ethical behavior stands in a two-fold relationship to God’s self-revelation. On the one hand, it is a response of gratitude for God’s saving acts in history, while on the other hand those saving acts themselves provide the pattern and standard for human conduct. The people of God are enjoined to model their behavior on the actions of God; the covenant requires nothing less than the “imitation of God” (Lev 11:45). The meaning of “justice,” for instance, is arrived at not by contemplating some abstract norm of justice, but by remembering how God delivered his people from oppression, and then acting accordingly.4 For Christian ethics, the imitation of God centers on the imitation of Christ (1 Pet 2:21), whose concrete manner of living and acting is known to us only through the biblical record.5

Theological Tradition

Revelation, including biblical revelation, is received, reflected on, and interpreted by the people of God, down through history. This interpretation and application of revelation constitutes the theological and moral tradition of Christianity, which serves as a second source for discerning God’s will. It is not only the Catholic church that so uses tradition; all branches of Christianity have appealed to historical precedents and experience in formulating moral and doctrinal teaching. Such tradition is more than a collection of dogmatic and moral propositions transmitted from the past; it is also the “story” of a particular people, handed on and re-appropriated by each generation. We cannot separate ourselves from our traditions and heritage. We enter into life in the midst of tradition; we are fundamentally shaped by tradition; and even our ability to question and change tradition comes from the tradition itself.

Moral Philosophy

The great moral traditions of Western philosophy, which have appealed principally to the exercise of human reason for the determination of right and wrong, have also had a profound impact on both the content and methodology of Christian ethics (the very word “ethics” is the legacy of Greek philosophy). Of particular significance has been the concept of natural law, which has been very influential in Catholic moral theology. The extent to which natural law considerations should shape Christian ethics is much contested, but some concept of a “natural” revelation of God’s moral will accessible to all humanity in virtue of creation has played a role in most expressions of Christian ethics, including New Testament ethics.6

Empirical Data

Christian ethics is more than a speculative exercise; it also requires attention to the full range of contextual factors that bear on each ethical situation. Indeed, the first task of moral analysis is to clarify the decision-making situation and identify the range of available options. The data furnished by the social sciences and by other empirical analyses thus has an indispensable role in ethical discernment. The special contribution of such descriptive research is to keep ethical evaluation in touch with reality, where the rubber hits the road.7

The Spirit-in-Community

The New Testament places great emphasis on a twofold role for the Holy Spirit in Christian ethical life—that of bringing about inner moral renewal in believers so that they spontaneously manifest ethical virtues,8 and of guiding them in ethical decision-making.9 Moral character-formation and moral decision-making are inseparably linked within the Spirit’s orbit. It is crucial to recognize that in the New Testament the Spirit’s work is expressed in the context of the Church.10 “Paul knows nothing of solitary religion or individual morality,” explains W. D. Davies, “but rather sees the Christian firmly based in the community.”11 The gathered community provides the necessary checks and balances that prevent the Spirit’s direction degenerating into individualistic subjectivism.

This list of the main sources of Christian ethics invites two immediate observations. The first is that while the five components may be conceptually distinguished, they are in practice inseparable. Scripture cannot be entirely distinguished from tradition, since Scripture is both the product of tradition and the shaper of tradition. Empirical data does not exist in isolation from the moral values and ideological commitments that govern the gathering, classification and interpretation of data. The Spirit’s guidance of the community is not merely intuitive but often employs the text of Scripture and the wisdom learned from ecclesiastical tradition or scientific discovery.12 The five sources, then, are intertwined. Yet there is still value in notionally distinguishing them, for in different Christian traditions different constituents have the dominant role, although in all traditions ethical arguments gain in persuasiveness by employing all five in an ongoing conversation.

Secondly, our delineation of several sources of ethical guidance shows that the catch-cry sola Scriptura does not really apply in Christian ethics. “Scripture alone,” contends Gustafson, “is never the final court of appeal for Christian ethics.”13 By itself the Bible is not enough to tell us what to do. The Bible may be a necessary source for Christian ethical reflection, but it is not a sufficient resource on its own. Arriving at moral judgments entails a dialectic between scriptural and non-scriptural factors, between considerations based on circumstance and rational inquiry and those that appeal to the biblical witness. The challenge of Christian ethics is to achieve a judicious ba...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Use of the Bible in Ethics
• Chapter 2: Re-engaging the Bible in a Postmodern World*
• Chapter 3: What Language Shall I Borrow?
• Chapter 4: Crime, Crucifixion, and the Forgotten Art of Lament
• Chapter 5: Prison, Prisoners, and the Bible
• Chapter 6: Satisfying Justice
• Chapter 7: The Violence of God and the Hermeneutics of Paul
• Chapter 8: Atonement, Violence, and the Will of God
• Chapter 9: For God’s Sake!
• Afterword
• Bibliography