Against Kingdom Ethics - American Reformer

Jesus, God’s Law, and the Believer

Evangelical approaches to ethical decision making are in total disarray. There are many reasons for this: social pressure to conform to prevailing moral norms (especially regarding sexuality), biblical and theological ignorance, a lack of understanding God’s creational norms (regarding the differences between men and women, the use of certain technologies, and more). But perhaps the biggest source of confusion can be reduced to one basic factor: a reduction of Christian ethical guidance to Christ’s teaching, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. This is what happens when, as Daniel Strand recently put it, Christians make “Jesus the revelation of God and not the Bible.”

To prepare to teach a course on ethics this semester, I began skimming the editor’s preface to Volume 2 of the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics. In the preface, the editor (John Bolt) mentioned a number of ethics textbooks popular in evangelical circles, including Kingdom Ethics by David Gushee and Glen Stassen, The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, and A Community of Character by Stanley Hauerwas. All such approaches, which have become increasingly accepted by evangelicals, argue that Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount—not the Ten Commandments or Old Testament teaching, not natural law—is what determines what is right and wrong for Christians today. For the sake of simplicity we can call this position that of “kingdom ethics.”

This is the same view that led Andy Stanley several years ago to tell evangelicals that they should “unhitch the Christian faith from [the] Jewish scriptures” (i.e., the Old Testament). Stanley claimed he was misunderstood, but his subsequent explanation of his words perfectly encapsulated the position of “kingdom ethics” when he said that the Old Testament is not “the go-to source regarding any behavior in the church.” Most evangelicals have probably never heard of Gushee, Yoder, and Hauerwas, but their pastors have; they were reading these books in seminary, and it has determined how they teach on the most pressing moral issues of our day.

As an example, Bolt captures what animates “kingdom ethics” in commenting on Yoder’s book: “Yoder sets this contrast clearly, asking whether the traditional use of the Ten Commandments for ethics really needs Jesus” (Bolt, x). It might seem obvious at first that Christians should ask that question. Jesus, after all, is the fulfillment of God’s saving plan for all of human history. As I read Bolt’s discussion, I even found myself initially thinking that to defend a traditional approach to Christian ethics—one based on God’s moral law found in the whole Bible and attested to in his creational order—I would have to find some way to answer Yoder’s question, to show how Christian ethics “really needs Jesus.”

A moment’s reflection, however, enabled me to see how absurd Yoder’s demand is. Jesus doesn’t change the Christian’s approach to ethics at all. To begin with, as Bavinck affirmed (recounted by Bolt), Jesus is God. He is the same God who gave the 10 Commandments to Israel under the Old Covenant. God does not change, nor does his moral law. It is always the same everywhere, for everyone. This is not to deny that Christ’s coming has changed the Christian’s relationship to certain aspects of Old Testament law. The “ceremonial” dimensions of the law (laws mandating a physical principle of holiness [foods, clothing, etc.]) were only instituted by God for Israel until the coming of Christ. The same is true of the laws regarding the whole sacrificial-temple system (as clearly seen in the letter to the Hebrews). There is, however, an abiding moral core of God’s law that is applicable to all people, at all times, in all places.

Jesus did not change the Christian’s relationship to the unchanging moral law of God. The Sermon on the Mount is not an exception to this principle, though it has routinely been understood as such throughout Christian history. This is the foundational error of the Anabaptists, and it is one that permeates much evangelical thinking today. In reality, it is not even accurate to say that “kingdom ethics” is based on the Sermon on the Mount. It claims to be, but it is mostly based on an egregious misunderstanding of the Sermon on the Mount. It both misunderstands Christ’s words in that sermon and reads them in total abstraction from the rest of Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments.

The “kingdom ethics” approach, for example, reads Christ’s preaching against the “eye for eye” mentality (Matt 5:38–42) as teaching absolute pacificism. It would, in this way of thinking, be wrong for a nation to go to war against another nation for any reason, but it would also be wrong to use physical force even to defend oneself or one’s family from violent assault. I have a friend who holds this view who once told me he would not use physical force even to stop someone violently attacking his wife. I honestly think he was just trying to be consistent in his thinking and I doubt he would really follow through on his principles if this actually happened, but it is a good example of where “kingdom ethics” leads. In Matt 5:38–42 Jesus forbids personal revenge, not the just application of physical force and violence. Exodus 22:2 is one place in Scripture that makes clear the permissibility of self-defense. Romans 13:1–7 shows the same regarding the use of force by the state.

Another example of “kingdom ethics” is how it understands Christ’s command to his disciples to love their enemies (Matt 5:43–48) and neighbors (Matt 22:34–40). These commands are routinely stretched to support any number of contemporary applications: support for unlimited immigration (including potentially illegal support for illegal immigration), the necessity to welcome homosexuals and transgenders into the church without calling them to repentance, and the mandate to place women into positions of official authority in the church, to give just a few examples. Such approaches badly misconstrue what Jesus commands. The mandate to love one’s enemies becomes a mandate to help all people attain what they desire, even if those desires are sinful (illegal entry into another nation, homosexuality, etc.; the sin of empathy writ large). Alternatively, such approaches apply Christ’s teaching about different facets of personal discipleship as if they were meant to be applied to the civil realm. The mandate to refuse to take personal revenge becomes the mandate to reject all uses of physical force. In all of this Christian discipleship becomes untethered from God’s creational design and his moral law. This is the inevitable outcome of attempting to determine Christian ethics merely from the Sermon on the Mount, or even Christ’s teaching more broadly. In contrast, a “whole-Bible” approach to ethics reveals the falsity of “kingdom ethics” and points the way toward a God-honoring solution to the most pressing moral issues of our day.

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