Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 1 Foundations of Christian Ethics
Chapter 2: The Covenant, the Law, and the Prophets
4. Jesus and the Old Testament
And fifth, in everything the prophets said, they spoke to the current situation. They spoke from a perspective that was more than "current,"
but they never spoke in abstractions. Where they enunciated general principles, as in Micah’s definition of true religion just noted (6:8) or Isaiah-Micah’s still unfulfilled vision of a warless world (Isa. 2:2-4;
Mic. 4:1-4), they spoke to the people as they were, in terms of what ought to be. The prophets saw and set forth visions that still stir us, but they were not "visionaries." It is because of their utter realism as they spoke within the conditions of a social and political community — or to adopt a current term, a responsible society — that next to the teachings of Jesus we find in them our firmest basis of social ethics.
difference in emphasis which makes their impact new. Point for point, there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus which cannot be found in the Old Testament or in the rabbinical teaching. Pharisaism, though it had its faults which called forth Jesus’ rebuke, had also in it much that was great and good. Witness, for example, this passage from The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written toward the end of the second century B.C.:
Love ye one another from the heart; and if a man sin against thee, speak peaceably to him, and in thy soul hold not guile; and if he repent and confess, forgive him. But if he deny it, do not get into a passion with him, lest catching the poison from thee he take to swearing and so thou sin doubly. . . [But] if he be shameless and persist in his wrong-doing, even so forgive him from the heart, and leave to God the avenging.14 Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the ethical teaching of Jesus leaves an impression which nothing in Judaism does. This is due in part to the conviction of Christians that Jesus fully exemplified his message, as no individual in prophetism or Phanisaism fully did. But it is due also to the extent to which Jesus always made human need the criterion of acts of obedient love to God. If the law of the Sabbath stood in the way of human service, it was to be suspended; he ate with publicans and sinners to win them to the Kingdom even at the cost of ceremonial uncleanness. Love of neighbor becomes freely given, uncalculating, unrestricted service, such as is epitomized in the parable of the good Samaritan, and this flows from the nature of the love of God. The love of God, though it appears not infrequently in the Old Testament and in the rabbinical writings, there carries with it a connotation of God’s love for the people Israel which was too small for Jesus. He took the moral framework of Israel and transformed it into something so universal, so compelling, that it became new.
And in the third place, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, Jesus took the eschatology like the ethics of his time and made it into something different. His inheritance from the prophets moralized his expectancy of divine intervention; his own sense of relationship to God gave a new turn to both eschatology and ethics. Probably because of a conviction of the nature of his own messiahship, but certainly because of his conviction that the kingdom of God meant the righteous rule of God in a redeemed community for this world and the next, he made the kingdom of God and not the triumph of Israel the supreme note in his teaching. With all the ambiguities that surround the records of his
teaching regarding the Kingdom, it is clear that it embodies the goal of God’s reign over the hearts and lives of men, and thus sets forth the great hope of a better world both now and in the world to come. To make Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom solely into a better society on earth is to lose its great overtones and foreshorten its vista; to deprive it of ethical content is to emasculate it into something Jesus himself would never have recognized.
Thus it comes about that Jesus, the greatest of the prophets, the
fulfillment of the law, inaugurated a new covenant for the redemption of mankind. It is to him, and not to any other teaching or teacher, that we must look for our basic moral insights. It is with good reason that one is reported as saying of old, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."
NOTES:
1. For a brief but still somewhat detailed summary, the reader is referred to my The Sources of Western Morality, chs. v, vi. For a more detailed study, J. M. Powis Smith, The Moral Life of the Hebrews (University of Chicago Press, 1923), though old is still the most useful single volume.
For a penetrating survey, see Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Guide to Understanding the Bible (New York: Harper & Bros., 1938) in the chapter on "The Idea of Right and Wrong."
2. The biblical narrative places the institution of the covenant in the time of Abraham (Gen. 17:1-8) with a still more general covenant in God’s promise to Noah (Gen. 9:8-17). These, however, are doubtless proleptic statements of a later development.
3. John Bright, The Kingdom of God (New York and Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 195 p. 25. Used by permission of the publisher.
4. For example, such important myths as those of the creation story, the fall, the tower of Babel, and the flood indicate Yahweh’s sovereign control of nature and history, and his union of righteousness with power.
5. Paul Ramsey, op. cit., ch. x, gives a significant comparison of the
Hebrew covenant with the social contract views of Hobbes, Rousseau, Bodin, and Grotius.
6. The closing words of Bertrand Russell’s classic statement of atheistic faith, A Man’s Worship in Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1954).
7. See W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), for the most authoritative statement of evidence to this effect.
8. D. Elton Trueblood in Foundations for Reconstruction (New York:
Harper & Bros., 1946) takes the principles of the Ten Commandments and applies them vitally to the problems of our time.
9. Repeated from Exod. 34:26, as are provisions for the Sabbath, feasts three times a year, the use of unleavened bread in sacrifices, and the offering of the first fruits to Yahweh.
10. Bright, op. cit., p. 171.
11. Note for example, Deut. 1:16; 7:2; 14:21; 15:1-2; 23:3.
12. See Ramsey, op. cit., pp. 49-50, for the list with illustrations of the finespun distinctions thus entailed.
13. The reader who desires a brief summary of the messages of Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Second Isaiah will find it in my Toward Understanding the Bible, pp. 67-74, or The Sources of Western Morality, pp. 120-40.
14. The Testament of Gad, tr. R. H. Charles, VII, 3-7.
15
return to religion-online
Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 1 Foundations of Christian Ethics
Georgia Harkness was educated at Cornell University, Boston University School of Theology, studied at Harvard & Yale theological seminaries and at Union
Theological Seminary of New York. She has taught at Elmira College, Mount Holyoke, and for twelve years was professor of applied theology at Garrett Biblical Institute. In 1950 she became professor of applied theology at the Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, California. Published in 1957 by Abingdon Press. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Harry W. and Grace C. Adams.