The Moral Life and Scripture

Prolegomena to a Future Series

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be taking Psalm 23 as my point of departure, describing a framework of the Christian life as refracted through the affirmation of the Psalm that has perhaps most deeply shaped popular imagination. Need a quick devotional topic? 23rd Psalm. Want to recite Scripture while walking around? Chances are good the 23rd rises to the surface. When you need a Psalm to use in a TV funeral, the 23rd has your back.

But beginning with the 23rd Psalm as a departure for the Christian moral life opens an important observation: there’s no inherent moral instruction in the Psalm. There are no commands or laws, nothing like the Proverbs or Law or Sermon on the Mount, nothing that would straightforwardly commend itself as moral instruction. The Psalm is an affirmation, praise, and in that sense, it’s perhaps the most important place to begin, because it begins not with an argument for the moral life, but an exploration of the moral life. It presumes that we’re already in it, and that God is the framework for that being in it.

Once upon a time, and perhaps in the future, I taught a course entitled “Foundations for Biblical Ethics”, which attempted to help students think canonically about their ethics of Scripture, using the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount as the point of departure. Through the class, students read how ancient Christians—and indeed, Scripture itself—views these not as contrary texts, but as a singular word of the LORD. But in using these two lodestones, I ran the risk of doing the thing I laid out above: emphasizing the notion that the moral life of Scripture is found only in commands, teachings, or prohibitions.

Oliver O’Donovan, among contemporary Christian ethicists, is probably the one who articulates this best when he describes the Christian moral life as a call and response, a seeking and finding. When we seek, we begin with the assumption that there is something to be found, and that there is one who has helped begin our seeking out. As such, Scripture does not simply shape our moral life when we are commanded, but when we observe the histories, when we ask questions about the stories, when we pray and when we are seeking to become wise.

Making this move opens up the canon of Scripture for the moral life in a way which then becomes expansive, because the presumption is that we are already in the moral life: the moral life of the hearer of the Law, of the prophets, of the histories is presumed. It’s not as if we first learn the data of Scripture, and then become moral beings; we hear the Scriptures as morally malformed beings already, which affects what and how we hear, and what and how we do. We hear the Scriptures as members of communities, formed and malformed, with virtuous habits and vicious loyalties. And so, the entrypoint into asking about the moral life is by assuming that the moral life is already in play: when I am reading the story of David and Goliath, it presumes a landscape in which we worry about David, boo Goliath, and tsk Israel for not trusting in God.

But it also becomes wild with respect to what we might find, and where: it becomes expected—even anticipated—that we will be guided by not only the prophets, but histories, psalms, oracles, and apocalpyses. The question of how to draw these things together into a coherent vision is a different one, but that we are instructed in unexpected places is, I take, a basic presumption that Scripture makes. If the corners of Micah and Isaiah can affirm the nature of the Messiah, then Obadiah and Jude can help us to see the frame of the moral life. Some have written on it by stripping down Scripture to the moral issues it describes, but I find this to be a wrong-headed approach: this presumes not only that I’m identifying the same issues as Scripture, but also that topics is what Scripture is primarily concerned with.

The moral concerns of Scripture run beneath, as it were, the material questions and topics which surface. As we approach Easter, it is with this in mind that we approach the cross and resurrection as the restoration of our entire person, a renewal of the cosmos itself. Within this vision, there is nothing that is off the table, such that Paul links together the resurrection of our bodies with the moral lives which we now lead: the two are of one piece. It is not so much that the moral life, then, is a tactical one, though it involves giving and receiving of reasons, of deliberation, and of action. Rather, the moral life is one which seeks to be iconic: it begins from the presumption that God in Christ is already making the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead present among us, and that involves our life in the world. Such a vision does not only consist of ethics as moral command, but of seeking out of the one who has already found us, offering our lives as images of praise.

And so, Psalm 23 seems like a pretty good place to start casting a vision of the moral life. We’ll start next week.

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Writing: I was on the road most of the week, partly for recruiting, and partly to eavesdrop on conversations about what the future of church might look like in my relatively small corner of Baptist life. I wrote about my takeaways here.

My second book this year, From Isolation to Community, launched on Tuesday, and that also took up some mental space: so far, the reactions have been great, and from the audience that I wrote it for: ordinary Christians and ministers seeking to knit together this elusive concept of “community” with ordinary church practice. Check it out, and give me some feedback: this was truly a labor of love project, with a lot of years of reading and teaching Bonhoeffer clicking together in some of the worst days the world has had in recent memory.

Reading: Mike Schur (creator of The Office and The Good Place) wrote a fantastic little book called How to Be Perfect, born out of his work on The Good Place. It’s really great, and the kind of thing that you should read if you want to learn more about the basic field of moral philosophy. The book of Job for Sunday School teaching. Border Optics, by Camilla Fojas, for my continued interest in migration.