(Reading time: 2-3 minutes)
Moses and Aaron with the Ten Commandments
(painting circa 1675 by Aron de Chavez)
For those of us who claim an ethic informed and motivated by Christianity and the Bible, serious study is required to sort out many competing and conflicting voices of what is right, what is wrong. As stated in my previous essays on a Christian ethic (reference “What is Right, Parts 1,2,3,” June 2019), I prefer to keep it simple by focusing on the most important ethical imperatives espoused by Jesus, and these cover a lot of ground – namely, to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Beyond this Jesus gives us additional positive ethical assignments that should keep us busy for the rest of our life.
Coming to reasonable agreement about our ethical principles is made more complex by several factors: 1) by the plethora of vices and restrictions that have been put forward by various church traditions, 2) by the cultural and historical distance between the biblical times and our times, and 3) by the language barriers that require translation and interpretation from Hebrew and Greek to our modern languages.
“…there is an institutional tendency to multiply rules and prohibitions …”
It is required of us to follow not only the positive exhortations, but to sort out the various vices and prohibitions, that we may steer clear of that which is sinful and harmful but also that we may check the tendency inherent in religion and institution to multiply rules and prohibitions and to use those rules to draw an ever tighter circle of exclusion between those “inside” and those “outside.” Indeed, it was a major theme of Jesus’ ministry to beat back the legalistic zeal of the religious leadership of his day; do we expect our challenge to be any different?
In a series of short posts, I will share a detailed and perhaps overly tedious analysis of the New Testament teaching on sins, vices, “what not to do.” My approach is linguistic, using concordances and lexicons to analyze the many verses and words in the New Testament admonishing against various behaviors and attitudes. I use an analytical approach but with a subjective element, given that it is required to interpret each use of any given word or concept to determine if the word is used in context to refer to a sin or vice, or merely as a routine element of the narrative. I have identified and broken down over 700 instances of “vice” references in their scriptural context, involving well over 100 Greek words or word groups. By interpretation, I have broken out the English and Greek words in these references, separated out the non-ethical cases, and sorted the ethical uses into groups. Interpretation and subjectivity is involved. I hope that discussion will ensue.
After untold hours of analysis, I was amazed to discover that the top four categories of negative behavior in this study, ranked by frequency of reference, correspond exactly between the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament as a whole, and they correspond exactly to the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th commandments which address lying, stealing, sexual immorality, and coveting (the exception being that Jesus’ fourth category is not coveting but hypocrisy).
Don’t think that calling upon the Ten Commandments over-simplifies the issue or lets any of us off the hook. The New Testament offers almost 250 references that deal with these four vices, indicating that we can expect some degree of subtlety and depth in the treatment of these ethical topics. I assure you that we will all be challenged, and find relevant insight into every corner of our contemporary situation.
To be continued …