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Biblical vs. Secular Ethics
Establishing acceptable norms of behavior and consistent standards of conduct has been part of the human enterprise since the dawn of time. Without principles of ethics and the moral rules that affect individual behavior, humankind would plunge into a state of chaotic indifference, insecurity, and unending fear. But while few question the need for moral guidance, a growing number of people believe that the only ethic worth considering must rest on a biblical foundation. Is morality dependent upon God and "revealed truths" found in scripture? Must this claim be accepted without question lest we risk the torment of eternal damnation for questioning it? Without critical evaluation and careful scrutiny, there is little hope of distinguishing truth from unfounded belief.
How valuable is the Bible as a source for ethical truth? Do the scriptures truly have the insight needed to guide humankind safely through the moral dilemmas of modern society? What constitutes a biblical ethic? Should the Bible be construed as the only basis for moral teaching? Is it really the final authority on moral issues, or are there secular alternatives that can serve as guides to acceptable conduct within the human community?
A distinguished group of social philosophers, biblical scholars, and ethicists met at the University of Richmond, Virginia, under the aegis of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) and its Biblical Criticism Research Project, to address these and related questions. The essays in this provocative work demonstrate a diversity of perspective and breadth of insight that will shed much needed light on the nature of ethics.
The contributors to this volume Robert S. Alley, Joe Edward Barnhart, Joseph L. Blau, Frank E. Eakin, Jr., Lewis S. Feuer, Joseph Fletcher, Theodor H. Gaster, James H. Hall, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Paul Kurtz, Gerald A. Larue, John Priest, Ellis Rivkin, Richard L. Rubenstein, and Richard Taylor.
How valuable is the Bible as a source for ethical truth? Do the scriptures truly have the insight needed to guide humankind safely through the moral dilemmas of modern society? What constitutes a biblical ethic? Should the Bible be construed as the only basis for moral teaching? Is it really the final authority on moral issues, or are there secular alternatives that can serve as guides to acceptable conduct within the human community?
A distinguished group of social philosophers, biblical scholars, and ethicists met at the University of Richmond, Virginia, under the aegis of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) and its Biblical Criticism Research Project, to address these and related questions. The essays in this provocative work demonstrate a diversity of perspective and breadth of insight that will shed much needed light on the nature of ethics.
The contributors to this volume Robert S. Alley, Joe Edward Barnhart, Joseph L. Blau, Frank E. Eakin, Jr., Lewis S. Feuer, Joseph Fletcher, Theodor H. Gaster, James H. Hall, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Paul Kurtz, Gerald A. Larue, John Priest, Ellis Rivkin, Richard L. Rubenstein, and Richard Taylor.
191 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1988
11 people want to read
About the author
R. Joseph Hoffmann
14 books48 followersFollowing graduation from Harvard Divinity School (M.Div. Th.M.) and the University of Oxford (D.Phil.), R. Joseph Hoffmann was tutor in Greek at Keble College and Senior Scholar at St Cross College, Oxford, and Wissenschaftlicher Assistent in Patristics and Classical Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He received the degree Dr. habil. from Heidelberg in 1983.
He began his teaching career at the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies where he developed the undergraduate and graduate program in Christian origins.
From 1991 to 1999, he was Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Church History at Westminster College, Oxford and a member of the sub-faculty of Oriental Studies in Christian origins.
Hoffmann has also taught at Cal State Sacramento, the American University of Beirut and Wells College, where he was Campbell Professor of Religion and Human Values until 2006 and Distinguished Scholar at Goddard College in 2009.
He has held visiting positions at universities in Africa (Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Botswana), the Middle East, the Pacific (Australia and Papua New Guinea) and South Asia, most recently as Visiting Professor of History at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan.
He is now Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Central Asia.
Beyond academe, he is well known for his advocacy of the humanist tradition. He was Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion until 2010, a senior vice president of the Center for Inquiry until 2008 and a founding faculty member (1986) of the Humanist Institute. In his recent work, Hoffmann has turned increasingly to the work of ”humanist restoration”–a project designed to reconsider the richness of the humanist legacy in the arts and sciences apart from recent attempts to emphasize the purely rationalistic and naturalistic varieties of humanism that emerged in the late twentieth century.
Hoffmann has focused on the controversial aspects of Christian origins, with special reference to early heresies, gnosticism, and the pagan philosophical critiques of the Christian movement. His most recent books include an edited volume entitled Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2006) and Sources of the Jesus Tradition (2010.)
His study of the concept of the right to life in early Christianity, Faith and Foeticide, will be published in 2014, along with another in his series of translations of the classical philosophical critiques of the Christian movement: Christianity: The Minor Critics.
He began his teaching career at the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies where he developed the undergraduate and graduate program in Christian origins.
From 1991 to 1999, he was Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Church History at Westminster College, Oxford and a member of the sub-faculty of Oriental Studies in Christian origins.
Hoffmann has also taught at Cal State Sacramento, the American University of Beirut and Wells College, where he was Campbell Professor of Religion and Human Values until 2006 and Distinguished Scholar at Goddard College in 2009.
He has held visiting positions at universities in Africa (Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Botswana), the Middle East, the Pacific (Australia and Papua New Guinea) and South Asia, most recently as Visiting Professor of History at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan.
He is now Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Central Asia.
Beyond academe, he is well known for his advocacy of the humanist tradition. He was Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion until 2010, a senior vice president of the Center for Inquiry until 2008 and a founding faculty member (1986) of the Humanist Institute. In his recent work, Hoffmann has turned increasingly to the work of ”humanist restoration”–a project designed to reconsider the richness of the humanist legacy in the arts and sciences apart from recent attempts to emphasize the purely rationalistic and naturalistic varieties of humanism that emerged in the late twentieth century.
Hoffmann has focused on the controversial aspects of Christian origins, with special reference to early heresies, gnosticism, and the pagan philosophical critiques of the Christian movement. His most recent books include an edited volume entitled Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2006) and Sources of the Jesus Tradition (2010.)
His study of the concept of the right to life in early Christianity, Faith and Foeticide, will be published in 2014, along with another in his series of translations of the classical philosophical critiques of the Christian movement: Christianity: The Minor Critics.
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June 6, 2024
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WITH DIVERSE VIEWPOINTS
Co-editor R. Joseph Hoffman wrote in the Preface to this 1988 collection, “The essays collected in this volume recognize the importance and antiquity of the Bible’s contribution to moral discourse. Their authors cannot be said to represent any single-minded position on the question of the ‘validity’ or ‘truth’ of biblical ethics, but many of them would agree that the moral view of the Bible belongs to the period 1500 B.C.E.-100 C.E., and thus cannot and should not be thoughtlessly invoked to settle moral questions… Most of the contributors argue… that biblical ethics are not ‘normative’ but ‘situational,’ that is, grounded in the moral concerns of their own day and their advice and opinions… At least some---certainly not all---of the authors… will suggest that biblical ethics are irrelevant… in making the hard moral choices that ‘modern’ society demands of its members.” (Pg. 8-9)
The other co-editor, Gerald Larue, wrote in the Introduction, “This book… is composed of the work of expert but is designed for the thinking nonprofessional… [The] encouragement of noncritical Bible reading produces followers who are both naïve and truly confused in their understanding of the scriptures. Such nonevaluative reading is challenged in the present group of essays…. The question arises: How can the Bible be viewed as a source of Jewish or Christian ethics?” (Pg. 11-12)
In the first essay, Larue states, “long before the first century, C.E., Jewish savants had engaged in a process I have called ‘continuing interpretation.’ I refer here to the fact that once precepts were accepted as divine utterances, the religious community were stuck with them… But times and life-settings change, and what once appeared as a pertinent and fixed regulation no longer fits precisely into the new situation. Somehow the divinely revealed commandments must be kept but provided with a new interpretation.” (Pg. 20-21)
In his essay, Hoffman says, “It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that the social agenda squeezed from the gospels by liberal Protestant, and even more recently Roman Catholic, theologians has no place in the ethical teaching ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth nor in the general biblical understanding of morality. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth lived in a world in which apartheid served as a religious principle and… is not known to have spoken out against the strict laws forbidding association of Jews and Gentiles… Far from advocating distribution of wealth as a solution to the plight of the poor, Jesus commended poverty as the appropriate preparation for the impending judgment…” (Pg. 58)
Later, he adds, “the sacred book of Christianity is not chiefly about ethics. Such ethical teaching as the New Testament contains is of an occasional variety and reflects situations within the embryonic church of the first and early second centuries of the common era. Those situations… are largely unfamiliar to modern readers and the solutions proposed by the gospel writers for dealing with them are as distant from us---and hence potentially as irrelevant to us---as the situations which called them into being.” (Pg. 68)
Former professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College Ellis Rivkin (1918–2010) wrote in his essay, “When… one dissolves the framework of Yahwistic absolutism, one discovers that biblical ethics is neither more nor less relative, neither more nor less compelling, than the ethics that has emerged within the framework of critical reason. The biblical framework… testifies to a God who has continuously given his assent, if not his mandate, to whatever time and tide demand… When the Bible is liberated from the forbidding framework of divine absolutism… it reveals a God who is responsible to the vicissitudes of history, open to the implications of change, and supportive of the quest for ethical and moral principles without dogmatic precommitment to any previous revelation… As a consequence, biblical ethics emerges as a mosaic of insets configured by a problem-solving people bound in covenant to a problem-solving God.” (Pg. 100)
James Hall says in his essay, “Biblical ethics and modern secular ethics differ radically. The latter … is predicated on… the recognition of inherent human rights, and the former (where it implies rights at all) encompasses only externally bestowed ones... All that I have shown is that the modern secular view of ethics and the biblical view are DIFFERENT on the question of inherent rights. It is entirely possible that the modern secular view of ethics is wrong and that the biblical view is right. It has not been my task to prove beyond question the objective reality of any inherent rights… [or] the objective reality of a universal prima facie human right to fairness.” (Pg. 128)
Joseph Blau (1909-1987), former professor of religion at Columbia University, wrote, “There were ‘true prophets’ and ‘false prophets’ in the Old Testament narratives, and the different adjectival attributions could be made only after the fact. A ‘true prophet’ is one whose prophecies ‘came true’; a ‘false prophet’ is one whose prophecies ‘proved false.’ If the churches and other instrumentalities of rational religion can become the commonplaces of the religions of the next century, then those who so prophesy will be known as the ‘true prophets’ of our time… If, on the other hand, a nostalgic evangelism… should prevail, then those of us who detest its coming, abhor its anti-intellectualism, and feel confident that the American people are too sane to hold to it for the long run---we optimists will be proved to have been the ‘false prophets’ of our age.” (Pg. 181)
In the concluding essay, Joseph Fletcher argues, “The case for … ethical autonomy---that is, that moral philosophy can stand on its own human feet without god or a deity of a religious belief---is well-established in scientific and philosophical circles, and even some religious thinkers nowadays tend to concede that ethical autonomy is a tenable position to take… My own judgment is that this tendency to religiousness will continue to be the human condition. It will always be around. As a humanist, I will settle for the clear evidence, so it seems to me, that in a democratic society, the medieval part of us is being denied by a growing norm, accepted even by some religionists---namely that private and personal mystical beliefs may not be imposed on others or on the public will.” (Pg. 184-185)
This volume is much more “diverse” in the viewpoints included that many other publications of Prometheus Books. It will be of keen interest to those studying humanist ethics and religious ethics.
Co-editor R. Joseph Hoffman wrote in the Preface to this 1988 collection, “The essays collected in this volume recognize the importance and antiquity of the Bible’s contribution to moral discourse. Their authors cannot be said to represent any single-minded position on the question of the ‘validity’ or ‘truth’ of biblical ethics, but many of them would agree that the moral view of the Bible belongs to the period 1500 B.C.E.-100 C.E., and thus cannot and should not be thoughtlessly invoked to settle moral questions… Most of the contributors argue… that biblical ethics are not ‘normative’ but ‘situational,’ that is, grounded in the moral concerns of their own day and their advice and opinions… At least some---certainly not all---of the authors… will suggest that biblical ethics are irrelevant… in making the hard moral choices that ‘modern’ society demands of its members.” (Pg. 8-9)
The other co-editor, Gerald Larue, wrote in the Introduction, “This book… is composed of the work of expert but is designed for the thinking nonprofessional… [The] encouragement of noncritical Bible reading produces followers who are both naïve and truly confused in their understanding of the scriptures. Such nonevaluative reading is challenged in the present group of essays…. The question arises: How can the Bible be viewed as a source of Jewish or Christian ethics?” (Pg. 11-12)
In the first essay, Larue states, “long before the first century, C.E., Jewish savants had engaged in a process I have called ‘continuing interpretation.’ I refer here to the fact that once precepts were accepted as divine utterances, the religious community were stuck with them… But times and life-settings change, and what once appeared as a pertinent and fixed regulation no longer fits precisely into the new situation. Somehow the divinely revealed commandments must be kept but provided with a new interpretation.” (Pg. 20-21)
In his essay, Hoffman says, “It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that the social agenda squeezed from the gospels by liberal Protestant, and even more recently Roman Catholic, theologians has no place in the ethical teaching ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth nor in the general biblical understanding of morality. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth lived in a world in which apartheid served as a religious principle and… is not known to have spoken out against the strict laws forbidding association of Jews and Gentiles… Far from advocating distribution of wealth as a solution to the plight of the poor, Jesus commended poverty as the appropriate preparation for the impending judgment…” (Pg. 58)
Later, he adds, “the sacred book of Christianity is not chiefly about ethics. Such ethical teaching as the New Testament contains is of an occasional variety and reflects situations within the embryonic church of the first and early second centuries of the common era. Those situations… are largely unfamiliar to modern readers and the solutions proposed by the gospel writers for dealing with them are as distant from us---and hence potentially as irrelevant to us---as the situations which called them into being.” (Pg. 68)
Former professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College Ellis Rivkin (1918–2010) wrote in his essay, “When… one dissolves the framework of Yahwistic absolutism, one discovers that biblical ethics is neither more nor less relative, neither more nor less compelling, than the ethics that has emerged within the framework of critical reason. The biblical framework… testifies to a God who has continuously given his assent, if not his mandate, to whatever time and tide demand… When the Bible is liberated from the forbidding framework of divine absolutism… it reveals a God who is responsible to the vicissitudes of history, open to the implications of change, and supportive of the quest for ethical and moral principles without dogmatic precommitment to any previous revelation… As a consequence, biblical ethics emerges as a mosaic of insets configured by a problem-solving people bound in covenant to a problem-solving God.” (Pg. 100)
James Hall says in his essay, “Biblical ethics and modern secular ethics differ radically. The latter … is predicated on… the recognition of inherent human rights, and the former (where it implies rights at all) encompasses only externally bestowed ones... All that I have shown is that the modern secular view of ethics and the biblical view are DIFFERENT on the question of inherent rights. It is entirely possible that the modern secular view of ethics is wrong and that the biblical view is right. It has not been my task to prove beyond question the objective reality of any inherent rights… [or] the objective reality of a universal prima facie human right to fairness.” (Pg. 128)
Joseph Blau (1909-1987), former professor of religion at Columbia University, wrote, “There were ‘true prophets’ and ‘false prophets’ in the Old Testament narratives, and the different adjectival attributions could be made only after the fact. A ‘true prophet’ is one whose prophecies ‘came true’; a ‘false prophet’ is one whose prophecies ‘proved false.’ If the churches and other instrumentalities of rational religion can become the commonplaces of the religions of the next century, then those who so prophesy will be known as the ‘true prophets’ of our time… If, on the other hand, a nostalgic evangelism… should prevail, then those of us who detest its coming, abhor its anti-intellectualism, and feel confident that the American people are too sane to hold to it for the long run---we optimists will be proved to have been the ‘false prophets’ of our age.” (Pg. 181)
In the concluding essay, Joseph Fletcher argues, “The case for … ethical autonomy---that is, that moral philosophy can stand on its own human feet without god or a deity of a religious belief---is well-established in scientific and philosophical circles, and even some religious thinkers nowadays tend to concede that ethical autonomy is a tenable position to take… My own judgment is that this tendency to religiousness will continue to be the human condition. It will always be around. As a humanist, I will settle for the clear evidence, so it seems to me, that in a democratic society, the medieval part of us is being denied by a growing norm, accepted even by some religionists---namely that private and personal mystical beliefs may not be imposed on others or on the public will.” (Pg. 184-185)
This volume is much more “diverse” in the viewpoints included that many other publications of Prometheus Books. It will be of keen interest to those studying humanist ethics and religious ethics.
Displaying 1 of 1 review