After Old Testament Virtue: Retrieving YHWH Christology for Ethics

Issue 141 Article

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by David E. Wilhite

Two challenges in contemporary theology normally not thought to be related, need to be revisited. The first is how Jesus has been disconnected from the Old Testament depiction of God. The second is how contemporary Christian ethicists have been unable to use the Old Testament for constructive purposes.

As for the first problem, most modern Christians assume that Jesus does not appear until the Gospels. In this way of thinking, the God of the Old Testament is the Father. Jesus may be prophesied, foreshadowed or prefigured, but he is distinct from the God of Israel.[1] This view, however, is a modern invention. Ancient Christians assumed virtually the opposite: all Old Testament theophanies are Christophanies.[2] When this was normative, Christians encountered Jesus directly throughout their canon.

As for the second problem, alongside the rise of historical critical readings of the Bible, Christians had to rethink how to accommodate the accounts of God in the Old Testament in relation to moral theology. The images of a jealous God (jealousy, remember, is a vice, not a virtue) who commands things like genocide were relegated to the context of the Bronze Age. Thus, the Old Testament God’s command to “be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2) became something affirmed only in the abstract, not in specifics.

In what follows, both of these losses will be traced to show how we arrived at our current state. The joint solution I will offer, is a retrieval of YHWH Christology. YHWH Christology, put simply, is the classical Christian belief that Jesus is the “Lord” who appeared to Israel. Recently, a few New Testament scholars have approached this position. At least, some have acknowledged that “YHWH texts” from the Old Testament are applied to Jesus by some New Testament authors.[3] Or, they can speak of the way that Jesus shares the “divine identity” or how he is “mapped onto” the divine identity.[4] Or, they can describe Gospel writers as depicting Jesus “as” or “like” YHWH.[5] To take these insights to their logical conclusion, the way most ancient Christians did, one would simply say that Jesus is the “Lord” of the Old Testament.[6] However, since even these scholars do not do so, and since Jesus is seen to be the Son of the God of Israel, not the God who appeared to Israel, the distinction, if not an outright Marcionite disconnection, remains.

To see this more fully, I will now explain what I mean by the loss of biblical ethics by tracing the history of biblical interpretation. Then, after we see what and how we lost biblical ethics, I will offer some ways forward to reclaiming biblical ethics once again by showing the possibilities that open up when reading in light of YHWH Christology.

Biblical Ethics…Lost

How have we lost our ability to read the Old Testament in a way that can provide ethical guidance to Christians? That story is complex and long, but it can be summed up by looking at key developments in modernity. It is widely acknowledged that Protestant ethics usually entail some sort of contrast, or at least tension, between Law and Gospel, works and grace. More generally, Protestants along with Catholic and Orthodox Christians, usually base their ethics on the teachings of Jesus in particular, not on the whole of biblical canon. It is important to note in this last clause that there is already a built-in assumption that Jesus’ teachings are only found in the Gospels, while the teachings found in the Old Testament are those of the Father. After all, there are no red letters in your Old Testament![7] With this came a larger problem of how to read the scriptures, especially the Old Testament in a theological framework, instead of a strictly historical-critical one.

How did Christians lose a theological reading of their Old Testament? Let us go back and see how the earliest Christians interpreted Israel’s scriptures, and from there we can better trace where things went wrong. We will first begin with the earliest recorded Christian interpreter of Israel’s scriptures, the Apostle Paul.

Paul famously makes a distinction between the spirit and the letter: “…ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). Not only does Paul identify a spiritual reading, he demonstrates how to apply one. One key example is in 1 Corinthians 9, when he stipulates,

For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever plows should plow in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop.[8]

Note that Paul refers to the Law (Deut. 25:4), but instead of reading it in its historical context, Paul applies this to his audience. On a literal historical level, the author of Deuteronomy seems to be giving ancient Israelites advice about how to care for livestock, but Paul assumes that God was not merely doing that. To expand Paul’s question (“Is it for oxen that God is concerned?”), the apostle seems to be implicitly asking, “Did God speak forth an infallible, authoritative, inspired utterance in order to explain to Israel how to care for a literal ox?” Then, he provides the explicit answer to his rhetorical question, for which his audience surely already knows the answer: this Law was “written for our sake,” that is, for the audience of Paul’s time. Paul does not in any way deny the historical meaning (as if one should muzzle the ox when it is treading out gain), and so I take him to be assuming a two-fold reading: a reading according to the letter, and a reading according to the Spirit.

Paul’s reading established precedent for later Christian interpreters. One key example is found in the Epistle of Barnabas (c.135). In fact, there are key items in Paul’s comments from 1 Corinthians 9 that appear in (Pseudo-)Barnabas and other later interpreters. First, in the example from 1 Corinthians 9 cited above, Paul (coincidentally?!) speaks about himself and Barnabas.[9] Second, immediately after offering his two-fold reading of the Law, Paul makes explicit the distinction between “material things” and “spiritual things.”[10] This is important because in the Epistle of Barnabas the author repeatedly makes the same distinction and follows Paul’s formula for how to read the scriptures in a two-fold way – that is, a material and a spiritual way. For example, after citing texts about Zion’s hope in “a precious stone” (Ep.Barn. 6.2, citing Isa 28:16), (Pseudo-)Barnabas opines, “Does our hope, then rest on a rock? By no means! But he says this because the Lord has established his flesh in strength” (Ep. Barn. 6.3). Notice, this follows the same line of questioning as Paul: cite a scripture about a literal/material item (ox/stone); then ask if this is (just) about a literal/material item (ox/stone), then answer that is not (only) and offer a spiritual reading (in addition). While we must admit that the Epistle of Barnabas is filled with examples of what we would deem problematic interpretations, at the heart of the text’s hermeneutic is the attempt to see beyond the “according to the flesh” meaning and find the “according to the Spirit” meaning, which is to follow Paul’s practice.[11]

Soon after the Epistle of Barnabas, this two-fold reading is first explicitly explained to outsiders by Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho (c.155). Trypho, a Jew, challenges Justin’s claim to follow the law of Moses, since Justin’s community does not follow food and sabbath laws. Justin has several responses, many of which are problematic for their supersessionist and antisemitic claims.[12] We must not sweep those under the rug, because contemporary Christian interpreters must do better. Even so, for us to do better, we can look to the logic, and not just the rhetoric, of Justin’s claim. He insists that Trypho and his fellow Jews follow the law according to the flesh, while Christians follow the law according to the spirit. In other words, the basic hermeneutic for Christians is that of a two-fold reading of scripture which sees beyond the fleshly/literal meaning in order to see a spiritual/theological meaning.

A century after Justin, this two-fold reading is famously expanded by Origen of Alexandria into a three-fold reading. In this way of thinking, between the fleshly and the spiritual is the “psychic” or soul-ful reading, so that scripture corresponds to humans’ body, soul,and spirit (cf., 1 Thess. 5:23), and thus the soul layer has to do with the moral or ethical meaning of the text.[13] It is curious, however, that Origen says precious little about the soul meaning. In fact, Origen scholars have long known that this threefold reading is somewhat of a misnomer.[14] In his On First Principles, he mentions this correlation to the body, soul and spirit of humanity, but he nowhere defines the meaning related to the soul. In contrast, when one looks at Origen’s sermons and commentaries, he is actually employing a twofold reading. This is to say that in practice, as part of his spiritual interpretation, Origen also finds the ethical implication. When doing so, at least in his best moments, Origen derives the ethical implication from the spiritual meaning of scripture, not the fleshly. This, I think is an important distinction for interpreters today who would recover a Christian reading. If one reads an Old Testament passage in a strictly historical framework, and then attempts to find the moral meaning, one likely bases the “moral of the story” on the human characters, which is potentially disastrous with many biblical passages. Origen looks to the divine persona in the text: we learn about morality from God’s character, not the human characters. I will return to this ethical reading below.

At this point, we should continue down the history of hermeneutics to note the shift from Origen’s threefold (or in practice, twofold) to the fourfold reading of the Middle Ages. John Cassian (d. 435) added the eschatological reading to the text, so that the four readings come to be known as the literal (historical), tropological (ethical), allegorical (theological), and anagogical (eschatological). While said fourfold reading does become popular and normative in the Middle Ages, it should be noted that these readings are more like available options for most interpreters, and not a checklist that every sermon or commentary must address. What is more, this alleged fourfold reading is, like Origen’s alleged threefold reading, somewhat of a misnomer. When pressed, it is clear that the medieval thinkers understood a basic twofold distinction for scripture: the letter and the spirit, and the latter could then be subdivided or understood in different ways. The major teachers of this approach, from Cassian to Thomas Aquinas and beyond, agree that the allegorical, tropological and analogical are part of the “spiritual” meaning.[15] This is because, when seeing beyond the historical meaning (the so-called “literal”), one can also see Christ in the text (especially via YHWH Christology) and, since Christ is divine, one sees the character of God in the text (the theological or “allegorical”), and from God’s character one derives both what our character should be (the moral or “tropological”) and our ultimate hope (the eschatological or “anagogical”).

At this point, however, we have to admit that the patristic and medieval writers displayed their fair share of problematic applications of this methodology. This is especially true for late medieval allegories, which eventually prompted the Protestant reaction to them (or, arguably, an overreaction to them). One notorious example is when Pope Innocent III (1161-1216) writes to some of the nobility in Europe and sets up an allegorical reading of Genesis so that the sun represents the higher papal authority while the moon represents royal, but lesser, power.[16] Of course, not only did kings not always agree with the pope’s allegorical interpretation, later Protestant kings in particular rejected this. In the 16^th century, Martin Luther uses this claim from Pope Innocent as an example of the kind of problems inherent in allegorical readings. Namely, Catholics are able to read the Old Testament and see the papacy, the seven sacraments and everything needed to support Roman Catholic claims over Protestants. Protestants, unsurprisingly, are unconvinced by such biblical claims.[17]

When facing such Catholic allegories, Protestants responded by throwing the baby out with the bathwater – not literally, of course (see what I did there?!). The fourfold reading, or really any reading that sees beyond the historical sense, was known as the sensus plenior, the fuller sense. Protestants rejected this understanding and instead insisted on the sensus literalis, the literal sense. Now here it needs to be stipulated that none of the magisterial Reformers rejected Christological reading of scripture. Instead, they claimed to reject allegorical reading, in favor of what is claimed to be the plain sense of scripture which retained the ability to “see” Christ in the Old Testament.[18] The central dispute is the need to prevent any Roman Catholic ecclesiology or soteriology from being “read into” the scriptures.[19] Nevertheless, despite this rejection of “allegory” in theory, in practice the Reformers largely continued offering at least a twofold reading of scripture. From this point forward, without a clear rationale for what seems to be an inconsistent application of allegorical readings, later Protestants come to insist that the literal sense is always the historical sense.[20]

By limiting scripture to only the historical meaning, Protestants eventually lost the tropological or ethical sense of scripture altogether. This was especially true when many Protestants began to accept Rationalism. The Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler (1692–1752), for example, understood the scriptures to be bound up with primitive thinking, and thus it was the task of theologians to interpret the “Natural Religion” revealed therein as something applicable to all times and places. In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) believed that the moral truths found in scripture could and should be exhumed from scripture itself and taught in a philosophically universal sense, so that one has “Transcendental Idealism.” The most famous example of this kind of maneuver is probably the so-called “Jefferson Bible,” which Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846) made by literally (yes, literally) cutting and pasting what he thought were the teachings that still applied to the modern world, an act he described as mining “diamonds from the dunghill”! More impactful was the work of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), who believed the scriptures could be shown to teach a Universal Moral Kingdom, but only once they were properly historically contextualized so that said context could be swept away. Likewise, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) famously championed the idea that the Gospel is the “kernel” that should be kept after the “husk” of ancient Judaism was peeled away.

Once Christian thinkers in general and modern Rationalists in particular decided on what is and what is not godly, then when these biblical scholars look back at scripture, especially Old Testament scripture, they saw a God who is not ethical. For example, God says over and over again, “I am a jealous God” (e.g., Exod 20:5). Jealousy is a vice, not a virtue. And so scholars must look to the text’s original context, where one sees Bronze Age people thinking like Bronze Age people, and assuming the same mentality in their god. The text and its content are dubbed primitive, provincialist, tribalist and unevolved, and thereby one has lost the ability to read the Bible for ethical guidance. Instead, these problematic texts were deemed to be products of history, and the problematic historical content, via the historical critical method, could be swept into the dustbin of history (figuratively speaking), while transcendental ideals were all that would remain. The irony here is that this sounds much like the genealogy of allegory so many of these same scholars would give to discredit pre-modern approaches: Plato’s abstract concepts were used to determine which texts about God need re-interpreted. Be that as it may, in modern critical approaches, ethics preceded interpretation, not the other way around.

Of course, not all Protestants agreed with the Rationalists and their conclusions, but in large part even the Fundamentalists who refuted them remained trapped (figuratively) in a historical framework. Thus, Fundamentalist scholars had to debate whether or not the world was created in six literal days, or whether Jonah was a literal person who was swallowed by a literal fish before being spat up on “the land” (cf., Jonah 2:10; Gen. 1:10) on “the third day” (cf., Jonah 1:17; Gen. 1:13). In the meantime, the ethical implication of the Old Testament is eclipsed by the concern for the historical truthfulness of the texts. All energy is devoted to understanding the text in terms of historicity, and so—at best—a shallow moralistic reading can be derived from the historical figures in the text. In short, biblical ethics, like Paradise, was lost. How then, can biblical ethics be regained?

Biblical Ethics…Regained

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a series of renewal movements arose in Christianity, largely as a reaction to the overly modernistic forms of Christian thinking reviewed above.[21] These renewal movements all entailed a call to reclaim sources and thought from early Christianity in general, and with that call came a desire to retrieve pre-modern exegesis in particular. Many thinkers from these movements have provided helpful ways forward in this area, and so they deserve to be mentioned here in order to give credit where credit is due. What is more, and what is rarely acknowledged, is how each of these movements also resulted in a renewed interest in biblical ethics.

The first is the Oxford Movement, which began in the 19th century Church of England. Its proponents, like John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey, began publishing a series of essays entitled Tracts for the Times (1833-1841), which earned them the label “Tractarians.” In these essays, the authors called for Christians to reclaim the thought and practice of the ancient church. One of their major contributions was the Library of the Fathers series, which eventually was adopted and republished in the series known today as the Ante-Nicene Fathers. The movement dissipated when many of its key proponents, like Newman, left the Anglican Church and became Roman Catholic. Even so, their efforts had a significant impact on the Church of England and the wider Protestant movement. It is also interesting to note one outcome of this movement in terms of ethical social action. Many Tractarians who remained in the Church of England were seen as suspect (“Popish”) and so denied the more prestigious appointments. Instead, many served in economically depressed areas, which caused them to help form the Christian Social Union in 1889.[22] The correlation between reclaiming ancient Christian readings and adapting to new moral demands recurs in other examples of retrieval movements that follow.

Another retrieval movement emerged in the early 20th century in Catholic France. It became known as “Nouvelle théologie,” despite its proponents calling for a return to the older sources. This retrieval is summed up by the French term, “ressourcement.” While many Protestants tend to assume that all Catholic thinkers rely on patristic sources, the reality has often been different for Roman Catholic scholars. The so-called “new” theologians found that Thomistic and Neoscholastic thought had overshadowed the more ancient Christian views and practices. Therefore, their theological works sought to retrieve an ancient Christian hermeneutic for the modern church. Like the English Tractarians, they also produced a series of patristic writings translated into French (along with critical editions) in the series named Sources Chrétiennes (1942-). Although this movement primarily affected Roman Catholic thought, it has also had a wider impact on many Protestants.[23] Another comparison with the Oxford movement is the fact that many in the Nouvelle théologie movement also spoke out against social injustices and issued calls for political action.[24] It is widely recognized that liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and Oscar Romero studied in Europe at the height of this movement and were influenced by it. Once again, we have a tie between the retrieval of the ancient and the promotion of the ethical.

Another key example of a retrieval movement is the “New Yale School of Theology” or “postliberal” theology. The movement is influenced by Karl Barth, who himself had delved deeply into patristic sources,[25] but its leading proponents were Americans George Lindbeck[26] and Hans Frei.[27] The notion of post-liberalism reflects a specific concern with the German Liberal approach to higher criticism: the Yale school did not reject historical critical studies as incorrect, but they did deem that approach to be insufficient. As part of their efforts to supplement the historicizing approach of modernity, they turned to pre-modern sources for support.[28] Once again there is a connection here to social concerns in general and virtue ethics in particular. For example, one of the most famous students of the Yale school was Stanley Hauerwas, who incorporated the narratival approach into his system of virtue ethics.[29]

Finally, we come to a loosely connected group of thinkers that can be labelled Evangelical Catholics. That title was championed by Lutheran theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson who impacted many others through their promotion of ecumenical dialogue. Because Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics found they share most core doctrines (while still disagreeing largely in terms of ecclesiology and soteriology), the patristic sources and practices offered common ground for dialogue. Other Evangelicals who shared a desire for ecumenical dialogue and the value of ancient tradition should be mentioned here as well. Thomas Oden (also a student of the Yale school) preferred the term “Paleo-Orthodoxy,”[30] and many like Robert E. Webber championed the category of the “Ancient-Future Church.” At this point, we are dealing with too diffuse of a movement to make any generalizations about ties between Evangelical-Catholic and Paleo-Orthodox concerns and social implications; suffice it to say that there are numerous examples where their retrieval of ancient Christian sources also coincided with ethical concerns.[31]

These various retrieval movements, therefore, have provided a road-map (not literally) for ways to reclaim a Christian reading of the scriptures and, in particular, a recovery of an ethical reading of the Old Testament. In what follows, I will first address two false premises that need to be understood before reclaiming a theological reading of scripture, followed by a brief look at the Psalms as a case study to an alternative approach that allows for a multi-layered reading.

When reclaiming a Christian reading of the Old Testament for ethical purposes, we need to acknowledge two false premises. First, when Protestants claim the literal interpretation, they tend to refer to a historical meaning. This premise, however, is born out of modernistic thinking. In this way of defining the literal meaning, how can the interpreter navigate different genres of literature like apocalypticism, parables and prophetic poetry? When trapped in a definition of truth that thinks only in terms of historicity, both fundamentalists and liberals are doomed to fighting the wars mentioned above about literal six-day creation and literal interpretations of Jonah, not to mention the literal interpretation of apocalyptic texts like Revelation. The early church (along with the Jewish Rabbinic tradition) never denied the historicity of these events out of skepticism about miracles; instead, they openly read these texts as parabolic and figurative. What is the “literal” meaning of a “literary” text? It is often not the kind discovered only with the tools of a historian. In short, we are dealing with something more aligned with the humanities than with the sciences.

A second false premise for Protestants in modernity is that texts only have one meaning. This is a modernistic idea. Reading a poem, one finds multiple layers of meaning: different meanings to different readers; different meanings to the same reader under different life circumstances, etc. To ask what is the meaning of a certain poem, the answer in part depends on what one is looking for in that meaning and it depends on a variety of factors. While this is intuitive to most people when it comes to poems, it is not obvious to modern Protestants when reading the Old Testament – despite the fact that the majority of our Old Testament is in poetic form![32] Once we acknowledge that it is a false premise to claim that a text only has one meaning, we can turn to Old Testament texts and allow for various layers of meanings. Let us take the book of Psalms as a case study.

When it comes to the Psalms, we should acknowledge that our inability to read the Psalms as Christians is one of the biggest losses in modernity, and this likely started when we lost our ability to sing the Psalms since we lost the inherent poetic nature of the genre. If the Psalms are not within arm’s reach in the library of one’s mind, then the Psalms will not shape daily activity and imagination, including our imagination when reading the rest of the scriptures. Ancient Christians continued Israel’s practice of using the Psalter as their primary hymnbook. Therefore, they repeatedly voiced their prayers in words shaped by the Psalms.

How did the ancients interpret the Psalms since they were so familiar with them? Well, if we were to ask them who is the Ego or speaker of the Psalms, early Christians would acknowledge that it is—generally—David. These are, after all, the “Psalms of David.” This is not to ignore all the exceptions, where the psalms themselves identify additional authors, which the early church knew and accepted. It is to say they are—in some way—of David. So as to who is the speaker of the psalm, in general the early Christians know it to be the human author, David. And yet, that is not whole of it. Who else is singing these Psalms? As just mentioned, it is Israel’s hymnbook. So, David (et al.) originally penned the Psalms, and Israel continued to pray them, making Israel corporately the Ego of the text.

Then again, at another level, most early Christians likely would not start with David or Israel, but instead would begin by seeing Jesus is the speaker in the Psalms (e.g., 1 Clem. 16.15). In cases like Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” this is easy for us moderns to accept because we know that historically Jesus did pray this from the cross (Matt. 27:46). Notice in this particular case, we might say, Jesus literally voiced the psalm. However, for the early church, this is only the start: Jesus can be understood to be the speaker of virtually every psalm. This works on several levels: Jesus is the Son of David, the fulfillment of the messianic hopes of David’s royal line, and Jesus is the embodiment of Israel. Some early Christians like Augustine even have a way to attributing the psalms of repentance to Jesus, while remaining committed to the Christ’s personal sinlessness: Christ as the head the church confesses and repents on behalf of his sinful body.[33]

This brings us to another layer found in the Psalms: the church is also the speaker. As Christ’s body, the church prays through these texts, and as the ongoing spiritual Israel (cf., Gal. 6:16), the Psalter continues to be the people of God’s hymnbook. Even that, however, does not exhaust the layers of the meaning in the psalms: the speaker of the Psalm can be the church corporately and also a soul individually. Since individuals within the church also memorize these psalms and pray them privately, the speaker can be any individual believer. Psalm 42:1, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God,” applies to anyone who prays it in faith.

Now, if one holds the false premise that texts have only one meaning, then one would have to look at this list as if it were a multiple-choice test: Who is the speaker of the psalms? a. David, b. Israel, c. Jesus, d. the church, e. the soul. However, for ancient and medieval Christians, the answer is “f. all of the above”! In short, the notion that a text’s meaning is found at the historical-literal level, and that texts only have one meaning are false assumptions.

With these false and modernistic premises removed, we can point to the shape of a Christian ethic that will be based on a theological reading of the scriptures, both Old and New. I stated above that Origen in practice thinks more in terms of a twofold reading of scripture, with the understanding that the spiritual/theological meaning can then provide the content for our moral formation – what in his On First Principles is call the “soul” meaning. What kind of moral system or ethical framework should we expect from a Christian reading?

In general, ethicists speak of three kinds of moral systems: deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics. Let me briefly assess the prospects of each in relation to a Christian reading of the Old Testament. While we might expect a Christian reading of scripture to produce a deontological approach, especially if we are to give equal voice to the Old Testament and its many commandments, I suggest that this is in fact not the kind of ethics that will result from our project.[34] What is the basis for such moral laws? Are they arbitrarily chosen by God? If not, are these moral absolutes that constrain even God? Such a view would make God beholden to concepts like justice. Instead, for Christianity, God is absolutely free, and the human understanding of justice is in fact dependent on God’s character. Furthermore, deontological ethics would be incredibly problematic if we imagined that there are simply abstract philosophical principles that govern morality independent of the developments of history. We certainly could not expect to discover the kind of deontological ethics that Kant taught (mentioned above), wherein once the moral imperatives of the scriptures are mined they can be taught and practiced apart from their original casing in Israel’s scriptures – what Jefferson called the “dunghill” and Harnack called the discardable “husk.”

Next, the second moral system, consequentialist, can be promptly set aside. Christians cannot understand morality as a utilitarian or pragmatic approach to weighing what means are justified by certain ends. This is not to say that Christians should ignore consequentialist considerations altogether,[35] but that these cannot be the basis for a wider approach to ethics. We are left, then, to consider virtue ethics.

To put it succinctly, in virtue ethics if one wishes do what is right, then one should attempt to do what a virtuous person would do. Making the right choice should become a habit, and one’s habits form one’s character. Aristotle lists the four cardinal virtues as prudence, justice, temperance and courage. The only question is how does one define these concepts. Early Christian writers like Augustine supplement Aristotle here. First, they add three more virtues, faith, hope and love – making the seven heavenly virtues a counter to the seven deadly sins. What is more important than the exact number or the addition of the theological virtues, is the way all seven should be defined for Christians: Christians know what justice is by looking to the character of God revealed in Christ. God is a just God, so we look to God’s character in order to know how to be just people. God is love, so we look to God’s character in order to know how to be loving people.

This idea is probably one of the most common statements in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew scriptures. Repeatedly, God calls the people to imitate divine virtue: “Speak to all the congregation of the Israelites and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”[36] Of course, God also gives commandments. Yes, God gives all kinds of laws and rituals and things that are in place. God even inspires books of wisdom that provide us with something like consequentialist reasoning.[37] Even so, these deontological and consequentialist elements all fall under the larger virtue ethic of scripture: namely, the role that the narrative of Israel’s Lord remaining faithful to the covenant in keeping with God’s own divine virtue. Therefore, a truly biblical ethic will take the shape of virtue ethics, ethics determined by God’s character. Thus, it would be folly to try to mine a deontological ethic out of the biblical narrative, as the modern Rationalists did.

At this point, we should take stock of the alternatives. In a modern Protestant rationalist way of thinking, the task of finding divine virtue in the Old Testament is difficult at best. The Old Testament God, to the modern reader, often looks unvirtuous. How are we to address the scriptures and honestly draw from it something like a virtue ethic? This is precisely where YHWH Christology can help. If Jesus is not YHWH, then we could easily slip into some kind of neo-Marcionism or neo-Modalism: The Old Testament God is the Father, but we follow the character of the New Testament God, the Son. If, however, we embrace YHWH Christology, we have to reject any kind of Marcionite or Modalist contrast between the character of God in the Old Testament and the character of God in the New Testament.

Even so, what are we to do with difficult passages in the Old Testament where God seems less than virtuous? This begs the question: how do we know that certain actions should be deemed unvirtuous? For Christians, certain behaviors are known to be less than virtuous, not because we have some sort of abstract philosophical principle that we impose on the text. Certain passages’ depiction of God are known to be less than virtuous because of God’s own standard of virtue revealed in those same scriptures. Obviously, working out all the details of this kind of virtue ethic is beyond what I can accomplish here, but I can point to promising possibilities. When we see something that looks like an unvirtuous representation of God, we first examine what this text is saying at its most basic, historical, fleshly level. But then we remember that this is only one layer of the text’s meaning! God told Abraham to perform a child sacrifice, which likely–in its original, pre-canonical context–reflects a socio-religious milieu wherein child sacrifice to appease a deity was normal. Even so, Abraham seems to trust that there must be more to see here, for he tells his servant that he and Isaac will return (Gen 22:5; cf., Heb 11:19). Therefore, when we read seemingly unloving statements about God’s actions toward Israel, which can be found throughout the all the books of history and especially in the prophets, then we read these in light of the deeper meanings we find revealed in God’s unfailing, never-changing, covenantal love for Israel, which is also found throughout the books of history and the prophets, not to mention the writings.[38] The point is that we do not need to apologize for a depiction of God as it is apparently unvirtuous in any given passage, nor do we need to dismiss it as historically bound and irrelevant (if not un-inspired). Nor do we need to allegorize it in the way allegory allegedly does (i.e., the bad kind of allegory so often maligned in modernity). Instead, we acknowledge the historically situated nature of the text while also seeing beyond this situatedness to the other layers of meaning in the same text.

Let us take the example of Job. Throughout the body of this text, Job repeatedly calls for God to appear and answer Job’s petition. God is put on trial. This is a stunning event: is there any corollary where a Bronze Age king tolerates this tone from one of his subjects? Much less, does any Bronze Age god allow himself to be summoned down from a heavenly throne to answer the demands of a mere mortal? And yet that is exactly what Job’s God does allow: “God comes in awesome majesty” (37:22), and in the storm out of the desert (38:1) the LORD appears to Job and gives an answer. In the same way, it should not surprise us when we find Israel assuming that God acts in ways that seem like justice to Bronze Age people, at least at the fleshly, historical level. And yet we should equally not be surprised to find that the Lord God of Israel leads the covenant people to a much higher understanding of justice (e.g., Jer 31:29-30). God is not just a king or a shepherd to Israel. God is the bridegroom from the Song of Solomon who, as was revealed to Hosea, must find a way to be faithful to his bride even when she has been unfaithful. God loves with immutable love. God acts with immeasurable justice. God saves with unimaginable grace. So yes, we can look to the scriptures and derive our ethics from the character of God. Because we believe that Jesus is the Lord of Israel’s scriptures. And we believe, therefore, that we can look to these scriptures and find virtue.

Admittedly, I can only gesture in the direction that this kind of retrieval can go. I have used the motif of what comes “after” in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre: if we are not just chronologically-after virtue but pursuing-after virtue, what have we regained?[39] I have also used the motif of what has been “lost,” like Milton, who wrote both Paradise Lost and (the less commonly read) Paradise Regained: paradise regained of course comes with all the joys and benefits of a relationship with God. In addition to retrieving virtue, our task is to retrieve the mystical presence of our Lord encountered in the scriptures. In this way, when we read the Song of Solomon or the Psalms, we re-enter in a mystical sense into Paradise, the enclosed garden (Song of Solomon 4:12), where Jesus is the lover of his Church.

YHWH Christology, one of the primary hermeneutic keys for ancient Christians, helps us retrieve this encounter. Jesus is the Lord for whom the voice in the wilderness prepared the way (cf., Isa 40:3; Mal 3:1; and Mark 1:2-3).[40] Jesus is the “I AM” who preceded Abraham (John 8:58)^[41] and even existed since the beginning (John 1:1). What is more, Jesus is the one whom Isaiah saw enthroned in glory (cf., Isa. 6:1) according to John 12:41. In this way, we can see Jesus in our Old Testament as the LORD who said “be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2), and thereby begin a retrieval of a virtue ethic that incorporates the whole of our canon.

Note: footnotes are to be found on the digital version of this article at www.christsianethicstoday.com

David E. Wilhite is Associate Professor of Religion at Baylor University.

[1] See discussion in Brian J. Tabb and Andrew M. King (eds.), Five Views of Christ in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022).

[2] For the evidence that theophanies were read as Christophanies in the second century and beyond, see D. Georges Legeay, “L’Ange et les théophanies dans l’Ecriture Sainte d’après la doctrine des Pères,” Revue Thomiste 10 (1902): 138-158, 405-424; and Revue Thomiste 11 (1903): 46-69, 125-154. For an introduction to and bibliography of YHWH-Christology in the early Christian centuries, see Bogdan G. Bucur, “From Jewish Apocalypticism to Orthodox Mysticism,” in The Orthodox Christian World, ed. Augustine Casiday (London: Routledge, 2012), 466-80, esp. 473; and Bucur, “Exegesis of Biblical Theophanies in Byzantine Hymnography: Rewritten Bible?,” Theological Studies 68 (1 2016), 92-112, esp. 97-98. Also see

[3] E.g., some of this material has been studied more in Paul by David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992; reprinted Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017). N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 2:705, agrees, calling it “Yahweh Christology” in certain Pauline passages. More “Yahweh texts” have recently been studies by Scott Brazil, Jesus and YHWH-Texts in the Synoptic Gospels (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2024). Several advocates of “early high Christology” could be mentioned here as well (discussed above).

[4] See especially Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: “God Crucified” and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), which is a collection of essays expanding upon his earlier work, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Another scholar who has corroborated and expanded Bauckham’s treatment of the Gospels is Simon J. Gathercole, The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). “Identity,” Bauckham argues is preferable and more emic than “ontology,” which is said to be anachronistic and bearing the baggage of later philosophically informed Christianity. See a review of Bauckham and others on this concept in Nina Henrichs-Tarasenkova, Luke’s Christology of Divine Identity (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2015), 56-88 (= Chapter 3, “Exploring the Categories of Personal and Divine Identity”). While we do not dispute the usefulness of the category of identity, it should be noted that this too is a later concept, only it is much later and the product of late modernity and postcolonialism. In effect, “identity” turns out to be a concept more familiar to us than to the ancient authors.

[5] Esp. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Readings in the Fourfold Gospel Witness (London: SPCK, 2015). Elsewhere, Hays tends to speak vaguely of how “Jesus somehow embodies the presence of Israel’s God.” See Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 69.

[6] As I have argued elsewhere: Wilhite, “Jesus in The Infancy Gospel of ‘the Israelite’ and the God of Israel,” Studia Patristica 126.23 (2021), 3-16; idem, “Is Jesus YHWH?: Two De-Judaizing Trajectories of Marcion and Justin,” Forum 9 (1 2020), 29-56; idem, “Jesus is Lord of the Old Testament: Retrieving YHWH Christology,” Pro Ecclesia 32 (3-4 2023): 334-55; idem, “Who is the Good Shepherd? Answers from Early African Sources,” in Early Christians and Their Art, ed. Mikeal Parsons and Robin Jensen (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2024), 143-74.

[7] The exception is the “Sword Bible,” but even then the editors explain the unique practice of making the words of “God” in the Old Testament in red like the words of “Jesus” in the New Testament, which is to say that that Jesus is not the Lord speaking in the Old Testament.

[8] 1 Cor 9:9-10 (NRSVUE); cf., 1 Tim 5:18

[9] 1 Cor 9:6, “Or is only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living?”

[10] 1 Cor 9:11, “If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we harvest material things?”

[11] Paul distinguishes between Israel “according to the flesh (κατὰ σάρκα)” (Rom 9:3) the true Israel: “for they are not all Israel that are from Israel” (Rom 9:6). For the purposes of this discussion, it is telling that this distinction comes after Paul’s stated concern about the ethical implications of the scriptures: “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Rom 8:5). When read in this light, the Epistle of Barnabas is not strictly a supersessionist text, since it does not see the church (or the New Covenant, baptism, the Eucharist, etc.) as replacing Israel (or the Old Covenant, circumcision, the sacrificial system, etc.) Instead, these things are spiritually equivalent, and thus the one is a continuation of the other.

[12] YHWH Christology offers a correction to supersessionism: by replacing the theological supersessionism of modern Christianity (i.e., God the Father of the OT is superseded by God the Son in the New Testament), there is no basis for any supersessionist claims about Israel being superseded by the gentile church, circumcision being superseded by baptism, etc., etc. See Wilhite, The Gospel According to Heretics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 38-39.

[13] I.e., that which should, but not necessarily does, guide the psuchē or “mind” since the soul/mind can be affected by the flesh, unlike the immaterial spirit. Cf., 1 Cor. 2:14-15, for the distinction between the psuchikos anthropos or the “natural man” (KJV) or the “unspiritual (NRSVUE),” and the pneumatikos or “spiritual” one.

[14] See discussion in Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen (Ignatius Press, 2007 [French orig. 1950]); Peter William Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Randall James, Learning the Language of Scripture: Origen, Wisdom, and the Logic of Interpretation (Studies in Systematic Theology 24; Leiden: Brill, 2021).

[15] See John Cassian, Conferences 14.8; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Pars Prima, Q1, Art.10; also, cf., The Catechism of the Catholic Church, para.115-18.

[16] To Acerbius and the Nobles of Tuscany (1198).

[17] See citations and discussion in Peter Harrison, “Protestantism and the Making of Modern Science,” in Protestantism after 500 Years, ed. Thomas Albert Howard and Mark A. Noll (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 98-120.

[18] At least, this was their stated position. In practice, they frequently employed allegory. Martin Luther, for example, offered much the same interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan as Augustine’s infamous rendition (discussed at the beginning of the second lecture); see Laato, “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” 4. Generations later, Jonathan Edwards can affirm “two senses,” a literal reading and a “mystical” meaning; see Stephen J. Stein, “Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977), 99-113, at 111.

[19] E.g. the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7.

[20] For a full treatment of the history of this methodology, especially as it relates to the New Testament and thereby uniquely Christian interpretations, see William Baird, History of New Testament Research, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 2003, 2013); and W. G. Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (London: SCM, 2012).

[21] See John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. Kathryn Tannner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 583-99; W. David Buschart and Kent D. Eilers, Theology as Retrieval: Receiving the Past, Renewing the Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015); and Darren Sarisky (ed.), Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal (London: T&T Clark, 2017).

[22] Peter d’Alroy Jones, Christian Socialist Revival, 1877-1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 88-94.

[23] See Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology a Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[24] See secondary sources and discussion of this topic in Sam Pomery, “Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of Nouvelle Théologie,” Modern Theology 39 (3 2023), 508-22.

[25] His Church Dogmatics is peppered with lengthy asides from the church fathers. See E.P. Meijering, Von den Kirchenvätern zu Karl Barth: Das altkirchliche Dogma in der “Kirchlichen Dogmatic” (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1993). In fact, the very last thing Barth penned was a lecture he never delivered since he died the next day. In it he insisted that on listening to the “Fathers who have gone before in the faith,” since “God is not a God of the dead but of the living.” See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 498.

[26] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984).

[27] Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

[28] Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naivete: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology, 2^nd ed. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995).

[29] David B. Hunsicker, The Making of Stanley Hauerwas: Bridging Barth and Postliberalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).

[30] Oden, Agenda for Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 57.

[31] E.g., Oden’s concern late in life with recognizing the global nature of ancient Christianity which could offer ways to de-center European hegemony; see his How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010). Likewise, Webber’s concerns in his early work, The Secular Saint: A Case for Evangelical Social Responsibility (Zondervan, 1979), can be seen as continuing to drive much of his later thought (cf., the 2004 reprint of The Secular Saint by Wipf & Stock).

[32] For example, even in the so-called books of “history, such as the Pentateuch, God only speaks in poetic form; see Brent A. Strawn, “God’s Pentateuchal Poesy: Why Does the Lord Speak in Poetry in the Torah (and Other Places Too)?”, in Art Seeking Understanding, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey and Robert C. Roberts (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2024).

[33] See details and discussion in Michael Allen, “Totus Christus and Praying the Psalms,” Pro Ecclesia 29 (1 2020), 45-52.

[34] Cf., the recent engagement with Barth’s version of deontology in Gerald McKenny, Karl Barth’s Moral Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), esp. 177-85.

[35] For a recent attempt at Christian consequentialism, see John E. Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Maiden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

[36] Lev 19:2 (NRSVUE).

[37] Cf., Prov. 26:4-5, “Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.” Even so, see Arthur Jan Keefer, The Book of Proverbs and Virtue Ethics: Integrating the Biblical and Philosophical Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[38] Obviously, there is still debate to be had, which is the point. One cannot dismiss the God of Genesis from our ethical consideration because – at the fleshly/historical/”literal” level the text portrays bronze age view of justice and sovereignty. For several perspectives, see Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray & Michael C. Rea (eds.), Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[39] MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3^rd ed. (Southbend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981 original]).

[40] For Mark in particular, I am indebted to Adam Winn; see his position in Larry Hurtado, Sandra Hubenthal, Daniel Kirk, and Adam Winn, Mark’s Christology: Four Views (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021), 211-40 (= Winn’s chapter, “The Case for Jesus as the YHWH of Israel in the Gospel of Mark”).

^[41] For the other “I AM” sayings, see John 4:25-26; 6:19-21, 41, 51; 8:12, 18-30, 54-59; 13:16-20; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1, 5; 18:3-9.