Interpretation. A Journal of Bible and Theology 41 (April, 1987): The Sermon on the Mount

A JOURNAL OF BIBLE AND THEOLOGY ~ APRIL 1987 nterpretati on EDITOR PAUL]' ACHTEMEIER Profe.l,wr olBiblicalln/elpre/a...

Author: Robert A. Guelich | Jack Dean Kingsbury | Lisa S. Cahill | Richard Lischer

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A JOURNAL OF BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

~ APRIL 1987

nterpretati on

EDITOR PAUL]' ACHTEMEIER Profe.l,wr olBiblicalln/elpre/a/ion*

ASSOCIATE EDITORS JACK DEAN KINGSBURY, Pmfe,uor olBibliml Theolo/{l'*

Book Reviews

JOHN B. TROTrI, Marketing Librlll-ian, Pmf'e,I,\(J/' 0( Biblio!{raPh)'*

EDITORIAL BOARD T.

HARTLEY HALL, Presidell/*

IV, Chairman

JAMES L. MAYS Prof'e,uor of' Hebrew ami Old Te,l/amell/* D. CAMERON MURCHISON AS,locia/e Prole_H(}/" of' Pas/oml Theolo/{l' alUl Educa/ion* CHARLES M. SWEZEY Pmfe,uor 01 Chris/iall E/hiC.\* REBECCA H. WEAVER A.I.Iis/(III/ Prof'e,lsor of' Church HiJ/()/~'*

*Union Theolo!{iml Semilllll)' ill Vilginia

ADVISORY COUNCIL WALLACE M. ALSTON, JR. Pm/or, Na.uau Pre,'h)'lenllll Church Prince/on, New jn,e;.' FRED B. CRADDOCK Prole,I,lOr of' New Tes/amen/ (jlld Preachill!{ The Candler School of'Theo/rI/{l' Emll/~' Univf1:"il)' GABRIEL F ACKRE Proje,uor of' Chi,l/iol/ Theolo/{l' Andover New/on T/telllo!{imi Center DAVID M. GUNN Prof'e,uor of' Old Te,l/amen/ Lml!{Ua!{f, Li/em/ure, alUl E,w/{fsis Columbia Theolo!{ical Semin(jJ~' ROLAND E. MURPHY, O. CARM. Prole,uor ol Biblical Studies The Divinil)' School, Duke UniveJ:,il)' PHEME PERKINS Pmf'e,uor of'Thelllo/{l' Bos/on Col/e!{e JOHN H. P. RWMANN Pmle,uor of'New Tes/amen/ Lu/hemn Theolll!{imi Semiuan' al Phiirllid/J/tia DAVID C. STEINMETZ Profenor of Church History and Doctrine The Divinity School, Duke University GEORGE W. STROUP Professor of Theology Columbia Theological Seminary

STAFF MARY

T.

ATKINSON,

Managing Editor

PHYLLIS]' DOUTHAT, MARY EVELYN SWEZEY

Circulation Associate Circulation Associate

Interpretation A JOURNAL OF BIBLE AND THEOLOGY

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Interpretation [~[ A JOURNAL OF BIBLE AND THEOLOGY APRIL 1987

VOLUME XLI

NUMBER 2

CONTENTS 115 Editorial 117 Interpreting the Sermon on the Mount ROBERT

A. GUELICH

131 The Place, Structure, and Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount JACK DEAN KINGSBURY

144 The Ethical Implications of the Sermon on the Mount LISA SOWLE CAHILL

157 The Sermon on the Mount as Radical Pastoral Care RICHARD LISCHER

170 Expository Articles 170 Matthew 5:43-48 BONNIE BOWMAN THURSTON

173 Matthew 6:5-15 PHILIP B. HARNER

179 Matthew 6:24-34 CHARLES

E.

CARLSTON

BOOKS 184 Major Book Reviews 184 The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, by Norman K. Gottwald J. GERALD JANZEN

187 Matthew as Story, by Jack Dean Kingsbury DENNIS DULING

190 Preaching, by Fred B. Craddock RICHARD LISCHER

193 Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise, by Ronald F. Thiemann

196 Shorter Reviews and Notices 220 Books Received

RALPH HJELM

Copyright 1987 by Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

Editorial F PEOPLE KNOW ANYTHING at all about the Bible, it will surely include material found in Matthew 5-7. The Golden Rule, turning the other cheek, the Lord's Prayer, walking the straight and narrow-all are drawn from its content. Yet despite its familiarity, the three chapters that make up what is popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount (wrongly named; Matthew 5:2 refers to it not as preaching but as teaching) continue to intrigue, baffle, and enlighten interpreters even after some two millenia of study. Its importance for the Christian church can hardly be exaggerated. It was the most widely cited passage of Scripture in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, played a major part in the way various reform movements of the sixteenth century understood their relationship to secular society, and has continued to playa role in the way Christians understand themselves and their role in contemporary life. It is therefore an appropriate topic for those interested in biblical interpretation to address. A broad survey of the many ways the Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted makes up the content of the first article. In it, Robert Guelich isolates the characteristic ways of viewing this biblical passage which have emerged in critical periods of the life of the church, and shows how each view has influenced the way Christian life was understood within the larger society of its time. Despite what Guelich calls the "sea of literature" thus produced, the Sermon, showing itself to be anything but self-evident in meaning, continues to challenge interpreters who seek to find the Christian path within secular society. The article is an excellent guide into that challenge and some of its possible solutions. Because the Sermon on the Mount is part of the larger literary entity we know as the Gospel of Matthew, an understanding of the Sermon depends in large measure on an understanding of its place and function within the larger context of that Gospel. In the second article, Jack Dean Kingsbury leads the reader step by step through an analysis of that context and the way the Sermon is related to it. Using this larger context to interpret the Sermon, Kingsbury tackles the vexed problem of the intention of these chapters: Did Matthew intend them to be an impossible ideal, or did he intend them as an actual guide for Christian living? Considering the Sermon passage by passage, from the opening Beatitudes to the closing parable of Houses, Kingsbury shows how Matthew made clear his intention. The article thus constitutes an invaluable aid for the interpreter of this portion of Matthew's Gospel.

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In the third article, Lisa Sowle Cahill invites the reader to consider with her the broader implications for Christian ethics which a careful interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount inevitably provokes. Assuming the canonical authority and the literary coherence of the Gospel of Matthew, Cahill examines the ethical implications of the Sermon for a variety of contemporary problems, including ethics as relationship and action, and as imitation of God; the impact of eschatological judgment on ethical decision making; and the social dimensions of the righteousness expected of the Christian disciple, including the problems of nonviolence and nonresistance to evil. Thoughtful reading of this carefully reasoned article will increase one's sensitivity to the ethical implication for contemporary life of the sayings of Jesus found in these three chapters of Matthew. Because the Sermon on the Mount represents an address not only to the individual believer but also to the community of believers, it is necessary to view it from that perspective as well. In the final article, Richard Lischer looks at the Sermon from the perspective of the actual life of that community to see what resources it has to offer. Noting what he finds to be a puzzling lack of references to the Sermon in contemporary literature devoted to the practical aspects of church life, a lack all the more surprising because of the organic relationship Lischer finds between this passage from Matthew and the life and ministry of the present-day congregation, Lischer examines how the Sermon can function in two of those aspects: pastoral care and the liturgical life of the community. Written from a close acquaintance with theology and biblical interpretation, this essay will reward those who read it carefully with a renewed appreciation of the value of the Sermon on the Mount for the Christian life of the community of believers. The interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is continued in the three expository articles, each dealing with a passage chosen from the material contained in it. In an exposition of Matthew 5 :43-48, Bonnie Bowman Thurston examines the intimidating demand that the Christian be "perfect" and aids the reader in finding the levels of meaning contained in that command. Philip B. Harner looks at Matthew 6:5-15 and helps the reader to a fuller understanding of the prayer Jesus commended to his disciples. In the third exposition, Charles E. Carlston examines Matthew 6:24-34, warning of the dangers of understanding the Word of God as a law, or simply as an exhortation to "try harder." Taken together, these articles provide the reader with a careful look at a most familiar yet most enigmatic passage from the Bible.

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Interpreting the Sermon on the Mount

ROBERT A. GUELICH Teaching Minister and Theologian in Residence The Colonial Church of Edina, Edina, Minnesota

Although interpreters have been occupied with the Sermon on the Mount for nearly two millenia, and have produced widely differing results, the challenge of these verses for Christians remains undiluted.

A

CCORDING TO W. S. KISSINGER, "No portion of the Scriptures was more frequently quoted and referred to by the Ante-N icene writers than the Sermon on the Mount." 1 The same may still obtain for our day when one recognizes that the so-called Sermon on the Mount of Matthew 5: 1-7:29 contains such well-known passages as the Beatitudes (5:3-11), the Lord's Prayer (6:9-13), and the Golden Rule (7: 12). Several exhortations have become ethical maxims such as turning the other cheek (5:39), going the extra mile (5:41), loving one's enemies (5:44), and walking the straight and narrow (7: 13-14). Familiarity, however, does not insure understanding. The sea of literature on the Sermon demonstrates that the meaning of the Sermon is anything but self-evident. So vast is this literary sea that no one has undertaken the task of charting the waters by writing a complete history of the Sermon's interpretation. 2 Yet trends and issues have emerged over the l. The Sermon on the Mount: A History of Interpretation and Bibliography, ATLA Bibliography Series 3 (Meteuchen, NJ: 1975), p. 6. 2. Four works offer some guidance: Harvey K. McArthur, Understanding the Sermon on the Mount (New York: Harpers, 1960); Kissinger, The Sermon on the Mount; Ursula Berner, Die Bergpredigt: Rezeption und Auslegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979); Clarence Bauman, The Sermon on the Mount: The Modern Quest fOT its Meaning (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985).

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centurie,s that provide an important setting for one seeking to understand and interpret the Sermon for an audience removed by nearly two millennia. 1. THE PRE-REFORMATION ERA

A review of the Ante-Nicene writers' use of biblical texts reveals that "the fifth chapter of Matthew appears more often in their works than any other single chapter, and Matthew 5-7 more frequently than any other three chapters in the entire Bible.,,3 Those writers indicate that the early church understood these teachings to be from] esus and prescriptive for the life of the Christian. For example, the Didache made frequent reference to passages from the Sermon in its exposition of the "way of life." Justin drew from much of Matthew 5 to describe Christian conduct in his apology addressed to the Emperor Antonius Pius (Apol. I, 14-16). Augustine prefaced our oldest commentary on the Sermon by referring to it as "the perfect measure of the Christian life.,,4 Though the question of practicability never directly arose during this period, we do find indirect signs of the early church's struggle to apply these teachings. "Without cause"s softens] esus' prohibition of anger. ]ustin's]ewish partner in dialogue, Trypho, hints at the idealistic tone of these demands when he says, "But the precepts in what you call your Gospel are so marvelous and great that I don't think that anyone could possibly keep them" (Dial. with Trypho, 12). Chrysostom may also betray this concern in his exhortation on 6:25-34: "Let us not therefore suppose his injunctions are impossible: for there are many who duly perform them, even as it is.,,6 After Constantine and the mass conversion of the populace to Christianity, a tendency towards a two-level Christianity emerged. Those for whom conversation meant rigorously following] esus' demands that eventuated in an ascetic withdrawal from the world stood in contrast to the masses who professed Christ and were baptized into the church. This distinction was clearly spelled out by Aquinas. The masses lived by the "precepts" or "the commandments" necessary for salvation, while those who chose a higher way towards perfection and greater merit followed the "counsels of perfection" or the "evangelical counsels" which the Lord added to the "precepts" (Summa Theol. I, IIae. cvii-cviii). More and more the Sermon's demands came to be interpreted as "evangelical counsels" attainable by a few. Thus one concedes the Sermon's imprac3. Kissinger, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 6. 4. The Preaching of Augustine, ed. Jeroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p. l. 5. Eikei in D L W 0 fl.l3 it syr; ir laL Or PL . 6. The Preaching ofChrysostom: Homilies on the Sermon on the MOLl,nt, ed. Jeroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p. 174.

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Interpreting the Sermon on the Mount Interpretation

ticability by recognizing that most of the demands were not even for every Christian.

2.

THE REFORMATION ERA

A major shift in interpreting the Sermon emerged from the sixteenthcentury reformation. Oversimplified, three approaches arose: Luther's, Calvin's, and the Anabaptists'. The "Anabaptists" or radical reformers 7 stand out because they took the Sermon to be the charter for the Christian life. Viewed as a compendium of Jesus' teaching, the Sermon represented a new law commensurate with the coming of the Kingdom of God and provi~ed the norm for every believer. Inevitably the demands of the Sermon did not mix with the sociopolitical realities of this world. Consequently, some took a revolutionary tack and attempted to build a new society, the Kingdom of God, based on the Sermon's principles (e.g., Munzer, the Zwickau prophets, the Melchiorists). The majority, however, settled for a radical separation of church and state and a withdrawal from direct participation in sociopolitical structures that might compromise the principles of the Sermon (e.g., the Swiss Brethren and the Mennonites). Thus, in their own way, the radical reformers illustrate the impracticability of the Sermon's demands for life in the "real" world. Luther's work on the Sermon addressed specifically the issue of practicability by focusing on two targets, the "canonists" and the Anabaptists. 8 On the one hand, he confronted the double standard of the "canonists" of the Roman Church who took the Sermon's demands as optional "counsels" for a select few, while holding the "precepts" or "commandments" to be necessary for salvation for all. On the other hand, he confronted the radical reformers who sought to apply the Sermon's demands literally for all believers leading either to an uncompromising withdrawal from the world or to an attempt to construct a new world. According to Luther, both had failed to distinguish between two divinely ordained orders, "two kingdoms," the secular kingdom of the world and the spiritual Kingdom of Christ. He viewed the secular order to be ordained by God as the ordering principle for society with roles ("offices") and laws, the ignoring of which would lead to anarchy and chaos. At the same time, he viewed every believer to be called to live and work in faith and love according to the demands of the Sermon. Consequently, one 7. Luther often used Schwiixmer ("enthusiasts"), but "anabaptists," "schismatics," and "sectarians" have all been used to refer to the often diverse followers of Thomas Munzer and the Zwickau Prophets, the Melchiorists or Hoffmanites, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Swiss Brethren. 8. Luther's "commentary" comes from a series of weekly sermons preached between 1530-1532 prepared for publication by his students with a preface written by Luther.

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must distinguish between a believer's "office" and "person," the one pertaining to the kingdom of the world and the other to the Kingdom of Christ. Therefore, as a citizen, jurist, or soldier one carried out the commensurate responsibilities established by civil law while personally in keeping with the Sennon intending no harm and grieving over the adverse consequences for those involved. 9 By separating the "two kingdoms," Luther avoided the "papist" error of subsuming the temporal or secular authority under the church and the "schismatic's" error of imposing the spiritual upon the secular and/or withdrawing from the latter. Yet by delineating two kingdoms, Luther too recognized implicitly what had come to be accepted by the "papists" and the "schismatics," namely, the impracticability of Jesus' demands in the Sermon on the Mount for the socio-political structures of this world. Calvin also addressed the same two fronts. 10 He objected to the "Schoolmen" relegating Jesus' demands to optional "counsels" and thus failing to recognize Jesus as a "Lawgiver" (Institutes, I, 419). He also rejected the literalism of the Anabaptists whose limited focus on the Sermon and strict application, for example, of the prohibition of oaths and the use of the judicial system illustrated their failure to interpret Scripture in light of Scripture as a whole. Like Luther, Calvin took the Sermon as applicable to all believers, but his response to the "Schoolmen" and the "Anabaptists" stems from a different approach to the Sermon. First, apropos the "Schoolmen" he raised into bold relief the issue of Jesus' role as "Lawgiver" in relationship to Moses and the law by disputing any distinction between "commandment" and "counsel." Jesus does not represent any discontinuity with the law. Calvin argued strongly for the "sacred tie between the law and the Gospel" (Commentary, I, 278) seen in Jesus' coming as the fulfillment of the law by restoring the true meaning of the law and stripping away the Pharisaic distortions (Institutes, I, 373-74). Jesus clarified the spirit of the law which remains binding for all. Second, Calvin countered the Anabaptists' narrow literalism and cushioned the Sermon's radical demands by reading them against the broader witness of Scripture. For example, he maintained that Jesus' prohibition of oaths only excludes oaths that "abuse and profane the sacred name" (Commentary, I, 295). "God not only permits oaths ... but commands their use ... [Exod. 22: 10-11]" (Institutes, I, 391). Consequently, properly understood against the broader context of Scripture the Sermon's demands prove practicable even for one involved in the structures of society. 9. Luther's Works, Vol. 21: The Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, ed. Jeroslov Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), p. 113. 10. One must extrapolate Calvin's treatment of the Sermon from his Commentmy on the Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949) and his Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, The Library of Christian Classics XX, XXI (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960).

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3. THE POST-REFORMATION ERA With the coming of the Enlightenment and the rise of historical criticism, new questions emerged. The Sermon survived the early stages unscathed as an accurate statement of Jesus' teaching, though the demands were often colored by the interpreter's view of Jesus. Wilhelm Herrmann, the professor of Dibelius, Bultmann, and Barth, wrote against the backdrop of Leo Tolstoy and Friedrich Naumann. II Tolstoy sought to implement the Sermon's imperatives literally in society even more rigorously than the Anabaptists. Naumann also took the Sermon's demands as imperatives for life but found them so impracticable as to be irrelevant for contemporary living. Herrmann concurred with Naumann that a literal observance of Jesus' commands was impossible but agreed with Tolstoy that Jesus' teaching had validity for the human situation. He combined these convictions by denying that Jesus' demands were ever intended to be commandments, new laws, or legalistic regulations to be slavishly followed. Rather the demands were more illustrative. Their intent was to call for a new mind set, a "disposition" or "attitude" (Gesinnung) based on the awareness that God is God and that love free from all legal and external constraints is the ultimate good. Thus, while impracticable, the Sermon's demands are applicable illustrations of how one should live. This interpretation became the trademark of Liberal Protestantism. Johannes Weiss' study on the Kingdom of God in Jesus' preaching concluded that Jesus proclaimed an imminent, eschatological kingdom, apocalyptic in character, that was to be inaugurated supernaturally. 12 This view eventually spelled the doom of the view that the Kingdom of God was essentially an ethical reality in the heart of the individual. 13 Albert Schweitzer then placed Jesus' ethical teachings, the Sermon in particular, within the framework of his apocalyptic proclamation as an ethic of repentance to prepare the disciples for the imminent kingdom and catastrophic judgment. 14 Jesus' expectation of an imminent kingdom makes the present but an "interim" in which to prepare for the coming judgment by responding to demands so foreign to this world they tear one away from all natural 11. Ethik (Tubingen: Mohr, 1901) and Die sittliche WeisungenJesu. lhr Missbmuch und ihr richtiger Gebmuch, 2d ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1907). 12. Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, tr. Richard H. Hiers and David L. Holland (Philadelphia : Fortress, 1971). 13. See Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity, tr. Thomas B. Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 14. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, tr. Walter Lowrie (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914) and The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity, tr. L. A. Garrard (London: A & C Black, 1968), pp. 79-88,96-101.

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moorings. IS Accordingly, the Sermon's demands deliberately negate all the values of this world. Schweitzer recognized the impractical character of the demands but maintained all the more that this "interim ethic" was meant to be followed by the disciples. The lesser known work of Hans Windisch contributed primarily to the area of methodology by distinguishing between historical and theological exegesis. 16 "Historical exegesis," he argued, looks exclusively at the text in its historical and literary context. "Theological exegesis" seeks to interpret through theological and philosophical insight the text for the individual in his or her own situation. He subjected the Sermon to a "historical" analysis that shows a difference between the Sermon in Matthew and the demands of Jesus. The eschatological thrust correctly seen by Weiss and Schweitzer belongs particularly to "Matthew's" emphasis in the Sermon. Viewed more closely, many of Jesus' demands, the stuff of the Sermon, have only a secondary interest in eschatology. "The teaching of Jesus, like that of the prophets, was the proclamation of salvation and of damnation and the declaration of an ethic of obedience" (Meaning, p. 121). His demands were meant as commandments to be fulfilled literally by the individual as a basis for ultimate salvation. Therefore, Matthew's Sermon unabashedly in line with Jesus' teaching offers a "religion of 'works' and eschatological salvation . . . . The commands of the Sermon on the Mount are conditions of admittance to the Kingdom of Heaven."17 Having determined the meaning of the Sermon by "historical exegesis," Windisch rejected the current options provided by "theological exegesis." He refused the "literalism" of Tolstoy and the Anabaptists because one was simply unable to meet the demands. Without any hint in the Sermon of help from God or the Spirit, ours is the fate of the "many" in 7: 13 (Meaning, p. 172-73). Windisch also refused the "Paulinization" of the Sermon which takes the demands as another expression of the law to bring us to God as sinners in need of God's forgiving grace effected in the obedient, atoning work of Christ for us. IS Instead Windisch found the theological key in the Beatitudes. Whereas doing the will of God is prerequisite for entrance into the kingdom 15. The "ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is (sic) interim ethics" that "make one meet for the kingdom of God," Mystery, p. 97. "Detachment from all that belongs to this world is therefore essential," Schweitzer, Kingdom, p. 96. 16. The Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, tr. S. MacLean Gilmour (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951). 17. Meaning, pp. 168-69. 18. Cf. Carl Stange, "Zur Ethikder Bergpredigt," ZST2 (1924-25), 37-74; and Gerhard Kittel, "Die Bergpredigt und die Ethik des Judentums, ZST 2 (1924-25), 555-94.

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according to the Sermon's demands, the Beatitudes promise salvation to the "poor in spirit." Thus there is more than one way to God in the Sermon. This note of promise and hope sounded loud and clear in the Beatitudes becomes inaudible by the warnings of 7: 13-27. Windisch found this note to be a "pre-Christian" prophetic hope of God's gracious acceptance of those who come "poor in spirit," a state to which the Sermon's demands would inevitably lead one. At the same time, trust in God's promise gives hope and power to live more in keeping with the demands. Consequently, while we cannot take Jesus' commands literally as intended because we are unwilling to "cut ourselves loose from those ethical and religious responsibilities whose claim upon us we admit" (e.g., nation, state, family, and law), we can, for example, use legal justice in keeping with the religious attitude intended by Jesus (Meaning, pp. 189-90). With Windisch the issue of practicability became secondary, a "theological" issue that no longer controlled the exegesis of the Sermon. Furthermore, "historical exegesis" shows the Sermon to have been composed in its final form by the Evangelist drawing on the ethical teaching of Jesus. Therefore, "historical exegesis" poses two tasks. First, one must distinguish between tradition and redaction. Second, one must inquire about the relation of Jesus' ethical demands to the law in particular and to the diverse religious, social, and political context in general of Jesus and the early church's setting. Consequently, subsequent works on the Sermon have focused almost exclusively on the issues of "historical exegesis.,,19 19. So complete is the separation of historical and theological exegesis that most commentaries pertaining to the Sermon fall into the categories of "critical" or "homiletical" commentaries. Examples of the former: Thaddaus Soiron, Die Bergpredigt Jesu. Formgeschichtliche, exegetische und theologische Erklamng (Freiburg: Herder, 1941); Robert A Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundationf01' Understanding (Waco: Word Publishers, 1982; Georg Strecker, Die Bergpredigt. Ein exegetischer Kommentar (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1984). More popular: Georg Eicholz, Auslegung der Bergpredigt (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1965); Petr Pokorny, Der Kern del' Bergpredigt (Hamburg: Evangelischer Verlag, 1969); Donald Carson, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978); Jan Lambrecht, The Sermon on the Mount: Proclamation and Exhortation, GNS 14 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985). Examples of the latter: Eduard Thurneysen, The Sermon on the Mount, tr. William C. Robinson (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1963); Archibald M. Hunter, A Pattern for Life: An Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965); D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 2 Vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959-1960); James Boice, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972); Myron S. Augsburger, The Expanded Life: The Sermon on the Mount for Today (New York: Abingdon, 1972).

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4. THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE Despite the plethora of critical literature in recent years on Matthew in general 20 and the theme of Jesus and the law in particular,21 relatively few works have appeared on the Sermon as such. 22 The Sermon is no longer seen as a compendium of Jesus' ethical teaching. Rather the Sermon is treated either as a section of Matthew's Gospel, the study of which discloses primarily the Evangelist's "theology," or as a resource for traditions that, when distilled from later modifications and expansions, can lead one back to Jesus' ministry. Of this recent literature, the work of four scholars illustrates in different ways the route "historical exegesis" has taken. For each writer the primary issue has become the Sermon's historical setting and meaning. Little or nothing about the practicability of the Sermon surfaces as a controlling factor. The issue of Jesus' relationship to the law arises exegetically from the material rather than theologically from the question of law and gospel. William D. Davies follows the consensus of Gospel criticism by taking the Sermon in Matthew to be the Evangelist'S collection of traditions. 23 But he justifies concentrating on the Sermon by arguing that one can isolate the Sermon as a clearly defined unit (cf. 5: 1-2; 7:2Sa) which the Evangelist consciously created more as an "author" than as an "editor" by his selection and arrangement of traditions (Setting, p. 13). Davies seeks to find an appropriate "setting" for the Sermon by viewing it in the context of Matthew's Gospel, Jewish messianic expectations, contemporary Judaism, the early church, and the ministry of Jesus. Since 20. See Donald Senior, What Are They Saying About Matthew? (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). 21. E.g., Gerhard Barth, "Matthew's Understanding of the Law" in Tradition and hzte1pretation in Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963); M. Jack Suggs, Wisdom, Christology and Law in Matthew's Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Alexander Sand, Das Gesetz und die Propheten (Regensberg: Pustet, 1974); John P. Meier, Law and History in Matthew's Gospel: A Redactional Study of Mt. 5:17-48, AnBib 71 (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1976); Ingo Broer, Freiheit vom Gesetz und Radikalisierung des Gesetzes; Ein Beitrag zur Theologie des Evangelisten Matthaus, SBS 98 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1980). 22. E. G. Jacques Dupont, Les Beatitudes: Le problhne litteraire. Les deux versions du Sermon sur la Montagne et des Beatitu.des, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Bruges: Abbaye de Saint-Andre, 1958); Les Beatitudes. La Bonne Nouvelle, Vol. II (Paris: Gabalda et Cie, 1969); Les Beatitudes. Les Evangelistes, Vol. III (Paris: Gabalda et Cie, 1973); William D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: University Press, 1964); Ulrich Luck, Die Vollkommenheitsforderung der Bergpredigt, TE 150 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1968); Hans Theo Wrege, Die Uberlieferungsgeschichte der Bergpredigt, WUNT 79 (Tubingen: Mohr, 1968); Hans Dieter Betz, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985 ). 23. The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount.

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the Sermon is a Matthean literary product, one seeks first to find its "setting" in Matthew's Gospel. Davies concludes that the Sermon represents for the Evangelist the "Messianic Torah" of Jesus Messiah which embodies not a new or different law but "a new interpretation of the Old Law" that is "authoritative in a new way (7 :28)" (Setting, p. 107). He supports this by arguing that the Evangelist viewed his community to be living in the Messianic Age inaugurated by Jesus the Messiah who, like the Teacher of Righteousness in Qumran and the Messiah with a didactic role in certain rabbinic traditions, gives the normative interpretation of the law (halakah) for this Messianic Age (Setting, pp. 188-89). But what specifically occasioned this portrait? Davies first seeks the answer in contemporary Judaism by comparing the Sermon with emerging Gnosticism, sectarian Essenism, and development in Pharisaism that culminated at J amnia. The last development offers the primary counterpart for understanding the Sermon. Thus the Sermon on the Mount is "the Christian answer to J amnia ... a kind of Christian, mishnaic counterpart to the formulation taking place there" (Setting, p. 313). At the same time, a look at various traditions of the early church reveals that Jesus' words, including the Sermon's radical demands, had been preserved because they constituted an indispensible part of the gospel itself. These demands were "revelatory of the nature of the gospel." Yet when used as directives for the life of the disciple, these radical, revelatory demands became more regulatory in a rabbinic manner and soon constituted a "base, or given ground, from which halakoth are deduced or to which they are attached" (Setting, p. 413). Therefore, for Davies the external pressures of J amnia and the internal needs of the community to use Jesus' demands as commands coalesced as the formative "setting" for the Sermon. Georg Strecker also recognizes the Sermon to be the final product of the Evangelist's redactional reworking of traditions that have passed through stages of development but whose core has roots in Jesus' ministry.24 Consequently, he concentrates on the Sermon as a statement for a community which despite its disappointment with the delayed Parousia still holds fast to the hope that the "crucified and resurrected One will appear as the Son of Man-WorldJudge and visibly establish the Kingdom of God" (Die Bergpredigt, p. 185). According to Strecker, the Sermon reflects the christological, eschatological, and ethical stance of the Evangelist. Jesus for Matthew does 24. Die Bergpredigt, pp. 9-12, 181-85.

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not represent a "new Moses" or a Christian parallel to Jewish scribal or rabbinic teachers of the law. Rather the Sermon comes as a divine revelation, an epiphany, from Jesus as the "Kurios-Son of God" whose postEaster majesty (28: 16-18) shines through his teaching seen in the mountain setting (5: 1, cf. 28: 16) that speaks of epiphany, of divine revelation (pp. 85-88). Jesus' teaching contains an eschatological call to decision in light of the coming eschaton that confronts one in the present tense from the first Beatitude to the concluding parable. Therefore, his "ethical exhortations" are simultaneously "eschatological demand" (Die Bergpredigt, p. 27). In 5: 20 we find the theme of the Sermon, the demand for a "righteousness" necessary to enter the kingdom. This "righteousness" means doing the will of God (7: 21) as revealed in the "law and the prophets" (5: 17-19) which Jesus "fulfilled" by his own exemplary ministry and above all by his teaching in 5:21-7:12. This teaching, for Strecker, fulfilled the law and the prophets by "bringing the 'law and the prophets' to their fullest expression" (Die Bergpredigt, p. 57). Therefore, the Sermon sets forth the "righteousness" demanded by Jesus, Kurios-Son of God, as the entrance requirement for the Kingdom of Heaven. The concluding warnings and exhortations (7: 13-27) make clear how seriously and unavoidably one was to take Jesus' demands. Hans Dieter Betz's essays provide the most recent treatment of the Sermon. 25 In contrast to Davies' use of source criticism and Strecker's use of redaction criticism as their primary critical device for interpreting the Sermon, Betz employs a form of literary or genre criticism as a means for understanding what the Sermon is and how it was understood. In search of a literary parallel for the appropriation of ethical tradition called for by the Sermon, he turned to the Hellenistic ethical literature of Plutarch and particularly the diatribe literature of Epictetus where similar appropriation takes place (Essays, pp. 7-10). Betz discovered the Sermon's literary genre in the "philosophical epitome" of Epictetus' Enchiridion (Essays, p. 11), a genre whose roots lie in Epicurus' Kurai Doxai (Essays, pp. 13-15). This genre consists of "a condensation of a larger work" made for the specific purpose of being a systematic synopsis to help one think and apply principles of the larger work without having the benefit of studying the whole or remembering the larger work (Essays, pp. 113-14). Accordingly, the Sermon is "an epitome presenting the theology of Jesus in a systematic fashion" (Essays, 25. Essays on the Sermon, which anticipates a forthcoming commentary on the Sermon for the Hermeneia series.

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p. 15). "The SM is not law to be obeyed, but theology to be intellectually appropriated and internalized, in order then to be creatively developed and implemented in concrete situations of life" (Essays, p. 16). Betz assigns the redaction of the Sermon to a pre-Matthean Jewish Christian community within the walls of] udaism but finding themselves in tension with Judaism (5:20; 6: 1-18) and especially with a "gentile Christianity of a Pauline stamp, with its freedom from the law" (5:17-19; 7: 15-20). Their distress stems from their loyalty to Jesus as the teacher of the "proper interpretation of the Torah and the correct praxis of piety" (Essays, p. 21). This community produced the Sermon apologetically and polemically to establish what] esus did and did not teach and to offer a "systematic theology" as the basis for right thinking and practice. The Evangelist preserved the Sermon in his Gospel but made little or no modifications even though he shared neither its setting nor its theology (Essays, pp. 18, 22). For Betz the key to the Sermon lies in four "hermeneutical principles" formulated in 5: 17-20. First, 5: 17 implies the formal genre of an "epitome" of sayings from the] esus-tradition whose theological content shows Jesus to be" 'orthodox' in the]ewish sense." His teaching like that of any orthodox teacher of the law was interpretation, not Torah, that "fulfills" rather than "abolishes" the law (Essays, pp. 41-43). Second, 5: 18 spells out the obedience demanded by] esus to the written Torah (,jot or tittle") until the passing of this age ("until heaven and earth pass away/all things come to pass" [Essays, pp. 43-45]). Third, 5: 19 declares the binding force of ] esus' interpretation of the Torah ("these commandments") which forms the teaching of the Sermon (Essays, pp. 46-51). Fourth, 5:20 defines the goal of] esus' teaching in the Sermon, a "righteousness" as the entrance prerequisite to the kingdom that comes from those who understand and practice] esus' instructions as found in the Sermon and thus "do justice in their thought and conduct to the will of God" (Essays, pp. 51-53). In sum, the Sermon "belongs, both theologically and in terms of history of religions, within the richly diverse] udaism of the first century" (Essays, p. 22). Though differing in many ways, Davies, Strecker, and Betz share two views. First, the Sermon addresses the ethical needs of a narrow, parochial community seeking to establish its identity in a diverse world of] udaism and gentile Christianity. Second, this identity comes through one's response to the Sermon viewed as] esus' normative interpretation of the law and of true religious praxis. The vexing question of practicability that has haunted the church's reading of the Sermon does not arise. For Davies and Strecker, the Sermon represents] esus' normative interpretation of the law according to

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the Evangelist that comes as the "Messianic Torah" of or the entrance requirements for the kingdom respectively. Accordingly, practicability is assumed. For Betz, the Sermon represents a community's synopsis of theology to be developed intellectually and appliced creatively to life rather than a law set forth to be obeyed. Practicability is not the point. More importantly these readings fail to address the issue of applicability-Windisch's "theological exegesis." What, if anything, does the Sermon have to say to the church today when "historical exegesis" leaves us with a text whose time-bound Christology, eschatology, and ethics reflect a community whose theology has proven wrong-headed and passe, unable to survive the first century? By contrast,johnP. Meier's work on a portion of the Sermon 26 shares in common with several other studies a very different reading of the Sermon's Christology, eschatology, and ethics. 27 The basis of these totally independent studies has been a careful redactional critical analysis of 5: 17-20 seen by Strecker and Betz as the fundamental, "hermeneutical" key to the Sermon. A redaction-critical analysis of 5: 17-20 indicates clear evidence of the Evangelist's modification of tradition dealing specifically with the law to make a broader programmatic statement about jesus' coming and its impact on the law. 28 Accordingly, the Sermon serves more a christological than an ethical or ecclesial function. 29 The Evangelist portrays jesus as the eschatological fulfillment of the prophetic hope of the Scriptures (5: 17, 18d), the one whose ministry including his deathlresurrection provides the "turning point of the old and new aeons" (Law and History, p. 165). As the one fulfilling the promise,jesus demands a "greater righteousness" (5:20) set forth in 5:21-7: 12. An analysis of the Antitheses shows that the law belongs to the old order and is transcended by jesus' "radicalizing"

26. Law and History. 27. See Robert Banks,jesus and the Law in the Synoptic Tradition, NTSMS 23 (Cambridge: University Press, 1975); "Matthew's Understanding of the Law: Authenticity and Interpretation in Matthew 5: 17-20,"jBL 93 (1974),226-42; Broer, Freiheit vom Gesetz; Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount; Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nachMatthaus, EKK III (Zurich: Benzinger Verlag, 1985). 28. Clear Matthean characteristics: (a) 5: 17-the editorial use of "or" (e), the "law and the prophets," the salvation historical use of "to fulfill" (plemun); (b) 5: 18-the broken structural pattern (A, C1, B, C2); the editorial use of "or" (e), the use of "until all things come to pass" and (c) the Matthean vocabulary of 5:20. 29. A literary critical reading of Matthew as a whole supports this redactional critical analysis of the Sermon. See Jack Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christology, Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) and Matthew as Story (Philadelphia, 1986).

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Interpreting the S erman an the M aunt Interpretation

(5:21-22,27-28,33-37) and "rescinding" the letter of the law (5:31-32, 38-39, 43-44).30 The Sermon-expresses "kingdom ethics" for Matthew in that it calls for conduct commensurate with the presence of the age of salvation, the "kingdom of heaven," inaugurated in time by Jesus Messiah, Son ofGod. 31 These demands only become "entrance requirements" for the kingdom future (cf. Strecker) because this conduct befitting the will of God demonstrates the reality of the "kingdom" or the new age in one's life (5:20; 7: 13-27). Rather than a fully developed"law" or even halakoth (cf. Davies' "Messianic Torah"), the Sermon's demands serve an illustrative role (cf. Betz's "epitome") by calling for behavior stemming from a new relationship of wholeness (5:48) between brothers and sisters (5:21-48; 7:12) growing out of a fundamentally new relationship with God (6: 1-7: 11). This relationship with God comes through the word and work of Jesus Messiah who announces the "good news" of God's deliverance in the opening Beatitudes (5:3-6) which he has aligned with Isaiah 61. 32 As for practicability and applicability, the Sermon addresses the people of the kingdom, all "disciples" (5: 1-2), who have turned empty-handed to God for grace (5:3-6). It offers neither a "new law" nor a more normative interpretation of the "old law." Nor does the Sermon play primarily a negative role to remind us of our failures. The Sermon, above all, summons the "disciple" to a new relationship with God and others that issues in conduct befitting the age of salvation ("the greater righteousness") made possible in this age through the presence of God's eschatological rule in Jesus Messiah, Son of God. As radical demands, they both set forth the marks of the kingdom present and expose one's short fall and all casuistic self-righ teousness.

5. SUMMARY Our survey has shown that the interpretation of the Sermon over the centuries has generally followed either a narrow, literal, and legalistic tack or a broader, more illustrative one. On the one side, the demands are interpreted literally and legalistically for the church as a whole (the early church and the Anabaptists), for a select few ("evangelical counsels"), for a select time period (Schweitzer), or for a special community (Davies, Strecker). On the other side, the demands are read more symbolically as 30. See also Robert A. Guelich, "The Antitheses of Matthew V. 21-48: Traditional and/or Redactional?" NTS 22 (1976-77),444-57. 31. For this interpretation of the Sermon, see Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount. 32. Robert A. Guelich, "The Matthean Beatitudes: 'Entrance Requirements' or Eschatological Blessings?" JBL 95 (1976),415-34.

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illustrative calls for ethical and religious conduct whose application is qualified by the broader context of (1) Scripture that provides a hermeneutic such as a Two Kingdom Ethic (Luther) or Scripture specifically interpreting Scripture (Calvin), (2) the ethic of Jesus in the underlying tradition (Herrmann, Windisch) or the social-rhetorical setting of a community seeking to follow their understanding of Jesus' teaching (Betz), or (3) a close reading of the Evangelist's compositional work in the Sermon supported by the literary setting in the Gospel read as a whole (Meier, Guelich). Until this century the controlling issue for interpreting the Sermon was practicability. This issue still obtains in the so-called "homiletical" commentaries whose primary concern is application. But the impact of Gospel criticism has moved the focus to the historical, religious, and literary context of the Sermon and raised antecedent issues that greatly influence the question of practicability and, as we have seen, the question of applicability. How does one address the antecedent questions? First, we accept the consensus of Gospel criticism that the Sermon as we know it is a "literary" product rather than a transcript of Jesus' teaching and we focus on the text. Second, we use the tools available to determine what the Evangelist has done with underlying tradition and concentrate on the import of the resultant text. Third, we check this reading and adjust it, if necessary, in terms of the structure and thought of the Gospel as a whole. Fourth, we seek a credible socio-religious setting for the Sermon as well as the Gospel in the life and times of the early church. Despite the lack of consensus in steps two through four, this writer is convinced that rigorously pursued they provide the necessary foundation for understanding the message of the Sermon and applying it today.

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The Place, Structure, and Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount Within Matthew

JACK DEAN KINGSBURY

Professor of Biblical Theology Union Theological Seminary in Virginia

For disciples who live in the sphere where God rules through the risen Jesus, doing the greater righteousness is the normal order of things.

A

PART FROM THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps familiar to more people than any other part of Scripture. Prominently situated toward the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, it is an extraordinarily imposing composition. The purpose of this essay is to examine the Sermon on the Mount precisely as one section of Matthew. To guide this examination, questions such as the following will be explored. What is the place of the Sermon on the Mount within the ground plan of Matthew? In what capacity does Jesus deliver it? To whom does he deliver it? What is its structure, and what is its central theme and message? How would Matthew have the reader regard it, as an impossible ethic, or as an ethic actually to be lived? 1.

What is the place of the Sermon on the Mount within the ground plan of Matthew's Gospel? Of the several answers given this question in this century, the one by Benjamin Bacon has been advocated by more scholars over a longer period of time than any other. In Bacon's view, the Sermon on the Mount dominates the whole of Matthew's Gospel, for from it one gains insight into the structure of the Gospel and into its nature and 131

purpose. Briefly put, the thesis Bacon promulgated 1 is that the evangelist Matthew was a converted rabbi, a Christian legalist, who, as a member of a church threatened by lawlessness, met this heresy by providing a systematic compend of the commandments of Jesus after the analogy of the Mosaic Pentateuch. In structure, Matthew's Gospel constitutes a compilation of "five books" that culminate in great discourses of Jesus and are supplemented by preamble (chaps. 1-2) and epilogue (chaps. 26-28). Among the great discourses, the Sermon on the Mount is programmatic, for here Jesus sets forth the "new Law," that is to say, his "teaching regarding Righteousness." Despite the enormous influence Bacon's understanding of the structure of Matthew has enjoyed, it has not been without its critics. Indeed, the arguments marshaled against it are of such force that there are many who regard it as having already been overthrown. 2 Nevertheless, Bacon's outline of Matthew continues to exert strong appeal. How is this to be explained? The principal reason, it would appear, is that the method almost all scholars have used in their study of Matthew over the last forty years has been redaction criticism. In redaction-critical perspective, Matthew is generally looked upon as an amalgamation of traditions and as in some sense a revision of Mark. When Matthew is held to be founded upon Mark, the single, most striking, feature distinguishing it proves not to be the story it tells but the presence in it of the Sermon on the Mount and the other great discourses. Because Bacon's outline identifies exactly the great discourses as the climactic feature of Matthew, scholars seem predisposed to accept it as necessarily being correct. Recently, however, the near monopoly that redaction criticism has had on the study of Matthew has begun to show signs of strain owing to the emergence of a new method, literary criticism. According to one form of literary criticism, a Gospel such as Matthew is not to be construed as an amalgamation of traditions but as a unified "narrative" that is made up of a "story" and its "discourse.,,3 Part and parcel of a story are the "events" being told, and these in turn are so arranged as to form a "plot." In the case of Matthew, the driving force of the plot is the element of conflict, and this pits Israel and especially the Jewish leaders against Jesus. Analyze Mat1. Cf. Benjamin Bacon, Studies in Matthew (London: Constable, 1930), pp. xiv-xvii, 29, 40-41, 47, 81-82, 165-68. 2. For a review of the arguments against Bacon's position, cf. Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christo logy, Kingdom (Philadelphia and London: Fortress Press and SPCK, 1975), pp. 1-7; and especially David R. Bauer, "The Structure of Matthew's Gospel, Diss. Union Theological Seminary in Virginia 1985, pp. 75-81 (forthcoming from Almond Press). 3. For a literary-critical treatment of Matthew that also explains the method, cf. Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).

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The Place, Structure, and Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount Interpretation

thew, therefore, in terms of its story-and plot-development; and the climax of the story occurs, not in the presentation of the Sermon on the Mount and the other great discourses of Jesus but in the narration of his passion. 4 It is through the narration of the passion that the reader is told of the resolution of the conflict Jesus has with the Jewish leaders; Whereas the leaders bring Jesus to the cross and believe that they have thereby triumphed over him and the error he has perpetrated in Israel, God vindicates him through the resurrection so that, at the last, Jesus is seen to be the one through whom God has accomplished the salvation of J ew and Gentile alike (chaps. 26-28). If literary criticism shows that the climactic feature of Matthew is in fact the narration of Jesus' passion, what importance is one to assign the Sermon on the Mount and the other great discourses? The importance of each of the great discourses is commensurate with the role it plays within the plot of Matthew's story. In the case of the Sermon on the Mount, it has its place in 4: 17-11: 1, where the narrator tells of Jesus as proffering salvation to Israel through his ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing (4:23; 9:35; 11: 1). Since the narrator characterizes the Sermon on the Mount as "teaching" (5: 1-2; 7:28-29), it becomes the example par excellence of this facet of Jesus' activity. In any event, Jesus' delivery of the Sermon on the Mount is not the climactic event in Matthew to which all else is made subordinate. The climax toward which the whole of Matthew steers is, again, the passion. II. Although Matthew's story of Jesus culminates in the passion, It IS nonetheless testimony to the great store' that Matthew sets by Jesus' teaching that the Sermon on the Mount is the imposing composition it is. In what capacity does Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and to whom does he deliver it? Bacon's views have been almost as instrumental in determining scholarly opinion on the Christology of Matthew in this century as they have been in determining how scholars have understood the structure of Matthew. Bacon himself describes Matthew's Jesus as a "second Moses" or "Lawgiver."s Topping this, another scholar has referred to him as "Torah incarnate.,,6 Still other scholars, while designating Jesus more typically as "Messiah," nonetheless attest to Bacon's influence on their thinking by 4. To see how this is the case, cf. Jack Dean Kingsbury, "The Developing Conflict between Jesus and the Jewish Leaders in Matthew's Gospel: A Study in Literary Criticism" (forthcoming in CBQ). 5. Cf. Benjamin W. Bacon, "Jesus and the Law: A Study of the First 'Book' of Matthew (Mt. 3-7)," JBL 47 (1928), 207-08. 6. J. M. Gibbs, "The Son of God as the Torah Incarnate in Matthew," StudiaEvangelica, IV (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968),38-46.

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explaining that what they mean by this is that] esus is preeminently the preacher of "sermons" or the one who delivers to the church the "new verbal revelation.,,7 The point is this: The christological corrollary of the thesis that, structurally, Matthew's Gospel culminates in the great discourses is that the Matthean] esus is made out to be, under one guise or another, the "Teacher." Yet however highly Matthew esteems Jesus' activity of "teaching," "teacher" remains for him no more than a term of human respect. This is why one never discovers persons of faith or true disciples addressing] esus as "teacher" or "rabbi," but only]udas, opponents, and strangers. No, the ] esus who teaches in Matthew and who delivers the Sermon on the Mount is not the "Teacher" but the "Son of God." Nor is it idle in Matthew's eyes to press this distinction. Conceived by the Holy Spirit,] esus Son of God is also empowered by the Holy Spirit (1: 18,20; 3: 16-17). In him God's kingdom, or end-time rule, is a present though hidden reality (12:28). He therefore enjoys a unique filial relationship to God (11 :27), by virtue of which he speaks and acts on the authority of God (7:28-29). Accordingly, when ] esus engages in teaching as when he delivers the Sermon on the Mount, he dares to speak in the stead, and as the mouthpiece, of God. To whom does Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount? According to the flow of Matthew's story, ] esus has just begun his public ministry by summoning Israel to repentance (4: 17) and by calling his first disciples (4: 18-22). Atop the mountain, therefore, it is the "crowds" and these first "disciples" who receive the teaching Jesus offers (5: 1-2). Still, to understand the crowds and the disciples as the recipients of ] esus' teaching from the mount poses a problem. Close scrutiny of the message] esus conveys reveals that it is, in certain respects, suitable to neither group. It is unsuitable as far as the crowds are concerned because they are not, as some would claim, nascent disciples 8 but "outsiders." However well-disposed the crowds may appear to be toward ]esus,9 as early as chapter 11]esus censures them as "this [evil] generation" that has repudiated both]ohn the Baptist and himself (11 :7, 16-19), and at the end of the gospel story they of course join with their leaders in calling for the crucifixion of ] esus and in making themselves responsible for his death (27:20-26,38-44). If one keeps in mind the fact that the crowds are not nascent disciples, one has only to read the Sermon on the Mount to recognize how little the contents envisage persons who do not hold to him. 7. Cf. Willi Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. G. Buswell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), pp. 151-52; Norman Perrin, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 174-77. 8. Cf., e.g., Paul S. Minear, "The Disciples and the Crowds in the Gospel of Matthew," Gospel Studies in Honor of Sherman Elbridgejohnson, ed. M. H. Shepherd,Jr. and E. C. Hobbs (Anglican Theological Review, 1974), pp. 28-44. 9. Cf. Matt. 4:24-25; 7:28-29; 8: 1, 9:8, 33.

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Yet even to read the Sermon on the Mount with the idea that the disciples just called by Jesus are the recipients is not wholly unproblematic. Passages like 5: 11-12 and 7: 15-23, which speak of enduring persecution on account of Jesus or tell of followers of Jesus who prophesy, cast out demons, and perform many miracles in his name but are in reality workers of lawlessness, simply have no place in the picture the narrator paints of the disciples during the earthly ministry of Jesus. Consequently, as fitting as it is from the standpoint of the flow of Matthew's story that the crowds and the first disciples should be named as the recipients of the Sermon on the Mount, the contents themselves of the Sermon indicate that they are meant not at all for non-disciples such as the crowds and only in part for the first disciples, and that they therefore have in view still other persons. Who are these other persons? Are they those first-century Christians who comprised the membership of Matthew's church? Yes, but this is not the most accurate answer one can give, for these first-century Christians are obviously not to be regarded as living within the "world of the story" Matthew is narrating but apart from it, in the real world. The answer to be preferred, therefore, is that the persons indicated by the contents themselves of the Sermon on the Mount as being its recipients are the "implied readers" (or the "implied reader") of Matthew's Gospel. Still, to say this is merely to prompt another question: Who is this "implied reader"? To ascertain this, one must probe the "world" of Matthew's story. In two or perhaps three passages, Matthew, as implied author, provides indicators of who the implied reader is whom he envisages as the recipient of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. At 27:8, Matthew remarks through the voice of the narrator that "to this day" the field bought with Judas' money is known as the Field of Blood. At 28: 15, Matthew similarly remarks that "to this day" false rumors are being spread to the effect that Jesus did not rise from the dead. At 24: 15, Matthew has the narrator abruptly interrupt the story so as to issue the reader a challenge to comprehend the meaning of the signs of the times ("Let the reader understand!"). What distinguishes these three passages is that they all point beyond the immediate story being told of Jesus, which extends from birth to resurrection, to a place in time and space following the resurrection from which one can look back upon the earthly life of Jesus. This place beyond Jesus' earthly life to which Matthew points and which he includes in the world of his story is that of the implied reader. The implied reader, then, is to be looked upon as one who is a disciple of Jesus and who lives in the perilous times between the resurrection and the Parousia which are so vividly described in such passages of the Gospel as chapters 24-25. Looking back upon Jesus' earthly life from a point beyond the resurrection, the implied reader can relate without difficulty both to the place of

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the Sermon on the Mount within Matthew's story and to the words Jesus utters in it. On the one hand, the implied reader can easily follow the narration of Matthew's story, so that the dramatic necessity of having Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of his ministry to his first disciples and the crowds attracted to him poses no problem. By the same token, the implied reader can also relate both to the character and the tenor of the Sermon on the Mount, namely, its profoundly "Christian coloration" as a word of the Messiah Son of God and the fact that in it Jesus speaks of such "future Christian experiences" as suffering severe persecution on account of him or encountering Christian prophets who are workers of lawlessness. In sum, the intended addressee of the Sermon on the Mount is primarily the implied reader of Matthew's Gospel. References made hereafter to "disciples" as recipients of the Sermon on the Mount in reality have this particular disciple, that is, the implied reader, in view. III. We have seen thus far that the Sermon on the Mount is the example par excellence of Jesus' teaching, that he delivers it in his authority as the Son of God, and that whereas according to the dramatic setting of the story it is the crowds and the first disciples he has called who receive it, the tenor of the Sermon itself indicates that the primary addressees are such "disciples" as the implied reader. With these matters in mind, two questions arise: What is the structure of the Sermon on the Mount, and what is its theme and its message? The narrative frame of the Sermon on the Mount describes Jesus as ascending the mountain to teach (5: 1-2) and, after finishing, as descending again (7:28-8: 1). This aside, the Sermon on the Mount divides itself into five parts: (1) Introduction: On Those who Practice the Greater Righteousness (5:3-16); (2) On Practicing the Greater Righteousness Toward the Neighbor (5: 17-45); (3) On Practicing the Greater Righteousness Before God (6: 1-18); (4) On Practicing the Greater Righteousness in Other Areas of Life (6:19-7:12); and (5) Conclusion: Injunctions on Practicing the Greater Righteousness (7: 13-27). As is apparent from this outline, the theme of the Sermon on the Mount is the "greater righteousness." Perhaps the passage in which this theme finds expression most clearly is the pronouncement Jesus makes at 5:20: "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." What is one to understand by the "greater righteousness"? The "greater righteousness" is that style of life intended to be the mark

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of disciples of Jesus. As was mentioned, Jesus in Matthew is preeminently the Son of God (1: 18,20; 3: 16-17). As God's Son, he calls persons to follow him, which is to say that he summons them to enter and to live in the sphere of God's eschatological kingdom, or end-time rule. Those who hear Jesus' summons become his disciples (4: 18-22) and "sons of God" (5:9); they, too, know God as Father (5:45). In fact, they form a new "family" (12:48-50), described as a "brotherhood" of the sons of God and of the disciples of Jesus, which is the "church" (16: 18; 23:8; 28: 10). The "greater righteousness," then, is the quality of life which is indicative of disciples who make up the church. It is behavior that comports itself with living in the sphere of God's kingdom (5:20; 6:33). Yet more can be said of the "greater righteousness," however. At 5:48, Jesus instructs disciples: "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." What "being perfect" means here is not, say, being flawless, but "being wholehearted," as this is described, for example, in an injunction like Deuteronomy 18:13: "You shall be wholehearted in your service of the Lord your God." Accordingly, to be perfect is to be wholehearted in one's devotion to God, and disciples are wholehearted in Matthew when they do God's will as this is taught by Jesus (7 :21). In Jesus' teaching, however, to do God's will is, at its core, to exercise love (22: 34-40). Loving as God loves, therefore, is of the essence of the greater righteousness (5:44-45). When disciples love as God loves, this reflects itself further in the fact that they also love the neighbor (7: 12). In sum, therefore, it is love toward God and love toward neighbor that constitute the heart of the greater righteousness. If the greater righteousness is the theme of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus specifies in the introduction (5:3-16) the types of persons disciples are who practice the greater righteousness. The introduction falls into two sections: the Beatitudes (5:3-12) and Jesus' words on salt and light (5: 13-16). Whereas Luke has four beatitudes balanced by four woes (6:20-26), Matthew has nine beatitudes and no woes (5:3-12).10 In pronouncing the Beatitudes, the Matthean Jesus confers end-time "blessings" upon disciples who are characterized by what they are (e.g., the poor) or do (e.g., the peacemakers). These blessings assure disciples of the vindication and reward that attend the salvation of God's consummated kingdom and thus provide encouragement in time of persecution and difficulty. To take each beatitude in turn, "the poor in spirit" are disciples who are

J.

10. For this and the following paragraph, thanks go to Harper's Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul Achtemeier (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 100.

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not only economically deprived but who also stand before God with no illusions of self-righteousness or self-sufficiency (5:3). "Those who mourn" are disciples who grieve over sin and evil in the world. "The meek" are disciples who are lowly and powerless, whose only hope is God. "Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness" are disciples who yearn for the final salvation that only God can effect. "The merciful" are disciples who eschew judgment and forgive. "The pure in heart" are disciples who are undivided in their allegiance to God. "The peacemakers" are disciples who work for the wholeness and well-being that God wills for a broken world. "Those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake" are disciples who incur tribulation because they serve God. What Jesus promises all these disciples is fundamentally the same benefit, the eschatological salvation that attends God's kingdom (5:3, 10). Jesus pronounces his beatitudes upon disciples who together form the new community of God's eschatological people, said above to be the church. In 5: 13-16, Jesus affirms that this community both is, and is called to be, the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world." As it pursues the life of the greater righteousness, this community summons others to glorify God, that is, to live in the sphere of his eschatological rule by themselves becoming disciples of Jesus. If in the introduction of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus focuses on the types of persons disciples are who practice the greater righteousness, in the second, third, and fourth parts he explicates what it is to practice this righteousness. At the head of the second part, which treats of practicing righteousness toward the neighbor (5: 17-48), Jesus utters a series of programmatic statements that have to do with his eschatological mission, the abiding validity of the law, and the necessity of doing God's commandments and of leading the life of the greater righteousness (5: 17-20). In 5: 17, Jesus roundly declares that it is not the purpose of his mission to abolish the law or the prophets but-by virtue of who he is, the Son of God in whom God's end-time kingdom is a present though hidden reality, and through what he says and does-to fulfill them. In 5: 18, he flatly asserts that the law will never pass away and that all that it requires will be done. In 5: 19, he utters "sentences" that pledge to disciples higher and lower degrees of eschatological reward so as to warn in the one instance against breaking even the most insignificant of the commandments and to urge in the other the observance of all of them. In 5:20, he similarly enjoins disciples to practice the greater righteousness "now" on pain of otherwise not entering the consummated Kingdom of Heaven "then." On balance, Jesus Son of God asserts in 5: 17-20 that in his coming, whereby God's kingdom has become a present though hidden reaJity, he accomplishes the 138


fulfillment of the law, giving it abiding validity, and that to do the law (or will of God), is to do the greater righteousness, at the heart of which, one will recall, is love toward God and neighbor. ] esus continues the second part of the Sermon on the Mount by proclaiming the six Antitheses, one of the more famous sections of the Sermon (5:21-48). Each "antithesis" overrides in some respect a "thesis" of the Mosaic law. Since the law as Jesus teaches it has abiding validity, the antithesis intensifies, or radicalizes, the thesis. Introducing each thesis is a formula that may be longer or shorter in length. Always intended, however, is the formula in its entirety, which reads: "You have heard that it was said to the people of old ... " (5:21, 33). As is apparent, this formula divides itself into three parts. 11 The first part ("You have heard") reminds disciples of the traditional custom (e.g., in the Jewish synagogue) of hearing the law read and expounded in services of worship. The second part ("it was said") features the use of the "divine passive" and is a periphrasis for "God said." The third part ("to the people of old") envisages the Israelites at Sinai who received the law but includes as well the generations subsequent to them who have likewise received it. In its totality, therefore, the formula introducing each thesis reminds disciples that it has been taught them that God, at Sinai, delivered Israel his law. In stark contrast to this introductory formula stands the formula with which Jesus introduces each of his antitheses. It reads: "But I say to you ... " (cf., e.g., 5:22). The force of this formula is unparalleled, for] esus, in uttering it, is in effect pitting his word against the word God spoke at Sinai, that is to say, against the law as known through Moses. In the last analysis, therefore, the astonishing thing about the Antitheses is that in them]esus Son of God dares to place his word and his authority above those of Moses. To turn now to the Antitheses,] esus commands, variously, that disciples are not only not to kill, but not even to become enraged (5:21-26); not only not to commit adultery, but not even to lust (5:27-30); not merely to comply with the law in obtaining a divorce, but not to divorce at all (5:31-32); not merely to obey the law and not swear falsely, but not to swear at all (5:33-37); not merely to adhere to the law in securing retribution, but to offer no resistance at all to one who would harm or exploit them (5:38-42); and not merely to love the neighbor while hating the enemy, but not to hate the enemy at all but instead to love him (5:43-48). A special word is in order concerning the third antithesis, about divorce 11. For a discussion of the meaning of these three parts, cf. Robert A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount (Waco: Word Books, 1982), pp. 179-82.

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(5:31-32). It contains the so-called "exceptive clause": "But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, parektos logou porneias, makes her an adulteress ... " (5:32). The issue is simple: What does this Greek expression mean? To date, three interpretations have been advanced. The traditional interpretation is that advocated, for example, by the translators of the RSV. As they construe it, the Greek expression means "except on the ground of unchastity." The contention of this interpretation is that the Matthean Jesus, though he forbids divorce in principle" nevertheless sanctions it in the event that a spouse commits adultery. Against this interpretation stand at least two objections: (1) Since Matthew, in referring to "adultery," uses the Greek word moicheia, it is unlikely that porneia is to be understood as a mere synonym of moicheia (cf. 15: 19); and (2) one can also question whether the Matthean Jesus, in sanctioning divorce by reason of unchastity, can truly be said to radicalize the Mosaic commandment on divorce (Deut. 24: 1). A second interpretation of the exceptive clause would read 5:32 along these lines: "But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wifenotwithstanding the word about immorality [found in Deuteronomy 24: IIJ-makes her an adulteress.,,12 The idea here is that the Matthean Jesus most assuredly does radicalize the command of Moses, for he forbids divorce altogether. The third interpretation of the exceptive clause would render 5:32 as follows: "But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except on the grounds of an incestuous marriage, makes her an adulteress.,,13 This rendering of 5:32 portrays the MattheanJesus as flatly forbidding divorce in every case except one:· Should, for example, a gentile couple join the church, whose marriage would (on the basis of a passage like Leviticus 18:6-18) have to be adjudged to be incestuous, that couple would be required to divorce (cf. also Acts 15:20,29). To choose between these three interpretations, either of the latter two would fit Matthean thought, and perhaps the third one is most likely to be correct. As Jesus takes up the third part of the Sermon on the Mount (6: 1_18),14 he has arrived at its center. This is true both formally and materially. Formally, the third part constitutes the center because it is preceded by the introduction and the second part and followed by the fourth part and the 12. Cf., e.g., Bruce Vawter, "The Divorce Clauses in Mt 5,32 and 19,9," CBQ 16 (1956), 165-67; Robert Banks,jes1l.5 and the Law in the Synoptic Tradition (Cambridge: University Press, 1975), pp. 146-59 (esp. 156). 13. Cf., e.g., John P. Meier, Law and Hist01Y in Matthew's Gospel (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1976), pp. 140-50; also Guelich, pp. 209-10. 14. For a detailed analysis of Matt. 6: 1-18, cf. Hans Dieter Betz, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 56-64.

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conclusion. By the same token, the third part itself contains three parts: It treats of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. What is more, at the center of the middle part, on prayer, is the Lord's Prayer. Formally, therefore, the Lord's Prayer can be seen to lie at the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount. IS Materially, too, the third part constitutes the center of the Sermon on the Mount. Thus far,] esus has delivered the introduction and addressed the topic of practicing the greater righteousness toward the neighbor. Upon completion of this third part, he will speak on practicing the greater righteousness in other areas of life and conclude the Sermon. Here in this part, he concerns himself with the fundamental issue of practicing the greater righteousness before God (6: 1-18). In the Lord's Prayer, the centerpiece of the Sermon,] esus highlights the essential element on which all such practice is predicated: that disciples know God as "Father" (6:9). Through Jesus Son of God, disciples are invited to live in the sphere of God's eschatological rule, where they, as sons of God, are rightly related to God and hence know him as Father. Consequently, as ] esus instructs disciples on how they are to give alms, pray, and fast, he is instructing them on how to give expression to their right relationship to God. To give alms is to perform charitable deeds, to pray is to approach God in petition as Father, and to fast is to show contrition. In contemporary ] udaism as well as for disciples, these were the three cardinal acts of piety. As] esus describes the doing of these acts, he contrasts "to be seen by men" (6: 1) with "in secret" (6:4, 6, 18). This contrast is manifestly not one between "public" and "private" per se, as though] esus were denying legitimacy to all public expression of charitable activity, prayer, and fasting. 16 No, "to be seen by men" expresses intent, and the contrast]esus draws is between "ostentation" and "proper motivation." The hypocrites who practice their acts of piety ostentatiously do so in order to win public acclaim for themselves. Such acclaim is all the reward they shall receive (6:2,5, 16). Disciples are to practice their acts of piety "in secret," that is, out of heartfelt devotion to God. Such practice God acquits with the promise of eternal reward at the latter day (6:4, 6, 17-18). The Lord's Prayer (6:7-15) is recited by]esus to provide disciples with an example of how they are to pray (6:9a). It divides itself, including the doxology, into four parts. The "address" (6:9b) shows that the prayer is directed to God as Father. The "thou petitions" (6:9c-l0) focus on God and 15. For a diagram of this, cf. Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthiius, EKK (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1985), I, 186. 16. On this point, cf. the remarks by Guelich, pp. 300-06.

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the advent of his kingdom as a consummated reality. The "we petitions" (6: 11-13) focus on the suppliants and their physical and spiritual needs. The "doxology," a later addition to verse 13, closes the prayer on a strong note of praise. In the fourth part of the Sermon on the Mount (6: 19-7: 12),jeslls deals with the practice of the greater righteousness in areas of life he has not already touched on. The prohibitions and imperatives he employs mark the subunits: "Do not store up" (6: 19-24); "Do not be anxious" (6:25-34); "judge not" (7: 1-5); "Do not give" (7:6); and "Ask ... seek ... knock" (7:7-11). The Golden Rule (7: 12) serves as both the conclusion and culmination of this fourth part. In each of these subunits, a climactic utterance of jesus occurs which captures the unit's intention. In 6: 19-24, jesus enjoins disciples not to store up for themselves treasures on earth, for "no one can serve two masters ... ; you cannot serve God and mammon" (6:24). In 6:25-34, jesus commands disciples not to be anxious about food, drink, or clothing but to "seek first the kingdom and his [God's] righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (6:33). In 7:1-5, jesus forbids disciples to judge others, on pain that "with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged" (7:2). In 7:6 (a prohibiton whose meaning is much disputed), jesus warns disciples against giving what is sacred and precious to persons who are undeserving, lest they, like swine, "trample [what is precious] underfoot and turn to attack you." In 7: 7 -11, jesus suddenly shifts from the negative to the positive and exhorts disciples to constant and fervent prayer ("Ask ... seek ... knock"), for they can rest assured that "your Father who is in heaven will give good things to those who ask him" (7: 11). And with the Golden Rule, jesus ends this part of the Sermon on the Mount by reminding disciples of what he has stressed earlier as well: Doing the greater righteousness is always, finally, an exercise in love (7: 12). In the fifth part of the Sermon on the Mount (7: 13-27),j esus concludes his teaching. The point he drives home to disciples is unmistakable: It is not only the hearing of his words but also the doing of them that counts. Disciples who both hear and do are like the "wise man who built his house upon the rock" (7:24). They, unlike the false prophets who will prove themselves to have been workers of lawlessness, will at the latter day "enter into the kingdom of heaven," for they shall have done "the will of my Father who is in heaven" (7: 15-16, 20-23). This survey of the five parts of jesus' Sermon on the Mount still leaves one question unanswered: How would Matthew have disciples regard the Sermon on the Mount, as an impossible ethic, or as an ethic actually to be lived? 142


IV. Matthew holds up Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount as an ethic disciples are to live. Disciples have been called by Jesus to enter the sphere of God's eschatological kingdom, the sphere in which God rules as Father. The ethic of the Sermon on the Mount describes life in this sphere. Disciples of Jesus are summoned to lead this life, which is to say that they are summoned to lead the life of the greater righteousness. They are to love God with heart, soul, and mind and to love the neighbor as the self. Does this mean, then, that Matthew is, in his understanding of human nature, impossibly idealistic and completely unrealistic? Not at all. His Gospel shows that he is fully aware of the reality of sin and of little faith. After all, disciples pray in the Lord's Prayer: "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One" (6: 12-13). Matthew is aware that disciples experience failure as they lead the life of the greater righteousness and . that they are continually in need of forgiveness from the side of both God and the neighbor. The thing to observe, however, is that Matthew refuses to make the reality of sin and of little faith the determining factor in his ethic. Instead, the determining factor for him is the reality of God's eschatological kingdom, or rule, which is present even now in the earthly and risen Jesus Son of God. For disciples who live in the sphere where God rules through the risen Jesus, doing the greater righteousness is the normal order of things. Until the consummation, disciples will, to be sure, have to contend with the shadows that invade this normal order, with sin and little faith. But this notwithstanding, they are indeed summoned to be the kind of person Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount, the kind of person who loves God perfectly and the neighbor as the self. Summoned as disciples are to lead the life of the greater righteousness yet being unable to realize this summons, are they therefore left without example? Again, not as Matthew sees it. Disciples are also bid to pray: "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (6:9-10). The human being in Matthew's Gospel who is whole in his relationship to the Father, in whom God's kingdom is a present reality, and who does God's will perfectly is of course Jesus Son of God. He it is who stands before disciples as the one who realizes in his life the ethic of the greater righteousness. Accordingly, bound to him in trust and assured of his forgiveness, disciples "follow after him" as they hear his call and lead the life of the greater righteousness.

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The Ethical Implications of the Sermon on the Mount

LISA SOWLE CAHILL

Associate Professor of Christian Ethics Boston College

The primary question the Sermon on the Mount poses is: What is the fullness of discipleship like when imitation of the Father known in Jesus pervades one's existence?

OWHERE IN NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION are exegesis, theology, and ethics bound more closely together than in approaches to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). When ethical concerns are foremost, the so-called "hard sayings" (Matt. 5:38-48) command attention. By demanding nonresistance and love of enemies, Jesus seems both to hold the faithful to impossible standards of concrete action and to break up the foundations of justice on which social cooperation is built. Also problematic are the equally direct and at points more impractical imperatives to avoid anger, lust, divorce, and swearing (Matt. 5:21-37). The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-11) generally have been of secondary ethical interest, while the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 5:9b-16) has remained peripheral in most accounts of Christian morality. Before the development in the nineteenth century of a historically critical method of studying and correlating biblical texts, the ethical attention given to the remainder of Matthew 5-7 was occasional at best, and the Gospel setting of the Sermon was virtually ignored. Undoubtedly the greatest impact of the historical-critical method on ethical interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount has been made by the discovery that the early church expected the imminent return of Jesus, Risen Lord and Judge, to complete the reign of God begun in his lifetime. The questions of the eschatology behind the Sermon and its relevance to

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The Ethical Implications of the Sermon on the Mount Interpretation

the Sermon's continuing meaning have been most prominent in recent discussions of the Sermon's ethics, especially those well-informed by biblical scholarship. Standard typologies of historically and theologically important readings have highlighted the importance of this emergent modern interest. The model proposed by Joachim Jeremias is simple, representative, and of continuing influence. According to this model, the Sermon usually is seen in one of three ways: (1) a perfectionist code, fully in line with the legalism of rabbinic Judaism; (2) an impossible ideal, meant to drive the believer first to desperation, and then to trust in God's mercy; or (3) an "interim ethic" meant for what was expected to be a brief period of waiting in the end-time, and which is now obsolete. Jeremias adds his own fourth thesis: The Sermon is an indicative depiction of incipient life in the Kingdom of God, which presupposes as its condition of possibility the experience of conversion. More complex or comprehensive schematizations have been offered, but most major interpreters can be understood in relation to the options posed by Jeremias. 2 The "perfectionist conception" becomes a "straw theory" if taken in the most extreme sense, because it would be impossible to find any representative of the position that every single injunction of the Sermon on the Mount, including the destruction of morally offensive bodily members (Matt. 5:29-30), should be taken literally and strictly. There is a strong tradition of gospel-based nonviolence which commends as stringently as possible the commands to love the enemy to the point of nonresistance. Early proponents include Tertullian and Origen; the best Reformation examples are the Radicals (e.g., Menno Simons), who faced extreme persecution for wanting to return to primitive Christianity and the Cross of Christ. In more recent times, the Quakers, Mennonites, and other pacifists follow in this current. Some mainstream theorists of natural rights and just war theory also understand the Sermon as in a sense a "new law." Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin all take Matthew 5:48, for example, as a direct moral precept commanding obedience. To find ways around the prima facie social and political implications of loving the enemy, they do not deny the precept's force as moral law, but limit the 1. The Sermon on the Mount, trans. Norman Perrin (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963). 2. I have attempted a more detailed, historically oriented discussion of major interpreters, with reference to primary texts, in "Nonresistance, Defense, Violence, and the Kingdom, "INTERP. 38 (October 1984),380-97. See broader schematizations by Harvey K. McArthur, Understanding the Sermon on the Mount (New York: Harper, 1960), who has twelve categories; Krister Stendahl, "Messianic License" in Biblical Realism Confronts the Nation, ed. Paul Peachey (Nyack, N.J.: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1963), pp. 139-52, who adds a thirteenth; and the historical survey in Robert A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1982), pp. 13-22. The commentaries of Guelich, W. D. Davies, and Hans Dieter Betz are discussed by Charles E. Carlston, "Recent American Interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount," Bangalore Theological Forum 17 (1985), 9-22.

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law's range. (Augustine applies it to attitude rather than to external action and is followed by Calvin; Luther distinguishes personal relationships as a Christian from larger social roles; and Thomas distinguishes precepts meant for all persons from counsels of perfection and places the "hard sayings" in the latter category.) Even so, none deny that following the law of love in the applicable realm goes beyond sheer extrinsic obedience to require heartfelt faith and charity. The notion that the Sermon is impossible of fulfillment, but has a pedagogical function, is usually associated with Martin Luther or, as Jeremias puts it, with "Lutheran orthodoxy." However, Luther himself maintained that faith is active in works of love and that it is precisely faith which loving service presupposes and of which it is a sign. For this reason, Jeremias' own hermeneutic of the Sermon carries through Luther's most central insights. The Sermon indicates a way of life which presupposes conversion; the Sermon's portrayals of discipleship, while not literal prescriptions, create ideals and set burdens of proof for all concrete embodiments. Finally, the position that the Sermon on the Mount is an "interim ethic" represents an extreme or caricatured version of an interest characterizing much contemporary thought. That interest is in early Christian eschatology, its impact on the original meaning of the Sermon, and on its continuing relevance. Among the historical questions which have dominated exegesis in the last one hundred years, this is surely one of the most central; its implications for ethics are vast. It was Albert Schweitzer who saw that the religious and ethical commitments of Jesus and the primitive church hardly could be disentangled from their eschatology. 3 Schweitzer saw no way to build a bridge from their world view to our own, a dilemma shared by many subsequent interpreters. Recently, ethicists and exegetes have rephrased the question: What is the continuing relevance of the eschatology which is so definitive a part of the early Christian religious experience ?4 Contemporary interpreters who reject the "interim ethic" solution share 3. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1914). Guelich provides an overview of the development of historical-critical research on the Sermon in the post-Reformation period, pp. 18-22. A constructive, historically based study is Norman Perrin, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963). 4. For instance, this question is important both for the exegete Pheme Perkins, in Love Commands in the New Testament (New York/Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982, pp. 2-4) and for the ethicist Thomas Ogletree, in The Use of the Biblic in Christian Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 177. In Perkins' words, biblical eschatology furnishes at least a "critical edge" to the Christian's perspective on the present world. In those of Ogletree, it demands the creation of a community which "stands apart from" the "dominant society" (p. 180). In The General Reversal: Ethics and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984) Allen Verhey, a: biblically grounded ethicist, develops the thesis that the ethics of the kingdom is response to the apocalyptic action of God, which reverses all earthly values.

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with the pioneering historical critics the conclusion that the eschatological perspective is key. Also shared is a desire to recover as closely as possible the original setting, process of composition, and the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Two important questions are whether the Sermon should be read in terms of originally discontinuous sayings and units or read as finally redacted, and whether even to understand the Sermon on the Mount as final collection requires reference to its place within Matthew's Gospel, the New Testament, and eventually the whole canon. To assert that the literary collection which the Christian community takes as its "Scripture" is authoritative in its final, edited form implies that the normative meanings of texts or units must be balanced out within a larger frame of reference in which other notes are struck. Although not every modern interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount has a full-blown theory of canonical authority, most agree at least on the importance of correlating the most pointedly moral constituents with other elements, and of situating these three chapters within the general program of the Gospel writer, surmised partly with the aid of historical critical tools. 5 My method likewise presupposes (1) at least a de facto functional authority of the canon in Christian theology, (2) the coherence of Matthew 5- 7 as a unit of meaning if considered from either a literary or a religious perspective, (3) reciprocity of meaning between this unit and the Gospel, (4) the usefulness of historical-critical research in shedding light on the original settings and meanings ofbot.h the smaller and larger units, and (5) continuity but not identity of the original meanings of Sermon and Gospel with their meanings for later communities which rely on the canon. No pretence will be made in this essay either to settle or to render superfluous the answers to two further issues of even greater importance and difficulty, (6) whether the authority of the canon as such is not only a fact but a requirement of Christian theology, and (7) the precise nature and criteria of the continuity between the original and the presently normative meanings of canonical texts. KINGDOM ETHICS AS RELATIONSHIP AND ACTION

In recent hermeneutics of the Sermon there is a trend to avoid the extremes of Jeremias' first three types, and to appropriate the insights of his fourth by recognizing coherence among several interdependent fac5. A notable exception is Hans Dieter Betz, who theorizes that Matthew took over the Sermon on the Mount from a pre-Synoptic source, with its own (and different) soteriology, in which the death and resurrection of Jesus plays no role. Understood independently from Matthew's Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount pictures the Kingdom of God as identical with God's activity of continual creation. The Sermon's central text is taken to be Matt. 6:25-34 (Essays on the Sermon on the Mount [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985], pp. 89-123).

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tors: Matthew's view of ] esus as the Messiah who fulfills] ewish expectations,] esus' depiction of discipleship in concrete and action-oriented but extreme terms, the Sermon's eschatological "kingdom" language, and traditional Christian views of ethics, both personal and social. These factors often are tied together in some understanding of converted relationship. The Sermon on the Mount portrays a new relationship to God as Father, which is epitomized in and somehow made possible for others by ] esus, which individuals actually and presently experience in their own lives and communities, which transforms their relationships so that, like God, they can look even on enemies selflessly, which makes them doers of concrete actions concerned foremost with grasping the situation and meeting the needs of others they affect, and which would be so radical in its fulfillment that fullness never has been experienced. The commentary by Robert A. Guelich exemplifies well this trend, proving the inseparability of the exegetical, theological, and ethical dimensions of the Sermon on the Mount. He interprets the "impossible" demands of the Antitheses as setting forth "] esus' demand for behavior commensurate with whole relationships rather than the broken relationships" demonstrated by the repudiated activities. 6 The Antitheses and especially the "hard sayings" demonstrate that "love" is "action that places the other's best interests rather than one's rights foremost.,,7 A practical question is whether the Sermon defines these loving acts in any precise way. The divorce texts and the instruction to love one's enemy can be translated into clear moral mandates-however problematic to interpret and apply. However, critical historical study has cast doubt on whether any apparently self-evident "mandate" can be taken for granted as original to the texts, and whether even the original specific meaning (to the extent that it can be uncovered) ought to be normative for every cultural and social situation. s If the Sermon's specific moral commands are most 6. Ibid., p. 193. 7. Ibid., p. 254. 8. On the disputed original senses of the divorce texts, refer to John R. Donahue, "Divorce: New Testament Perspectives," The Month 14 (1981),113-20. Equally disputed is the original referent of "enemies" in Matt. 5:39b. The present consensus appears to be that they were not national or political enemies but religious or perhaps personal ones. See Richard A. Horsley, "Ethics and Exegesis: 'Love Your Enemies' and the Doctrine of Non-Violence,"JAAR 54 (1986),3-31; Guelich, p. 219 on the "evil one," and p. 227 on religious enemies; Krister Stendhal, "Hate, Non-Retaliation and Love: 1QS X. 17-20 and Romans 12: 19-21," HThR 55 (1962),345-55; Victor Paul Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), p. 47; Stephen Charles Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), Chap. 9; Luise Schottroff, "Non-Violence and the Love of One's Enemies," in Essays on the Love Commandment, ed. Reginald H. Fuller (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 12-13; William Klassen, Love of Enemies: The Way to Peace (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 85-88; Pheme Perkins, Love Commands in the New Testament, pp. 27-40.

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appropriate to their own historical setting, and if the ethical import of the Sermon derives primarily from its depiction of evangelical discipleship, then it becomes questionable whether the formulation of moral rules ought to play any further part in interpreting the Sermon. If not, then it remains to account convincingly for the Sermon's endurance and practical forcefulness. Robert C. Tannehill suggests that the Antitheses of Matthew 5:39b-42 function as a literary unit to reverse conventional religious and moral values. These verses can provide effective directives toward action in various historical settings. Although specific, extreme commands such as "turn the other cheek" obviously are not literal language, they center on "focal instances" of action which stand "in deliberate tension" with the way in which we "normally live and think."g The patterning of instances induces the hearers to enlarge their field of reference to other situations cailing for overriding attention to others. The hearers are urged to act likewise without being told exactly which acts in which situations will represent substantially similar relationships. ETHICS AS IMITATION OF GOD

If it is true that the Antitheses' examples of righteousness function as "focal instances," what attitude or disposition toward others gives coherence to the "pattern" represented by the series of exemplary actions? What does the Sermon suggest internally about the substantive relationship out of which the mandated actions are to proceed? The grounding relationship will characterize the kingdom, since its presence is the subject of the Sermon on the Mount. A key theme of the Sermon's depiction of the kingdom is imitation of God; 10 to act as God does, with forgiveness and mercy, is to live in the kingdom. The Lord's Prayer, an appeal for the fullness of the kingdom, closely associates it with doing on earth the will of the Father (6: 10). It is one's forgiveness of neighbor on which one's own forgiveness by God explicitly depends (6: 15); the disciple prays to be forgiven as one who also forgives (6: 12, 14-15). The purpose of loving even the enemy is to "be sons of your father who is in heaven" (5:45a); if one is to go beyond merely self-gratifying relationships, then one must aim to be as "perfect" in the 9. "The 'Focal Instance' as a Form of New Testament Speech: A Study of Matthew 5: 39lr42,"JR 50 (1970),379. Tannehill does not see all the imperatives of Matthew 5-7 as "focal instances," however. Others, like the divorce texts, are of the form "legal rule," because practicable as stated, though open to future applications and exceptions (p. 381). 10. The theme is noted by William Spohn, SJ., What Are They Saying About Scripture and Ethics? (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 122. Spohn ties imitation to participation in the life of God by the power of the Spirit and cites authors such as Augustine, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and H. Richard Niebuhr.

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ways of mercy and forbearance "as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5 :48). The command not to judge others' failings (7: 1-5) bears out the forgiveness theme of the prayer for the kingdom; it is our attitude toward others which will determine God's attitude of judgment or forgiveness toward US. 11 Righteousness in God's eyes is not purity and lawabidingness, but mercifulness effective in compassionate action. Matthew's inclusion of the "Golden Rule" (7: 12) urges the disciple to identify with the other, to perceive the other's concrete need as though it were the disciple's, to act toward the other as though the other were oneself. The morally right act is simply but radically the act which demonstrates the forgiving attentiveness to the needs of others disclosed by Jesus as the will of God. Love is defined in Matthew's Sermon as a way of acting, not as an emotion. However, inferable from the deeds done is an attitude toward others which might be characterized as empathy, kindness, generosity, or compassion. 12 With this, the "dilemmas" which an ethic of love is sometimes said to pose, such as the conflict between love and justice or the impasse of a choice between two neighbors, are set aside if not answered. The mandate is not to settle such conflicts in the most prudent or effective way but to enter into them by identifying the needs of those concerned as one's own. This theme of love as attentive forgiveness fleshes out the concrete meaning of the "hard sayings," including the baffling instruction not to resist the evil one (5:39). Although the precise original meanings of nonresistance and "one who is evil" remain unclear, 13 it can be concluded minimally that the disciple does not approach the enemy or evildoer in hard, resistant, alienating, and self-righteous judgment but in a compassionate desire to meet the needs of wrongdoers and victims as well as possible in the circumstances. 14 The Beatitudes are confirmatory: Those blessed with the kingdom are "poor in spirit" (5:3), "meek" (5:5), "merciful" (5:7), "pure in heart" (5:8), "peacemakers" (5:9), those who "hunger and thirst" for the "righteousness" understood throughout the Sermon as forgiveness, and those who are ready to be persecuted by those who judge by power and status, or even by the law of the scribes and Pharisees 11. Elsewhere in Matthew, kingdom "righteousness" also is constituted by forgiveness and mercy, e.g., the parable of the King and the Wicked Servant (18:23-35); or the giving of a cup of cold water to one of the "little ones" (10:42). 12. On forgiveness and compassion, see Frederick E. Schuele, "Living Up to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount," Christian Biblical Ethics: From Biblical Revelation to ContempoTaJY Christian Praxis: Method and Content, ed. Robert]. Daly (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 208. 13. See n. 10 above. 14. Tannehill illustrates this point with a case study, p. 383.

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The Ethical Implications of the Sermon on the 1\10unt Interpretation

(5: 10-11, 20). The phrases of the Beatitudes may well have reference to minority social position as well as to discipleship attitudes,I5 and thus fit well with the many sayings of Jesus (in the Sermon, 6: 19-21) about the dangers that wealth and power present to the greater righteousness expected of the disciple. The more position and prestige one has to protect, the less likely one is to enter with compassionate action a situation in which one's assets are required for the well-being of others. Surrounding the Lord's Prayer are admonitions (6: 1-8, 16-24) not to pray or do good works for worldly motives, especially in order to increase one's own importance, but rather out of a desire to imitate God's generosity. The often cited and seemingly naIve "lilies of the field" passage can be understood in context as an exhortation not to be caught up anxiously in one's own daily needs but to seek first of all God's kingdom and his righteousness. Action which is righteous the way God's forgiveness and attentive care are righteous is the most basic condition of the goodness experienced in the life of the disciple. ESCHATOLOGICAL JUDGMENT

An obvious next question is what will sustain a compelling connection between relation to God and acts toward others, if acts are not backed forcefully by sanction-implying moral rules. I6 To insist, as did Luther and many recent interpreters, that action flows necessarily and spontaneously from conversion, seems right but inadequate once the incompleteness of the kingdom is acknowledged. Eschatological concerns can diminish the stringency of the Sermon's ethics if they tip the balance to relationship over acts or to the imminent over the present character of the kingdom. 17 Needing attention are the eschatological themes of warning and judgment which accompany those of salvation, freedom, and blessing. I8 When the radical, conversion-based injunctions are placed in the context of the three 15. E.g., Guelich, pp. 97-109. 16. On whether any general moral principles or specific moral rules may be grounded in the New Testament, compare Allen Verhey, pp. 174-78, 187-95; Richard N. Longenecker, New Testament Social Ethicsfor Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. 14-15, 26-28; and Robert J. Daly, Christian Biblical Ethics, pp. 97-103. 17. In The Kingdom of God in the Teaching ofjesus, Norman Perrin draws on his teacher Jeremias to develop a tensive "present/not yet" approach, highlighting the disciple's relationship with God (see esp. pp. 184-204). The "peace pastoral" of the U.S. Catholic Bishops recognizes this fundamental view of the kingdom in its first half, but in its second half defends 'just war" and nuclear deterrence provisionally because of the imperfection of the present order (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response [Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1983]). 18. Verhey, pp. 88-89,92; Guelich, pp. 405-13; Hermann Hendrickx, The Sermon on the Mount (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1984)pp. 160-74.

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chapters of the Sermon and, more broadly, in that of the Gospel, they derive much of their forcefulness from accompanying warnings .of the consequences for those who fall short of the law's fulfillment and of the greater righteousness enjoined by Jesus (5: 17, 20). Those who fail "will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (5:20), "shall be liable to judgment" (5: 22a), "will be liable to the hell of fire" (5: 22), or "thrown into hell" (5: 29; cf. 30b). The insistent pairing of the twin themes of righteous action and judgment is central to Matthew 7; these themes are amplified by those of efficacious prayer and mission. As we have seen, action is an important component of spreading the gospel. It is the life of "good works" which gives "glory to your Father who is in heaven," and by which the disciples will be "salt" and "light" to the world (5: 13-16).19 Doing the good works commended is not a distant ideal but necessary now. "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (7: 21). Although doing what is heard is hard, Jesus assures that "good things" shall be given to those who earnestly ask (7: 11). The Sermon's exhortation to pray counteracts exaggerated "gift" interpretations of the kingdom, since the petitioner has a role in securing the blessings from which action springs. The warnings not to be taken in by false prophets in sheep's clothing (7: 15), or by trees that do not bear good fruit (7: 16-20), or by those who perform showy works in Jesus' name (7:22-23), or to build one's house on "sand" by not actually living up to Jesus' words (7:24-27) suggest choice, responsibility, difficulty, and the possibility of delusion in the life of would-be discipleship. The allusions to the "narrow gate" (7: 13-14) and the Lord's repudiation of "evildoers" on the "last day" (7 :22-23) are explicit references to judgment. 20 SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF DISCIPLESHIP

Three questions, well-rooted in the tradition, surface as soon as one moves out from radical discipleship to contemplate the roles and respon19. Possibly also 7:6 is a mission saying, cf. Guelich, pp. 353-54; and Hendrickx, p. 155. If so, it may be illumined by 6: 1-8, 16--21. Christian discipleship and respectable religious practice are not the same; do not be religious for earthly reward and do not prostitute the gospel by giving it to those who will use it for worldly respect or power. 20. This ties the Sermon to other judgment material in Matthew, as in chaps. 13 and 24-25. Enlightening for the ethicist isJohn R. Donahue, S.J., "The 'Parable' of the Sheep and the Goats: A Challenge to Christian Ethics," TS 47 (March 1986), 3-31. Donahue ties together discipleship deeds, implications for justice, and the text's apocalyptic horizon of judgment and restoration.

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sibilities of the disciple as also a member of communities whose identity is not primarily religious. (1) Do the actions mandated for the Christian by the Sermon have necessarily any political, institutional sphere of reference? (2) Is justification of violence definitively excluded from Christian ethics? (3) To what extent are the ethics of the Sermon translatable into "public" discourse? The Sermon on the Mount does not suggest a "social ethics" in any direct or usual sense. It depicts active, personal outflow of a total conversion by virtue of which ordinary religious and moral expectations are shaken to their roots and one is transfixed by Jesus' transparence to the reign of God. Sayings and imperatives with ethical content and even prima facie sociopolitical implications function most obviously and effectively within the parameters of the Sermon as engaging illustrations of the immediate sphere of committed discipleship. Indeed, the energy of the practical moral life must spring up here: in individual commitment within a supportive community. Martin Hengel argues historically that a fundamental difference between Jesus and the Zealot revolutionaries is that Jesus saw the primary source of evil in the world as the evil in the individual's heart rather than Roman political domination, the priestly aristocracy, or large landowners. Thus the reign of God is not brought about in the first instance by socio-political transformation but by the "transformed heart" which alone "is capable of new human community, of doing goOd.,,2I Yet, even if the Sermon does not plainly dictate social objectives, it may imply them. It is particularly appropriate to draw out such implications if the realization of the kingdom is understood biblically to span races, cultures, nations, and now also generations. Inasmuch as the twentiethcentury disciple has increased capacity to affect whole groups of socially and economically disadvantaged, even oppressed, persons, the broader social duties of discipleship hardly can be ignored. Stephen C. Mott, by emphasizing "status" as "the key to social ethics" in the New Testament,22 shows how specific New Testament injunctions can serve as the basis, not of prescriptions, but of a social ethics of consistent discipleship action. The inclusive religion of Jesus challenged the status distinctions on which secular cultures depend, thus destablizing traditional Roman society, and provoking persecution. Compatibly with Tannehill's hermenutic of "focal instances," Mott affirms the continuing social meaning of the inclusive call to discipleship and of merciful action. One hardly can forgive another, show mercy in the face of his or her need, and treat the other as oneself 21. Martin Hengel, VictOlY over Violence: Jesus and the Revolutionists (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), pp. 47-48. 22. "Use of the Bible in Social Ethics II," Transformation 1 (1984), 24.

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would want to be treated, if the other is perceived as alien and approached in terms of gender, race, national, religious, or class stereotypes. To be perfect in one's compassion is to presuppose that such divisions have ceased to exist, along with the institutions which support and feed on them. Parallel perceptions of the social implications of the Sermon are represented by the ethics of theologies of liberation. Hermann Hendrickx's commentary lifts up the dawning of the kingdom in Jesus as the key theme, expressed paradigmatically in the Lord's Prayer. God's rule requires identification with the oppressed, mutual solidarity, noncondemnation, liberation from fear, and praxis which enhances human welfare. 23 With good biblical warrants, liberation theologians highlight Jesus' special concern for the outcast (but notably, not only or even particularly the "innocent"), and suggest that the disciple ought to prefer the most powerless. NONVIOLENCE AND NONRESISTANCE

Can "love" and "nonresistance" express themselves as socio-political resistance to injustice, or even as physical violence and killing? The Sermon's answer lies in a further question, Which among available alternatives is truly merciful and forgiving? This question certainly puts the burden of proof on the advocates of violence. Political and economic resistance may be justified, but any attitude of righteous anger likely to result in a less compassionate or more self-assertive act toward the perpetrator of injustice looks dubious. 24 John Howard Yoder is outstanding among those who take seriously the "hard sayings" (and Jesus' nonviolent example) as a part of discipleship witness. Taking due account of canonical complexity and historical-critical research, Yoder arrives at a negative judgment on any Christian use of violence, in any situation. 25 Absolute exclusion of violence on the basis of 23. Hendrickx, pp. 3, 87. 24. I do not find in the Sermon justification for the disciple to seek or use power and anger against injustice; such justification is scant in the New Testament generally. This is no doubt why many Christian defenses of active resistance to injustice rely heavily on the Hebrew Prophets. One of the few New Testament warrants might beJesus' confrontation with the merchants in the temple, found in each Gospel (Matt. 21: 12-13, Mark 11: 15-17, Luke 19:45-46, John 2: 13-17). 25. The Politics ofJesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972); The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale, Pa.lKitchener, Ontario: Herald Press, 1971); The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Yoder is followed in his conclusions by Stanley Hauerwas, whose view of the Christian life as "story" is based in biblical themes, but less so in exegesis and current biblical scholarship. See, among many books, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Prime1' in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

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the Sermon (Matt. 5:38-48) is challenged by those who, like Richard Horsley,26 do not identify questions of war, revolution, or even personal self-defense against an attacker as concerns for which it has direct implications or who, like Stephen Mott,27 resist the extrapolation from it of moral rules. It should not be assumed that Christian ethicists who reject violence also reject involvement in the transformation of the social order. Even Yoder, who ostensibly repudiates "resistance,"28 does not seem to see "nonresistance" as incompatible with social action, as is clear in The Priestly Kingdom. Yet, the gospel is betrayed if social effectiveness is made more than a secondary objective. William Klassen, like Yoder a Mennonite, finds "the way to peace" in nonretaliatory enemy love, tied to and "modeling" a coherent life of discipleship.29 Luise Schottroff sees aggressive love of enemy as resistant to social evil and as "a combative and evangelistic means for the salvation of all,,,30 consistent with gospel inclusiveness and Jesus' manifest intent to cut across religious and social boundaries. PUBLIC LANGUAGE

All social justice interpretations of the Sermon suggest translation into language viable in the larger social order. The Thomistic "natural law" tradition of Roman Catholics, for instance, claims that radical gospel demands support reasonable cooperation toward social justice. This is true both of those who discuss the Sermon at length, such as Hendrickx and J an Lambrecht, and of those more concerned with social problems, such as Pope John XXIII and the U.S. Bishops in their recent pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace. 31 Even without arguing that the Sermon expresses common ideals, its special insights can challenge secular society, as they do for Yoder. A recent volume of the Bangalore Theological Forum 26. Horsley, "Ethics and Exegesis," cited in n. 8 above. 27. Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 28. The Original Revolution, pp. 48, 55-63. 29. Klassen, p. 135. 30. Schottroff, p. 28. See also Daly, "The Love Command and the Call to Nonviolence," in Daly, p. 216; the Jesus of the New Testament urges "active, converting love ... toward enemies of the community." Gerard Vanderhaar, Enemies and How to Love Them (Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985) defends nonviolence as an effective course in Soviet-U.S. relations, though Christian love does not "let the enemy wallow triumphantly in ugliness" (p. 74). Franz Alt argues that the only way to address "the atomic threat" is with modest, empathetic understanding of "people who think differently" (Peace Is Possible: The Politics of the Sermon on the Mount [New York: Schocken Books, 1985], p. 86). 31. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), in Seven Gr'eat Encyclicals, ed. WilliamJ. Gibbons (New York/Paramus: Paulist Press, 1963), pp. 289-326; see n. 17 above for the pastoral.

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addresses the power of the Sermon's message for non-Christian and even non-Western cultures. 32 Certainly the Sermon's integral presupposition of discipleship makes moot, from its internal viewpoint, the question whether Christian ethics can be universalized. Even though discipleship may affect the social order, it is still true that, as J. L. Houlden notes, the New Testament never presents ethics autonomously.33 The primary question the Sermon poses is not, How can the Christian speak to or affect natural moral values or social justice? nor, In what way does the Christian live differently from others? but rather, What is the fullness of discipleship like when imitation of the Father known in Jesus pervades one's existence? It is a question directed very much from inside an experience of radical commitment, of life in and with the risen Lord. The answer is that discipleship is lived only in the action which identifies the agent with the needs of the other, neighbor or enemy (not in fruitless "hearing"). To return to this section's three programmatic questions, if the ethics of the Sermon is an ethics of discipleship and forgiving love, then (1) the social dimensions of Christian action are necessary but presuppose personal transformation; (2) there exists a profoundly serious bias against any act which violates a basic condition (e.g., life) of the wellbeing of one toward whom the Christian acts; and (3) questions of public language and policy are not questions internal to (though not excluded by) this unit of Matthew's Gospel. Ethical attention is redirected toward concerns more germane to the Sermon when its eschatology is grasped. These concerns converge in three claims: (1) God's reign is present in and only in those who, with Jesus, share God's special righteousness; (2) the kingdom righteousness of forgiving love is given to those who wholeheartedly pray for it; and (3) converted, active discipleship presents itself to hearers of Jesus' words as an obligation for which each will be held responsible.

32. Bangalore Theological Forum 1711 (1985); see Eric]. Lott, "The Indian Christian and the Sermon on the Mount," pp. 1-8; Wolf Kroetke, "The Sermon on the Mount & Christian Responsibility for the World," pp. 23-40; Somen Das, "Violence & Non-violence: Re-appraising Gandhi's Understanding of the Sermon on the Mount," pp. 41-64. Mark Heim draws on Reinhold Niebuhr's love-justice dialetic to argue that the Sermon's general relevance to social life can only be recognized by faith ("The Sermon on the Mount: Ethic and Ethos," pp. 65-82). 33. Ethics and the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 66, 125.

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The Sermon on the Mount as Radical Pastoral Care

RICHARD LISCHER

Associate Professor of Homiletics Duke University Divinity School

As the expression of God's radical pastoral care, the Sermon on the Mount can only be interpreted as communities of Christians attempt to live it.

ARLY in the Church Dogmatics Karl Barth asserts that the task of theology is to assess the relationship of the church's distinctive talk about God with the church's being. 1 How do doctrinal and liturgical formulas square with the life of the church, and how faithful is the church to the various charters which have shaped its identity and purpose? The Sermon on the Mount is one such charter. Yet for many reasons, not the least of which is its alleged impracticability, the Sermon is usually ignored by practical theology or isolated from its churchly context and admired for the grandeur of its moral or psychological truths. Contemporary Christians, however much they may admire the Sermon on the Mount, want even more to use it or to know if it is usable in the congregation. Most Christians are convinced that the Sermon cannot regulate a secular society, and many doubt its viability in the bureaucracy and political intrigues of the denomination. Yet what of the congregation, the empirical community of Jesus Christ which often lives in tension with both society and church bureaucracy? One would suspect that the congre-

E

1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), I, 1, 4.

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gation enjoys a more intimate relationship with the Sermon on the Mount, for the congregation derives its identity, tasks, and sustenance from the Scriptures and the sacraments as they are expounded and celebrated in its midst. May we not reasonably expect to find that the Sermon is not merely applicable to the church but is, as Barth put it, expressive of the "being" of the Christian congregation? The congregation is, in fact, the most appropriate theater for this, Jesus' greatest teaching. One finds little published support for such a claim. The church has directly appropriated little of the Sermon on the Mount into its polity and ritual, and only a few contemporary works in practical theology, ministry, pastoral care, and preaching comment on the Sermon. It is another essay to say why this is true. Instead, I will sketch a few characteristics of the congregation in order to confirm and promote the organic relationship that continues to exist between the Sermon on the Mount and the life and ministry of the contemporary congregation. THE SERMON AS A CHURCH DOCUMENT

The Sermon on the Mount is set in the most ecclesially oriented of the Gospels. No other Gospel is so shaped by the church's thought or designed for its use as Matthew's. For this reason it has exercised a uniquely normative influence in the later church. In Matthew alone the congregation is the ekklcsia (Matt. 16: 18), which is the qehal Yahweh of Old Testament-Jewish expectations. 2 Matthew's Gospel does not rely on a hierarchy of pastoral offices to make Jesus present to the church. Quite the opposite is true (Matt. 20:25-28). Because Jesus is still the pastor in this church, in the midst of his people (Matt. 18: 12, 20), his congregation offers the richest possibilities for fellowship, service, discipleship, and suffering. Matthew does not delineate gradations of "church," with the greatest of these residing somewhere beyond the local congregation; nor does he feed modern idealizations of "community" by glossing over the sins of his own group. Matthew's congregation has its problems,3 and those problems appear to revolve around the "being" of the church in the physical absence of 2. Gunther Bornkamm et al., Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, trans. Percy Scott (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963), p. 38. 3. The Matthian community'S problems are outlined by W. D. Davies in The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: The University Press, 1964), pp. 316 and passim; Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew, Proclamation Commentaries (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 91-93; William G. Thompson, Matthew's Advice to a Divided Community, AnBib 44, pp. 258-59; Hans Deiter Betz, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 20-22; and Bornkamm, Tradition and Interpretation, p. 22.

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Jesus. What is the nature of the church? The question of the temple tax in 17:24-27 apparently reflects the unresolved issue of the church's distinctive identity amidst the conflicting currents of popular piety, Judaism, and Paulinism. Matthew's community is also torn by the more banal disputes that perennially divide congregations: moral laxity, legalism, bad preaching, factionalism, ignorance, and wealth. Who may belong to the church? Like any pastor, the Evangelist is concerned with the quality of relationships within the congregation, with offenses and restoration; yet the Sermon breathes a different spirit than later manuals of church discipline. Matthew agonizes over the mixed nature of the community, but the Sermon pleads for reconciliation and makes no provision for expelling sinners and heretics. What is the mission of the church? Even the Gospel's perception of the church's mission is not without ambiguity. Matthew begins and ends with delegations from and toward the nations; yet it portrays a teacher whose concern is only momentarily deflected from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The radicality of the "you have heard ... but I say to you" construction is balanced by respect for the law, which Jesus has come to interpret and fulfill, not to relax or abolish (Matt. 5: 17). The members of this community will take the law seriously in their dealings with one another. If the Sermon on the Mount is a catechism, as some have characterized it, 4 it is not so much a doctrinal summary as a guide to pastoral care for those who are endeavoring to live in God's new congregation. In sum, the Gospel renders typical Christians struggling to be faithful in what one writer calls "the climate of ordinary Christianity ,,,5 a major feature of which I take to be the intense and conflicted life of the local congregation. That there appears to be a movement of audience from "the disciples" in 5: 1 to "the crowds" in 7:28 does not suggest an attempt to generalize something so peculiar as a church's catechism. If the disciples represent the "typical" Christian and the crowd the potential disciple, then the audience of the Sermon has merely shifted from the initiated to those who have overheard the teaching and must now decide if they are ready to commit themselves to the One who makes such a blessed and difficult life possible. 4. Bornkamm, Tradition and Interpretation, p. 27 and Joachim Jeremias, The Sermon on the Mount, trans. Norman Perrin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), p. 23. The radical nature of the teaching in Q prompts Davies to remind us that this is not a catechism in the sense of elementary instruction (Setting of the Sermon, p. 386). 5. James P. Martin, "The Church in Matthew," INTERP. 29 Uan. 1975),41, n. On the disciples as "typical" Christians in Matthew, see Edward Schillebeeckx,Ministty, trans.John Bowden (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1981), p. 22.

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THE ESCHATOLOGICAL COMMUNITY

The Sermon on the Mount is difficult in many ways: difficult to try, as in love for one's enemy or uncoerced generosity, difficult to do, as in nonresistance or total sexual purity, but even more difficult to conceptualize as a framework for Christian existence. The framework larger than any of the precepts or prohibitions within it is the eschatology of the Sermon. The Rule of God provides a more comprehensive auspices for the Christian life than even the most thoroughgoing principle of nonviolence, for the latter is ultimately a response to the former, a courageous way of bringing oneself or one's group into alignment with the hidden but real dynam~c of God's governance in the world. Whereas morality-if we are to believe Reinhold Niebuhr-suffers in collision with institutions but proves workable in the individual, eschatology in anything but its crassest varieties of futurism meets with incomprehension at all levels: institutions, communities, groups, and individuals. It is the eschatology of the Sermon, not its morality, that confounds contemporary Christians. The eschatology of the Sermon begins with the Beatitudes but underlies the entire discourse. The Beatitudes characterize those who have been called by God. 6 They are less a roll call of kingdom-virtues than an affirmation of the eschatological blessedness which is already enjoyed by those who are followers of Jesus Christ. The Beatitudes are not a strategy or exhortation to blessedness but an indicative with the force of a promise. So sure is the reality of the kingdom which has been inaugurated by Jesus that his followers already have what the kingdom promises. The promise of the Beatitudes serves as preface to what Robert Tannehill calls "focal instances" or imaginative examples of life in the kingdom. 7 In Matthew 5 Jesus repeatedly cites a command, radically deepens its significance, and provides an imagistic amplification of his teaching. Not only shall we not kill, we shall not be angry. This is what that looks like: If you bring your gift to the altar and there remember a broken relationship, leave your gift and first be reconciled (Matt. 5:21-24). The focal instance is as concrete and realistic as everyday life; yet it is extreme and shocking when compared with ordinary behavior. The focal instance is not a cut-and-dried law, like the legislation on divorce found in 5:31-32 and in the other Gospels, from which deductions may be drawn. Rather it oper6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, " ... neither privation nor renunciation, spiritual or political, isjustified except by the call and promise of Jesus, who alone makes blessed those whom he calls, and who is in his person the sole ground of their beatitude" (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. 1963], p. 119, n.). 7. Robert C. Tannehill, "The 'Focal Instance' as a Form of New Testament Speech: A Study of Matthew 5:39b--42," The Journal of Religion 50 (Oct. 1970), p. 380.

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ates metaphorically, producing an imaginative shock to the lTIoral imagination and enabling the hearer to see his or her own life in a radically new way.8 That the Beatitudes should produce a metaphoric effect is not surprising, for metaphor, with its multiple and contradictory layers of meaning, is the unit of expressive language most suited to the is/is not/will be tension characteristic of eschatology in general and the Beatitudes in particular. When the Beatitudes are reduced to virtues or the maxims of positive thinking, the rest of the Sermon is lost as well. Then the sayings about purity, love, generosity, piety, and all the others can no longer be understood as representative portraits of the new community's daily life of discipleship. Rather, they become new rules, and as rules they eventually produce the predictable forms of ethical activism, anguish, or securitydepending on the species of self-deception at work in the hearer. So the reconciliation urged upon litigants as they rush to court (Matt. 5:26-27) "makes sense" to Christians, for everyone knows that people who go to the same church or live in the same neighborhood ought to get along. But why should the Teacher be crucified for reinforcing what everyone already knows? What if reconciliation and the other behaviors advocated by the Sermon are not "rules" in the sense of new and more stringent laws, but are rather ingredient to the Rule of God? In this New Rule we do not do the law, but what the law ordains is fulfilled in us (cf. Rom. 8:4). We reconcile with our neighbor, not because we feel better afterward, but because the court we are rushing toward belongs to God. We seek reconciliation, not merely as an individualistic response to a command, but because the End toward which we journey will be characterized by the reconciliation already effected in Jesus Christ. Our ethical behavior, what we do now, is a downpayment on the perfect peace, harmony, love, purity, and worship that will characterize the End. How perverse it is to claim that the Sermon can only be done by individuals. It is precisely as individuals cut off from the community that we are bound to fail. For the Sermon portrays a dynamic constellation of relationships-a kind of radicalized Canterbury Tales-within the pilgrim community. Because the pilgrims have experienced by faith the assurance 8. Tannehill, "The 'Focal Instance,'" pp. 381-83. Jeremias paraphrases the Sermon as follows: "And now you should know that this is what life is like when you belong to the new aeon of God" (The Sermon on the Mount, p. 31). Barth interprets the dictates of the Sermon on marriage, swearing, anger, etc., to be "incidental and only by way of illustration," for "it has always proved impossible to construct a picture of the Christian life from these directions" (CD, II, 2, 688). On the other hand, Robert Grant reminds us that the earliest Christians received the Sermon "literally as commands to be obeyed" ("The Sermon on the Mount in Early Christianity," Semeia 12 [1978], 219).

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of their destination, they are encouraged by its promise and guided by its rubrics. Eschatology and ethics have always had to do with one another,9 but what is their relationship? In an important work published nearly fifty years ago, Amos Wilder asserted that eschatology serves as a sanction for Jesus' ethical teaching. It is, he said, the symbolic "overtone" of the ethical element that lends motive and significance to Jesus' message of thisworldly redemption. Wilder's study grades the levels of the sanctions beginning with the lowest or "formal" sanctions, which are predictions of rewards and punishments (e.g., Matt. 5:25-26). These sanctions are ultimately based on self-interest, for the rewards and punishments not only stretch into eternity but impinge upon the present messianic times. The highest or "essential" sanctions derive from the nature, character, or glory of God ("You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," Matt. 5:48; cf. Matt. 5: 16).10 We might question the priority of ethics above eschatology in Wilder's interpretation or suggest that he inflates the distinction between the formal aspects of literary eschatology and the essential character of the God who makes promises. Yet Wilder's inventory of sanctions is a reminder that the church too often employs the biblical representations of formal sanctions, which feed upon self-interest, but ignores essential sanctions in the nature of God and God's kingdom. The result is the suffocating atmosphere of moralism in many Protestant churches. Moralism is comfortable with lists of virtues or suitable causes, the pursuit of which will stave off unhappiness and issue into present or future satisfactions. "The Be-Happy Attitudes," to cite a current bestseller, promise the reader a sense of personal fulfillment. We are inoculating the world with a mild form of Christianity, E. Stanley Jones said, so that it is now all but immune to the real thing. The aim of any such inoculation is security: not security in Christ but security from Christ and his terrible freedom. 11 Because the church has overlooked the promise of eschatology, it is left with the baffling residue of commands which will not work in the world 9. Davies writes, "They may seem uneasily yoked but the conjunction to which we refer should not be unexpected because, in the Jewish hope for the future, eschatology was never divorced from the ethical, the Messianic King was to be also a teacher or interpreter of the Law: the Messiah could be like Moses" (Setting of the Sermon, pp. 424-25, itals. removed). 10. Amos N. Wilder,Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching ofJesus (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), pp. 47 and 57ff.). 11. Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), p. 64. George Buttrick directly addresses the problem of moralism in his sermon on Matt. 7: 12, "Is It the Golden Rule?" in The Twentieth Century Pulpit, ed. James W. Cox (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978), pp. 30-35.

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but whose performance is ominously tied to eternal salvation (cf. Matt. 7:24-27). As a compromise, preachers continue to lash their listeners with the "principles" of the Sermon, avoiding embarrasing specifics like the word on divorce, and concentrating on viable issues such as peace and prayer. Recovering the individual injunctions without appropriating the eschatological-communal-evangelical complex summarized by the word "gospel" (Matt. 4:23) is like trying to build the ship in the bottle. It never works. Our only hope of living as the community of the Sermon is to acknowledge that we do not retaliate, hate, curse, lust, divorce, swear, brag, preen, worry, or backbite because it is not in the nature of our God or our destination that we should be such people. When we as individuals fail in these instances, we do not snatch up cheap forgiveness, but we do remember that the ekklesia is larger than the sum of our individual failures and that it is pointed in a direction that will carry us away from them. How does one combine eschatology and ethics in the local congregation? The question sounds ridiculous because we know that the problem is of a different order than "How can we involve the youth?" or "How can we improve our music?" One way, of course, the Protestant way, is to preach the Sermon on the Mount as an indication of the community'S effort to live out its own identity. This is to set the Sermon into the larger framework of God's present and coming kingdom. Root out the moralism that urges an attitude or task but offers no resources in God for its attainment. Since moralism is not limited to preachers but pervades all strata of congregational life from the Board of Trustees to the children's Sunday school class, let the entire congregation become an incubator of the promise and the demand of the Sermon. For example, is there a gospelbased method of making a church budget that will exemplify the congregation'S mission without being "anxious about tomorrow"? In my first parish my predecessor had quietly refused his salary until the congregation met its mission commitments. By the time I arrived, a small, rural congregation, easily stereotyped as "ingrown," was giving away well over half its income every year. Are there ways in which the congregation can refuse to try to serve God and mammon, perhaps by offering both coat and cloak to a floundering sister church? In such focal instances the congregation'S enactment of the Sermon will not only teach its members how to live as faithful disciples, but the congregation itself will become, without self-advertisement, what Jesus says it is: "the light of the world" (Matt. 5: 14). PASTORAL CARE AND CONVERSATION

It is somewhat puzzling that Matthew's rendering of the new con-

gregation in the Sermon on the Mount should be ignored by contempo-

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rary studies of pastoral care and conversation. If the Sermon presents a series of case studies of daily life in the kingdom, why does the Sermon appear only in a few scattered footnotes in the literature of pastoral care? Over the past few decades pastoral care has focused on individual counseling with little attention given to the corporate dimensions of moral guidance, cure of souls, and the formation of the congregation. Yet even when the Sermon on the Mount was governed by an equally individualistic hermeneutic, there seems to have been little communication between the privatized demands of the Sermon and the personal liberations wrought through pastoral counseling, no doubt because the Sermon shakes the therapeutic foundations upon which pastoral counseling is based. Every year I lead a seminar in our university's medical center on the topic of psychiatry and the Christian faith. The discussion inevitably touches on those elements of Christianity which the psychiatrists consider most toxic to the mental health of their patients. It occurs to me that most of their examples are drawn from the Sermon on the Mount. They have patients who want to be perfect, who feel guilty about anger and embarrassed by lust, people who actually believe that Big Brother God knows what they are thinking. "I grew up in a Lutheran home" (an ominous opening statement), "and I never heard anything healthy about human nature, nothing about recreated humanity in Christ, but only don't do this or don't do that." The Sermon is one more example of "the rules," only in this case the rules run counter to our essential humanity. The Sermon's tone violates the moral neutrality necessary for self-acceptance and change. Its obsession with purity gives free reign to the tyranny of the super-ego. The main objection to its message is that those who take it too seriously move away from the median ranges of mental health, our culture's translation of salvus. Far from a set of helpful guidelines for living the happy life, the Beatitudes detail the disjunction of blessedness from happiness, and salvation from health. In a society that celebrates "the narcissism of similarity" the Sermon disappoints repeatedly.12 What someone said of the characters in the stories of Flannery O'Connor applies to the adherents of the Sermon: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." The psychiatrists have a point. Theirs is no small indictment to bring against a religious program that so thoroughly disaccommodates its adherents for a well-balanced life in a technological and therapeutic society. Before we can recover the Sermon on the Mount for pastoral care, we need to retrieve pastoral care from pastoral counseling and pastoral 12. See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 72.

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counseling from its reliance on formal rather than essential sanctions for its work. In some theories of pastoral care, the Bible is merely a "resource" for counseling, so long as it is interpreted according to reputable psychotherapeutic principles. 13 The church is a "context" for pastoral care, and more than a few pastoral counselors cite the physical location of their office in a church building as reason enough for omitting the explicit language of God from the counseling session. 14 In much of modern pastoral care God has become a "fiction" or a formal symbolization-in Wilder's terms, the overtone which lends significance to the therapeutic task. The essential sanction for pastoral care has become human nature as it is explicated by various psychological theories. God and church are too often appended to studies in pastoral care the way "last things" was tacked on to the end of dogmatics books. Several pastoral theologians are leading the retrieval of the communal and moral dimensions of the church's rich tradition of pastoral care. 15 There is now growing criticism of pastoral counseling's uncritical adoption of psychological models and techniques. William Clebsch and Charles J aekle have noted, "In our time, the weakness of reconciling as a function of pastoral care is obvious. There is no place in the structure and rhythm of the life of modern congregations where a serious discussion concerning the state of one's soul is expected.,,16 Don Browning reminds us of the "system of practical moral rationality" that characterized the communities of Judaism. Although the methods of the scribes and the Pharisees were criticized and transcended by Jesus, his church's pastoral care presupposes the tradition of moral casuistry and cannot be understood apart from it. 17 Browning's attention to the original moral context and method of pastoral care is an important contribution. But Browning does not say where pastoral care finds its normative meanings so that the church can become 13. For a summary of the relation of biblical study and pastoral counseling see Donald Capps, Biblical Approaches to Pastoral Counseling (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981), pp. 18-46. 14. See "The Church as Context" in E. Brooks Holifield, A History of Pastoral Care in America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), pp. 342-48. 15. E.g., William H. Willimon, Worship as Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979); William B. Oglesby, Jr., Biblical Themes for Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1980); Thomas C. Oden, Pastoral Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983); John Patton, Pastoral Counseling, A Ministry of the Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983); Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care, ed. Gerald L. Borchert and Andrew D. Lester (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985). 16. William A. Cle bsch and Charles R. J aekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective (New York: Jason Aronson, 1964, 1983), pp. 65-66. 17. Don S. Browning, The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), pp. 122-25.

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the "community of moral discourse, inquiry, and action" he wants it to be. Nor does he say which values are normative or by what criteria they might be judged normative. 18 Attention to the Sermon on the Mount will create the atmosphere for moral inquiry, but only the type of moral inquiry sanctioned by the holiness of God. Browning's analysis of the moral context of pastoral care does not rely on the primary language of the Christian symbols and thereby perpetuates the notion that the reality of God, perhaps veiled as the process of moral inquiry or the inherent goodness of community, has a legitimate functional equivalent within the church. Thus our quest for pastoral or congregational uses for the Sermon on the Mount leads to a fundamental conclusion. The Sermon's authority is sanctioned by the essential nature of God and is delivered by the only One capable of mediating that holiness. Jesus says repeatedly, " ... but I say to you." When for whatever reason we cannot bring the reality, immediacy, and authority of God to articulation in our pastoral care, counseling, and conversation, our continued reference to the Sermon on the Mount lapses into sentimentality. For many the word "pastoral" does suggest a situational relaxation of the church's dogma. The "pastoral" approach is accommodating. It appears to suspend the demands of the Christian faith and to substitute for them the more widely accepted values of decency and acceptance. Indeed, this misconception of "pastoral" has obscured for many the pastoral tendencies of the Gospel of Matthew and the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is a pastoral care document, not in the sense that it sentimentalizes the promise and demands of the kingdom, but in the sense that it applies them in concrete situations. It presupposes an intensity of community life far removed from the anonymity, mobility, and amorphous values of what Robert Bellah and others calls "the lifestyle enclave.,,19 What often passes for "tolerance" in the modern congregation is in reality excommunication through indifference. "Tolerance" cares so little for the other that it will not endure the pain of confrontation and reconciliation. The Sermon delivers a form of pastoral care many contemporary Christians would politely decline. Yet the care is genuine. The Sermon recognizes the demands the community's members constantly place upon one another and realistically appraises the daily opportunities for failure and faithfulness in the Chris18. Browning, Moral Context, pp. 95-100. "The minister is interested primarily in building a moral universe and facilitating right conduct in a community of persons" (p. 99). 19. Bellah, Habits of the Heart, p. 71ff.

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tian community. The Sermon wants to show that the demands of the kingdom can work even in difficult situations. It makes provisions for degrees of anger in Matthew 5:21-26; it permits an exception to the absolute prohibition of divorce (5:22)-a pastoral concession to reality easily overlooked in our society; it offers the Lord's Prayer as an alternative to the complicated demands of conventional piety.2o The Sermon takes our humanness seriously. The second misconception of pastoral care is that it is private care exercised by the professional minister or pastor. Mat~hew is not yet aware of this subtle form of clericalism. The Sermon seems strangely bereft of a pastor; yet what it offers can best be characterized as radical pastoral care, radical because it is an expression of God's holiness and because its chief actor is not a chosen professional but the people themselves. In the Sermon is it the whole organism that functions in obedience to the kingdom. For the congregation wishing to live by the Sermon the most helpful suggestion may have less to do with the Sermon's individual features and more to do with its framework or grid for ministry. Many congregations have an extensive structure of boards and committees, ranging from the Board of Proyerties to the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee, but no systematic mechanism for engaging members in pastoral care or for delivering pastoral care in the congregation or the community. That is the pastor's business. Most congregations operate with a "trickle down" theory of pastoral care. Were a congregation to adopt the Sermon on the Mount's model of pastoral care based on Christians' radical responsibility for one another-as it is derived from Jesus' mediation of God's holiness-the congregation's life and ministry would change dramatically. One of the pastor's most important tasks would be the equipping of "pastors" for the care of the sick, conflict resolution, education, ethical deliberations, prayer, and evangelization. Those appointed for such work might not be the most influential or powerful members in the congregation, but those with the spiritual maturity and gifts requisite to the pastoral tasks. This view of pastoral care reflects the Sermon's rational but not legalistic framework for ministry. Pastoral care in this sense can no longer be separated from "administration," but now, instead of training Christians to be committees, the church will train them to be pastors, those who care for their brothers and sisters in the stress and conflict of daily life.

20. W. D. Davies compares the pastoral qualities ofM, as opposed to Q, to the Gemara or commentary on the Talmud (Setting of the Sermon, pp. 387-99).

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LITURGICAL LIFE

Yet any congregation may stumble over the Sermon on the Mount precisely because it does reflect "a system of practical moral rationality" which seems alien to a religious culture that has grown weary of rationalism and is turning to narrative expressions of its faith and identity. We claim our identity as members of God's new congregation less by deliberating the provisions of the Sermon, especially where they are unamplified by focal instances, than by telling and retelling the community's formative stories. We do not embrace the admonition concerning the laying up of treasures (Matt. 6: 19-21) as readily as its narrative expression in the parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16-21). We seem to learn less about God and mammon from Matthew 5:24 than from the parable of the Shrewd Steward in Luke 16: 1-13. The admonition on the forgoing of oaths in Matthew 5:24 means little to us until we see what that can look like in the story of Jesus' silence before Caiaphas (Matt. 26:57-64; cf. 27:11-14) and Peter's perjury in the courtyard (Matt. 26:69-75). The story means even more to us as we sit in the shadows of a Lenten vespers, hear the passion read, and experience the futility of oath-taking in a world that is filled with lies. How can the congregation integrate the Sermon on the Mount into the story of its own pilgrimage? That integration takes place in the liturgy. Liturgical actions themselves are often misconceived as special ceremonies which are unrelated to the rest of life. Yet Baptism is not an episode of private initiation but an action involving the entire church and one that will be recalled and renewed daily. Confession is not a formula for personal remorse but a moment in the ongoing mutual admonition and absolution of the brothers and sisters. Preaching is not a virtuoso performance but the language of the church as it engages in the laborious reversal of Babel and the formation of a new people. Eucharist is not a postscript to preaching but the symbol and reality of the transformation of all things through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Doxology is not a hymn to be sung but a life to be lived. In the liturgy the Sermon on the Mount imparts its character to the formation of God's people. It is the lyrics to the church's song. In most lectionaries a substantial part of the Sermon on the Mount is read during the Epiphany season. In the Sermon on the Mount the glory of God begins to shine in the face of Jesus as he manifests the holiness and authority of the Father. That glory will move, as it were, from mountain to mountain in the Gospel of Matthew: from the Sermon on the Mount to the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17) where his place above Moses is reiterated, to the Mount of Olives (Matt. 21: 1; 24:3), to Golgotha, and

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finally to the Galilean mountain for the culmination of his epiphany (Matt. 28: 16-17). In the church year the Sermon takes its place as one of a series of stations in the journey. The church also reads Jesus' words on ostentatious piety (Matt. 6: 1-6, 16-21) on Ash Wednesday and the Beatitudes on All Saints' Day, when future and realized aspects of eschatology are fused as on no other festival day. In the church's worship the Sermon's Lord's Prayer is a part of every service. It is the eschatological prayer of the new community, of the community now conlmitted to live by the promise of the kingdom. Aside from this prayer, little of the Sermon has gained direct access to the liturgy. Indirectly, however, its emphasis on holiness, obedience, and santification is everywhere. In the Lutheran service of Holy Baptism, for example, the minister charges the parents: You should, therefore, faithfully bring them [the children] to the services of God's house, and teach them the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. As they grow in years, you should place in their hands the Holy Scriptures and provide for their instruction in the Christian faith, that, living in the covenant of their Baptism and in communion with the church, they may lead godly lives until the day of Jesus Christ. 21

This liturgy presupposes the kind of community that was nurtured by the Sermon on the Mount. It presupposes an ordered and intense process of formation directed by those who are mature in faith, for the purpose of godly thought and behavior. Such formation is the result of God's covenant of grace which is actualized in the church through Baptism. Its end is not personal happiness or fulfillment but "the day of Jesus Christ," which is the same End for which the Sermon on the Mount was given to the church. There can be no fitting conclusion to the study of a living eschatological document. The Sermon belongs to the pilgrim church. The church is not the context for the Sermon but its agent. Therefore no individual has ever captured its definitive meaning, for as the expression of God's radical pastoral care, the Sermon on the Mount can only be "interpreted" as communities of Christians attempt to live it.

21. The Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publ. House; Philadelphia: Board of Publication, Lutheran Church in America, 1978), p. 121.

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Expository Articles BONNIE BOWMAN THURSTON

Assistant Professor of Theology Wheeling College

Matthew 5:43-48 "You, THEREFORE, MUST BE PERFECT" OST OF US have trouble loving a perfectionist. He or she has . achieved a state of being too rarefied for us. Perfectionism is out of fashion. We tend to think of it as a sort of psychological illness with compulsive behavior as its first cousin and "nasty niceness" as its great aunt. Twentieth-century Christians, with our psychologizing tendencies, are not the first to be troubled by Matthew 5:48, "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The verse has always presented a kind of exegetical knot to biblical scholars. Let us make an effort to loosen that knot a bit. To a large extent our understanding of 5:48 will depend upon how we interpret the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. As with the Sermon, the context is crucial. Matthew uses 5:48 as a summary for the last of the Antitheses in the larger section on law in the Sermon (5: 17-48). As the last of the group, it is placed in a position of importance; the reader will remember it. In argumentation, many rhetoric books suggest we place the second-tobest argument first, the other evidence in the middle, and the best argument last where it will be remembered. If we apply this rule to this case, then we must read 5:20, "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," and 5 :48 together. In this way we see the section pointing toward an intensification of the law, with perfection as the highest point of intensity. As Louis Bouyer points out in Introduction to Spirituality (New York: Desclee Co., 1961), " ... the whole meaning of the law, for Israel, is to mark the people with the divine seal: 'Be ye holy as I am holy' (Lev. 19:2)." Bouyer suggests Jesus is carrying the same idea to its extreme form in 5:48 (p. 265). Certainly the word "perfect" (teleioi) is close to the Hebrew equivalent meaning "without spot" or "without moral blemish." In the LXX it is used in relation to men like N oah-"a righteous man, blameless in his generation" (Gen. 6:9).

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Expository Articles Interpretation

Matthew's Greek, however, seems to suggest something more than absence of moral imperfection. It suggests the "wholeness and singleminded ness by which God goes about fulfilling purposes and the standard by which we are called to obey" (Key, Young, et al., Understanding the New Testament [Englewood Cliffs, N.].: Prentice Hall, 1965], p. 284). "Perfect" here means complete, whole, full-grown, mature, accomplished, or perfect in its kind. It is a word of special significance for Matthew. It is found in the Synoptic Gospels only in Matthew, and in Matthew only three times, each as an insertion in parallel materials. We remember the word most clearly from the story of the rich young man (19: 16-22). The young man comes to Jesus in search of eternal life. He has observed all the laws, but Jesus adds one more requirement: "If you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (19:21). Here again, "perfect" occurs in the context of law and its intensification, and of the kingdom. Matthew strengthens the demands of the same story in Mark (10:21ff.) and Luke (18:22ff.). I think this is done to stress the special quality that marks Jesus' followers: Their perfection is their discipleship, the extent to which they follow him: Both 5:48 and 19:21 occur with the command to love the enemies. Love of enemies extends the Old Testament law for, historically, the Hebrews were commanded to love their neighbor, and they tended to view their neighbor as their compatriots or tribe. Matthew's Jesus constantly extends who the neighbor is here including even enemies. Perfection in love contemplates all persons alike from the standpoint of God. God sees impartially, "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust" (5:45). In both contexts, Jesus is asking for observable dedication to certain qualities of conduct. Perfection, as he calls for it, does "not imply complete sinlessness and full virtue as matters of fact" (Robert Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982], p. 388). It implies wholeness of consecration to God. What I am suggesting is that "perfection" for Matthew is not the condition of having arrived at some state of being: Perfection has to do with discipleshi~the seal of those who follow Jesus. Recall how carefully Matthew has pointed to the difference between "you"-the followers Jesus addresses-and the Gentiles (oi ethnikoi), the nations or heathens. "And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?" (5:47). The "you (umeis) in verse 48 is emphatic, in contrast with the tax collectors (telonai) and Gentiles (or the scribes and Pharisees in 5:20). 171

Matthew frequently sets this new congregation of those who follow Jesus against the Jews or Gentiles. He has Jesus address the persecuted congregation, "Blessed are you" (5: 11), possibly implying exclusion of "them." Jesus refers to "their synagogues" and examination before "them and the Gentiles" (10: 17-18). The Gospel as a whole is interested in showing the specialness of the community of followers we now call the church. "You" are the doers of the new interpretation of law Jesus has given. Perfection is the "more" which distinguishes doers of the teachings of Jesus. The letter of James supports such an assertion. James is particularly close to Matthew in his concern for the church; his letter quotes the Sermon on the Mount twenty-three times and exemplifies Matthew 7: 31, "N ot everyone who says Lord, Lord .... " James distinguishes between those who talk discipleship and those who do it. The letter opens with the recognition that following Jesus will lead to various trials, but testing will produce steadfastness, and the full effect of steadfastness is "that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing" Games 1 :4). Perfect (teleioi) is joined by a coordinate conjunction with complete (olokleroi). Grammatically, coordinate conjunctions are used to link ideas of equal value. "Complete," then, is a compound word (holos = whole, and kleros = lot), which means, in effect, "that which was assigned by lot or share." You are perfect when, by the trials of following Jesus , you have regained the entirety of your original endowment! So we are led back to the law of Moses which came because of the hardness of heart, "but from the beginning it was not so" (Matt. 19: 8); back to the Antitheses and intensification, "you have heard it was said .... But I say to you;" back to the difference between God's original intention which Jesus comes to reveal and the law which was given because of our "imperfection." In Matthew's Gospel the context of perfection is intensification of law and discipleship. The love commandment forms the basis of its tradition. It addresses those who have been called to follow Jesus-Jesus who was in every way as we are, but without sin, blameless before God; Jesus who most perfectly shows God's original intentions. Here is perfection in love: Jesus shows us how to be "perfect before the Lord your God" (Deut. 18: 13, teleios ese enantion kyriou tou theou sou). "Following Christ and radical fulfillment of the law are the same" (G. Barth, "Matthew's Understanding of the Law" in Bornkamm, Barth, Held, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963], p. 97). Perfection is wholehearted discipleship. We who are called to follow Jesus, we who belong to the suffering Son of Man, and not the tax collectors, the scribes, the Pharisees (whoever they

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may be today), we are called to show the perfection of God's love which does not limit who the neighbor is, which does not draw lines between the good and the evil, the just and the unjust. We know it to be from but not of us when, in our desire to follow after Jesus, we can "do good to" when we do not "feel good toward" (Robert Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literaty and Theological Art [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub!. Co., 1982], p. 388). Our perfection begins when, as Paul Tillich translates the phrase, we begin to "be all-inclusive as [our] heavenly Father is allinclusive" (Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965] pp. 35-36. In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul reminded her that each of her members was called to lead a worthy life. Christ, he writes, has given different gifts for the work of ministry "until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4: 13). Markus Barth's commentary on Ephesians suggests one interpretation of "to mature manhood" (eis andra teleion) as "into perfect adulthood" (Ephesians: Translation and Commentary on Chapters 4-6 [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1974], pp. 484-96). This is the notion of perfection which, I believe, Matthew wants to suggest to the church: not that we arrive but that we continue steadfastly to journey. Perfection is not a completed state of being; it is not an abstraction. It is the person of Jesus whom we grow toward and follow after in order to complete or mature ourselves. Our perfection is, in modern parlance, "in process." It is the process by which we develop our discipleship; it is the "following after" which the rich young man found so difficult. We "follow toward" perfection even as Jesus, by his suffering and dying, by his living and rising, was perfected.

PHILIP

B.

HARNER

Professor of Religion Heidelberg College

Matthew 6:5-15 N OUR LIVES AS CHRISTIANS we often try to follow the principle, "Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you." We respond enthusiastically to this advice because it seems so comprehensive. It acknowledges fully the importance of God's grace, which

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we seek, in one form or another, when we pray. It also takes into account the importance of our own activity, as the contribution that we ourselves make when we seek to live as Christians in the world. As the same time, however, we need to recognize that this principle simply presents two ideas, side by side, without analyzing or defining the relationship between them. As helpful as it may be, the advice of "praying and working" becomes a restatement of the old question concerning the relation between grace and good works. This same question arises when we analyze the passage before us, Matthew 6: 5-15. We notice in particular that Jesus referred to rewards for the practice of piety: "your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matt. 6:6; cf. 6: 1,4, IS). We wonder whether Jesus thought of religion in terms of seeking rewards, or if not, how he understood the nature and role of rewards. We also notice that Jesus gave the Lord's Prayer as a model for his followers to use (Matt. 6:9-13). As we analyze the prayer, we wonder how Jesus related the themes of God's grace and human activity within the structure of the prayer. The question of rewards and the structure of the Lord's Prayer both concern the operation of God's grace and its relation to our own efforts to live as Christians today. A central organizing principle that helps us consider these issues is that the Kingdom of God is a gift which requires the best response that we can make. The kingdom is a gift which God freely offers in his grace. Jesus assured his disciples that "it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). He pointed out that the kingdom is God's to give (cf. Matt. 20: 1-16), and it is more than anyone could earn, even the most righteous (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Jesus never spoke of building or earning the kingdom; he always regarded it as a wonderful gift of God's grace. Yet he also emphasized that people must make the best response they could to receive and appropriate God's gift. They must receive the kingdom with open-hearted trust and thankfulness (cf. Mark 10: 15), and they must respond to it with unswerving devotion and loyalty (cf. Luke 9:62). They must regard the kingdom as the su preme value that transvalues the other commitments of their lives (cf. Matt. 13:44-46), and they must dedicate themselves to doing God's will and following the teachings of Jesus (cf. Matt. 7:21-27). God offers the kingdom as a gift, but he expects that people will take the gift seriously and make the appropriate response. In New Testament study it was especially Joachim Jeremias who pointed out that the structure of the Sermon on the Mount itself reflects this understanding of the relation between God's grace and human response (The Sermon on the Mount [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963], pp. 30ff.). The Beatitudes, at the beginning of the Sermon, represent the theme of grace or gospel, for they are Jesus' promises to his followers that God is freely offering 174


them his kingdom. The remainder of the Sermon represents primarily the theme of human activity or law, delineating the kinds of responses that the followers ofJesus should make to God's gift of the kingdom. The Beatitudes, Jeremias suggests, govern the remainder of the Sermon, just as in mathematics a number before parentheses determines every figure within the parentheses. This view of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole can help us understand the specific issues of rewards and prayer that arise from our passage, Matthew 6:5-15. The understanding of the Kingdom of God as a gift seems at first to be inconsistent with Jesus' teaching that God will reward us for activities such as almsgiving, prayer, and fasting (Matt. 6:4, 6, 18)-or, in more modern terms, contribuing to the United Fund, teaching a church school class, or working for the elusive goals of just peace and peaceful justice. The idea of rewards does mean that God cares how we live. It is important to him whether we do right or wrong, good or ill, and in rewarding us he shows that he regards us seriously as persons. Further aspects of rewards are equally important. As disciples, we are to do good without thought of reward (Luke 6:35). Because the kingdom itself always remains a gift of God's grace, it is also important for us to realize that we do not earn the kingdom or receive a place in it as a reward. Just as we seek to do God's will as a way of responding to his gift of the kingdom, so the rewards that we receive are ultimately aspects of the kingdom itself. Gifts and rewards from God tend to coincide, especially since rewards, as the parable of the Faithful Servant reminds us (Luke 17:7-10), are always greater than anything we could hope to earn. Rewards from God are more "gift" than "reward," and the final reward is the gift of life in God's kingdom. If we compare the treatment of "wisdom" in the Book of Proverbs with Jesus' view of life in the kingdom, we find a very similar understanding of the relation between gifts and rewards. In Proverbs, wisdom in principle is available to all, the simple and the foolish as well as the noble and the wise (Prov. 1:2-6; 8:1-21; 9:1-6). In a similar way, Jesus offered the kingdom to all who would receive it, even the tax collectors and the sinners. Wisdom must be sought and appropriated by each individual person (Prov. 2: 1-5); similarly, life in the kingdom requires single-minded dedication from each disciple. Wisdom offers rewards, which are both material and spiritual (Prov. 3: 1-4, 16; 9: 11; 22:4); Jesus, as we have seen, assured his followers that God would reward them for their good deeds. Wisdom itself, however, is greater than the rewards it brings (Prov. 3: 13-15; 8: 10-11). In a similar way, the kingdom itself is greater than any reward which could be earned. As a last similarity, we should note that wisdom in the final analysis is a gift (Prov. 2:6--15; 3:5-8), just as the Kingdom of God is a gift of divine grace. These 175

similarities suggest that Jesus may well have been preserving Old Testament tradition about "wisdom" when he retained the concept of rewards but articulated it within the context of the conviction that the Kingdom of God always remains a gift of God's grace. If we ask now about the relationship between the themes of God's grace and human activity in the Lord's Prayer, we find that the form of the prayer reflects in miniature the structure of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. The Beatitudes, at the beginning of the Sermon, are promises and assurances of God's grace as it is freely offered to the new community of the followers of Jesus. In a similar way the address "Father" at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer grants the followers of Jesus the opportunity to enter into a new relationship with God, closer and more meaningful than any that was possible before. As assurances of God's redeeming and forgiving grace, the Beatitudes make the remainder of the Sermon possible, for they enable the disciples to regard their efforts to obey God's will as responses to his grace rather than attempts to earn the kingdom as a reward. In a similar way the address "Father" in the Lord's Prayer makes the remainder of the prayer possible, for it draws the community of disciples into a new relationship with God on the basis of which they are able to offer their prayers of intercession and petition. A third way, finally, in which the Beatitudes correspond to the address "Father" is that both presuppose an implicit reference to Jesus himself. As the one who was truly righteous and merciful, pure in heart and peacemaking, Jesus himself exemplified and realized par excellence the qualities of discipleship depicted in the Beatitudes. In a similar way Jesus, as the unique Son of God, addressed God as "Father" and gave the disciples the privilege of addressing God in the same way, so that through his sonship they are brought into a new relationship with God as children of their heavenly Father. These parallels in function and content between the Beatitudes and the address "Father" make it appropriate that the Lord's Prayer should stand within the Sermon on the Mount, whatever its original setting may have been in the ministry of Jesus. We should also notice that in one important respect the structure of the Lord's Prayer does differ from that of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. The Sermon begins with the theme of grace or gospel, and then it continues, with only occasional exceptions, with the theme of human activity or law. Most of the Sermon, therefore, consists of Jesus' teachings, which represent God's will for the community of disciples. The Lord's Prayer, in contrast, opens with the theme of grace and then continues with petitions for further gifts of God's grace, such as the kingdom, daily bread, or forgiveness. This difference is understandable when we remember that the Sermon as a whole belongs to the category of teaching or instruction,

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whereas a prayer by its very nature focuses more on God's actions than on human activity. This observation, in turn, raises the important question to what extent the Lord's Prayer contains any reference to human activity. To analyze this issue we may look individually at each of the four major sections of the prayer-the opening address, the "Thou" petitions (which refer to God using the word "thy"), the "We" petitions (which refer more immediately to the disciples, using the words "we, us, our"), and the closing doxology (praising God and attributing to him "the kingdom and the power and the glory"). It seems clear that the opening address and the closing doxology refer to the operations of God's grace rather than to human ethical activity. The address reflects God's gracious gift, through] esus, that brings the disciples into their new status as children of their heavenly Father. The doxology refers to God's sovereign activity as king. It corresponds to the "seal" of praise with which the] ewish people were accustomed to conclude their prayers, and it has a rich Old Testatment background in, for exampie, Second Isaiah (cf. Isa. 42: 8, 12; 43: 7, 21; 49: 3). The doxology reflects human activity in the sense that the disciples respond to God's grace by praising him. This "doxological" response to God's grace within the context of prayer is parallel to the ethical response that the disciples are asked to make in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. Each type of response is appropriate within its own context, as an aspect of Christian life, but the doxological type of response must be distinguished from human activity in the more traditional sense of doing "good works" or obeying the teachings of ] esus. The question whether the "Thou" petitions refer to human activity involves the interpretation of the individual petitions. Many people today would probably understand "hallowed be thy name" and "thy will be done" as statements of commitment on their part to show their respect for God and carry out his will by the way they lead their lives. In itself, this kind of commitment is essential to Christian living. In terms of interpretation, on the other hand, it would seem that the eighteenth-century critic] ohann Bengel was correct in arguing that the verbs in all three petitions have the same force, so that all three are genuine petitions to God rather than references to human activity. The "Thou" petitions, therefore, most probably mean that God is being asked to sanctify his name in the world and carry out his will, just as he is asked to bring his kingdom. If this interpretation is correct, it means that this section of the prayer refers to God's grace rather than human activity. It also signifies that the "Thou" petitions are forms of intercessory prayer, for God is asked to act in a way that affects, in principle, the entire world. Only after the disciples have 177

prayed for the world do they turn to their own needs and bring them before God in the "We" petitions. The "We" petitions, with one exception, refer to God's actions rather than human activity. They ask God, as the heavenly Father, to meet the needs of the community of disciples by providing them with gifts of his grace, such as daily bread, forgiveness, and protection from evil. The only reference to human activity occurs in the petition for forgiveness: "and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" (Matt. 6: 12). In all probability, this is the only reference to human activity in the entire Lord's Prayer. It does not mean that we must forgive others so that God will forgive us. As the parable of the Unmerciful Servant suggests (Matt. 18:23-35),Jesus believed that God freely offers his forgiveness but then expects that we will respond by showing forgiveness to others. Forgiveness from God is a gift of God's grace, but we must take the gift seriously and make the right ethical response if we are to appropriate the gift and incorporate it into the structure of our own lives. It is significant that the sole reference to human activity in the Lord's Prayer reflects the same pattern of thought that we have observed in the Sermon on the Mount as a whole-God freely offers us his grace and then expects us to make a fitting response through our own ethical activity. In biblical thought this pattern can be traced back to the structure of the Sinai covenant, which opens with the statement of God's grace to Israel in delivering the people from bondage (Exod. 20:2) and then presents the Ten Commandments as the covenant stipulations that the people are expected to follow in response to the grace that God has shown (Exod. 20:3-17). Second Isaiah reflects the same pattern of thought, in brief poetic form and in reversed order, in the summons that Yahweh addresses to Israel: "Return to me, for I have redeemed you" (Isa. 44:22). In light of this pattern we can understand more clearly the meaning of the advice, "Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you. " We pray to God for the inexpressible gifts of his grace, which only he can give; then we seek to do "good works," not as a way of earning rewards or earning the kingdom, but as a way of taking God's grace seriously and making the best ethical response that we are capable of making to the grace that God has freely offered. In this respect the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord's Prayer in particular, invite and challenge us to perceive the new possibilities of life that God graciously offers and then respond in a way that combines gratitude to God, concern for others, and a commitment to obeying God's will as it is formulated in Jesus' teachings. 178


CHARLES

E.

CARLSTON

Professor of New Testament Intelpretation Andover Newton Theological School

Matthew 6:24-34 UR TEXT seems so simple: Trust God; have no anxiety about necessities; God will provide. Yet these verses, carefully thought through, are so full of difficulties that they raise in a striking way the fundamental problem of the nature of theological language. For one thing, the logic is unclear. Verse 25 begins with "therefore," but it goes far beyond the question of money, of which alone verse 24 speaks, so the conclusion does not necessarily follow. In verse 27 the general theme of God's providence is transformed into a much more secular bit of advice: Anxiety is ineffectual, anyway! The metaphor used (the cubit) is not particularly successful: Who ever thought (or wished) to become more than two feet taller by worrying about it? Finally, the optimistic tone of the whole passage turns suddenly in verse 34 to a melancholy observation about the generally sad state of the cosmos. None of this adds up to discursive clarity. Nor are things much better if one probes what is really being said about money. One does not have to be an ideologue to consider what is said here about economics naIve: Can we not take money seriously as an economicnot merely a moral-issue without falling into self-satisfaction, as some realists have done:

O

Do not set your heart on your wealth, nor say, "I have enough!" (Sirach 5: 1)

Again, one need not put Jesus (or Matthew) into Pauline categories to feel that something like works-righteousness lies perilously close to the surface in verse 33; yet verses 28-29, taken alone, could be understood as implying that work itself is quite unnecessary! Some of this, to be sure, is due to the historical development of the passage and some to the difficulties all metaphorical theology commonly gets into. Still a major problem exists: Faith here seems almost to be identified with naIvete, as if trust in God is roughly equivalent to not having good sense. Was Joseph, in planning during the seven good years for the seven lean years to follow, an example of unfaith? Are we, when we act similarly? How then shall these transparent statements be understood, since they evidently cannot mean exactly what they say? To sort some of this out, we begin with the structure of the passage. In 6: 1-7: 12 alms, prayer, fasting, riches, anxiety, judging, and then prayer 179

again are discussed as "focal instances" of the more general principles already laid down in the Sermon's introduction (5:3-20) and the Antitheses (5:21-48), with their concluding call to perfection (5:48). Within this larger section, 6:24-34 includes general instruction (v. 25), illustrations (vs. 26-32), and two conclusions (vs. 33, 34). The specific (and secondary) application of the well-known proverb in verse 24a ("No one can serve two masters") is to "Mammon," which is money, often ill-gotten (cf. Luke 16:9,11), a common substitute for trust in God. This metaphorical warning is then extended in verses 25-34 to all of life's necessities, by the use of material-some of it proverbial-from Q and elsewhere, which gives a variety of reasons for not being anxious. While the general emphasis here is clear enough, the details do not fit easily. "Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" is obscure in itself, as well as in precise application. (Perhaps: God created life and the body-will he not then provide for their sustenance?) The logic-from the greater to the less in verse 25 and from the less to the greater in verses 26, 28-30-is rabbinic and seems (unlike the Stoic doctrine of the impersonal generosity of nature) to suggest the Creator's providential care. Birds and lilies (perhaps the purple anemone?) are not so much mere examples as natural witnesses to the providence of God (see esp. v. 30). Yet verse 27 is a foreign body in this argument. Whether the Greek word is to be translated as "span of life" (properly: "time of life," "age") or "physical stature" (which seems to be implied by "cubit") is unclear but irrelevant. In either case the emphasis has moved completely away from God's providential care to a thoroughly secular reminder that some things are beyond our control. (True, anxiety will not make me taller; but does than mean that work will not make me richer?) And verse 32a points to verse 33, which seems equally foreign to the whole: Trust God not because some things are more important than food or clothing (v. 25) nor because God will provide life's necessities (v. 32b) but because the Gentiles wrongly seek (v. 32a) what will be given you if you seek first God's kingdom (Matthew: and righteousness). Finally, verse 34, cited by Matthew alone, is a rewording of a well-known proverb, connected only by catchword to the theme of inordinate care. In other words, one must distinguish sharply between the general thrust of the passage-trust in the providence of God-and some of the individual phrases, which come originally from other contexts and fit only partially into the overall argument. Most of this structure is already given in Q (cf. Luke 12:22-31), but Matthew has placed the whole in its present position in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Luke 6); and he has added the term "righteousness" to "the 180


Kingdom of God" in verse 33. Both changes call for comment. The use of God's "kingdom" in verse 33, almost at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, shows that (as in 5:20) Matthew is writing for Christians who already know what Jesus' teaching is about; and he intends by "therefore" (oun) to connect that generalization with what has gone before (similarly in 5 :48 and 6:9). The promise of God's providential care, in other words, is not for everyone (cf. "Gentiles," in v. 32) but for those who have heeded the demand of 5: 17-20 by putting the will of the Creator first. It is clearly Matthew's intention to make of these verses an essential part of Jesus' teaching on the nature and demands of discipleship. Something of the same is surely intended by his addition of the word "righteousness" in verse 33. Scholars are divided over the precise use of the term here. Some would distinguish a traditional apocalyptic or "Pauline" usage (righteousness as God's gift) here and possibly in 5:6, 10 from an "ethical" use (righteousness as the conduct required of the faithful), as in 5:20;6: 1 (3: 15 and 21 :32 belong together and could be placed in either category). In general, however, two things seem to be clear: The righteousness demanded of disciples is a demand of God, the exemplar of such righteousness; and the verbal/conceptual connections with ,5:20 (also Matthean!) seem close enough to require the ethical interpretation in our passage as well. In other words, the demand is rooted in the character and activity of God, but the ethical demand itself is central. "Faith" that produces no ethical response is as little faith for Matthew as it is for James (or, for that matter, Paull). Both of these redactional modifications thus place our section on "anxiety" within the context of promise and demand which characterizes all of chapters 5-7. The larger context of these verses is also Matthew's whole conceptual world, including both Jewish and early Christian traditions. Pharisaic Judaism knew, as the Psalms of Solomon show, that the Creator sustains the Creation: For if I hunger, unto Thee will I cry, 0 God; And Thou will give it me. Birds and fish dost Thou nourish ... And if they hunger, unto Thee do they lift up their face (5: 10-12).

The same thought is reflected in the promise of Psalm 37:4, 25 and, of course, in the stories of both the manna (Exod. 16: 19) and Solomon's proverbial opulence (II Chron. 9). Even Matthew's language here has a biblical ring: "Birds of the heaven" and "grass-or plants-of the field." The Babylonian Talmud includes a saying which is strikingly like verse 34: 181

"Care not for tomorrow's cares; for you do not know that the day brings forth; perhaps tomorrow you will not exist, and then you will have cared for a world no longer yours" (BSanhedrin 100b). Terms similar to the language of our passage also occur in Luke, not only in the parallel (12:22-31) but also in 16:9, 11, 13; 12:7, 16-21 and elsewhere, while Matthew himself has parallels to part of our text in 10:29-31 (sparrows, hairs of one's head) and in the repeated use of "little faith" (8:26; 14:31; 16:8; 17:20). Many passages from different circles of early Christianity reflect the motifs of God's overarching sustenance and care (Phil. 4:6f.; I Pet. 5:7; Rom. 1 :20), coupled with a warning about excessive concern for money and possessions (Heb. 13:5-6). So if Matthew has put his special stamp on these materials, he is writing within a widely understood and accepted moral framework. That framework is, in fact, even wider than the Jewish and Christian traditions. Several images and statements in our text reflect a mentality of univeral wisdom: two masters (v. 24a); the contrast between the life (psyche and the body (soma) on the one hand, and life's necessities on the other (v. 25b); the divine feeding of birds, who do not farm (v. 26a); the proverb about the cubit (v. 27); the allusion to Solomon's splendor (v. 29); and the saying(s) in verse 34, among others. If the original reference was to the itinerant radicals who made up Jesus' earliest followers, the use of such wisdom materials inevitably expands the reference to include Christians (and others) of later generations as well. To be sure, the solemn "But I tell you" (v. 29) provides a christological base for such wisdom-the Matthean Jesus is, among other things, a wisdom-teacher-but the intent of this is clearly to expand the teaching, not to narrow it. Only those are specifically excluded who too zealously seek (v. 32: epizeteo, NEB: run after!) the things of creation instead of the Creator. This, to be sure, is the nub of the problem. What is too zealous? Is not such a question already an evasion of Matthew's quite explicit language? The text does not, like Aristotle, suggest moderation in all things; it states everything absolutely-as fanatics of every day, including our own, have always insisted. So we return to the nature of theological language. To state what is at stake here requires the use of absolutes, but to take the absolutes at face value robs them of any genuine meaning. This is the paradox with which the interpreter must live; and it is the paradox of theological language itself-not only of metaphorical language, which so many in our day are rightly describing as challenging us at the very edge of understanding, not merely in our imaginative faculties. Two examples will suffice. "Live by the day." Fine. That means realistically acknowledging the 182


brevity not only of one's own life but perhaps even of human historywhich is certainly one implication of Jesus' eschatological teaching. If that is its whole meaning, however, any hope for the future, even as God's future, is misplaced, and what we hope for is not really the Kingdom of God the Creator. The paradox, in other words, is built into Jesus' teaching. Similarly, asceticism, especially in those societies which have and use too much of the world's basic materials, is always an important option. Yet to absolutize our text as a universal call to a simpler life, even to those with too much, is to make of Christian discipleship simply a change in life-style, which it is not. In other words, two dangers exist here: to domesticate a radical challenge into a mere exhortation to try harder, or to make the Word of God into a law, thus robbing it not only of its character as the Word of God but also of its power to change the world for the better. In diametrically opposed ways, then, our temptation is to trust not in God but in our own vision of the future, by means of things we can ourselves control. No muted call to do one's best will ever break out of that doublebind. In an odd sort of way, in other words, only these paradoxical absolutes are truly realistic calls to faith.

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MaJ·or Book Reviews THE SOCIAL MATRIX OF THE HEBREW BIBLE The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, by NORMAN K. GOTTWALD. Fortress

Press, Philadelphia, 1985. 702 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by J. GERALD JANZEN, professor of Old Testament, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH WROTE that "every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." One measure of the stature of Norman K. Gottwald's earlier tome, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Orbis, 1979) [hereafter TYJ, is the impatience with which its readers have awaited the volume here under review. Shorter by about a third while covering much more ground, The Hebrew Bible [hereafter HB] nevertheless achieves a thorough and comprehensive presentation of Israel's traditions down to the first century B.C.E. Within its own terms, and as a sequel to TY, HB must be acclaimed a resounding success. It is written in a style which to a considerable degree has strained out the knots and clots of sociological jargon because of which TY, unless ingested slowly, gave heartburn. The wealth of data is at all times presented and interpreted by a clear integrative vision. That vision, for all its ideological forthrightness, displays an undertone of humility, an openness to dialogue which promises to save Gottwald's materialism, and his dialectical-conflictual model of social relations, from hardening into what (after Paul Valliere, Holy War and Pentecostal Peace) one might call Heroic War-eternal and irreducible conflict between static unreconcilable factions. This openness is illustrated by the difference between the subtitles of TY and HB: The rubric of the first is purely sociological, but the second is socio-literary. In the end the literary is absorbed into the social, but this is understandable given Gottwald's commitment to materialist exegesis of text and of world. In time, the contents of the literary Trojan horse may subvert the materialism. Part I, "The Text in Its Contexts," deals with three introductory matters: a brief but lucid resume of the history of the study of the Hebrew Bible (Chap. 1); a presentation of the material and social world in which the Hebrew Bible arose (Chap. 2); and an overview of the literary history of the Hebrew Bible, both in its formation and in its after-history (Chap. 3). The meat of the volume comes in Parts II-IV, titled respectively: II, "Intertribal Confederacy: Israel's Revolutionary Beginnings" (Chaps. 4-6); III, "Monarchy: Israel's Counterrevolutionary Establishment" (Chaps. 7-9); and IV, "Home Rule Under Great Empires: Israel's Colonial Recovery" (Chaps. 10-12). The text is generously illustrated by 24 maps, 29 tables, 12 charts, and two excellent bibliographies, in all an extraordinarily successful execution of this standard feature of the introduction genre. The volume concludes with a well-focused discussion of "The Interplay of Text, Concept, and Setting in the Hebrew Bible." By placing this discussion at the

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end of the book rather than in Chapter 1, Gottwald may be taken to emphasize that the issues implied in this interplay remain open. It is these issues that I wish now to address. To begin with: Is HB in fact an introduction to the Hebrew Bible? Or is it rather, following TY, an introduction to the history of Israelite society, an Israel successively liberated, co-opted and colonialized? Agreed, the biblical texts gain in pith and point when read with appreciation for their material-social contexts of production; and they acquire enlarged pith and freshly focused point when read relative to material-social contexts of reception. The question is whether texts mediate directly between two such worldly contexts, or whether texts may have a thickness of their 'own into which one must first enter, a thickness constituted by their capacity to construct an alternate material-social world imaginally. If the latter is in any sense the case, then an introduction to such texts should help the reader to enter the world constructed by the text and not just the world out of which the text arose. The issue may be illustrated by reference to The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowe's classic study of the sources and influences behind Coleridge's great poem "Kubla Khan." Invaluable in its own right, Lowe's book is in fact the road to Kubla Khan; the road to Xanadu is found within the poem through an apt reading of the poem itself. Gottwald of course has objected to such a move. Because of "the socially embedded nature of the subject matter in biblical texts," and because of "our position as socially situated and conditioned believers and theologians," he writes, "what we can no longer do in good conscience is to isolate the religious factors from the total social setting as though, once the historical and social 'accidents' are noted as 'background,' we are free to move on to the self-contained religious essentials" ("The Theological Task after The Tribes of Yahweh," in Gottwald, ed., The Bible and Liberation [Orbis, 1983], p. 192 [hereafter BL]). The objection must be refused, precisely because of the abovementioned double embeddedness. The attractiveness of space-labs to scientists and manufacturers is that in them chemical and other reactions may occur in a manner enabled by the freedom of the materials from their usual gravitational embeddedness. Religious symbols have their greatest value when entered into for their capacity to neutralize momentarily the "gravitational" forces of our materialsocial context. This value, of course, is value for our material-social existence. In BL, Gottwald has reproduced a lengthy quotation from the last chapter of TY, a chapter titled "The Key to Israel's Religion: Idealism or Historical Culture Materialism." This quotation reads in part, " ... religion is the function of social relations rooted in cultural-material forms of life .... The uniqueness of the Israelite religious perception lay in its discovery through social struggle that the concrete conditions of human existence are modifiable rather than immutable conditions" (BL, p. 195; TY, p. 701). Change occurs through social struggle; religious perception arises through participation in that struggle; and religion with its symbol systems is the function of this struggle and this perception. As he states elsewhere in TY, religious symbols are servo-mechanisms whereby social groups transact their business more efficiently.

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Such an understanding of symbols might go somewhat toward a sensitive reading of symbol-systems in communities gearing themselves largely to the material cycles of nature and solidly-entrenched social systems. For such symbolsystems arise by processes as necessary as the natural cycles and as coercive as the social systems, which they identify, replicate, legitimate, and reinforce. But what such a materialist approach does not explain is how people get the idea (sic) that things could be different. Nor does it explain how some symbol-systems can kindle, in habituated and routinized hearts and minds, ideas of an alternate worldly reality and empower commitment and action or at least hope toward such an alternative. In other words, materialist exegesis may be more or less at home in myths of unchanging reality; but it is alien to the biblical epic symbolism for which reality displays features of both regularity and change, both necessity and freedom, conceived purposively and morally. The issue may be pressed further with the aid of a comment in Thorkild Jacobsen's great study of Mesopotamian religion, The Treasures of Darkness (Yale, 1976). Jacobsen himself is extremely sensitive to material and social contexts of the generation of symbols, and a master at reconstructing such contexts from the religious texts of Mesopotamia. Also, he warns of the danger of disembodied interpretation of metaphors isolated from their local settings. However, he adds, "it is equally easy to o'verweight the human nature of the religious metaphor and forget that its purpose is to point beyond itself and the world from which it was taken .... The whole purpose of the metaphor is a leap from [the literal] level, and a religious metaphor is not truly understood until it is experienced as a means of suggesting the Numinous" (p. 5). Such a "leap," into the gravity-free zone of the metaphor or symbol, enables the symbol to point beyond its material-social vehicle. The materialist refusal to make that leap constitutes a curious form of literalism as deleterious as that of fundamentalism. To my recollection, only once in HB does Gottwald venture the leap. With the unexpectedness and unlikeliness of an aria from Handel's Messiah in the middle of Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera, the following sentence appears in the middle of the discussion of Amos: "From what sources did Amos draw the moral and intellectual energy single-handedly to proclaim the total rejection of Israel by Yahweh? First and foremost must have been his overwhelming encounter with God." Ifwe may take this statement at face value (Gottwald does not typically work in modes of irony), then Amos' religious vision was not a function solely of "social relations rooted in cultural-material forms of life" but also of his encounter with the Holy. Similarly, texts may arise not solely as earth-functions, but also through imaginative processes in which God may have a share. To acknowledge this systematically and to adopt its consequences methodologically, Gottwald needs to reexamine the materialist metaphysics which underlies his sociological methodology. That he can refer positively not only to Marx and Freud, but also to Kant and Hegel (BL, p. 196), shows that he is not in principle inhibited by the metaphysical veto widespread in liberationist circles. Yet a century-old metaphysics revised sociologically is implicitly a new meta-

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physics. It is high time that the conflictual relation between materialist and idealist modes of thought (for materialism too is a mode of thought) be abandoned, in favor of a dipolar metaphysics within which both material and ideal factors are given full explanatory and transformative power concerning the world. Such a metaphysics is already available to us, a century (and a cultural-linguistic tradition) closer to us than that of Kant and Hegel. With it, we could speak of Amos' encounter with God without betraying our materialist concerns or remaining imprisoned within them.

GOD'S SON IN CONFLICT WITH GOD'S PEOPLE Matthew as Story, by JACK DEAN KINGSBURY. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1986. 149 pp. n.p. Reviewed by DENNIS DULING, professor of religion, Canis ius College.

IN THIS WORK Kingsbury, one of America's leading Matthean scholars, has risked exploring some well-known territory with a new compass. Having already contributed distinctive redaction-critical and composition-critical positions on Matthew, he takes the further step, as have Rhoads and Michie on Mark and Culpepper on John, to read the First Gospel through the lenses of modern literary criticism, primarily Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse. With respect to format, the book opens with an introductory chapter which analyzes Matthew from the perspective of Chatman's literary theory. This is followed by three chapters on Matthew's "plot." Then come three chapters, one each on the Son of man, the disciples, and Matthew's community. A final chapter contains brief concluding remarks. In addition to these eight chapters, there is a Preface, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Matthean passages. Chapter 1, "Understanding Matthew: A Literary-Critical Approach," presents an overview of Matthew from Chatman's perspective. For Chatman, a "narrative text" has a beginning, middle, and end and can be analyzed as "story" and "discourse." The "story" is "what" is told, whereas the "discourse" is the way the story is told. Kingsbury takes the First Gospel to be his "narrative text" and Matthew's "story" to be the life of Jesus from his birth to his death and resurrection. The first way to understand the "story," according to Chatman, is to analyze the "plot." Matthew's "plot," says Kingsbury, is centered on conflicts with evil powers and human adversaries. The most important of these conflicts is with "Israel," which consists primarily of the Jewish leaders and secondarily of the Jewish crowds. Kingsbury draws on his well-known theory that Matthew should be divided into three parts based on the temporal phrase "from that time on" (4: 17; 16:21). Part 1(1:1-4:16) presents Jesus, Part II (4:17-16:20) tells how the major conflict builds when Israel rejects Jesus' ministry, and Part III (16:21-28:20) intensifies the conflict when Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23) and the leaders are joined by crowds (26:47-56). The conflict is finally resolved by Jesus' death and resurrection, which solidifies the exclusion of "Israel" from the

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kingdom (cf. 4: 17 by anticipation). A subsidiary, fundamentally different, but parallel conflict occurs between Jesus and the disciples, but it is resolved by their final inclusion in the kingdom (28: 16-20). A second way to understand the "story," according to Chatman, is to analyze the "characters." Characters may be either "shown" by their actions or "told," that is, described. Matthew's characters, says Kingsbury, are usually "shown," and they can also vary according to "traits." Correspondingly, Kingsbury likewise discusses "settings" - place, time, social circumstances - which "set the character off." In addition to "story," Chatman analyzes "discourse," that is, the "way" a story is told, written, directed, or performed. He also discusses "point of view," that is, the various perspectives which can be taken by a character, the narrator, or the "implied author." What is Matthew's "discourse"? Kingsbury terms the real author the "first evangelist," and argues that both "narrator" and "implied author" may be designated as "Matthew," since the narrator is but the reliable voice of the implied author. The "point of view" of the narrator is both "omnipresent," or able to move about in time and space, and "omniscient," or able to give the reader "inside" information. Kingsbury furthermore analyzes three other dimensions of "point of view" - evaluative, phraseological, psychological- based on the studies of Uspensky and Lanser. Having laid the theoretical foundations in Chapter 1, Kingsbury analyzes the plot in more depth. In Chapter 2, "The Presentation of Jesus (1: 1-4: 16)," Jesus is put forth not only as the "Davidic Messianic King," but also - "primarily and normatively" - as the "Son of God." This designation, as the baptism shows (3: 17), is God's own "evaluative point of view." In Chapter 3, "The Ministry of Jesus to Israel and Israel's Repudiation of Jesus (4: 17-16:20)," Kingsbury expands on the growing conflict between Jesus and Israel through Jesus' preaching, teaching, and healing (4:23; 9:35; 10: 1). Here, the crowds - contrast Peter's (God's) "point of view" in his confession (16: 16)wonder and speculate about Jesus' identity and look upon him wrongly as a mere prophet (16: 13-14). In Chapter 4, "The Journey of Jesus to Jerusalem and His Suffering, Death, and Resurrection (16:21-28:20)," God's evaluative point of view is reaffirmed in the transfiguration (17:5) and the parable of the Wicked Tenants (21 :37). It is also contrasted with that of the disciples, who now begin to misunderstand the meaning of suffering discipleship (16:21, 24). In Jerusalem, the crowds continue to misconstrue Jesus as a mere prophet (21: 11, 46). They also confess him as the Son of David which, while correct, is not correctly perceived by them and finally falls short (22:41-46). The leaders' "evaluative point of view" is that Jesus blasphemes, aligns himself with Satan, sees himself to be above the law and tradition, opposes their ethics, and undermines their authority. The supreme irony in Matthew's "plot" is this: The leaders' attempt to carry out God's will by charging Jesus with a crime, thus leading to his death and resurrection, does in fact conform to God's "evaluative point of view" but in a way not intended by them.

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In Chapter 5, Kingsbury claims that Jesus' self-designation "the Son of man" does not identify him for the characters in the story, that is, explain for them "who he is." Instead, it is a "public title" and describes Jesus as "the man" who is presently active, suffers, and will be vindicated (p. 98). Kingsbury suggests that the best way to deal with "the Son of man" in English is to substitute for it, each time it occurs, the phrase "this man." If one asks who "the Son of man" is, the answer is that he is the Son of God (16: 13, 16). In Chapter 6, Kingsbury treats the story of the disciples in Matthew, and in Chapter 7 he focuses on the community of Matthew. He opines that the "implied readers" of Matthew's story might serve as an approximate index of the social, economic, and religious life of the original readers. These, he argues, were Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles at home perhaps in Antioch of Syria around A.D. 85 or 90. They were prosperous, in conflict with Jewish and gentile communities, and had developed a relatively high level of community organization. In his brief "Concluding Remarks" (Chap. 8), Kingsbury summarizes his analysis and contends that just as the disciples finally arrive at a mature understanding of Jesus at the end of Matthew's story, so does the implied reader. Indeed, "it is apparent that the first evangelist, who wrote this story, would also have wanted the real reader to understand it and to act on it" (p. 136). Kingsbury'S book is not heavily theoretical. The advantage is that it is less burdened by literary terms and ideas; the possible disadvantage is that those not grounded in Chatman's "narratology" might be occasionally adrift. At the same time, frequent references to "implied reader," "evaluative point of view," and the like reinforce the literary dimensions of the analysis, but they are also occasionally obtrusive. With regard to more important matters of content, one might argue from the perspective of both plot and characterization that the leaders and the Jewish crowds should be more sharply differentiated. In 12:23, for example, the crowds seem to function as "foils" for the Pharisees (v. 24: "but," de). Also, if their estimation of Jesus as "prophet" and Son of David is insufficient, there needs to be a better way to relate thisjudgment to Kingsbury'S views thatJesus is paradoxically an "itinerant radical" and the "Davidic Messiah-King." Specialists on Matthew who build on Bacon's theory of Prologue, Epilogue, and alternating discourses and narratives will obviously think that Kingsbury'S analysis has not allowed enough room for the verbal quality of Jesus in the great discourses, which certainly "shows" his character as teacher. Also, the "this man" interpretation of the Son of Man, which is very enlightening, will not, for some exegetes, do justice to the cosmic-apocalyptic and ecclesiastical dimensions of that Christology. In the final analysis, however, these points of taste and interpretation should not overshadow the special contribution of this book, namely, the literary-critical approach to Matthew. It is sometimes objected that this approach does not take seriously either the historical information in the Gospels or the conclusions of historical research. In Kingsbury'S case such an objection is unfounded. He has built much of his study on his previous research, some of which has had historical impulses, and his final chapter is concerned with "the community of Christians for

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which the story was originally written" (p. 120). Such observations can, of course, cut both ways; a purist "new critic" might object that his historical interests have blunted his literary criticism. I, for one, welcome the attempt to correlate intrinsic analysis with extrinsic analysis. Again, it is sometimes objected that the gospel genre is ancient, unique, and not designed to entertain, but functions as religious propaganda and/or apologetic. Therefore, methods for analyzing modern, imaginative narrative fiction simply do not apply. It is important not to gloss over these objections. But if an interpreter is to engage in literary criticism, one option is to explore modern analysis of narrative, at least until more adequate ancient critical tools are unearthed. It is, of course, important to keep in mind the crucial differences. When Kingsbury states that the implied author and the narrator are usually the same in Matthew, and that the implied author might serve as an index of the real author, I understand him to be making observations which take into account the nonfictional character of the gospel genre, but without abandoning all that literary criticism has to teach. In addition, his final comment about the first Evangelist's wanting the reader to act on his story is clearly a comment about the real author's theological intentions. Again, objections to such synthesizing might be raised from the literary-critical side, but it must be admitted that the dominant approach is literary. As such, Kingsbury's study, like all such studies, becomes a contribution to the refinement of working tools for gospel narratives. Kingsbury's new book is classic Kingsbury: carefully laid out, closely argued, and authoritatively presented. It is an important book on Matthew, and a prelude for more to come. Not only will it serve students and informed lay readers well, but also, to pick up the opening metaphor, it contributes to the change in Matthew's map in such a way that other explorers will need to consult it before travelling further.

A NEW TEXTBOOK ON PREACHING Preaching, by FRED B. CRADDOCK. Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1985. 224 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by RICHARD LISCHER, associate professor of homiletics, The Divinity School, Duke University.

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS TEXTBOOK Craddock worries that "the day of textbooks is now past" (p. 13), which is only partially true. Many are writing comprehensive books on preaching, but since H. Grady Davis' Design for Preaching (1958) none has established preeminence in the field of homiletics. Davis' day has now passed, and Craddock's book is its likely successor. The dangers of the textbook genre are well documented. The homiletics text may present a creative method so peculiar to the author that it cannot be used by anyone else. By attempting to treat everything, it may treat nothing in depth, making critical conversation with other authors and methods impossible. By supplying many teachir;t.g examples for the student, the textbook's attention to particulars makes it

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vulnerable to obsolescence. In Preaching Craddock avoids most of these pitfalls. He averts idiosyncrasy by rounding out his advocacy of inductive preaching (in As One Without Authority, 1971) with a more inclusive approach to method. He avoids a lengthy theological debate by moderating his earlier, near-exclusive interest in the listener in Overhearing the Gospel (1978) and ignoring the controversial thesis of that book. This book traces many of the traditional topics of homiletics, including the theology of preaching, the minister's life of study, the evaluation of the listener, the interpretation of the text, and the formation, language, and delivery of the sermon. Preaching does not lapse into a survey because the author selects what he considers the most significant dimensions of preaching, namely, interpretation and form, for thorough discussion, while giving only summary attention to its less controverted aspects. For example, he does not develop the place of the Holy Spirit in preaching or the character of the one who preaches, topics richly treated in the Middle Ages but now largely ignored. Nor does he draw on the various theories and collections of data used by those, like Hans van der Geest and Donald Capps, who join preaching to pastoral care. There is little in Preaching on the sermon's character as a liturgical act and nothing on its relation to the sacrament, leading me to surmise that this work may find its most appreciative audience-though by no means its only one-in the free church tradition. Although the author stresses the importance of "memory" in preaching, by which he means an appreciation of the heritage of biblical interpretation (p. 157£'), this textbook contains so little of the history and terminology of homiletics that it appears to lack a memory of its own tradition. The present book is not only free of older homiletical advice and lore, which is a great relief, but it is remarkably spare in its use of examples, illustrations, sermons, footnotes, and bibliography, which, depending on the audience, mayor may not be an advantage. Beginning students are pleased and encouraged by the book's format. It is my guess that the experienced pastor may want more directed reading. The author proceeds from his own thorough and sophisticated grounding in Bible, hermeneutics, and theology but does not belabor scholarly arguments. The result is a book that is disarming in its simplicity and tone. After any possible lacunae have been noted, one must add that it offers the most comprehensive rationale for preaching of any of the available textbooks. One of Craddock's scholarly trademarks is his bridge-building between the Bible and preaching. As professor of Preaching and New Testament at Candler School of Theology, he has contributed more than most to the revival of biblical preaching in this country. The more that students read of Craddock, the less likely will they dare preach on an idea or a topic unrelated to a text! Preaching does what no other homiletics textbook does: It effortlessly incorporates the assumptions and methods of critical scholarship into the task of sermon preparation. The author's discussion of exegesis-for-preaching in Chapter 6 is a valuable and non-technical guide that should be required reading for students and practicing ministers. Not only has Craddock reduced the threatening aspects of exegesis, he has also helped demystify hermeneutics. In his treatment, interpretation is not a puzzle but

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an awareness. Interpretation begins with the preacher's awareness of the needs of the audience (pp. 85ff.). The choice of the listener as starting point, though given no explicit theological rationale, accords with Craddock's analogical approach to preaching. There is a theology of the Word in Preaching, but it is far from Barthian. The Word is always swaddled in the mundane, "for somewhere on the spectrum between opaque and transparent, the revelation of God in Jesus occurs" (p. 56). Throughout his work Craddock stresses the need for "recognition," the audience's recognition of what it already knows about itself and God, in order for preaching to be effective (e.g., pp. 160-61). This approach is suggestive of what might be called "preaching from below," a method that exploits the depths of experience in order to confirm what in another vocabulary is called revelation. Some will be frustrated by the allusive language of Craddock's theology of preaching, and some may wish for a more explicit exposition of the gospel as the transforming power that creates its own hermeneutic as it goes, but students report a sense of refreshment in this discussion of the Word whose validity does not depend on touching every theological base from Barth to Tillich to Gutierrez. The most valuable section of the book is Part III, "Shaping the Message into a Sermon," in which the author takes on the nemesis of every homiletics textbook: form. Like Davis, he begins by reviewing the formal qualities to be sought in the sermon: its unity, memory, movement, and others; but unlike Davis, Craddock never isolates form from the text's meaning and purpose. Especially helpful is his section on "Identification," in which he reminds us of what Aristotle knew long ago, namely, that specificity is the route to the universal. Yet Craddock also knows that as good as it is to see, details can smother. Aristotle said as much when he defined imitation in generic rather than "photographic" terms (Poetics, 9). When Craddock describes the actual process of arriving at a sermon, he separates the exegetical work that culminates in the discovery of the text's message from the homiletical task of shaping that message into a sermon. The older homiletics, however, invariably forced the message into one of several prefabricated patternshomiletics' version of the commonplaces. Craddock calls this procedure "Selecting a Form," and he cites several advantages of such a system, chiefly its convenience (pp. 176-77). Yet the patterns were often chosen without reference to the meaning or the form of the text. Augustine first noticed the incongruity between the biblical message and the rhetorical tools available to its communication and urged the Bible itself as a rhetorical handbook for preachers. Craddock honors this tradition and keeps company with moderns like Joseph Sittler and Amos Wilder who have taught us to allow the language of Scripture to in-form contemporary preaching and discourse. On a couple of points Craddock's attention to biblical form does not go far enough to satisfy contemporary homiletical theories. Against those who favor an exclusively literary or phenomenological approach to interpretation, Craddock insists that a text can be summarized into a simple statement of theme and that such a reduction is essential to the organization of a sermon. No text can be appropriated all at once or in its entirety. Against those who tend toward a fundamentalism of form, Craddock asserts that the sermon form need not duplicate the form of the text. Rather the sermon should not violate the spirit of the form of the text, for example, by

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transforming a beatitude into a strategy or a doxology into a moral. On both issues, it seems to me, Craddock wisely adopts a commonsense approach and thereby removes the burden of unworkable theories from the shoulders of the preacher and student. In place of selecting a form, Craddock suggests "Creating a Form." Here the reader catches intimations of the radical freedom of preaching, and here those looking for formulas will be disappointed. Although the form of the text may suggest a clue to the form of the sermon (here Craddock gives several examples), it is the theological burden of the text (though he does not use the term) and the situation of the audience that determines the shape of the sermon. Such an approach to preaching requires close meditation on the Scriptures and implies great depth of pastoral awareness. A premeditated concern with form only interferes with the mediation of the gospel in a particular rhetorical situation. As a preacher I find this bold and exhilarating; as a teacher of preachers I am faced with anxious questions which are answerable, finally, by the freedom of the gospel itself. But students as well as practitioners must be so confronted. Craddock's rhetoric of preaching may constitute his clearest theological statement. In a real sense the author's homiletical style is the best illustration of his textbook. Those who know Fred Craddock the preacher will derive the greatest benefit from his Preaching. Both are well worth knowing.

THE DOCTRINE OF REVELATION REINVESTIGATED Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise, by RONALD F. THIEMANN. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1985. 198 pp. $23.95. Reviewed by RALPH HJELM. professor of philosophy, University of Maine.

No LESS THAN ANY OTHER FORM OF CRITICAL THINKING, the history of theology has been marked by preoccupations that have frequently covered serious vulnerabilities. Thiemann argues that this is eminently clear in the rich and complex modern debate over the doctrine of revelation. His claim is that the debate in general and influential expressions of the doctrine in particular are flawed by what he calls "an epistemological foundationalism." This, he insists, has made influential modern discussions of revelation incapable of providing a theoretical justification for "an account of God's identifiability" requisite to the belief in God's gracious prevenience. This problem which the book explicates is not merely what is exposed in such great collisions of recent interpretations of revelation as the debate between Barth and Brunner in 1934 but is the end product of an accumulated epistemological and apologetic preoccupation that stems from the Enlightenment itself. Writing with a fine appreciation of the Reformation motif of divine sovereignty and prevenience as his point of departure, Thiemann goes on to claim that perpetuating what he considers to be the fragile Lockean claim that revelation is a special epistemological category and a support for an extraordinary form of

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causality is an egregious error. It jeopardizes the coherence of theology itself as he views it. This Enlightenment foundationalism has nurtured the development of various modern theological refinements from Schleiermacher to the present, each attempting to demonstrate a kind of human accessibility to God's revelation without allowing knowledge of God's nature. Even though Locke's epistemological interpretation of revelation has been radically refined in various forms of the empiricist and rationalist spirit, we still attempt theologically to prove doctrines of revelation by utilizing philosophical affirmations or human experiences as foundational. And so the preoccupation regarding the nature of revelation continues, and so theological strategies that attempt to justify it continue to be epistemological and causal. In penetrating critiques of some contemporary perspectives that continue this approach to the doctrine of revelation, Thiemann examines in considerable detail the neo-Kantian position of Gordon Kaufman. For Kaufman, theology has no access to the divine identity or the divine prevenience and so becomes essentially constructive, a discipline rooted in human imagination, providing at best doctrinal concepts which humanize and provide an essential orientation to life. In the same critical vein, he discusses foundationalists such as David Kelsey and Charles Wood, whose views of revelation are functional insofar as they are determined by construals of biblical texts which shape and transform Christian identity. These views, like Kaufman's, make revelation and prevenience extensions of some feature of the human experience, tradition, or vision. Thiemann's own analysis clearly turns on his repeated claim that "the doctrine of revelation I seek to defend is not a foundational epistemology theory but an account which traces the internal logic of a set of Christian convictions (emphasis added) concerning God's identity and reality" (p. 70). Despite his adept support of this perspective by philosophical and linguistic analyses and allusions (some of which are essential to his argument and some not), for him a doctrine of revelation and prevenience is not defensible by what he considers the extrinsic claims of religious experience or epistemological judgments. By meticulous argument, the first three chapters of this book present a clear restatement of this Reformation vision of God's prevenience as radically discontinuous with the postEnlightenment understanding of human religious history comprehended in the subtleties of the putative human experience of transcendence, the clarifying resources of culture, or rigorous epistemological analyses. The final four chapters present a nonfoundational view of theology and the way it can be used to defend a belief in God's prevenience and a nonepistemological doctrine of revelation. Having argued against the Enlightenment process of the'ological foundationalism and its modern expression, these chapters develop a case for a descriptive theology (in contrast to explanatory, not in contrast to normative) which puts forward an expression of belief in God's prevenience through the dynamics of biblical narrative, or what Thiemann calls "narrated promise." He calls it "narrated" because its intelligibility is not borne out in philosophical hermeneutical analysis but "within the web of supporting belief and

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practices" (p. 99) such as stories, homilies, and liturgy. It is "pmmise" because it "breaks the 'cooperating framework' inherent in all causal conceptions of the divine-human relation" (p. 110). Predictably, Thiemann sustains his thesis of the "Christian aptness" of nonfoundational theology of prevenience and narrated promise by his analysis of a Gospel scriptural narrative, the Gospel of Matthew. Disclaiming that by this analysis he is imposing on Scripture a theological scheme, he views Matthew as a remarkable narrative, personally specifying Emmanuel as God's prevenient and gracious promise, cumulatively rendering "an account of God's identifiability" (p. 153) the center of a Christian doctrine of revelation. Critical comments on a book of this high order will certainly be vigorous. Philosophical theologians generally will call attention to its lack of apologetic intention, as will phenomenologists and hermeneuts. Yet the author clearly intends it to be essentially an argument in the kerygmatic tradition. Throughout, Thiemann considers theology a descriptive discipline in the Reformation mode. Those whose religious rootage is not here will be tempted to fault this argument for its criticism of post-Enlightenment theology, probably most of all in its concluding judgment of Schleiermacher. But this reaction to Thiemann's book cannot be based on the claim that it is obscurantist, because it is a carefully crafted essay, precise in expression, and clearly informed by historical theology. Given its intention, perspective, and structure, we have here a clear and cogent theological argument. It should be widely read and closely analyzed not only because it is a fascinating and persuasive statement on the possibility and necessity of a theology that is determined by the neglected doctrine of prevenience, but because it exposes a modern preoccupation with revelation as a species of epistemology that arguably covers a theological vulnerability.

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Shorter Reviews and Notices • Problems of Biblical Theology in the Twentieth Century, by HENNING GRAF REVENTLOW. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1986. 188 pp. n.p. (paper).

THIS VOLUME REPRESENTS the promised sequel to Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century (English, 1985). It is not primarily an attempt to evaluate the more recent scholarly debate over the viability of doing biblical theolog~, although this topic is briefly treated III the final section (Chap. III) of the book (pp. 145-78). Rather, it furthers the work of the first volume by thoroughly canvassing the various attempts of this century to assess "the theological significance of the Old Testament and its relationship to the New" (p. 1).

To this end, the author describes the resurgence of interest in biblical theology as represented in the Anglo-Saxon movement of the same name (Chap. I). But the bulk of the book (pp. 10-144) is a bibliographic-intensive survey of ways in which the relationship between Old and New Testaments have been conceived, given the climate of modern historical-critical analysis. Salvationhistory, typology, sensus plenior, and promise/fulfillment are analyzed as approaches offering a solution to the problem of relating the two Testaments. Much of this ground is familiar, but it is helpful to have the vast resou.rce material collated and succinctly r~vIewed. Fresh perspectives are provIded for the reader in Reventlow's treatment of "The Superiority of the Old Testament," which draws chiefly

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upon the work of Dutch scholars, and in his lengthy excursus, "Israel and the Church." The reader should be alerted that the genre of this book, like its predecessor, is status quaestionis. As such, it succeeds as. an excellent bibliographic resource, wIth relatively few omissions, and it will place the reader in a good position to do further study. It does not attempt fresh proposals in any conscientious fashion, and Reventlow only obliquely sets forth his own position on the problems he reviews. The final chapter is basically a survey of recent German approaches to biblical theology (Gese, Stuhlmacher, Schmid, Luck). To the extent to which the reader feels inclined toward seeing probable solutions emerging from the Continent, Reventlow's final review will prove valuable. Questions of canon, sociology, and the broader hermeneutical debates could have received more detailed analysis. But even with this caveat, both this and Reventlow's earlier work put the general reader in an excellent position to construct the basic issues facing biblical theology in the future. CHRISTOPHER R. SEITZ Lutheran Theological Seminary Philadelphia

Shorter Reviews and Notices Interpretation

• Genesis 12-36, by CLAUS WESTERMANN. Translated by JOHN J. SCULLION. Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1985. 603 pp. n. p. • Genesis 37-50, by CLAUS WESTERMANN. Translated by JOHN J. SCULLION. Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1986. 269 pp. n. p.

THESE TWO VOLUMES complete the translation of Westermann's enormous commentary on Genesis, 1501 pages in all. The first volume was reviewed in this Journal in 1977. The original appeared in the German series Biblischer Kommentar beginning in 1974. That the translation is complete and published in 1986 is a compliment to the translator and the publisher. This work is the first "large scale commentary" written on Genesis since Hermann Gunkel's classic of 1922. For those prepared to exploit this comprehensive treatment of the first book of the Bible, this now completed set is the commentary. Westermann has been the contemporary scholar who has carried on Gunkel's form-critical tradition in the most intensive and useful way, concentrating himself, as Gunkel did, on Psalms and Genesis. He is a superb exegete and a stimulating theologian. The combination makes an interpretation of quality and usefulness. Volume II begins with the Introduction to chapters 12-50 and contains the commentary on chapters 12 - 36, the cycle of stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Volume III introduces the Joseph story and contains the comment on 37-50. These two introductions are, to risk an exaggeration, worth the price of the volumes. They put the stories about the patriarchs and

Joseph in a theological perspective that casts its interpretive light on every passage in the text. Westermann does not fail those who study to prepare for preaching and teaching in the church! After the introductions come exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, exegeses of each passage containing full bibliographies, an annotated tra~sla tion, a discussion of form and settmg, explanation of the text by verses, and a concluding section on "purpose and thrust." It is impossible in a short review even to catalog Westermann's positions on the most important questions that arise in the critical interpretation of these chapters. In this reviewer's opinion the exegesis is maintained throughout at a quality seldom reached by most scholars. This is not a commentary for everyone. It cannot be fully exploited with~ out access to the Hebrew text. The voluminous bibliographies are irrelevant to all except the most advanced scholar. The endless dialogue with the field, carried on with references to the works of others in almost every sentence, in a way typical of major German commentaries, assumes a great deal of the user. But for those with preparation and interest the commentary is unsurpassed. The translation professes to be "literal." It is wooden. The style is stilted. There are sentences so opaque that the reviewer had to return to the original to learn what was being said. One wonders why the translator chose this kind of literalism. J AMES LUTHER MAYS Union Theological Seminary in Virginia

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• Understanding the Word: Essays in H01wTofBernhard W. Anderson, edited by JAMES T. BUTLER, EDGAR W. CONRAD, and BEN C. OLLENBURGER. JSOT Press, Sheffield, 1985. 389 pp. $37.50

THE ESSAYS OF THIS VOLUME, presented as a Festsch1'ift to Professor Anderson, are characterized by their technical expertise and by the diversity of their subject matter. Many of the contributors have chosen topics developed in dialogue with Anderson's work. The breadth of issues addressed in this volume is itself witness to Bernhard Anderson's many contributions to biblical scholarship. Scholars and serious biblical students should find ample stimulation in these eighteen essays. Several of them will become important additions to seminary and graduate study syllabi. Let me briefly mention a few to encourage that they all be read: Walter Brueggemann ("Imagination as a Mode of Fidelity") uses the Book of Deuteronomy to illustrate the interface between Israel's literary imagination and social construction; George W. Coats ("Lot: A Foil in the Abraham Saga") examines the role of Lot in the Abraham narratives and suggests the implications of Lot's role for understanding the theology of the Yahwist; Murray L. Newman ("Rahab and the Conquest") uses sociological analysis to study the story of Rahab osh. 2) and to suggest the diverse functions of this story in Israel's history; J. Christiaan Beker explores the uses of Habakkuk 2:4 and Genesis 15:6 in the Book of Romans as a model for biblical theology. Other contributors include Roland E. Murphy, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Paul D. Hanson, Phyllis Trible, Walther Zimmerli, Claus

o

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Westermann, and Howard Clark Kee. Many of us younger students of Scripture have long been grateful to Anderson because his Understanding the Old Testament was our college introduction to the challenge of the Old Testament. We have continued to learn from his writings over the years. With Understanding the Word we have another reason to be grateful to him-that his career has served as the stimulus for so many talented and diverse dialogue partners to provide such a valuable and stimulating resource as this book. JOHN M. BRACKE Eden Theological Seminm)

• Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira's Hymn in Praise of the Fathers, by BURTON L. MACK. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1985. 263 pp. $25.00.

THIS ORIGINAL AND BRILLIANT STUDY is much more than an analysis of Sirach's famous hymn (Sir. 44-50). It is a global interpretation of Hebrew wisdom, with particular emphasis on Ben Sira's contribution. To this end there is first an analytical survey of the seven chapters-an original treatment of the pattern of characterization, themes, and structure of the presentation of Israel's heroes. While the hymn reflects its own peculiar reading of the Hebrew epic (especially the P tradition), it is inspired by the Hellenistic encomium. But it is more than this. It is an epic with mythic function. Here Mack proposes a view of Old Testament wisdom as the key to his interpretation of Sirach 44-50. Specifically this is the wisdom


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myth (as reconstituted by Mack), which IF YOU WANT STUDENTS who are being attempted to deal with the social crisis introduced to the New Testament to caused by the Exile. Wisdom now be- take the historical and cultural backcomes a divine figure which gives order ground of early Christianity seriously, to (even creates) the world by entering this is the supplementary text to use. into it and issuing her call (Mack never Commendably brief, it is refreshing elaborates on her feminine character). without filling. The book is wellHe reads chapters 44-50 in the light of conceived, thoroughly researched, the wisdom myth of Sirach 24 (cf. Provo written to be read, and interesting. The 8) and singles out four moves: creation, focus of each of the five chapters deals quest, location, and exaltation. These with the conventional topics: political correspond to four parts of 44-50: the setting, forms of religious expression order of covenants, conquest and his- (Jewish sects, Hellenistic philosophical tory, restoration and cult, and the cli- schools), institutions (temple, synmax (glorification of Simon in chap. agogue, polis, kingship), the ancient 50). Thus history has been interpreted interpretation of Scripture (Philo, by wisdom ("glory" in 44-50 is the Qumran, the rabbis), and a concluding counterpart to "wisdom"). Ben Sira's chapter on demons and holy men dealhymn is a "mythic charter for Second ing with ancient world views that Temple Judaism" (p. 84). shaped the perspectives ofJudaism and This brief summary is necessarily un- early Christianity. There are two feafair to the complexity of Mack's recon- tures of this little handbook which I struction of Sirach's sapiential view of particularly appreciate. First, the inhistory. It fails to convey Mack's cre- formation packed into the book is reative analysis of Ben Sira's thought in a liable. Roetzel has obviously worked on period when Old Testament tradition each topic in depth with the result that and Hellenistic ideas came together. many traditional (but wrong) views He expects learned criticism or "test- typically included in introductory New ing" (p. 178), and I have misgivings Testament texts are either consigned to about the reconstruction. Yet his mod- the dustbin or appropriately qualified. esty and provocative suggestions are Second, in conventional texts historical impressive. This is a challenging inter- and cultural background material is pretation of late Hebrew wisdom that rarely integrated with the study of the deserves respect and merits full dis- New Testament itself. Roetzel concussion from scholars. stantly moves back and forth between various aspects of the setting of early ROLAND E. MURPHY Christianity and the New Testament Duke University Divinity School texts themselves, underscoring again and again the necessity of understanding the world in which the literature of the New Testament arose. The • The World That Shaped the New Tes- book gets four stars. tament, by CALVIN J. ROETZEL. John DAVID E. AUNE Knox Press, Atlanta, 1985. 120 pp. Saint Xavier College n.p. (paper).

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JamesA . Sanders is Professor of Intertestamenlul and Biblical Studies at the School of Theology at Claremont and Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School.

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• Christ in Community, by JEROME H. N EYREY, S.J. Michael Glazier, Inc., Wilmington, 1985. 295 pp. $12.95 (paper).

NEYREY PRESUMES A GREAT DIVERSITY in the New Testament portraits of Jesus and then hypothesizes that such diversity may be largely accounted for by the various experiential horizons of the early Christian communities. For Neyrey the Christology of the New Testament is essentially a record of the early church's ideas and perceptions of Christ from within its own diverse cultural Sitze im Leben, so that these diverse Christologies provide a window into the sociology of the church rather than into the historical Jesus. In fact, the possibility of data from the historical Jesus is never considered as a potential check or corrective to ecclesiastical "distortions." In the first part of the book, N eyrey distills the four Gospels into a series of what he calls "catchbasins" to collect various stages of the church's portrait of Jesus (Mission and Membership, Understanding of the Old Testament, Eschatology, Ethics, Group SelfUnderstanding), after which he proposes to examine the experience and Christology of the various Christian groups who have produced the Gospels' portrait of Jesus. The second part of the book examines two Pauline portraits of Jesus (I Cor. 1:18-25; Phil. 2: 6-11) in an attempt to show how Paul's portraits were shaped by the situation of the churches to which he was writing. The third part gives a very cursory summary of the Christology of Ephesians and Colossians. Neyrey seems to have attempted to do two things at once and has fallen

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short in both. On the one hand he writes ostensibly for the sophisticated layperson in the church, but his work presumes a breadth of critical scholarly expertise lacking to most laypersons. On the other hand he writes for the scholarly community, but his work fails to marshal and fully develop the critical dimensions of his suggestions. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this work is a strong tendency to state the conclusions as initial hypotheses which, to no one's surprise, are then "clearly" found in the materials carefully selected and arranged for analysis. This is not to say that the book is a total loss. There is much to stimulate interest, some intriguing hypotheses, some unusual angles of insight, some unique combinations of data which suggest whole new ways of looking at some of the New T estament material. One only wishes these could have been fully developed. In spite of its weaknesses, or perhaps because of them, the scholarly community will find this book a thought-provoking intersection with the contemporary flow of critical biblical studies. M. ROBERT MULHOLLAND, JR. Asbury Theological Seminary

• Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, by HANS DIETER BETZ. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1985. 170 pp. $27.95.

THIS VOLUME is not a full-scale commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, but rather a group of essays written as preparatory studies for such a commentary, to appear in the Hermeneia series. The positive contributions are those one would expect of Betz. First, Betz


shares with us his vast knowledge of Greco-Roman literature and makes some intriguing comparisons: for example, the Sermon on the Mount might be compared to the literary genre of the philosophical epitome, such as is found in the Enchiridion of Epictetus and the Kyriai Doxai of Epicurus. At the same time, Jewish parallels are not ignored: contacts with Jewish wisdom-traditions are obvious. Indeed, the Sermon on the Mount sees Jesus as the teacher of the right interpretation of the Law; Jesus is presented as an orthodox teacher within the range of acceptable Jewish VIews. This leads into Betz's second contribution, which consists in a provocative thesis underlying all the essays. According to Betz, the Sermon on the Mount is, in its entirety, a pre-Matthean document written by Jewish Christians of the mid-first century, perhaps in Jerusalem. It propounds a view ofJesus and his teachings notably different from that of PauloI' the evangelists. These Jewish Christians see themselves as still part of Judaism, yet they are conscious of tensions with the motherreligion. Thus, feeling that they are the "true Judaism," they are in conflict with both the Pharisees and gentile Christianity. The theology of the Sermon on the Mount is not that of Matthew, who is open to a world-church of Jews and Gentiles. In contrast, the Christian preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus plays no role in the Sermon on the Mount. If this preaching was known to the community of the Sermon on the Mount, it had been rejected. There is no explicit Christology or soteriology based on Christology. It is this second contribution that will no doubt arouse much debate. The

present reviewer must confess that he remains unconvinced of this pivotal point. There is simply too much Matthean vocabulary, style, and theology in the Sermon on the Mount to allow for a totally pre-Matthean document. Conversely, the Sermon on the Mount fits too neatly into the overall pattern of the Gospel to be a foreign body. The weakness of Betz's approach is especially striking in the treatment of 5: 17-20. Eyebrows will be raised over Betz's resurrection of the idea that "least" in 5: 19 refers to Paul. More to the point, whatever the prehistory of the Sermon on the Mount, it is now an integral part of Matthew's Gospel, the concrete document in front of us. An exegete treating the Sermon on the Mount cannot do his job adequately if he does not explain how the Sermon on the Mount was incorporated into this larger whole and what it means there. Of course, one must remember that these essays are preliminary. One must await the Hermeneia commentary before a final judgment can be made. JOHN P. MEIER Catholic Univenity

• Discipleship in the New Testament, edited and with an Introduction by FERNANDO F. SEGOVIA. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1985. 213 pp. $16.95 (paper).

THIS COLLECTION OF PAPERS delivered at a symposium at Marquette University seeks to reexamine discipleship in the New Testament in the light of recent scholarship. Four of the papers deal specifically with the teacher-disciple relationship. Werner Kelber argues that

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EERDMANS ...

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TENDING THE GARDEN Essays on the Gospel and the Earth Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson A variety of authors examine the relationship of God, humanity, and all creation. Paper, $8.95

IMAGING GOD Dominion as Stewardship DouglasJohn Hall "Completely renovates the traditional Christian 'triumphalist anthropology' by reconstructing, on solid biblical foundatlons and with impressive theological documentation, the pivotal themes 'the image of God' and 'dominion over the earth.' " -H. Paul Santmire Paper, $8.95


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The Sermon on the Mount: A Theological Investigation, Revised Edition

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A Structural Analysis of the Sermon on the Mount (Religion and Reason 34)

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Josephus's Interpretation of the Bible

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