Foundations of Christian Ethics: New Creation

A year ago, I made the case for the importance of theological ethics.  If Christians want to live faithfully, we cannot uncritically absorb the ethical ideas of our surrounding culture.  Nor can we rely on our intuitions and feelings, since these often lead us astray.  Nor can we simply look in the Bible for proof texts that will directly address every ethical issue that confronts us, since the Bible does not directly address many important ethical issues that twenty first century Christians face.  Thus, if Christians want to live faithfully, they must develop a biblically grounded, theologically formed wisdom that enables them to discern what the implications of what God’s word says are for the new and complex issues the Church faces today.

In The Moral Vision of the New Testament, New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays argues that the three central concepts of New Testament ethics are the Christian community, the cross of Jesus Christ, and God’s New Creation^[1]New York: HarperCollins, 1996.  Following Hays’s insight, in this three-part series I will briefly sketch how these three theological ideas provide a theological foundation for a distinctively Christian ethics.  In this first post, I will explore the ethical implications of the theological doctrine of God’s New Creation.

Eschatology in the Old Testament

Eschatology is the area of Christian theology that deals with the “last things.”  When most Christians hear the word “eschatology,”  they immediately think of people trying to use biblical prophecy to lay out detailed timelines about the future or debates about pre-, post-, or amillennialism.  Many Christians therefore think of eschatology as speculative and irrelevant for Christian ethics in the here and now.  However, a proper, biblical understanding of eschatology reveals it to be centrally important to Christian theology as a whole and to Christians ethics specifically.  

The Old Testament prophets often spoke of “the day of the LORD,” a day when God would dramatically intervene in history to judge the wicked, save the righteous, and rescue Israel from her enemies (Isa 13:6-13; Ezek 13:1-9, 30:1-19; Joel 1:15, 2:1-11, 3:14; Amos 5:18-27; Obadiah 15; Zephaniah 1:1-2:3).  This often referred to specific historical events that were relatively limited in scope.  However, eventually, this idea of the the day of the LORD heightened to a prophetic message of hope that there would one day be an ultimate “Day of the LORD” when God would intervene in history so dramatically that He would set all things right, not only for Israel, but for the whole world.  

Using very similar language, the prophets Isaiah and Micah both prophecy that in “the last days,” God’s temple will “be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it” (Isa 2:2, Mic 4:1).  All the nations on earth will learn the LORD’s ways, and, as a result, there will be world peace (Isa 2:3-5; Mic 4:2-5).  In some Old Testament prophecies, this eschatological hope is connected to a Messianic hope for a future ideal Davidic king who will play a key role in inaugurating this blessed future age (Isa 9:1-7, 11:1-10, 16:5, 55:1-5; Jer 23:5-6, 30:1-11, 33:14-26; Ezek 34:20-31; Hos 3:4-5; Zech 12:1-13:1).  In Isaiah, this eschatological hope expands beyond blessings and peace for Israel and all the nations to envision a “new heavens and a new earth” in which all of God’s creation will be in harmony and will be blessed (Isa 65:17-25).  In Daniel’s apocalyptic vision, when God intervenes to set all things right in the world, the dead will even be raised, and the righteous among them will inherit eternal life (Dan 12:1-3).

The New Testament and “Realized Eschatology”

According to the New Testament, all of these Old Testament eschatological hopes — the coming of the Messiah, the restoration of Israel, the resurrection, the inauguration of God’s New Creation — have already been fulfilled in and through Jesus.  Jesus is the Messiah, who, through His death and resurrection, has inaugurated God’s New Creation and brought about a way for Israel (and all of humanity) to be reconciled to God.  Yet, the eschatological age has not, as might be expected from Old Testament prophecy, been fully inaugurated all at once.  Sin, suffering, death, and rebellion against God still remain, and they will not fully be done away with until Jesus’s Second Coming.  It is then that God will fully complete His plan to make all things new and to eliminate all traces of evil from His creation (Rev 21:1-5).  

In between Jesus’s First and Second Comings, we live in a time when the eschatological age of God’s New Creation has already begun, yet the old age of corruption and estrangement from God still lingers.  Christians thus live in a tension between the New Creation God is bringing about as He establishes His Kingdom and the lingering corruption of the old creation in which they live.  “If anyone is in Christ,” the apostle Paul writes, “the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor 5:17).  Yet, Christians still struggle with temptation and sin, as “the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh” (Gal 5:17).  Christians have the hope of eternal life, yet, at present, they still live in bodies subject to corruption, suffering, and death.  So it is with all of creation.  God is at work making all things new, but, at present, creation is “groaning” as it awaits the time when it will “be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:20-22).  

New Creation and Christian Ethics

So, what are the ethical implications of this theological idea of New Creation?  As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright puts it, “The new creation has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus, and God wants us to wake up now, in the present time, to the new reality.  We are to come through death and out the other side into a new sort of life; to become daytime people, even though the rest of the world isn’t yet awake.  We are to live in the present darkness by the light of Christ, so that when the sun comes up at last we will be ready for it.”^[2]Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), page 206.  As the firstfruits of God’s New Creation, Christians are called to align the way they live with the nature of that New Creation, and not according to the corruption of the old creation which is passing away.  

This means that Christians do not base their ethical ideas on what seems to be a “reasonable” way to live based on empirical observation of our Fallen world.  Rather, Christians are called to bear witness to the world of the nature of God’s Kingdom by living out their identity as new-creational beings.  For this reason, even if their Christian way of life radically cuts across the grain of “how the world works,” they will refuse to compromise their ethical convictions.  If, from the world’s perspective, Christian ethics is “crazy,” “ineffective,” and “unreasonable,” that is of no concern to Christians, since they know that the powers of evil that control this Fallen world have already been defeated and will soon pass away forever.  

This new-creational theological perspective works itself out at the practical level in many ways.  Because Christians have the hope of eternal life, they have no need to cling to and be enslaved by fleeing pleasures that distract them from serving God and their fellow human beings.  Because Christians have the hope of the resurrection, they have no need to fear death, and are free to choose to love others, even their enemies, at the risk of their own lives.  Because in the eschatological age there is no marriage (Matt 22:30), Christians can give up marriage and sex, denying themselves, if this is what will best enable them to serve God and His Kingdom.

The primary ethical task of Christians is not to “make the world a better place.”  Christians believe that, through Jesus, God has already begun His project of bringing all of creation to perfection, a project that will with certainty be completed when Jesus comes again.  The primary ethical task of Christians is to be witnesses to God’s New Creation by living in light of this truth.  

If we decide that our primary ethical task is to “make the world a better place,” we will continually make ethical compromises with the sinful methods of the world that seem most “effective” at changing things for the better in the short term.  Such an ethical posture represents a lack of faith that God really has through Jesus already defeated all the powers of evil and really is at work to make all things new.  If we want to truly and faithfully fulfill our Christian ethical task of being witnesses to God’s New Creation, we must go to work being agents of life, beauty, truth, goodness, and justice in the midst of this Fallen world, even if the world sees our way of life as “ineffective.”

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