The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics QUOTES

81 " This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

82 " Those who can naively affirm the bumper-sticker slogan, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” are oblivious to the question-begging inherent in the formulation: there is no escape from the imperative of interpreting the Word. Bumper-sticker hermeneutics will not do. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

83 " The posture of the community is not to be one of supine passivity, however.22 The actions positively prescribed here are parabolic gestures of renunciation and service. By doing more than what the oppressor requires, the disciples bear witness to another reality (the kingdom of God), a reality in which peacefulness, service, and generosity are valued above self-defense and personal rights. Thus, the prophetic nonresistance of the community may not only confound the enemy but also pose an opportunity for the enemy to be converted to the truth of God’s kingdom. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

84 " It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

85 " The narrative and theological force of this story is analogous to that of the saying, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matt. 21:31); just as that saying does not necessarily commend extortionate tax-farming and prostitution as continuing practices, so these stories about centurions cannot be read as endorsements of military careers for Christians. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

86 " Confronted with the diversity of New Testament witnesses, we are often tempted to dissolve the plurality of perspectives by appealing to universal principles (love, justice, and so on) or dialectical compromises. Such conceptual movements away from a text’s specific imperatives are often escape routes from its uncomfortable demands. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

87 " community, cross, and new creation. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

88 " The New Testament itself repeatedly insists on the necessity of embodiment of the Word. The sequence of the verbs in Romans 12:1–2 is significant: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice [Hear the metaphor!]…. Be transformed…that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Knowledge of the will of God follows the community’s submission and transformation. Why? Because until we see the text lived, we cannot begin to conceive what it means. Until we see God’s power at work among us, we do not know what we are reading. Thus, the most crucial hermeneutical task is the formation of communities seeking to live under the Word.32 "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

89 " Rather, she writes about violence from the perspective of its victims: How can we point to the eucharistic bread and say “this is my body” as long as women’s bodies are battered, raped, sterilized, mutilated, prostituted, and used to male ends?…As in the past so still today men fight their wars on the battlefields of our bodies, making us the targets of their physical or spiritual violence. Therefore, the ekklsia of women must reclaim women’s bodies as the “image and body of Christ.” It must denounce all violence against women as sacrilege and maintain women’s moral power and accountability to decide our own spiritual welfare, one that encompasses body and soul, heart and womb.286 "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

90 " The question for her is not whether to exercise violence but how to survive it, how to denounce it in a way that will effectively set women free from its destructive effects. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

91 " Paul does not seem to share the conviction expressed in the Damascus Document and in Luke 16:18 that all remarriage is adulterous. As we have seen, he is startlingly unconcerned about traditional conceptions of purity and defilement (conceptions that provide the underlying Levitical warrants for the prohibition of remarriage). For him, what matters most is freedom to serve the Lord with “unhindered devotion” (v. 35) and to experience the eschatological peace of the people of God (v. 15). "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

92 " it is a terrible mistake to isolate any particular rule about divorce from the wider canonical narrative context. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

93 " As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

94 " The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Scripture (along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians) bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 1 Cor. 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

95 " There can be no understanding of the church as community in New Testament terms apart from the prior reality of God’s election of a covenant people, as narrated in the Old Testament. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

96 " Perhaps an analogy will clarify the point. Let us suppose that a sect should arise promulgating the view that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was actually an inspired prophecy forecasting political events that must occur before the year 2000. The members of the sect would then busy themselves in attempting to work out the symbolic correlations between the story’s characters and the dramatis personae of the world’s political stage in the 1990s. Some of the proposals might be enormously detailed and ingenious, but surely we would have to say to such interpreters, “No, you’ve got it all wrong; The Lord of the Rings is not that sort of text at all.” Something similar must be said to those who read Revelation as predictive in this way. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

97 " The original audience of the book would have read such symbolism “as fluently as any modern reader of the daily papers reads the conventional symbols of a political cartoon.”10 (For example, American readers of a political cartoon featuring an elephant and a donkey immediately know that the elephant symbolizes the Republican party and that the donkey symbolizes the Democrats.) "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

98 " This is one of the passages in the letter that could hardly have come from the pen of Paul. The assertion that women will be saved through bearing children clashes flagrantly with Paul’s profound conviction that all human beings are saved only by virtue of the death of Christ. The lame exoneration of Adam (2:13–14) also sits oddly in conjunction with Paul’s portrayal in Romans 5:12–21 of Adam as the source of sin and typological representative of sinful humanity. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

99 " But the fact remains that there are numerous homosexual Christians—like my friend Gary and some of my ablest theological students—whose lives show signs of the presence of God, whose work in ministry is genuine and effective. How is such experiential evidence to be assessed? Should we, like the earliest Jewish Christians who hesitated to accept “unclean” Gentiles into the community of faith, acknowledge the work of the Spirit and say, “Who are we to stand in the way of what God is doing?” (cf. Acts 10:1–11:18)? Or should we see this as one more instance of a truth that all of us in ministry know sadly about ourselves: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels”? God gives the Spirit to broken people and ministers grace even through us sinners, without thereby endorsing our sin. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

100 " Can homosexual persons be members of the Christian church? This is rather like asking, “Can envious persons be members of the church?” (cf. Rom. 1:29) or “Can alcoholics be members of the church?” De facto, of course, they are. Unless we think that the church is a community of sinless perfection, we must acknowledge that persons of homosexual orientation are welcome along with other sinners in the company of those who trust in the God who justifies the ungodly (Rom. 4:5). If they are not welcome, I will have to walk out the door along with them, leaving in the sanctuary only those entitled to cast the first stone. "

― Richard B. Hays , The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics