I. Introduction
In this essay, we seek to explore a reading of Judges
21 together with aspects of sex and human rights as they relate to contemporary,
social challenges. I pick this Scripture passage quite deliberately, as one
which modern readers find especially challenging, even problematic. It’s the
sort of passage that I have found, as a pastor, can both surprise and repulse the
unsuspecting reader, leading to fresh questions over the authority and relevance
of parts of the Bible.
Judges 21 begins with an oath by the men of the
Israelite tribes: ‘None of us will give his daughter in marriage to a
Benjamite.’[1] There has
been a genocidal attack by the men of Israel against the cities of Benjamin. The
attack has happened because the tribe of Benjamin had not punished a Benjamite
city that had allowed an outrageous attack on a traveller, but instead had
gathered in their defence. The other eleven tribes of Israel gathered together
to punish the Benjamites. Only 600 Benjamite men escaped the ensuing slaughter.
But now, how might the integrity of the twelve tribes be preserved? Should a
whole tribe disappear from the twelve tribes of Israel? Grief has surfaced
among the Israelite tribes, but not remorse. Surely none of the other tribes will
voluntarily give their daughters to the surviving Benjamites. In the ensuing
need to find wives for the surviving men of Benjamin, a further attack is
orchestrated by the men of Israel against a city that had failed to send
fighting men to join the campaign against Benjamin. When this foray fails to
harvest a sufficient supply of virgins for the surviving Benjamites, a raid on
the dancing girls at ‘the annual festival of the Lord in Shiloh’[2]
is allowed to supplement candidates to serve as wives.
The whole scenario, like much contemporary
discussion on sex and human rights, is messy and complicated. The narrator
repeatedly observes that at that time, ‘Israel had no King’.[3] Yet
the narrator makes no judgment on the outrageous acts against cities and
persons, but simply tells the tale. The passage is problematic not because of
the presence of clear, ethical declarations and moral guidelines, but because
of their absence. This is what makes it so difficult to read. Are there no standards
of justice? Are there no ethical or moral rules relating to sex and human
rights to be learnt and applied for the reader? Is violating behaviour
acceptable?
What is to be set as proper, sanctionable
behaviour? What is to be deplored? The narrative itself appears to provide us
with few if any hints. But herein lies also its utility, inviting us to search
further. This is the task we set ourselves in this essay: we will seek to
explore the relevancy of this passage to the Christian life, as we today
wrestle with issues of sex and human rights.
We begin by exploring
the question of what is Biblically sanctioned by God in terms of the ethical
mandates or convictional norms for society, with reference to human rights. We look
at perceptions of justice, peace, persons[4]
and their plurality[5],
enquiring into what we might understand by each of them in their relation to
human rights.
Like the
Israelites in Judges 21, modern
Western culture has largely lost its way. Our argument in this essay will that
it has done so by losing sight of both the ontological[6]
drivers and the teleological[7]
foci that are part of the grand, Gospel narrative that is brought to us through
the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Justice, if
it is to be pursued, requires both a definition of persons within a plurality
and also an expectation and hope of a just resolution to issues of injustice:
justice that is not simply constitutive but is also determinative. We will
further argue that such ontological drivers and teleological anticipation of
eschatological fulfilment are integral to a Biblically Christian worldview and
ethic. Society without an identity formed through a defined understanding of
personhood and a teleological focus is society that has no ascended King called
Jesus Christ.
1. Human Rights and Justice
The Judges 21
narrative implies that a society without a King lacks right order. Nicholas
Wolterstorff in his work, Justice: rights
and wrongs,[8] argues
that a theory of justice built simply on ‘right order’ offers an inadequate instrument
in establishing societal order. For Wolterstorff, human rights are not
reducible to utilitarian values effecting social convenience. Reviewing the
development of legal theory in the Western European tradition and incorporating
Biblical perspectives, Wolterstorff notes an Old Testament emphasis on care for
the marginalised in the community, the poor, orphan, widow and the
resident-alien, pointing the way towards constitutive justice. Constitutive
justice depends upon establishing a society that holds to virtues or
convictions that are adopted and embraced in the practices of that society.
This constitutive justice has to be built on values that are more than
utilitarian expediencies. Wolterstorff argues rather that natural rights,
“‘inhere” in God and in us, on account of the
worth that God has by virtue of some status that God has, and in us by virtue
of some status that we have. Rather than something or
other conferring the right on entities that have this status, the worth
of the status grounds the right’.[9]
The issue of
status that Wolterstorff raises is of value to us, in that it happily removes
discussion as to the nature of justice beyond the strictures of utility,
establishing instead a right of justice based on personhood. Our exploration must
therefore move on to look at how personhood is to be determined. The United
Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the classic benchmark of human
rights in the 20th century, affirms the ‘inherent
dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human
family’.[10] The
problem that then arises is the same as that generated by the Scriptural
narrative under review. How do we establish a proper relationship between the
rights of a person and the rights of the plurality of persons, where this plurality
leads to the constitution of a society to which a person belongs? And what do
we do when the perceived interests of a person are in conflict with the
perceived interests of the society to which they belong?
Wolterstorff’s
answer to this dilemma is to affirm that ‘rights are normative social
relationships: sociality is built into the essence of rights’.[11]
Wolterstorff distinguishes this approach from, on the one hand, a Marxist
dismissal of human rights as an expression of individual selfishness; and on
the other hand, the agapists’ demand that ‘we are
always and only to act out of gratuitous benevolence and generosity’.[12]
But what are to
be our criteria in seeking to recognise normative, social relationships? Where
should we turn to establish what these are, or should be? To look simply for
convictions that are popularly accepted as normative or even effective in
sustaining social relationships may be possible in a simple society; but in the
complex, fluid environment of population mobility and urban life, how can this
be possible? Furthermore, living in a culture of postmodern relativism, where
persons interact with and adhere to many different social groupings and cocktails
of values, how might we ever determine the meaning of ‘normative’? If we are to reject with Wolterstorff a
utilitarian approach, partly because it offers such an inadequate understanding
of the status of a person, what are the alternatives? The answer for many lies
in codified certitude. There is an understandable attraction towards forming a
clearly prescriptive codex of ethical and moral norms: such thinking is present
in advocacy of Sharia Law, a foundationalist legalism built on Torah, or a
Christianised adaptation of the Decalogue. The resultant clarity of clear codes
might prove attractive to some; but is there nothing better? Is it possible, in
the quest for justice, to affirm both the status and value of persons and their
plurality in a clear yet uncodified way?
The Old Testament’s
repeated association of righteousness with a justice that is both constitutive
and determinative, and the New Testament’s identification of righteousness as both
a constitutive quality to be developed in the Christian life as well as being
an absolute, determinative quality arising through faith in Jesus Christ, points
the way. In modern life, many advocate and espouse constitutive, developmental
qualities or drivers that we might embrace and own. Love, forgiveness,
compassion are popular examples. In the same way, New Testament justice and
righteousness are to be developed and grown into: yet, at the same time, we
recognise that these are also fully realised for us only in and through the
atoning death and vindicating resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus
Christ, justice is fully achieved and righteousness is fully realised. These constitutive
and determinative components both come together for us in the Being of Jesus
Christ. What motivated and drove him forward in his life and ministry is what
now drives us forward in our life and ministry, undertaken in his name. This arises
from our union with Jesus Christ. This is what we describe as our ontological
drivers.
But there is
more. Jesus Christ has, through His atoning death, resurrection and ascension,
accomplished all that is necessary to complete this task: the outcome is assured
and determined. Jesus Christ is our avenue of entry into the New Heavens and
the New Earth, where justice is fully established. We have a hope of fulfilment
and the assurance of a good, future resolution before us: we can see the end[13]
result in Jesus’ bodily resurrection and in his anticipated, coming reign. This
is our teleological focus.
The message of
Jesus from the outset of his preaching ministry, inviting people to recognise
the nearness of the Kingdom of God, was a call to own such ontological drivers
patterned on him and also a teleological focus owned by him: focus upon living
in a righteousness belonging to the Kingdom of God that would serve the justice
of the Kingdom of God. Here we have a focus upon justice that is both constitutive
and determinative. A justice that is to be struggled after in the present, but
that finds fulfilment and vindication in the coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ,
thereby determining God’s justice within the whole cosmos. Righteousness[14],
like peace, observes the Apostle Paul, is a characteristic of the Kingdom of
God.[15]
2. Human Rights and Peace
A further corollary to justice is found in peace.
Peace, like justice, is both an ontological driver and a teleological focus for
us. It comes through our participation in the person of Jesus Christ and in the
pursuit of His ministry. Peace comes with the establishment and maintenance of
justice, ushered in by the Messiah,
‘Of the increase of his government and
peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his
kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that
time on and forever’.[16]
Peace is more than the absence of disruption: it
is the predicate of an order that is being constituted through establishing integrity
and wholeness. This is the fuller sense of Biblical Shalom.
Peace comes through establishing God’s order both
in persons and their plurality; and as such it is integrally related to
holiness. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is harbinger of peace as much as executor
of justice. For the peace that He imparts, breathed upon his disciples,[17]
is a peace that comes from God alone. It is set apart from rebellion against or
refusal to acknowledge God: it is holy.
That the peace associated with Jesus Christ, a
peace that comes from God alone,[18]
is integrally related to God’s holiness can easily be lost sight of when
engaging in a discussion of human rights, sexual or otherwise. Human rights, as
conceived of in terms of the UN Declaration, are not related to belief or
participation in God. Peace may be construed as the absence of a person or persons’
violation; but the positive, Biblical characteristics of peace are not defined.
Social pluralism is assumed within the UN Declaration, a perspective both
tenable and popular in the climate of determined optimism that gave birth to
the UN Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. But in our time, where there are continuing
and growing conflicts in a world in simmering crisis, such an assumption may be
questioned. By whom and how can normative social values be identified and
affirmed? The apparent irreconcilability of conflicting worldviews and agendas render
the rights of each and every person, to live life however they desire,
increasing fragile. The establishing of peace in the present order of Creation,
characterised by an absence of strife or conflict, may now lack credibility. Another
endgame needs to be envisioned and advocated which speaks not only of persons
but also of plurality.
And here is where the Christian message, calling
Creation to the process of being transformed into conformity to Christ[19],
offers hope. Christian peace is realised only where there is a King coming to
establish His Kingdom. Such peace becomes a hope that generates faith, both an ontological
driver and a teleological focus. It is not a peace that can be realised in a
world where there is neither repentance nor rebirth. It is established through
the order that comes in and through the person of Jesus Christ.
3. Human Rights, Persons and Plurality
Jesus Christ, harbinger of both justice and peace,
is represented in the New Testament Scriptures as both a unique and a
relational person. From the birth genealogies of the Synoptic Gospels through to
his life’s ministry and teachings on service and self-sacrifice for others,
Jesus Christ is a person who is a man for others. He is presented as a person
in relationship to other persons. He is a person who lives and dies and is
raised again for the sake of the plurality.
And in this, Jesus Christ is true to the Old
Testament narratives in a way that is represented in Judges 21. What is here
challenged is any priority in viewing persons defined and removed from societal
contextualisation, outwith plurality. The tacit assumption of the Judges 21 text
is at one with Wolterstorff. We are persons possessed of human rights in and
through the context of our relationship to others. Human rights may inhere in
us as persons; but only in so much as we understand ourselves as possessed of
that status as persons constituted within plurality.
The relation of persons to their plurality is
frequently founded in contemporary Christian discussion on an analogical model,
fashioned around understandings of perichoresis and Social Trinity: this is an
approach we neither favour nor adopt here. It is sufficient for our purposes
that we note that from the Genesis accounts onwards, persons are discussed in
the context of their relationship to God and other persons, where from the
outset Adam is a generic and not an
individual designation.[20]
Although post-Enlightenment readers find it so hard to recognise, God is so
presented as viewing mankind primarily in the plurality and dealing with persons
as constitutive parts of that plurality.
II. Persons and
Purality
4. Ontological
Drivers
What, then, is it that God sanctions? And how
would the God of Jesus Christ help us address the apparent amorality of Judges
21, or the challenge of establishing ethical and moral guidelines for matters
of sexual or conjugal practice today? As Wolterstorff
observed, it is not enough to revert to a demand that we
simply act out of gratuitous benevolence and generosity, person to
person. Such would not require us to contextualise our understanding of persons
within plurality. What we learn from Jesus Christ is that the imperative of God
is addressed to persons within the context of their plurality. So it is that
Jesus Christ affirms the Jewish Shema’s
call to love God[21] - who
is our God and who is One - within the
context of loving our neighbours as ourselves, placing the attitudes and
actions of personal worship within the context of persons and their plurality.
Human society is to reflect and echo the integrity and holiness of God Himself.
What is it that
characterises the communion of God with us? What is it that is essential to the
revelation and mission of God, as He reaches out to embrace and commune with
His creation? Our answer is that God looks to express Himself through the
transitive actions and expressions of His own person made manifest in Jesus
Christ, reaching out to touch and embrace His Creation in order to establish
justice and peace among persons in plurality. God declares Himself to Moses as
compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, full of merciful love and faithfulness
and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. He also declares that sin must be
both recognised for what it is – a violation of relationship with God and with
the plurality – and that sin be punished in order for persons within plurality to
be corrected.[22] And so
it is that He fully expresses Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, whose
expression of humanity directs the characteristics of Deity towards persons in
their plurality; whilst dealing in and through His own representative humanity
with the repercussions and effects of human sin.
Put another way, God does not sanction the
universalising of ethical drivers pertinent originally to a prescribed context or
parochial culture. The drivers that predicate ethical imperatives and mandates,
reflective of Christ and contextualised within the cultures we live and work
among, are drivers rooted in the character of God’s own Being expressed into
the humanity of Jesus Christ: they are ontological drivers. These are not simply
expressing the characteristics, convictions or virtues quickened in an ennobled
or enabled humanity; but they are drivers arising from the very character of
God Himself, the God of Israel come among us in Jesus Christ. Ontological
drivers arise because of the transitive nature of God in His economy towards
us. God reaches out to embrace us in the activity of His own Being. They are
not the drivers of sexuality and conjugal rights formed within a rebellious,
sinful society. It is an alternative reality that Moses met with in the
revelation of the Divine goodness to him in Sinai. And it is this that we meet
with as our humanity is embraced and encompassed in the person of Jesus Christ.
His exemplary humanity expresses the embedding of God’s Being in His person, come
within our human plurality.
Why stress ontological drivers, rather than further
developing a convictional basis for ethics, rooted in the perceived propriety
of context and culture? Because as Christians we willingly give ourselves to be
defined by the person of Jesus Christ. Through our identification with Jesus
Christ we identify drivers in the Biblical narrative that belong to the very
character of God, for basic to the Christian message is the declaration that
the metanarrative that defines us is found in the life and ministry of Jesus
Christ alone. Ontological drivers are not to be confused as outcomes: they are
not prescribed forms or expressions of mandated behaviour, yet neither are they
accidental. They require an experimental process of present discovery through constant
and ongoing dialogue with the Biblical narratives, questioning how they can be
realised and brought to expression within our context and culture. But all of
this has to be applied through the prism of Jesus Christ Himself, who so fully
and completely represents God in His holiness come to us and among us in order
to gather us as persons into His plurality.
5. Teleological Focus
But the failure of the Israelites in Judges 21 is
not only because of the absence of ontological drivers. They have no
anticipation of either a King or a Kingdom. They are leaderless and hopeless.
They survive yet are directionless. There is no hope and no goal to pursue with
joy.
We have rejected the premise that a Christian ethic can be built solely on the basis of perceived virtues or values. But neither is it enough, in pursuing justice and peace, to speak only of ontological drivers: as if even the characteristics of God's goodness - compassion,
grace, slowness to anger, merciful love, faithfulness and forgiveness - were
content enough for a Christian ethic when faced with questions of sex and conjugal
rights in this present, sinful age. To embrace an understanding of justice and peace pursued
solely in terms of ontological drivers endangers a betrayal and
renunciation of the strategic role of hope within the Biblical metanarrative of Jesus Christ, testified to in the
Gospels and integral to the New Testament Epistles. Where is the ‘good news’ of
the Gospel if there is no coming King? How can there be faith, if is there is
nothing yet presently unresolved and undetermined to hope for?
It is not enough
to speak only of drivers, in reaching towards a Christian ethic. In looking to an
ethical response to the challenges of affirming Christian perspectives in
dealing with questions of sex and human rights, including conjugal rights, we
must also address the question of teleological focus. What is it we hope for,
wait for and long for in the New Heavens and the New Earth? What is the
character of this holy reality the Holy Spirit leads us to hope and long for? Of
course there will be a sense of frustration as we wrestle with our instincts
and desires in the present. For the present is not what we hope and long for.
In addition to drivers we need focus: an understanding of the Kingdom of God that
is yet to come and what the Bible speaks of in terms of its fullness among us.
A focus on a New Heavens and a New Earth, a hope that is so real that it shapes
and effects our behaviour now. A measured, present response to what we long
for. A hope expressed through faithful, present participation in Jesus Christ. Anticipated
enjoyment through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit coming to
strengthen our resolve in our present life and experience, even whilst we live
in these bodies which are held in a present cosmos saturated with sin and
damaged by decay.
What is badly in need of recovery within the
present writer’s context and culture in Scotland and quite probably in a wider
European context, both in ethical discourse and in the practice of preaching
the Good News of the Kingdom of God come in Christ, is a focus and anticipation
of the realisation of the new order born out of the endgame that is the Kingdom
of God. That this Kingdom, heralded by Jesus Christ, is one defined by holy
relationships: a plurality of persons. Where all who participate are willingly
defined by the person of Jesus Christ and happily participators in the
plurality constituted by Christ. An environment where justice and peace are
both predicated by the will of God and our joyful and collaborative recognition
of the same. Where we willingly and, in terms of this present sinful cosmos,
sacrificially root our lives in a plurality which is under the rule of Jesus Christ
our King. This is the essence of church: the plurality that is rooted in the
person of Jesus Christ.
We live, tragically, in a season where the lack of
a ruling King leads to societal decay and disintegration. By advocating the marrying
of ontological drivers to teleological focus, we seek to avoid the dangers of both
a static, unyielding foundationalism and also a confused, relativised post-foundationalism;
for the danger inherent in any post-foundational approach to ethics is that
principles and universal, normative values are disallowed and, whilst
convictions and virtues may be affirmed, all is relativised. Or put simply, the
‘narrative is king’. Judges 21 is important in exposing this. The narrative is
clear. The practices are apparently condoned. Does that make them right? The
difficulty with a narrative based approach to ethics is that it can be deemed
utilitarianism by another name: albeit a utilitarianism defined by context and
culture.
We will only effectively shape church as a
witnessing, alternative pattern for society when we grasp Christ’s call that we
give ourselves to living out participation as persons in a holy plurality,
renouncing life driven by the demands of sinful appetites. We need to reaffirm
our identity as persons who are part of a plurality. A plurality that is
motivated by expressing itself through ontological drivers that are founded
through identification with the glory and goodness of God’s Being expressed in
Christ. And ontological drivers so embraced that they are worked out by persons
who have renounced individual self-determination in order to be part of and to
serve the plurality that will populate the society of the New Heavens and the
New Earth. A new society where both sexual propriety and purity, as aspects of a
society filled with the justice, peace, persons and plurality that we long for
and live for, are owned and pursued.
[1] Judges 21.1
[2] Judges 21.19
[3] Judges 17.6, 18.1, 19.1, 21.25
[4] Person is used in preference to individual, as the latter can
connote a polarised or separate identity of the individual from society. Our
thesis in this essay does not embrace such a distinction.
[5] A plurality is to be understood as a society of persons of which
each person is a constituent part.
[6] In Greek, the ontos is
‘essential being’: hence ‘ontological’. For the Christian, our ontological
identity is the identity we own through having been brought to share in the
‘being’ of God, in and through Jesus Christ. An ontological driver is a
motivational imperative that we embrace because we receive for ourselves an
identity that is rooted in and through Jesus Christ. The indicative of God’s
Being thereby becomes the imperative of Christian conscience.
[7] Again, in Greek, the telos
is the outcome or ending that we are focussed upon. It is this that we find our
hope anchored in, because of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. It
represents a focus that is upon the envisioned New Heavens and New Earth that
now serves to motivate us and shape our present attitudes and actions.
Teleological focus brings hope, births faith and motivates love.
[8] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice:
rights and wrongs, Princeton University Press, 2008.
[9] Justice: rights and wrongs,
p. 317.
[10] Preamble, The United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human
Rights.
[11] Justice: rights and wrongs,
p. 4.
[12] Justice: rights and wrongs,
p. 285.
[13] In Greek, the telos:
hence ‘teleological’.
[14] The association of righteous and justice, so often paired together
in Old Testament Hebrew, is reininforced in English translations of the Greek
New Testament by the use of both terms to render dikaiosune.
[15] Romans 14.17
[16] Isaiah 9.7
[17] John 20.21-22
[18] John 14.27
[19] Christomorphism
[20] Genesis 1.26
[21] The startling abruptness of the Hebrew is so easily lost in
translation: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord: our God; the Lord: One’. Here is the
mystery of Trinity that evokes the response of doxological praise: it is
through the singularity of God’s Being that the plurality in which we find our
personhood is identified and constituted.
[22] Exodus 34.6-7
