Bible and ethics

moral formation and analogical imagination

Johannes Nissen

pp. 81-100

in: Williams Ortiz Gaye, Clara B. Joseph (eds), Theology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

The use of the Bible in ethics is comparable with the way in which literature and film are used in ethics.¹ Every great work of literature, film, or drama invites us into an alternative reality where new possibilities are disclosed for our lives. In a similar way, the New Testament presents a different way of living. Yet, it seems that the parallel to other great literature also has its limits, in so far as the Bible is considered to have a specific authority. In the New Testament the new possibilities for living are described as "life in Christ," "discipleship," "living the Truth," and so on. Since appropriation means making my own what is genuinely "different" or "other," there must first be some critical distance from the texts to know that their world is not my world. Sandra Schneiders-rightly notes that the biblical "text must maintain its identity, its 'strangeness," which both gifts and challenges the reader. It must be allowed to say what is says, regardless of whether this is comfortable or assimilable by the reader" (Schneiders 1991, 171).