Old Testament Ethics: A Paradigmatic Approach

Old Testament Ethics: A Paradigmatic Approach. By Waldemar Janzen. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994, 236 pp., $19.95 paper.

Janzen has developed the paradigmatic approach to doing OT ethics in deference to what he regards as the western attraction to principles. "Story," Janzen affirms, is the most important theological genre of the OT, for it is the means through which the ethical-theological instruction of God to his people is communicated.

His starting point is C. J. H. Wright's definition (in An Eye for an Eye, 1983, p. 43): "A paradigm is something used as a model or example for other cases where a basic principle remains unchanged, though details differ . [I]t is not so much imitated as applied." However, Janzen immediately drops the concept of a "basic principle" out of Wright's definition and substitutes instead "mental images of model persons" (p. 27). It is not the "basic principle" that links the paradigm and the new situation, as in Wright's definition, even though that may be true of grammatical paradigms (from which the metaphor of paradigm was borrowed), but a paradigm is understood as "a personally and holistically conceived image of a model (e.g. a wise person, a good king) that imprints itself immediately and nonconceptually on the characters and actions of those who hold it" (pp. 27-28). To attempt to extract principles from the OT would be to treat the Bible reductionistically and, I suppose, propositionally.

Janzen's overarching paradigm is the familial paradigm, which is exemplified in the behavior of Abraham who seeks to keep the peace with Lot (Genesis 13). Three ethical components are central to this familial paradigm: the preservation and continuation of life, the possession of the land, and the maintenance of kinship through hospitality. Four other secondary paradigms model what he calls a "God pleasing life": the priestly (Phinehas in Numbers 25), wisdom (Abigail in 1 Samuel 25), royal (David in 1 Samuel 24) and prophetic (Elijah in 1 Kings 21) models. Finally, Christ serves as the paradigm of all these models, for he is the preeminent familial paradigm proclaiming the kingdom of God. These five Biblical characters (Abraham, Phinehas, Abigail, Elijah and David), we are told, are "exemplary in certain very specific actions" and they are "models only with respect to these actions," but they must not be held up to us for "comprehensive imitation" (p. 20).

Despite the creativity of this approach, a key problem is his definition of ethic: He never tells us what is right or what is wrong. Janzen struggles to avoid any principial standards while still maintaining that we are somehow guided by these paradigms. So why was the story of Abraham and Lot chosen as the central paradigm? And what in the story is significant for giving to us ethical guidance? Was it, indeed, Abraham's self-effacing offer toward Lot that was the exemplary point, or does Scripture elevate Abraham's faith as the central feature of the text? What made the other four stories models in their own right? Are we not owed some criteria for selecting the models that are central? And what are the rules for sorting out the descriptive materials from those that are prescriptive and normative, even if they are only models that are exemplary and do not demand imitation?

In reacting to the suggestion that the holiness of God, indeed, an imitatio Dei, is the central organizing feature of OT ethics, Janzen pleads that the very "otherness" of God, which God's holiness naturally embodies, means that "humans cannot be and do, and are not meant to be and do, what God is and does" (p.115). Thus mortals are let off the hook on account of their frailty and creatureliness.

But even more importantly, the most surprising missing ingredient in this ethic that focuses on the familial paradigm is that it makes little place for God in an ethic that purports to originate from the divine. The "good life" appears to be a life that is lived in harmony with humanity. While there are "laws" in the Decalogue, for instance, Janzen declares that these are merely "shorthand" formulas for Israel's story (p. 58). To say that the laws emerged from the story does not fit with the Biblical claims that the laws came through revelation, in the context of a covenant with binding legal obligation, similar to that between the suzerain and his vassals.

Thus while a narrative ethic of stories can provide a general ethical framework it is unable to give specific principles or directions that one can apply to one's life, the very aspect that Wright had included in his definition but that Janzen deliberately deleted from his. Only in his final chapter does the presence of God enter, in what otherwise has been more of a sociological grounding of ethics than a theological one. But does Janzen ever really close the gap that separates the story and ethics? The closest he seems to come is on p. 178: "In briefest summary, we can say that the Old Testament's ethical directive points the way to true, God-intended humanity. To be truly human in this sense is to be holy, to be wise, to be just, and to serve, if necessary to the point of suffering. True humanity both embraces and transcends these distinctive ethical quests." But how it embraces is left unclear, and in what way(s) and according to what criteria it transcends is likewise a mystery, especially if Scripture is to function as its norm.