A Fresh Perspective

What would a modern day Jesus inspired sexual ethic look like? Did Jesus teach a sexual ethic?  I believe he did, though not explicitly. Biblical fundamentalists who like to claim that the Bible’s teaching is clear about any number of complex issues will find little in the Gospels to support a claim that Jesus is clear on all matters sexual in nature. Though Jesus does indeed have something to say. What Jesus does say, however, must be viewed within the broader perspective of that which constituted the critical core of all his teaching. When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment in the law, he responded, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”(Matt. 22:37-40). And lest we look for some wiggle room in the way we define ...

The only time in the Gospels where Jesus talks about life after death is in a response to a question by the Sadducees. They did not believe in life after death, so the question posed to Jesus is a loaded question. A woman had married seven brothers successively in obedience to the law of levirate marriage. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? The Jews who believed in life after death, like the Pharisees, believed in resurrection, not immortality. Many of the Greeks believed in immortality. They believed in a sharp distinction between soul and body. Some Greeks called the body the prison house of the soul. They believed that in death the soul doesn’t die, it simply departs the body. In the Hebrew tradition, there is no separation of soul and body; soul and body are one. The immaterial is inseparably connected to the material in Hebrew thought. Therefore, they believed that when the body dies so does the soul, and then it takes an act of God to raise the total person....