New Testament Social Ethics for Today

To answer the question of what role the New Testament should play in the formation and expression of Christian social morality today, Richard Longenecker here proposes a developmental hermeneutic, which distinguishes between "declared principles" and "described practices" in the New Testament writings. With this distinction in mind, he focuses on the three couplets of Galatians 3:28 — "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" — showing how these matters were treated in early Christian thought and explaining their meaning for us today. In so doing, Longenecker lays a hermeneutical foundation for the much larger discussion of Christian social ethics.