Each Friday over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of meditations on the 23rd Psalm by my friend, Myles Werntz, Director of Baptist Studies at Abilene Christian University. Once the series is finished, I’ll share my reflections on his reading of the Psalm and the moral vision it casts.
Here’s Myles’ introductory note:
The 23rd Psalm has a purchase on the Christian imagination like few other places within Scripture. Need a quick devotional topic? 23rd Psalm. Want to recite Scripture while walking around? Chances are good the 23rd rises to the surface. When you need a Psalm to use in a TV funeral, the 23rd has your back.
But what if the Psalm, in its deceptively simple frame, offers us a moral vision, a vision for the contours of a creature’s life before God?
Taking the 23rd Psalm as a departure for the Christian moral life opens an important observation: there’s no inherent moral instruction in the Psalm. There are no commands or laws, nothing like the Proverbs or Law or Sermon on the Mount, nothing that would straightforwardly commend itself as moral instruction. The Psalm is an affirmation, a praise, and in that sense, it’s perhaps the most important place to begin, because it begins not with an argument for the moral life, but an exploration of the moral life. It presumes that we’re already in it, and that God is the framework for that "being in it”.
Once upon a time, I taught a course entitled “Foundations for Biblical Ethics”, which attempted to help students think canonically about their ethics of Scripture, using the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount as the point of departure. Through the class, students read how ancient Christians—and indeed, Scripture itself—views these not as contrary texts, but as a singular word of the LORD. But in using these two lodestones, I ran the risk of doing the thing I laid out above: emphasizing the notion that the moral life of Scripture is found only in commands, teachings, or prohibitions.
Oliver O’Donovan describes the Christian moral life as a call and response, a seeking and finding. When we seek, we begin with the assumption that there is something to be found, and that there is one who has helped begin our seeking out. As such, Scripture does not simply shape our moral life when we are commanded, but when we observe the histories, when we ask questions about the stories, when we pray and when we are seeking to become wise. Making this move opens up the canon of Scripture for the moral life in a way which then becomes expansive, because the presumption is that we are already in the moral life: the moral life of the hearer of the Law, of the prophets, of the histories is presumed. It’s not as if we first learn the data of Scripture, and then become moral beings; we hear the Scriptures as morally malformed beings already, which affects what and how we hear, and what and how we do.
Read in this way, the Scriptures become wild with respect to what we might find, and where: it becomes expected—even anticipated—that we will be guided by not only the prophets, but histories, psalms, oracles, and apocalpyses. The question of how to draw these things together into a coherent vision is a different one, but that we are instructed in unexpected places is, I take, a basic presumption that Scripture makes. If the corners of Micah and Isaiah can affirm the nature of the Messiah, then Obadiah and Jude can help us to see the frame of the moral life.
And so, Psalm 23 seems like a pretty good place to start casting a vision of the moral life. The basic thesis of this series is that the Psalm, when approached asking about its moral vision, yields it willingly, and that the Psalm, already embedded within our popular imagination as it is, has been wanting to do this for some time.
I’m grateful to Chris for hosting this experiment. The aim is to tease this out over eight installments, give or take, as the Psalm leads us through the world, shaping our fears, desires, and virtue, in generous anticipation of the life to come.