Dr. Ben Witherington, Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, has a blog on
which he has published a section of a book he is writing on New Testament ethics. I have extracted below a portion of what he published, all of which I found very interesting. Witherington shows how Paul's treatment of slavery exhibits increasing specificity as the closeness of his contact with those receiving his letters advances. In short, Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon demonstrate an ethical trajectory which proves quite illuminating.
Witherington labels this section "LEVELS OF MORAL DISCOURSE"
Unfortunately, besides the neglect
or disparagement of NT ethics, one of the other negative things that
has happened to NT ethical material is the de-contexualizing of the
material and the failure to see its usual ad hoc nature. All too often
it has been treated rather flatly or uniformly. These things ought not
to be. NT ethics is just as much a word on target for certain Christian
audiences as the theologizing we find in these same documents. And in
fact, when we have material that is repeated in more than one document,
for example like the household codes, we begin to discover that there
are trajectories of change in some of this material, just as there are
levels of discourse. Let me explain what I mean by these two concepts
(levels of discourse and trajectories of change) as they are in fact
intertwined.
If a person has any sensibility about wanting to make
an effective communication with a particular audience and persuade them
of something, especially if the issue here is exhortation and
application, then that person must: