I've been listening to a lecture by Graham Cole, Trinity without Tiers (HT Mike Bird). He made one point which really struck a cord with me:
There is a way of doing Christian ethics that actually leaves the Gospel out. That is you reconstruct the inner life of the essential Trinity and then draw applications to family life, marriage, the church, even for some the wider society. And yet I believe the genius of the NT is to always go through the narrative of Christ and what he has done for us.
[...] instead of trying to imitate the inner life of the essential Trinity, I think Thomas a Kempis got it right - we imitate Christ. Did Jesus say: "this new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I love the Father"? No, "as I have loved you". And behind that is the footwashing of John 13 and the self-sacrifice and the humility that represents.
1 Corinthians 11:1: Paul says "imitate me as I imitate Christ".
1 Peter 2:21 says he left you an example to follow in his steps when it comes to unjust suffering.
1 John 2:6 says we're to walk as he walks.
I could show this over and over again that that is where the accent in our NT falls. The narrative of Christ is crucial to the shape of a cruciform Christian life. A life that is shaped by the cross.
He then discusses the wonderful text of Philipians 2:1-11, before concluding:
notice he doesn't say be other person centred like I have always been in the eternal godhead. He goes through the story of Christ, the evangel, to make his point. The imitation of Christ is, I think, the NT accent.
I don't think it is an either/or but I agree that we ought to accent the cross. More generally I disagree with Cole on quite a bit, not least in being more positive about a strict ruling of Rahner's rule and its application to ethics. I loved Tom Smail's Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity. Maybe some kind of distinction between (creation?) ethics based on being created in the image of God, and (redemption?) ethics based on how we engage a fallen world like Christ did in dying for his enemies (although creation and redemption is all of one piece [thanks Isaiah, Ienaeus, Wingren, Wright etc] there is some kind of differentiation)?
More thought required.
