Note: From, New Testament Ethics: Revisiting the Moral Vision of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The issue of how Christians should handle material and monetary goods is a well-known conundrum that, as Richard B. Hays (hereafter R. B. Hays) admits in his landmark study The Moral Vision of the New Testament, “has not received an emphasis commensurate with its importance in the New Testament.” The problem is that mutually exclusive ways of handling possessions seem to be recommended in the New Testament: on the one hand, a localized life of “generous sharing” (e.g., Luke 19:1-10) and, on the other hand, an itinerant life of “radical renunciation” (e.g., Luke 14:33). In our engagement with Moral Vision, we focus on Luke’s Gospel, which treats the moral issue of goods at greater length than other New Testament writings, in order to explore this tension between “sharing” and “renunciation.”
In this essay, we suggest, first, that historical-critical accounts of how Luke resolves the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation” tend to focus on information about what to do (i.e., rules and principles) and so underestimate the heart. When attention is not directed to the heart, moral motivation and formation are left unexplored. As the seat of desires and dispositions, the heart initiates behavior and orients it toward a vision of the good life. If the heart motivates people to act, it is also critical to discuss how good hearts are formed. Moreover, this prioritizing of rules and principles seems to stem from unstated premises about what morality fundamentally is. When one draws on these historical studies in the descriptive task, one must use them with attention to these shortcomings.
Second, we suggest that when we let our interpretative attention be sharpened by theological reflection on motivation and formation, we can make more sense of what Luke says about possessions and have a richer discussion of what we must constructively say today about the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation” on the basis of Luke’s Gospel.
In making these two suggestions, we explore issues of moral motivation and formation that Hays’s brief discussion of possessions in Moral Vision raises but does not address.
The Neglected Heart
Before we turn to Luke’s Gospel, we will briefly indicate how historical-critical attempts to describe Luke’s understanding of the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation” largely neglect the heart – and thereby moral motivation and formation – and we propose that this scholarly impulse arises from routinely held assumptions about what is central to moral life.
A Rule of Redistribution
The majority view in biblical scholarship since the early 1970s has been to resolve the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation” in terms of a rule of redistribution.
When Luke narrates what Jesus teaches and how characters behave, he is taken to imply, but not to explicitly state in the text, that a localized life of redistributing possessions to people in need is prescribed for a mostly rich audience, while an itinerant life of dispossession belongs to a bygone era of Jesus and his disciples. To argue that this is what Luke implicitly communicates, the majority view relies heavily on hypotheses about what extratextual information the audience used in the reading and hearing of the text.
When Luke’s resolution is framed as a choice between two types of commanded behavior, information about what to do – roughly a rule in Hays’s taxonomy of rules, principles, paradigms and symbolic world – is placed at the center while the heart is pushed to the periphery, despite its apparent importance in Luke’s ethics (e.g., Luke 6:43-45; 8:11-15; 10:27). The point is not that moral motivation and formation are never discussed in the exegesis of individual passages about goods (e.g., Luke 12:34; 16:15). Rather, our suggestion is that formation of moral character plays little role (if any) in claims about how Luke resolves the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation.”
A Principle of Renunciation
A growing number of scholars have challenged the majority view. They argue that specific, and seemingly contrary, ways of using goods in Luke’s Gospel are various applications of a general principle of “renunciation.”
For Christopher M. Hays (hereafter C. M. Hays), Jesus’s call to renounce all possessions in Luke 14:33 is “a coherent ethical principle with a range of contingent applications” depending on vocation and wealth. [C. M. Hays, Luke’s Wealth Ethics: A Study in Their Coherence and Character, p. 185] Here renunciation is not the leaving behind of most or all goods, but a disinvestment from the old order and its priorities.
Along similar lines, Rachel L. Coleman has recently argued that Luke urges all disciples to perform acts of leaving and following, albeit in very different ways. [Rachel L. Coleman, The Lukan Lens on Wealth and Possessions: A Perspective Shaped by the Themes of Reversal and Right Response] God’s “reversal” calls for a “right response” where disinvestment from the old order is not a goal in itself but a means to an investment in the kingdom. Although Coleman rarely uses the term “principle” and somewhat reinterprets the notion of “renunciation” in light of the symbolic world of God’s eschatological reordering of all reality, she takes different ways of handling goods to express the same values and so discusses the issue of possessions largely in terms of R. B. Hays’s category of principles.
It seems promising to understand the issue of possessions within the symbolic world of God’s eschatological reordering in which disciples disinvest from the old order to invest in the new reality. Yet, this symbolic world can illuminate the tension between redistribution and dispossession even more when we recognize that the process of leaving and following is more a transformation of moral character than it is an application of principles. To be sure, C. M. Hays and Coleman offer insights about motivation and formation in their exegesis of specific texts. For example, C. M. Hays claims that “in Luke the heart is the determinative factor in the behavior of a [narrative] character” while discussing Jesus’s charge that some Pharisees love money (Luke 16:15). [C. M. Hays, Luke’s Wealth Ethics, p. 150 (emphasis added)] Even so, they place information about the good as principles or values at the center of their summaries of how Luke resolves the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation,” and so they seem to push the heart and its formation to the side like the majority view.
Beyond Rules and Principles
Why are resolutions sought in a rule of redistribution or a principle of renunciation? R. B. Hays notes incompatible rules about possessions in Luke’s Gospel. He also argues that “very little direct appeal is made in the New Testament texts [on goods] to principles.” [R. B. Hays, Moral Vision, p. 467]
Then he interestingly observes that paradigms and symbolic worlds are the primary modes in Luke’s instruction on possessions. Although he does not infer from this observation that motivation and formation are important for understanding “sharing” and “renunciation” in Luke’s Gospel as we will do, his insight makes us consider why paradigms and symbolic worlds are central in the biblical text while rules or principles dominate the scholarly analysis. It is difficult to shake off the impression that the historical-critical accounts sketched here assume that knowing the right thing to do is primary in moral life and that they therefore seek a resolution to the tension between “sharing” and “renunciation” in rules or principles. These accounts, which are central to the descriptive task, seem insufficiently theological in that they pay little attention to how premises about morality direct interpretative attention toward rules and principles in the biblical text and thus away from the heart and how it is shaped by paradigms and captivated by “symbolic worlds.”
Excerpted from New Testament Ethics: Revisiting the Moral Vision of the New Testament edited by Cherryl Hunt, Nicholas J. Moore, and Timothy J. Murray ©2026 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Carl-Magnus Carlstein, lecturer on Biblical Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden; and Rebekah Eklund, professor, Loyola University Maryland
