Biblical ethics?

It seems that my Basic Christian Ethics class will be giving me the most food for thought this semester. This week, in the first part of a section on "The Bible and Christian Ethics," we considered the role of the Old Testament in Christian Ethics. As part of our reading for Monday's class, we were assigned the following passages of Old Testament texts for reading:

Exodus 20-23 (The Ten Commandments and other laws)
Leviticus 20:6-26 (the "purity laws," including the infamous anti-homosexuality passage)
Deuteronomy 5:1-21 (The Ten Commandments again)
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (Israel's instruction to teach the law to their children)
Deuteronomy 10:12-13 (Summary of the law: What does the Lord require of you? To love and serve him.)
Deuteronomy 13:6-11 (Commandment to kill your children if they lead you astray from the worship of the one God.)
Deuteronomy 20:10-20 (Guidelines for war against other nations, including an injunction to kill all the people in the towns they conquer, but not to kill any trees!)
Deuteronomy 22:13-30 (Laws about sexuality, particularly about the importance of women being virgins when they are married -- the penalty is death if they are not.)
Isaiah 1 (The prophet denouncing the empty ritual of the temples as having no meaning because the people have turned away from God.)
Amos 5:18-24 (More condemnation of empty ritual - "I despite your festivals; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies")
Micah 6:6-8 ("What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.")

Among these passages, we find some real gems of "biblical ethics" -- for instance, in the passage from Exodus, we are told that killing another person is grounds for the death penalty. But killing a slave is grounds only for punishment, not death for the slave-owner, and only if the slave dies immediately. If the slave survives for a few days after being beaten and THEN dies, "there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner's property." (Exodus 20:21) How are we to apply THIS Scripture in today's world?

Or what about Deuteronomy 13:6-11, which instructs parents that they should kill their children if they worship any gods other than the God of Israel? So should modern-day Christian parents kill their children if they decide to convert to Hinduism or Islam?

At the same time, however, within this collection of sometimes horrific laws, there are also laws that I consider morally commendable, such as the prohibitions against lending money at interest (Exodus 22:25-27), and against oppression of "resident aliens" (Hebrew: gur, meaning one who is unable to be at home due to war or famine -- a modern-day equivalent would be refugees or undocumented immigrants, according to our Old Testament professor Becky Wright), since the Israelites were themselves once aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).

So what to do with these texts? How do we construct a consistent biblical ethic based on Scripture? Do we simply "pick and choose," throwing out the passages about killing one's children and keeping the passages about not oppressing refugees? What does it mean to say that this text is the "Word of God"?

Many of my classmates did not seem troubled by the difficult passages in the Old Testament, making comments about taking into account the time and context in which the Old Testament was written, and using analogies of human development to say that the earliest Old Testament laws were given to the people of Israel in an early state of development morally and that today we have progressed to a higher state of moral being in which we are able to understand and interpret more nuance than people were then.

But these arguments seemed hollow to me. For one thing, the idea that humanity has progressed over linear time (often associated with "modernist" thinking) was somewhat disproved by the atrocities of the 20th century, including two World Wars and the Holocaust. And it seems inconsistent to me to on the one hand talk passionately about how we should take more seriously some of the Old Testament teachings on economics (the idea of a Jubilee Year where all debts are forgiven, the practice of keeping the edges of the fields un-plowed and left for the poor to eat) while at the same time arguing that we should not pay attention to those parts of the Old Testament that seem offensive to us today.

For one thing, not everyone is agreed about which parts of the Old Testament are offensive. I find the so-called prohibitions against homosexual behavior to be offensive, but many Christians do not. The Evangelical churches I was a part of in college would criticize this kind of approach to the Bible for using "man's judgment" to evaluate the worth of "God's Word." Who are we to question God's Word, they would ask? And in some ways, I am still asking this question.

I suppose I am looking for a consistent way to read the Scriptures, and I want to be up front and honest about what standard I am using to evaluate them. If I want to say that certain passages are not in keeping with what I know about God and God's will -- well, where did I get my ideas about what God and God's will are like? I suppose I got my ideas about God from reading other passages of Scripture (like Micah 6:6-8 and many of the Gospel texts), but other parts of it come from my own inner sense of right and wrong, of what is good and just.

I guess I can be thankful that I am a part of the Episcopal Church, which approaches faith through the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, tradition, and reason -- not the "sola scriptura" (or "Scripture alone") of Martin Luther and the later Reformist (Protestant) churches. That at least gives me grounds to bring my own reasoning (in the context of the wider Church community) to bear on the Scriptures, rather than feeling obligated to take them all literally, at face value, and try to follow every law and regulation within them.