The Sermon on the Mount

From Craig L. Blomberg's article, "The Most Often Abused Verses in the Sermon on the Mount," Southwestern Journal of Theology (Volume 46, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 1-17):

... it is significant that while one can still find supporters of the most influential approaches to the sermon throughout church history - the older Catholic “two tiers of Christians,” the Lutheran “law to prepare for the Gospel,” the Calvinist “mandate for the state,” the nineteenth–century liberal “social optimism,” Schweitzer’s “interim ethic,” and old–line dispensationalism - even various contemporary representatives of these movements, along with much of mainstream biblical scholarship, have achieved a broad consensus that the sermon is to be understood as part of Jesus’ “already but not yet” ethic and inaugurated kingdom eschatology that characterized his teaching more generally. The rest of our paper will assume that this interpretive grid is the most accurate one.

Matt. 5:1-2 immediately reinforces this conviction as the stage is set for Christ’s sermon. While crowds surrounded Jesus, “his disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.” His words form instruction for those already committed to him at some level as his followers, and they are addressed to his followers in community. In other words, Jesus’ ethic is not first of all for the state or society as a whole (though applications can be made there), but neither is it limited to what today would be called individual Christians’ private lives. It is a manifesto for what would become known as the church.