To answer the question of what role the New Testament should play in the formation and expression of Christian social morality today, Richard Longenecker here proposes a developmental hermeneutic, which distinguishes between "declared principles" and "described practices" in the New Testament writings.

With this distinction in mind, he focuses on the three couplets of Galatians 3:28 -- "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" -- showing how these matters were treated in early Christian thought and explaining their meaning for us today. In so doing, Longenecker lays a hermeneutical foundation for the much larger discussion of Christian social ethics.