Christology and Ethics [Paperback]

F. LeRon Shults (Editor), Brent Waters (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2010

This book brings together leading theologians and ethicists to explore the neglected relationship between Christology and ethics. The contributors to this volume work to overcome the tendency toward disciplinary xenophobia, considering such questions as What is the relation between faithful teaching about the reality of Christ and teaching faithfulness to the way of Christ? and How is christological doctrine related to theological judgments about normative human agency? With renewed attention and creative reformulation, they argue, we can discover fresh ways of tending to these perennial questions.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

F. LeRon Shults is professor of theology and philosophy at Agder University, Kristiansand, Norway. He is the author of several books, including Christology and Science and Reforming the Doctrine of God.

Brent Waters is the Jerre and Mary Joy Stead professor of Christian Social Ethics and director of the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. His other books include This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics and Christian Moral Technology in an Emerging Technoculture.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (June 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802845096
• ISBN-13: 978-0802845092
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,671,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars The Ethic of Christ, June 9, 2011

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This review is from: Christology and Ethics (Paperback)

Shults writes an interesting concluding chapter which focuses on the more current philosophical debate of "otherness" as a means to get at the relational nature of ethics. His style is to quote many authors along the way. He summarizes Oliver Davies in Theology of Compassion: "compassion stands at the heart of empirical reality, as the encounter with the presence of the real personal other" (p. 205). And Pannenberg Systematic Theology (Volume 2) "argues that the self-distinction of Jesus from the Father is the inner basis for his divine sonship," and "this differentiation is vindicated and confirmed by the resurrection which reveals the self-actualization of the trinitarian God in the world" (p. 208).

The next most significant chapter is by Wannenwetsch, perhaps the best, which is a crystallization of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's position: "The question HOW that can be must be changed into the question WHO this person is. The answer is: the historical one and the crucified, the resurrected and ascended one, the God-human, revealed as brother and Lord, as creature and as creator" (Christology, by Bonhoeffer). He has sections on "Overcoming Moral Idealism (Bonhoeffer "locates the ethical center of Christology in ecclesiology" p. 85); "Challenging an Ethics of Emulation (Luther said "sacrament first, exemplar second" p. 89); Challenging a Moral Anthropology of Separation" (Bonhoeffer said "The 'heart' in the biblical sense is not the inner life, but the whole man in relation to God" p. 90); "Overcoming Moral 'Christologies of Separation'" ("Ethics and Christology share the same subject matter--'the form of Christ taking form in the world'" p. 92); "Responsible Action" ("responsible action is genuinely free for the neighbor ... free from self-concern" p. 93); "Overcoming Immediacy and Self-Justification" (
the moral life--as accounting for Christ in the world, instead of accounting for oneself before the world" p. 94).

Huyssteen quotes Hector in his chapter on "Should We Do What Jesus did?": "'perfect God-consciousness' in Jesus Christ can be equated with 'divinity' precisely because Christ's God-Consciousness is the human 'organ,' what today we will call the embodied mind, through which God's activity becomes incarnate" (p. 170).

Henriksen analyzes the Parable of the Goats his chapter, "The Surprise of Judgment and Justice": "It is not God who excludes humans from relationships in the last judgment, but that humans, by excluding others from community, exclude themselves" (p. 145).

If you skip the first three chapters, you can get on to the good stuff.