Customer Reviews

Evangelical Ethics: Issues Facing the Church Today

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For two decades this book has well served the evangelical community as a basic textbook in ethics. First published in 1985, a much needed second edition appeared in 1993. But with further ethical reflection called for, especially in the rapidly developing area of bio-technology, a third edition was in need, and here is the result.

This new edition features a new chapter on genetic engineering, which looks at the history, technology and morality of such issues as cloning and stem cell research. There is also a new chapter on environmental ethics. In addition to addressing some contemporary environmental concerns such as global warming and biodiversity, it offers a biblical foundation for thinking about the earth and our stewardship of it.

And the existing ten chapters have been revised as well, bringing statistical and bibliographic information up to date.

The opening chapter lays out some general principles of ethical thinking from a biblical viewpoint, including the problem of conflicting obligations, and the place of Christian morality in a pluralistic culture.

The other nine chapters focus on major ethical and social hot potatoes of the day. Thus there are meaty chapters on such issues as contraception, reproductive technologies, homosexuality, abortion, war and peace, and capital punishment.

All the issues are approached from a decidedly biblical and socially conservative standpoint. Thus in the chapters on abortion and euthanasia, a strong pro-life stance is argued for as the one most closely reflecting the biblical data.

On the issue of war and defence, Davis argues that the Christian case for pacifism rests on a weak hermeneutical basis, and that the just war tradition, including nuclear deterrence, is morally justifiable.

On the related issue of capital punishment, the author takes the view that it is still a binding principle, not limited to Old Testament times. It reflects both the justice of God as well as his wrath against the wrongdoer.

On the thorny issue of divorce and remarriage, Davis argues that while God hates divorce (Mal. 2:16), there are cases, such as sexual infidelity and desertion, where divorce is morally permissible, though not obligatory. Reconciliation should be the main emphasis, with divorce seen as a painful last resort.

Homosexuality is not overlooked. The social, medical and theological components of this discussion are all well covered. Davis argues that homosexuality is contrary to the divine will for human sexuality, and real hope is available for the homosexual who seeks to renounce his lifestyle.

In sum, this book offers a clearly biblical approach to many of the controversial social and ethical debates of the day. A lot of ground is covered in the book's 350 pages. One can argue that more could have been included. For example, a full discussion of cloning and stem cell research could have been featured in a separate chapter. The very topical issue of same-sex marriage is not even mentioned in the chapter on homosexuality. Other omissions come to mind.

But one can only cover so much material in a single volume. And Davis has elsewhere developed some of these topics further, as in his 1984 book on abortion. All in all this is one of the best books on contemporary social and ethical debate from a biblical perspective.

This is a book for the early 1980s. I'm being clear because it claims to be an "updated and revised" edition from 2004. While a couple very short chapters were added, the old material is mostly untouched. Since half the chapters are on medical issues it is sad to see almost no medical research cited past 1983.

Besides the outdated and sometimes false claims, this leads to archaic statements like, "In-vitro Fertilization represents a form of experimentation exposing human subjects to as yet unknown risks." The author managed to insert "9/11" into the war chapter as a justification for the continued need for nuclear weapons, but failed to add a single word in that whole chapter about not torturing prisoners or avoiding the killing of innocents.

The book claims to target the ethical issues likely to come up for the Evangelical pastor or lay person today. In some respects it does that - issues like divorce, the environment, and civil disobedience aren't covered in similar books. But why is there nothing at all on money, poverty, or business ethics? What we do with our money and how we act towards the poor are among the great ethical issues of the Bible, appearing more than any other modern moral problem. How can that be missing from a book on evangelical ethics? Issues of race and immigration are curiously absent as well.

It was distressing to see homosexuality covered but not premarital sex (which is happening more in the average evangelical congregation?), and have the death penalty covered but nothing at all about the rest of the justice system. Individual ethical issues for believers are much less important than hot-button political issues - day-to-day life isn't as relevant.

For the stuff that is covered, the information reads more like a legal brief for one side than a fair exploration of ethical issues from a Christian perspective. Statistics and studies are presented in an out-of-context and misleading manner. The arguments are inconsistent - in the IVF chapter even a "small risk" of grave injury is considered "morally unacceptable", but in the death penalty chapter the risk of innocent people being executed is considered irrelevant to the morality question. In the abortion chapter it is strongly stated that even if there's only a possibility that innocent lives are being ended, the procedure must be made illegal, but the war chapter go to lengths to justify the Godly use of nuclear weapons without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives that would be ended instantly. Creative solutions to difficult problems and "third ways" between two opposite options are rarely explored - apparently the author only cares whether the answer is "yes" or "no", and how to actually deal with difficult ethical situations is irrelevant.

Finally, the Bible is twisted and selectively quoted to meet the author's ends. In the Death Penalty chapter, Genesis 9:6 is interpreted as a divine command that holds true today and singlehandedly shows the death penalty is Biblical (even though you'd have to kill EVERY person who kills someone - even involuntary manslaughter - if it were taken as a divine command), while every relevant command of Jesus is explained away as metaphorical, irrelevant or just plain ignored. Matthew 5:9 isn't even mentioned in the war chapter, while Revelation 19:11 supposedly shows that Jesus condones even nuclear war! Judges is quoted more often than the book of Mark, and Paul's letter to the Romans is quoted almost as often as all four Gospels combined. Three verses in psalm 139 are quoted 10 times across the book, yet the three chapters of Christ's Sermon on the Mount only get 3 quotes total (once on divorce, once to claim Matthew 5:18 lends support to the death penalty, and once to claim the entire sermon is irrelevant to war).

In the end, the author appears to adhere to an odd blend of Reformed Theology, right-wing American political aims, and an ethic of "the ends justify the means" in order to support his positions. If you want some out-of-context Bible verses and a bunch of research from the 1960s and 1970s to prop up a pro-Republican argument for one of these moral issues, then it's a good resource. But if you're honestly exploring these moral questions for yourself and want to understand them in a Godly and Biblical way, look elsewhere.

Last note - I was disturbed a number of times to see a study cited authoritatively, and then turn to the footnotes to find that the author was not actually quoting the study, but was actually quoting only a mention of the study in some journalist's editorial. That is very poor research - if you're using newspaper and magazine editorials to glean research for an academic book, you're taking too many shortcuts.

Davis' book serves as an excellent introduction to the issues facing contemporary Christianity. He covers 10 topics ranging from contraception to homosexuality to abortion. He gives a brief introduction to each topic then attempts to present a biblical viewpoint for each issue.

I agree with the previous reviewer who said to ignore the negative reviewer - such people attempt to bog Christians down in unnecessary details while glossing over biblical thought. For example, the negative reviewer criticizes Davis' brief introduction of an issue while elaborating much more on the Christian viewpoint. Nuts! The book is aimed at Christians who wish to present thoughtful points on particular issues, so why get so bogged down in details that you start straining gnats? Besides, the negative reviewer seems to try to impress others with arrogant intellectual acumen.

Negative reviewer aside, the book is an excellent read for those who wish to be grounded in basic arguments for a Christian position on a particular issue.

Highly recommended!

It has been easy for me to slip into the mentality that engagement in ethical issues is not the priority of the Christian individually or the Church as a whole. To be honest, as I consider the past eight years of my Christian life, I can say that most of the time I have spent in seriously pondering the truth of Christianity and its application, I have narrowed in primarily on issues that relate directly to me. To my shame, I admit that I have engaged in little significant ethical reflection in regards to how I am called, as a Christian, to think and interact Biblically on moral issues in society.

Evangelical Ethics, by John Jefferson Davis, is a much-needed corrective in my own life and, I would trust, for Christ's Church as well. In just my first reading, I have been profoundly encouraged to not only engage the significant ethical issues facing the Church, but to not rest content until I understand those issues in light of Scripture. This is not easy work, but it is an essential work. Jesus calls us to be salt and light.

After opening the book with a chapter on decision making, Davis examines eleven major ethical issues facing Christians and the Church today: contraception, reproductive technologies, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, capital punishment, civil disobedience, war and peace, environmental issues, and genetic enhancement and manipulation. In each section, Davis presents the historical and legal background of the particular issue, providing thick documentation from the relevant sources. He then examines each issue in light of Scripture, bringing the reader to what he considers a clear Biblical position, or, at least, a place where the reader can use the given information to begin to think more clearly about that specific issue.

Davis' work is also highly accessible. The book itself, not including the end notes, is only 288 pages. It is not an exhaustive treatment of each subject; rather, it is a helpful introduction to the major ethical issues presently facing the church. Though thoroughly researched and documented, Davis' work is straightforward, clear, and will benefit pastors, scholars and laypeople alike.

Evangelical Ethics has been tested in over two decades of readership and is now in its third edition. Since it was first published in 1985, Davis' treatment of contemporary ethical problems has been a standard in churches and Christian classrooms. Having read and profited from Davis' book, I now understand why this is the case. It is well-researched and well-written, and it provides a sure foundation from which to start thinking about these important issues. I highly recommend it.

This book provides a good survey of basic contemporary ethical issues, with a solidly evangelical response to them. However, the format of the book itself is unethical!!! This book has been revised twice (most recently in 2004), so you would think that the portion of each chapter dealing with medical concerns and statistics would have been updated. And yet the majority of the cited statistics come from the '70s or early '80s! Those stats that have been adjusted are done so randomly and inconsistently. The scriptural arguments are still helpful and useful of course, but if you are looking for accurate and recent information about certain issues, do not buy this book.

I found this book very helpful for answers to many questions about modern issues for christians and what the bible has to say regarding them. Sometimes it helps to have a book like this to help those who are facing difficulty in their life and show them the verses in the bible to clear up any misunderstanding of what we are to do as christians with our lives and choices.

The major thesis of this book is that ethics should be deontological and casuistic. As an evangelical Protestant, the author tries to derive ethics from Scripture. But given the universal consensus among NT scholars that there is a dynamic tension between the "now" and the "not yet" in (varying) degrees in the NT, I'm not sure if Davis can really execute his basic program. In other words, if we only see through a glass darkly ("not yet"), does that not mean the task of ethical reflection means an ongoing coversation, where our conclusions are just provisional? Can Scripture alone really address every single ethical case in a normative fashion similar to the Puritan Richard Baxter's Christian Directory? While I (for one) would like to say that firm ethical stances must be made, I'm not sure if Davis asks whether his work is a conversation-starter or stopper. It seems more like the former than the latter. Moreover, on some ethical issues, he doesn't really come to any conclusion, despite his call that the church must have ethical direction.

He does dismiss agapism (i.e. agape is the central principle for ethics) as lacking in stating ethical rules (I would have to agree), but his argument seems to set up a straw man, where he quotes an agapist as being vague. A far better argument would have been to show that certain books of the NT are explicitly silent on using agape as a ground for ethical norms (e.g. Hebrews, Mark except for one pericope, James, etc.). To be sure agape is a dominant ethical theme in Paul and John (and given lots of primacy by folks like Augustine and Aquinas). But it's fairly obvious to me that the cross spans the spectrum of the NT writings, rather than agape per se. Hence, we derive agape as an ethical principle from the cross of Christ, but not vice versa. Agapism alone is lacking in that it fails to make clear what kind of love we are talking about. But because Davis is unclear about this, we're left wondering.

Given that major premise that ethical norms must be derived from Scripture, I must say the exegesis in this book relies more on proof-texting than on looking at the texts within their own contexts. The book is formatted so that he jumps immediately into ethical issues after a one chapter prolegomena. It might have been better for him to slow down and present his exegesis of Scripture (e.g. Pauline, Johannine, general epistles, the synoptics, etc.). Moreover, an attempt to use "Scripture to interpret Scripture" leads to some throughly unconvincing arguments. E.g. he dismisses a pacifist argument that the cross is the supreme example of nonviolent response to violence, b/c it overemphasizes Christ's work as exemplarist rather than falling under the penal substitution. First, it waters down the full rhetorical force of NT texts like 1 Pet 2:21-25. Second, it begs the question, since some pacifists (like Richard Hays and Stanley Hauerwas) clearly see that penal substitution implies exemplarism. Third, his discussion fails to show any clearly thought out method for how to interrelate Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Here, it seems tradition and experience play an overriding factor over Scripture. I would have to agree with Hays that Scripture univocally witnesses to nonviolent resistance to injustice.

If you want to read a Christian ethics textbook, you are better off reading Richard Hays' _Moral Vision of the NT_ or Stanley Grenz' _The Moral Quest_. Those books show a FAR MORE conscious attempt to deal with the method behind their madness. If you are assigned this book, check it out from the library. Spend your money elsewhere.

This was a great and interesting read. The author not only knows what the issues are, but also how to deal with them. Great for any Christian who is looking to know what to do with some of the current moral delimnas facing the US.

Davis is an author who I am proud to call a fellow "Evangelical" Christian. He does a good job of debunking the myth that faithfulness to the Bible's doctrine is equivalent to intellectual decay.

Actually, Davis is engaged with considerable empirical research. He shows a side of scientific development and insight that is often deleted from media outlets because it seems to confirm the truth of Scripture.

Davis weighs in on issues that are extremely difficult. However, his formula for discerning the best ethical choice is straightforward and effective. The Scriptures take their rightful place as the central ethical standard for Evangelical Ethics. An investigation into scientific development, Biblical scholarship, and changing societal mores together yields a thorough investigation of some of the toughest issues of our day, including poverty, sexuality, and abortion.

Davis is a great inheritor of the legacy of Machen and other Evangelicals that saw the doctrines of Christianity as timeless truths that could be repeatedly proven in the practical matters of everyday life. This is a great book.

An excellent introduction to ethics from a biblical perspective. The author includes a description of the issues involved, including the historical background and different viewpoints. He applies biblical principles to answer difficult questions on such subjects as abortion, contraception and euthanasia.