ETHICS ASKS the questions: What is right to do? How do we know? David P. Gushee puts the concept of the sacredness of human life at the center of his moral reasoning. A professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, Gushee has given us a work that is an important milestone on the road of constructive Christian ethics.
In this book Gushee has set himself a large and ambitious goal. He writes, “I am proposing that, rightly understood, a moral norm called the sacredness of life should be central to the moral vision and practice of followers of Christ.”
He seeks to ground this moral norm in scriptural authority and in the Christian tradition at its best. His survey of scripture and of Christian history is truly impressive, considering most of the major elements of the Christian theological and ethical traditions, including the current thinking of liberation theology. He demonstrates knowledge of the feminist critique of scripture, and he at least mentions eco-feminism. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.
Moreover, Gushee also considers such important Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. He devotes a chapter each to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and to the Nazi desecration of human life. There is much food for thought here.
For me, however, the book is primarily descriptive. And it does not provide an explanatory framework to help us understand why scripture and the Christian tradition have led the way in both the recognition of the sacredness of human life and in the violation of this holiness. It would have been helpful for Gushee to give us a brief discussion of Ernst Troeltsch, who in his two-volume The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches enables us to see that the line of demarcation between the church and the world is porous to the point that there is always interpenetration between the two. Church teachings leaven and flavor the moral thinking of the world outside its doors while the world’s often destructive ideologies come to church every Sunday and sit down on the front pew and sometimes preach from the pulpit.
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