What does it mean to investigate human fragility? And what counts as knowledge or results from such investigations? Theology and the empirical sciences will give different but related answers to these questions, answers which will, we hope, mutually illumine one another.
The contemporary rediscovery of ancient sources of biblical exegesis makes an important contribution to the renewal of Christian ethics. This rediscovery is motivated by a dissatisfaction with modern critical commentaries on Scripture and by a desire to re-engage with the biblical text itself, allowing it to speak to our contemporary ethical challenges in fresh and surprising ways. The article sets out the key objectives and contributions of this new approach to biblical ethics. The heart of the challenge it brings is to encourage us to move beyond a preoccupation with questions of hermeneutical methodology and towards a properly theological appreciation of the role of ʹtraditionʹ in our ethical reading of Scripture.
Singing the Ethos of God is a meditation on an interconnected set of problems modern western Christians encounter when trying to bring Scripture to bear on the moral questions of the day. My sense that such a book needed to be written crystallized in an Oxford seminar on the use of the Bible in Christian ethics. In that seminar several world-class biblical scholars and moral theologians gathered with a room full of the English-speaking world’s future pastors and academic theologians, attempting to discern the ethical implications of a few classic biblical passages.
The results were disastrous. Occasional flashes of insight emerged, but the participants were left with the overwhelming impression that so much complicated critical machinery has been interposed between us and Scripture that we (i.e., primarily academically trained theologians) no longer have the skills to handle it directly.
FOR MOST OF US THERE IS SOMETHING GENUINELY EXCITING ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY. What child is not viscerally attracted to the gleaming rows of cars at a new car show, or amazed at the world to come promised in science fiction? Even our adult imagination boggles at what is being made possible today by technology, a fact marked by the stories of new hi-tech feats that now regularly appear on the front pages of our newspapers.
Almost all of us are used to having our attention grabbed by new technologies. We are part of a social milieu in which a host of social and cultural forces have succeeded in linking these developments with excitement, a sense of exploring the unknown, a touch of entrancing menace, and aesthetic progress.
But, in this general excitement, have we directed attention away from the miracle at the heart of the universe? In asking about the relationship between the Bible, technology and human identity, the Bible presses us to ask this question. It does so by indicating that human identity can be understood as being formed by that which excites it, because where our interest is engaged, “there will your heart be also” (Mt 6.21).
The Gospel and Public Life: Cultivating a Faithful Witness in the Face of Challenge On October 8th, 2013, British moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan visited America’s capital and participated in a dialogue with Ken Myers and Matthew Lee Anderson. Held a few blocks from the Capitol building, the conversation addressed questions and themes of political theology and was loosely centered around O’Donovan’s 1996 book The Desire of the Nations. The event was sponsored by RenewDC, Mere …
