Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics Normative Dimensions

How should we understand the relationship between Christian ethics and religious ethics? Among comparative, ethnographic, and normative methodologies? Between confessional and non-confessional orientations, or between theology and philosophy? This volume brings together emerging religious ethicists to engage the normative dimensions of Christian ethics. Focusing on scripture, tradition, and reason, the contributors to this volume argue for a vision of Christian ethics as religious ethics. Toward this end, they engage with scripture, interpretation, and religious practice; examine the putative divide between reason and tradition, autonomy and heteronomy; and offer proposals about the normative characterization of conceptual and practical issues in contemporary religious ethics. Collectively, the volume engages Christian thought to make an argument for the continuing relevance of normative methodologies in contemporary religious and theological ethics. 

1.       1. Normative Dimensions in Christian Ethics 

I               Scripture

2. Christian Ethics, the Bible, and the Powers of Reading

3. Between Comparison and Normativity: Scriptural Reasoning and Religious Ethics

4. The Asceticism of Interpretation: John Cassian, Hermeneutical Askesis, and Religious Ethics

II             Tradition

5. Choosing to Become Who You Are: Authority and Freedom in Karl Barth’s Account of Moral Formation

6. Natural Law, Freedom, and Tradition: A Catholic Perspective on Mediating between Liberty and Freedom

7. Schelling’s Pauline Anthropology

III            Reason

8. Paul Ramsey’s Christian Deontology

9. Union with Christ: Participation as the Ground of Christian Ethics in Augustine and Reformed Augustinianisms

10. Mothering Theo-Political Ideology: Natural Law, Empirical Facts, and Discourse Politics

Bharat Ranganathan is the Beamer-Schneider SAGES Fellow in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, USA.

Derek Woodard-Lehman is Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he also serves as the Wellington Programme Coordinator for the Centre for Theology and Public Issues.