Christian Ethics

The contemporary moral climate encourages self love but deprives the individual of the resources needed to discern what it means to love oneself. Christian ethical ambivalence about self love complicates matters further. This book draws on theological accounts to assert that self love requires honesty to oneself and in acts and relationships. The arguments thereby call upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self.

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder in Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers--what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with recent work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously some unfashionable premodern conceptions--Satan, demonic possession, spiritual powers, cosmic battles. The book makes a powerful case for the rejection of humanism and naturalism, and for explaining the moral obligation to struggle against evil by reference to the New Testament's cosmic narrative.

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterized by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social leveling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. He argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

In a provocative reexaminatin of the ethics of family, community, and sex, the author contends that the Christian right's campaign against homosexuality has come to limit the agenda for American Christianity as a whole. "We should be asking not whether gay people should be allowed to fit in, but rather which historically gay practices can help transform the schismatic, failing church today".