Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context.
Park, Joon-Sik
Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context.
By Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee. Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 538. $32.
In integral mission, conversion is not separable from ethics but
involves a radical reorientation in one's social, economic, and
political allegiances and practices. Missionaries, however, do not have
the right to prescribe the ethical content of conversion and they should
not attempt to do so. Each culture must freshly and responsibly discern
and determine for itself the ethical demand of the Gospel.
Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary (Pasadena, Calif.) and David Gushee
of Union University (Jackson, Tenn.) have coauthored an introduction to
Christian ethics that provides a most useful paradigm for an ethic
grounded in Scripture and situated in a cultural context. They intend
"to reclaim Jesus Christ for Christian ethics and for the moral
life of the churches" (p. xi). Allowing the teachings and practices
of Jesus, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, to set the agenda and
structure, the authors present a radically unique and compelling way of
doing ethics.
Critically engaging various moral traditions, Kingdom Ethics
examines two foundational issues of ethical methodology--sources of
authority and levels of moral norms. It then carefully establishes its
own "holistic character ethics," which embraces practices,
virtues, and narratives in integral relation to rules and principles.
Following the pattern of the transforming initiatives identified in the
Sermon on the Mount as the normative guide, the book's second part
addresses crucial contemporary moral issues, reflecting both on
experience and on social scientific data. The authors address issues
relating to life and death, marriage, sexuality, race, economics, care
of creation, and politics.
Kingdom Ethics is shaped, but also limited, by the authors'
own North American cultural location, experience, and perspective; few
Third World theologians and ethicists are seriously engaged. Yet, since
the book is a profound call to Christian discipleship based on incisive
and illuminating reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, it deserves to
be used across cultural boundaries as a model to construct a faithful
and relevant Christian ethic.
Joon-Sik Park is the E. Stanley Jones Associate Professor of World
Evangelism at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Delaware, Ohio.
Earlier he served as pastor of multicultural United Methodist
congregations in Ohio and Kentucky.
