Scripture and Ethics

How should the Bible be used in Christian Ethics? Although this question has been addressed many times, little attention has gone to how the Bible actually has functioned in constructing theological ethics. In this book, Jeffrey Siker describes and analyzes the Bible's various uses in the theology and ethics of eight of the twentieth century's most important and influential Christian theologians: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Bernard Haring, Paul Ramsey, Stanley Hauerwas, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. In approaching each author, Siker organizes his study around five related questions: which biblical texts does each author in fact use; in what ways does each use these texts; how does each envision the authority of the Bible; what kind of hermeneutic does the author employ; finally, what has each author's particular approach to the Bible yielded in terms of Christian ethics, or, in other words, what are some of the practical results? Siker ends each chapter with a critical evaluation of the various problems and prospects for the author's use of Scripture, and concludes the study with a comparison and contrast of the author's respective appropriations of the Sermon on the Mount.