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The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. x + 546 pp. £75.00/$50.00.

Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski, eds.

Brian Brock
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

A mature graduate student recently expressed surprise that 'things have really changed in Christian ethics in the last few years!' Having expected ethics to focus on dilemmas, she found instead serious reflection on ecclesiology; having gone looking for moral principles, she discovered detailed engagement with Christian doctrine. The effect was a sense that conceptual approaches that seemed normal a decade or two ago now seem outdated, worn.

For a lively but impressionistic account of these developments by one of its chief architects (an important task in its own right), one is advised to read the first three chapters of the only other serious competing volume, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, which also has the value of discussing a range of practical questions.

For a more scholarly and historically detailed account of recent developments in the discipline, one is advised to turn to The Oxford Handbook. In it, Bernd Wannenwetsch's essay on 'Ecclesiology and Ethics' provides an excellent bridge between the two volumes in relation to the new orientation of Christian ethics. Its theological density and erudition give the reader a sense of the difference in tone between the two volumes. The Oxford Handbook claims to be neither for beginners nor professionals, but aims at 'those who know a good bit, who would be in position to do advanced work in the field, and who might be helped and stimulated by a survey of the field'. It is a more complex work, and in many ways more rewarding of serious intellectual effort than the Blackwell Companion.

The book is organized around Calvin's (and Aquinas') insight that Christian reflection on ethics ought to begin with reflection on God and his works. The clarity of this insight renders sections one ('Dogmatics and Ethics') and four ('The Spirit of the Christian Life') the most elegant and helpful. Section one details the place of the doctrines of creation, redemption, eschatology, ecclesiology, and grace in a Christian ethic, and section four elegantly explores the classic New Testament topoi of faith, hope, and love. That this book is organized around and finds its intellectual weight in theological discussion is again evidence of the sharp sea-change in the self-understanding of practitioners of Christian ethics.

Parts 2 ('Sources of Moral Knowledge') and 3 ('The Structure of the Christian Life') begin to lose the clarity of concept and organization of parts 1 and 4. Methodological nuances developed during previous chapters are sometimes retained, sometimes lost in discussions of scripture, divine commands, church tradition, reason and natural law, experience, vocation, virtue, rules, responsibility and death.

The Handbook is generally heavy on theory, which is especially disappointing when the theorizing becomes slipshod as it does in Part 5 ('Spheres of Christian Life'), undoubtedly the low point of the book. With the exception of Sondra Wheeler's essay on the family, this section neither interacts well with the tradition of the 'mandates' or 'estates' that the editors suggest it is surveying, nor does it bring the insights of the previous parts into contact with the myriad of practical questions of contemporary life. This is a pity, but it is a deficit that the bulk of the Blackwell Companion admirably fills.

The final part of the book, part 6 ('The Structure of Theological Ethics: Books that Give Shape to the Field'), is a helpful if idiosyncratic and patchy backward look over developments in the discipline over the last century. One gets the distinct sense that it is in this section that those authors who were displaced from the critical opening parts fight rearguard actions to defend the continuing relevance of their (now less popular) theological heroes. Perhaps the chapter that best fits with the opening four parts of the book is the final one explicating the social teaching of the modern Roman Catholic encyclicals.

The meat of this book is in the first 320 pages, a substantial enough contribution. But this is the red meat of conceptual theory, the relevance of which may well not be clear on first sight. What this handbook does show, and well, is that Christian ethics has recently become markedly more interested in the conceptual content of calling oneself a Christian ethicist. This is a welcome development worth studying in the way the Handbook facilitates.