The Disappearance of Ethics is not a lament over the loosening morals in today’s society, as the title could suggest. Instead, it is Oliver O’Donovan’s case that while the discipline of ethics is having a moment of crisis, a recent renaissance in Christian theology can revive it.

The occasion for this argument was the 2021 Gifford Lectures; those lectures’ long goal of discussing and promoting natural theology gave O’Donovan a unique angle from which to make his case. Those who have attempted reading O’Donovan in the past but have given up may find The Disappearance of Ethics to be an ideal reentry point to his work. This is for two reasons. First, the structure of this work is straightforward and helpful. It features six lectures, the first three arguing for an element of ethics that has gone missing, and the last three responding in turn to how concepts from Christian theology could provide avenues of recovery. Second, its brilliance is that it returns to many of O’Donovan’s best loved themes without being a tired repetition of his earlier works. Instead, he provides fresh ways of framing and engaging with his most valuable theological and ethical insights.

In the first three lectures, O’Donovan argues that three aspects of ethics have gone missing: its object (the good), frontier (time) and agent (real persons). He chooses as a main conversation partner the philosopher Max Scheler, for a century ago he too was trying to respond to the beginnings of these disappearances. O’Donovan also gives major attention to Immanuel Kant, as well as other significant philosophical thinkers, describing their various roles in causing these disappearances. These opening lectures each make a patient case that major strands of Western thought have painted themselves into a corner. For example, with the case of the missing good, O’Donovan argues that Kant’s radical detachment of freedom from nature leaves us alienated from our intuitions that values are real and should impact our living. In the case of the missing frontier of time, he demonstrates that Western thinkers have made a habit of collapsing history into nature, robbing both of their actual identity and value to us as moral subjects. And in the case of the missing agents, O’Donovan penetratingly asks whether or not it matters that persons, whom we know to be irreplicable, are swallowed up by time.

Throughout these arguments, O’Donovan’s tone is calm and informative; there is no sneering or superiority. This allows space in each of these chapters to offer examples of how practices and wisdom from Christianity provide rational and hopeful ways forward. He offers worship as a response to real antecedent good, faith and promise as a way to navigate time, and the practice of confession of sin as a way to ground personal agency over time.

These appetizers give way to the main meal of theological help in the final three lectures. Here O’Donovan offers creation as a way to recover reality, law as a way to recover history, and the Spirit as a way to justify human agency.

O’Donovan argues that the doctrine of creation offers what nature alone cannot: a vindication of our preference for life over death. First, this good work of God (creation) opens to humanity the tasks of participation and realization. Second, the co-originality of being (good) and time demonstrate the complexity of creation, which, when viewed from the vantage point of the will of God, opens a vista of the “moral meaning of history … formed within the horizons of gift and fulfillment” (p. 100). We are invited again into an intelligent and glad response to the order of which we are a part.

In law and history, O’Donovan notes that law is not found in nature and so must be understood as a cultural artifact of mediation. Specifically, it mediates history, which is too large and sprawling to be of any moral use without interpretation and curation. Law, when used lawfully, can formulate demands from the implicit goods and evils we recognize, which guide our judgments through new challenges as they arise. It also establishes a unitary public tradition by which we socially relate and communicate. O’Donovan is careful to note the many ways law can fail. Chiefly, it can easily be cut off from Christology, which is not revealed in nature, and so loses its vocation of bearing witness to God’s promise and instead become only an executioner. Nonetheless, law serves to distinguish history from nature when used rightly.

Finally, O’Donovan explores the topic of the Spirit, that cooperative personal agency between God and humans who was especially given at Pentecost. He investigates the meaning of baptism as one fruitful way of identifying how the Spirit conforms and transforms human agency into the patten of Christ. Baptism, for example, is a unique way of recognizing both the individual and the community’s unique roles. It is also a pledge of the immediate self to a moral future, as well as being a way that future history lays claim to the individual. This establishes the possibility of endurance and ending life as “a coherent subject” (p. 144), that is, as one who is not alienated from past versions of one’s self and actions but is able by faith to account for the totality of their life lived before God as indeed one, unified life.

One strength of this book is that, by its conclusion, the reader wants the arguments to be true, so effectively has O’Donovan displayed the good that they offer: a life of free, creative, joyful partnership with God in goodness. Which is to say that his attempt to buttress ethics with the resources of theology succeeds. He closes by asking, “Has the human race reached the point where it can no longer argue with conviction for what its cultural instincts tell it strongly that it ought to do?” He answers as follows:

Theology—or, to speak more precisely, the prophetic word of good news—comes to the aid of human moral reason where it feels the ground falling away under its feet. It assures it of the validity of moral thought in a world where the meaning of history is not perspicuous. Which is to say, theology comes to the aid of human existence itself. (p. 153)

O’Donovan demonstrates in this work how to be both rigorously academic, even erudite, while maintaining an unflinching commitment to the evangelical proclamation of the necessity of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By pressing again and again into how nature and history suggest but can’t prove the reality of the Creator God and his Son, by insisting that the answer must come from a word revealed and a promise given, he holds out a vision for how the gospel can be framed, as it deserves to be, as very good news. Indeed, as our only hope. In this way, he strengthens not just ethics as a discipline, but evangelism as a practice, showing how ethics and theology together offer living water to those dying of thirst.

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