This book is an integration of the Old and New Testaments, and it is intended to demonstrate that there should be only one Testament. Together they form the Bible of the Jewish people. They unfold the long journey that Abram and Sarai were summoned by God to initiate. As migrants without a country and without an ethnic identity, they personified the Truth of God by incarnating “the Lord God’s” being of presence and transcendent possibility. Incorporated into an eternal covenant as Abraham and Sarah, they established the birthright of God’s elect people as the embodiment of the integration of universality and ethnicity. The journey continued through their descendants, vacillating between the union of universality and ethnicity and mere ethnicity, and, in the course of Israel’s history, it separated the prophets from the priests. The journey traverses the Yahwist Strand of the Pentateuch, the four prophetic divisions of the Book of Isaiah, Book 1 of I Enoch, the Apocalypse of Daniel, John the Baptist, and it climaxes in the ontological termination of the moral order of separation through the death of Jesus of Nazareth and the inauguration of a New Creation and its New Humanity through his resurrection from the dead. The journey is concluded by Paul the Apostle who, as an ethnically determined Pharisee, is called by God to proclaim the moral order of integration as a gift to the nations of the Gentiles.

Christianity and Social Work is written for social workers whose motivations to enter the profession are informed by their Christian faith, and who desire to develop faithfully Christian approaches to helping.

For Christians, Holy Scripture is not only a source of revelation on which to ground one's faith, it is also an indispensable reference point for morality. They are convinced that in the Bible they can find indications and norms of right behaviour to attain fullness of life. This use of Scripture is not of course without its problems caused by the different times and circumstances in which people find themselves today compared with biblical times. In 2002, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, at the behest of the then-President Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, set about to examine the problem of the relationship between the Bible and morality by posing itself the question: what is the value and the significance of the inspired text for today's morality? This document seeks then to explain the context for norms of morality encountered in Scripture, and shows also that, while there remain moral questions which cannot be fully answered from Scripture, nevertheless Scripture does offer criteria which are helpful in finding solutions.

Christian Ethics and Commonsense Morality goes against the grain of various postmodern approaches to morality in contemporary religious ethics. In this book, Jung seeks to provide a new framework in which the nature of common Christian moral beliefs and practices can be given a new meaning. He suggests that, once major philosophical assumptions behind postmodern theories of morality are called into question, we may look at Christian morality in quite a different light. On his account, Christian morality is a historical morality insofar as it is rooted in the rich historical traditions of the Christian church. Yet this kind of historical dependence does not entail the evidential dependence of all moral beliefs on historical traditions. It is possible to argue for the epistemic autonomy of moral beliefs, according to which Christian and other moral beliefs can be justified independently of their historical sources. The particularity of Christian morality lies not in its particular historical sources that also function as the grounds of justification, but rather in its explanatory and motivational capacity to further articulate the kind of moral knowledge that is readily available to most human beings and to enable people to act upon their moral knowledge.

This seminal work makes a cogent and compelling case for Christian ethics based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Drawing on a profound knowledge both of the history of Christian thought and of contemporary ethical theology, Oliver O'Donovan illumines such important concepts as freedom, authority, nature, history, and revelation. This revised edition also includes an extensive new prologue in which the author enters into critical dialogue with four key figures in Christian ethics: John Finnis, Martin Honecker, Stanley Hauerwas, and Karl Barth.

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

This book addresses the old question of natural law in its contemporary context. David VanDrunen draws on both his Reformed theological heritage and the broader Christian natural law tradition to develop a constructive theology of natural law through a thorough study of Scripture. The biblical covenants organize VanDrunen's study. Part 1 addresses the covenant of creation and the covenant with Noah, exploring how these covenants provide a foundation for understanding God's governance of the whole world under the natural law. Part 2 treats the redemptive covenants that God established with Abraham, Israel, and the New Testament church and explores the obligations of God's people to natural law within these covenant relationships. In the concluding chapter of Divine Covenants and Moral Order VanDrunen reflects on the need for a solid theology of natural law and the importance of natural law for the Christian's life in the public square.]> 07 02