Christian churches across the spectrum, and Christian ethics as an academic discipline, are often guilty of evading what Jesus actually said about moral life, focusing instead on other biblical texts or traditions. This evasion of Jesus has seriously malformed Christian moral witness—which Jesus said is tested by whether we put his words “into practice.”
David Gushee and Glen Stassen’s Kingdom Ethics is the leading Christian introductory ethics textbook for the twenty-first century. Solidly rooted in Scripture—and uniquely focusing on Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount—the book has offered students, pastors, and other readers a comprehensive and challenging framework for Christian ethical thought. Writing to recenter Christian ethics in Jesus Christ, Gushee and Stassen focus on the meaning of the Kingdom of God, perennial themes of moral authority and moral norms, and all the issues raised by the Sermon on the Mount—such as life and death, sexual and gender ethics, love and justice, truth telling, and politics.
This second edition of Kingdom Ethics is substantially revised by Gushee and features enhanced and updated treatments of all major contemporary ethical issues—including updated data and examples, a more global perspective, gender-inclusive language, a clearer focus on methodology, discussion questions for every chapter, and a detailed new glossary.
Kingdom Ethics is for readers anywhere wanting a robust, comprehensive understanding of Christian ethics that is founded on the concrete teachings of Jesus and will equip them for further exploration into the field.
“This highly revised second edition of the now-seminal Kingdom Ethics improves what was already a practically perfect primer on Christian ethics for laypersons, pastors, and theologians.” —Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Saint Louis University
“Freshly conceived, newly organized, carefully explicit about both method and the complexity of concrete moral judgments, this book exemplifies what we all want evangelical Christian ethics to be—centered on Jesus, deeply grounded in Scripture, and attentive to emerging issues and new concerns as God’s people seek to discern the shape of a life lived in faithful response to the in-breaking kingdom.”
—Sondra Wheeler, Wesley Theological Seminary
