Glen H. Stassen

"Kingdom Ethics is arguably the most significant and comprehensive Christian ethics textbook of our time." -- Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom, North Park Theological SeminaryChristian 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.

A comprehensive update of the leading Christian ethics textbook of the 21st century.Ever since its original publication in 2003, Glen Stassen and David Gushee's Kingdom Ethics has offered students, pastors, and other readers an outstanding framework for Christian ethical thought, one that is solidly rooted in Scripture, especially Jesus's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.This substantially revised edition of Kingdom Ethics features enhanced and updated treatments of all major contemporary ethical issues. David Gushee's revisions include updated data and examples, a more global perspective, more gender-inclusive language, a clearer focus on methodology, and added discussion questions.

The study of Christian ethics in North America has been profoundly influenced during this century by the work of H. Richard Niebuhr. That influence is felt nowhere as keenly as in the widespread use of his classic text, Christ and Culture. Yet certain central flaws exist in Niebuhr's work on Christ and culture, particularly in its lack of concrete norms for the church's transformative engagement with the world. Scholars have long realized that further work must be done in this area if the church is to speak the word of the gospel adequately in the midst of a pluralistic and changing culture. In this book, Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder push Christian ethical reflection beyond Niebuhr by offering an analysis and critique of Niebuhr's well-known fivefold typology of the relation of Christ to culture. They wrestle with the issue of how the actual, working church goes about being an agent of the transformation of culture. Unlike Niebuhr, whose description of the transformationist ideal had little grounding in the concrete existence of the church, the authors reflect on those practices through which congregations seek both to embody faithfulness to Jesus Christ and to be the church in their culture. As a prologue to this analytical and constructive task, the volume contains a previously unpublished essay by H. Richard Niebuhr, "Types of Christian Ethics," in which he laid out the framework of the typology he would later expand in Christ and Culture.

Glen Stassen believes Christians should direct their energies toward finding a set of criteria and a model for a "just peace" instead of "just war." He bases his just peace theory on the new reality of our world, on recent biblical interpretation, and on the experiences of people who lived in the face of oppression and nuclear threat, and who--together with political scientists, Christian ethicists, and activists--fashioned realistic steps toward peacemaking.