Christian Ethics
A New Covenant Model
Author Hak Joon Lee ISBN 9780802876874 Binding Trade Cloth Publisher WM B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Publication Date November 09, 2021 Size 152 x 229 mmIn this capacious and accessible introduction to Christian ethics, Hak Joon Lee advances a renewed vision of Christian life that is liberative, grace-centered, and justice- and peace-oriented in nature. Responding to key ethical questions of today, Lee applies the moral meaning and implications of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ to twenty-first-century life, characterized by fluidity, fragmentation, division, and violence.
Christian Ethics begins by introducing covenant as the central drama and storyline of Scripture that culminates in the New Covenant of Jesus. It presents shalom (the wholeness and flourishing of creation) as God’s ultimate purpose and God’s covenant as “God’s organizing mechanism of community” that mediates God’s work of liberation and restoration. Lee proposes a creative model of Christian ethics based on the New Covenant of Jesus and its organizing patterns, reconstructing the key categories of ethics (agency, norms, authority of Scripture, ethical discernment, etc.) and drawing out four practices—communicative engagement, just peacemaking, grassroots organizing, and nonviolence. The result is a new model of Christian ethics that is inclusive, egalitarian, ecological, and justice- and peace-oriented, which overcomes the limitations of traditional covenantal ethics.
In the second part of the book, Lee systematically applies New Covenant ethics to the most urgent and controversial social issues of our time: democratic politics, economic ethics, creation care, criminal justice, race, sex and marriage, medicine, and war and peace. Through his deep, pastoral, and irenic inquiries into these difficult topics, Lee demonstrates a pattern of covenantal moral reasoning that undercuts the dominant neoliberal ethos of individualism and transactional relationship that more and more influences Christian moral decisions. His conclusion is that as covenant has been at the heart of modern democracy, human rights, civil society, and civic formation, a renewed understanding of covenant centered in Jesus can help to heal our broken society and imperiled planet, and to reorganize the fragmented human life in the era of globalization and digitization.
— Neil Messer
University of Winchester
“Hak Joon Lee’s ‘new covenant ethics’ is an ecumenically oriented and politically constructive evangelical tour de force. While he places the Trinity and Eucharist at the center, he includes nonviolence, community organizing, and just peacemaking among Christianity’s constitutive practices. On debated moral questions like same-sex marriage, Lee favors moderate conservatism, yet wisely counsels traditionalists and revisionists to apply a peacemaking ethos to their own coexistence. More importantly, this is an ethics centered on justice and the poor. The cosmic presence of the Spirit gives the new covenant world-spanning, inclusive transformative power. This would be a wonderful book to work through with a seminary class or a congregational study group.”
— Lisa Sowle Cahill
Boston College
“It isn’t every day that a Christian ethicist offers a comprehensive new proposal for the entire discipline. That is what Fuller Seminary professor Hak Joon Lee does in this formidable book. Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model does more and better work with the biblical theme of covenant than I have ever seen in our discipline. Lee goes beyond scholastic Reformed treatments of covenant to a ‘new covenant’ approach with a thoroughgoing justice-oriented Christocentrism. One does not have to agree with every social-ethical proposal here—I dissent on same-sex relations, for example—to be very much impressed by the theological, biblical, and methodological seriousness of this stimulating new book, which deserves very close consideration by scholars, pastors, and students alike.”
— David P. Gushee
Mercer University
“The language of ‘covenant’ floats through the universe of contemporary Christian ethics like the element helium floats through the physical one: it is abundant, lofty, necessary for telling a coherent origin story, and yet surprisingly inert. Contemporary discussions about covenants are, after all, far more likely to attend to their significance in the history of Christian ethics than to make covenant language do much work in the present. In Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model, though, Hak Joon Lee performs an impressive alchemical feat: he transforms reasons to attend to the significance of covenants in the history of Christian ethics into arguments for their applicability in contemporary Christian social ethics. Building from his telling of a biblically and historically informed theo-drama in which covenants are central to the movement from liberation to restoration, Lee fashions a Jesus-centered ‘new covenant ethic’ that can catalyze social imaginations capable of addressing matters as varied as economic inequality, war, marriage, racism, and the environment. In doing so, he reminds us that covenant language has been significant because it is still potent.”
— Mark Douglas
Columbia Theological Seminary
“Hak Joon Lee informs, instructs, and inspires in this wide-ranging, challenging, and compelling text in Christian ethics. The work takes seriously the current context, contemporary political theologies of liberation, and Christian tradition. Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model should be obligatory reading not only for theological ethicists but also for those who desire to live in and love the world faithfully as followers of Jesus.”
— Patrick T. Smith
Duke University Divinity School
“In Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model, Hak Joon Lee convincingly argues that ‘covenant’ is the most comprehensive image on which a rich Christian ethical vision and practice can be centered. He shows that a new covenant vision, far from being a stale offering from an irrelevant past, steers the Christian moral conversation between secular liberal and conservative biblicist options, integrates and organizes the most important methodological conversations of the past century, and helps Christians respond in a biblically grounded yet passionate and culturally open way to the most pressing social issues of our day—politics,
Hak Joon Lee is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. He has published several books, including God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach; Discerning Ethics: Diverse Christian Responses to Divisive Moral Issues; Intersecting Realities: Race, Identity, and Culture in the Spiritual Life of Young Asian Americans; and The Great World House: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Global Ethics. Lee has been invited to be the keynote speaker for Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations in several cities, and, for over a decade, he has been involved in curriculum projects for pastors and Asian American students and young adults with a view to furthering church renewal and intergenerational bridge- building.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: New Covenant Ethics
1. A Brief Survey of the Old Testament Covenants
2. The New Covenant of Jesus Christ
3. Covenantal Drama and Threefold Dialectics
4. The Distinctive Nature, Characteristics, and Practices of New Covenant Ethics
5. The Strengths of New Covenant Ethics
6. A Short Comparison with Other Christian Ethics
7. Norms and Values
8. The Three Ethical Motifs of Goal, Law, and Virtue
9. The Moral Authority of Scripture and Other Sources
10. Ethical Reasoning
Part Two: Social Ethics
11. Covenantal Social Imagination
12. Distributive Justice
13. Politics
14. Economic Ethics
15. Creation Care
16. Criminal Justice
17. Race
18. Sex and Marriage
19. Medical Ethics
20. War, Peace, Just Peacemaking
Conclusion
Discussion Questions