Writing about Christian ethics is an activity either for the fool who thinks the task is simple or for the brave who knows the task is fraught. And moral theologian and Christian ethicist Luke Bretherton is no fool. As the subtitle of his new book, A Primer in Christian Ethics, suggests, Christian ethics is about nothing less than a life lived well over time and before God. There is literally no more expansive or difficult a topic. Christian ethics is closer to art than science, more a cultivated form of judgment than an algorithm.

For the last twenty years, Bretherton has been a major voice in bringing together politics and theological ethics, working in community organizing, political discourse, and theological ethics. In staking out the contours of his work, Bretherton brings his extensive experience to bear, honouring the complexity of the discipline of Christian ethics but without overwhelming the reader. Bretherton’s account of Christian ethics is intentionally pluriform (appropriate for one whose last book was subtitled Political Theology and the Case for Democracy). Drawing on exegetical, political, and philosophical concerns, his work makes possible a robust conversation about the Christian moral life as a shared life, one that must account not just for private judgments but also for public and shared enactments of a Christian moral life.

Christian ethics for Bretherton offers counsel both on navigating the wide scope of issues that constitute our common life and on living out of this wisdom as a particular kind of people who are called into the full range of creation to live a “shalom-like life in the light of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.” This calling generates “myriad ways of being alive, each with their own way of bearing witness to reality as structured and ordered in and through Christ.” This dual commitment to a single origin and a pluralized manifestation of moral living characterizes Bretherton’s approach.

I signal this at the beginning not only because it frames Bretherton’s approach but also because it reveals the tension in bringing particularly Christian goods to bear on public discussions. From the start, Bretherton observes that the use of Scripture and tradition is a long-standing norm for Christian ethicists, but he argues that three other forms of “listening” need to be included if such truths will play out in a pluralistic society. We need to listen to moral strangers, to creation, and to cries for liberation. For Bretherton, Christian ethics is “not, ultimately, verified by whether we espouse this or that statement of faith or dogma but by the quality and depth of our love of God and neighbor.” These sources to which we must listen have not always been discounted in Christian ethics, but the placing of them as co-equal theological sources signals an important shift—namely, an awareness that Christians live a shared moral life within a polity composed also of non-Christians. For if God gives goods in a way common to creation, then it follows for Bretherton that this shared moral life must be discovered alongside those outside the Christian tradition.

It is in this methodological move, however, that questions begin to surface. To be sure, the God of Scripture works among people other than Israel. Genesis 15:16, among other passages, indicates that sin is a category applied not just to Israel but also to the Amorites, and God is patient in visiting them with justice. And Paul’s preaching supposes that virtue is something cultivated not only by Christians but by unconverted Gentiles as well. Bretherton’s ethical vision clearly works within such an understanding:

The sources he employs, then, are interlocking. Following Richard Niebuhr, Bretherton describes Scripture as a “revealed reality and not a revealed morality.” What he means is that Scripture offers an account of who God is and how to see the world God has made, but it does not offer unbreachable norms of how to approach the particularities of moral questions and ethical quandaries:

Bretherton is not saying that the Bible has no moral guidance. The Bible rather “furnishes its readers with ways of learning to describe and narrate the world truly. . . . The Bible serves to apprentice us in a Christian moral and political vision.” How do we live this out? That guidance, he says, must be gained from listening to other voices. Because Scripture “is not then a code of beliefs and behaviors to be subscribed to,” texts must be struggled with as we hear the ongoing cries for liberation, the voice of strangers, and the music of creation.

Scripture is that which attests to God, but it is not limited by the letter of particular commands and prohibitions. In this way, Bretherton is not dissimilar from patristic and medieval interpreters, who read the letter of Scripture as a window into spiritual depths beyond the limits of the literal, nor indeed from the New Testament authors themselves, who draw analogies between Old Testament prohibitions and the moral life of the first-century Roman Empire.

But what are we to do when these sources alongside Scripture conflict, moving beyond the limits of what Scripture not only makes possible but also forbids? The recovery of a plurality of voices beyond one economic and political class is a positive good for Christian moral judgment. There is indeed warrant within Scripture for the inclusion of sources such as suffering, creation, and our ancestors. But the limits of the moral life revealed in Scripture put Bretherton’s methodology to the test. It is unclear that one can have the revealed reality of God as the Scriptures do apart from something like a revealed morality with both possibilities and limits, possibilities that exceed what other sources might commend (like loving one’s enemies) and limits that foreclose routes our age considers ordinary. In Scripture, God’s nature—and the contours of the reality that God creates—is revealed to us in part by moral instructions: by commendations to love the stranger, by indictments of cultural idolatries of wealth, by judgments on sexual immorality. One cannot read the Scriptures and ask what God is like, or what the reality of the created world is, without these instructions as guides for what it means to navigate that reality well. The reality Scripture evokes already includes moral constraints and limits as part of that reality.

But it would seem that these sources are not of equal measure. To return to Bretherton’s comment early on, it is unclear whether “the quality and depth of our love of God and neighbor” is the kind of criterion that can be established inductively if it is Scripture and theological tradition that first name the God in question. The governing criterion of love of God and love of neighbour is well established by Scripture, but it cannot, without squinting very hard, be established inductively through observing the non-human world, nor is it universally available through moral strangers. There is an asymmetry to the sources.

One can claim that the Word of God “shatters our predetermined assumptions about what to do,” as Bretherton does, and broaden the sources of Christian moral wisdom to include more than Augustine and Aquinas, and one can acknowledge that the revealed reality Scripture offers comes with moral prescriptions. These prescriptions enable us to know what the contours of that revealed reality are. Bretherton’s limits of what work Scripture can do are intended, it seems, to rightly help its readers attend to voices that have been implicitly but not explicitly attended to in the moral task. But absent any sense of what moral roads might not be commendable, the methodology offers a compass—a description of where east, west, and south lie—but without a north to orient our journey into the world’s complexity.

The descriptive task of A Primer in Christian Ethics brings the readers along on an incredibly learned journey. Bretherton offers an overview of ethics that is expertly sourced for the complex world it guides us through.

In a chapter on work, Bretherton draws on Scripture, calls for liberation, the voices of strangers, and the creation to help make sense of how capitalist economies work and how to address the idolatries of the marketplace. The chapter is intricately written, weaving together reflections from Scripture’s economic vision, Benedictine spirituality, political analysis of universal basic income, and the integrity of household economies. The constructive vision he sketches of the political economy, moral economies, and the elimination of dehumanizing labour is compelling.

But it is unclear what limits might be intrinsic to achieving this kind of vision. Scripture indicates for Bretherton that work is meant to be a form of attunement to creation, a form of “metabolizing the world around us,” and necessary for the realization of personhood. And he is rightly aware of the danger of a world of pure leisure, in which technologies provide for all our desires, shaping us into inhuman kinds of creatures. His vision of economies is one in which little economies—ecclesially based like the monastics or otherwise—must be turned outward toward “God’s cosmic economy” lest they become “idolatrous and self-destructive.”

But if Scripture offers us only a revealed reality and not a revealed morality, which includes prescriptions and limits, then it is unclear on what basis we name things as self-destructive, much less idolatrous. Does artificial intelligence have intrinsic features that should be avoided? Is there an ecological intervention that might be technologically possible but would be morally off limits? It is unclear what these limits might be, provided they contribute to reasonable flourishing of creation as a whole. Arguably, Bretherton’s prescriptions could be taken as implementable if they pass through the mechanisms of democratic deliberation. Such a process would seem to account best for his method. But if the metric of what counts as moral faithfulness, and how to name the God toward which that faithfulness is ordered, is drawn from one of the moral sources but not all equally, the democratic process cannot be as capacious as we might wish. It is not necessary to resort to a fundamentalist account of Scripture and morality to make this kind of claim.

I offer this line of critique not as a judgment of the work as a whole. Bretherton’s work has much to commend itself—the attention to moral complexity, the inclusion of non-scriptural sources that can help us think ethically, the care for the processes of deliberation. But a stronger view of Scripture that acknowledges not just the reality but the moral reality of Scripture would strengthen this already promising foundation for Christian ethics. To be sure, including Scripture’s measure of the moral life brings with it judgments that might not always concur with a democratic presupposition. But if love of God and neighbour is to be the metric of a Christian moral vision—a metric that is not just descriptive but also morally imperative—then it seems that the cat is out of the bag: Scripture’s ontology and its moral vision cannot be so discretely set apart; the polite party is over, and the wild rumpus is about to begin. The solution cannot be to cut the baby in half. Rather, it is to invite the full range of what Scripture has to offer into the conversation, and invite with it a more interesting public moral conversation.