Earlier this week, I considered the personal effect of meditating on and living in the truth of being made in God’s image. Today, I want to show how the image Dei should inform our public theology and social ethics. In a sentence, the image of God should inform the way we look at the world, because only when we keep the image of God at the forefront of our mind will we rightly be able to glorify God in all of life. Here are five ways the image of God should inform our ethics—four specific, one generic. Continue reading
Ethics
An Introduction to Bioethics
Paul Simon once sang that their are 50 ways to leave your lover—a practice I’m not endorsing—and today there are just as many ways to make a baby, almost. According to Joe Carter, in his weekly post on bioethics, there are at least thirty-ways to make a baby. He writes,
Until the 1970s, all but one child ever born was the result of sexual intercourse; today, there are at least thirty-eight ways to make a baby. In an attempt to conquer infertility we’ve developed dozens of methods, a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms, to create a child: IVF, IUI, ICSI, DI, AI, ET, etc.
I had no idea that there were and are so many ways to bring children into this world. Of course, these reproductive technologies may help many infertile couples to be parents, but they also create innumerable ethical difficulties. Continue reading
Biblical Theology for the Real World
In The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Krister Stendahl defines Biblical Theology as what the Bible ‘meant,’ while Systematic Theology was defined as what the Bible ‘means.’ However, as it is shown in by James Hoffmeier in his recent book The Immigration Crisis: Immigrants, Aliens, and the Bible and Eric Schumacher in a recent associational sermon, Biblical Theology has everything to do with life today and for making biblical decisions in the church (Schumacher) and outside of it (Hoffmeier).
With Goldsworthy-esque style, Pastor Schumacher defines a Biblical Theology of Cooperation in the church like this: Biblical Cooperation happens when God’s people, under God’s rule, trust God’s promises and obey God’s commission in the pursuit of God’s glory. His sermon follows 7 points that trace cooperation from Creation to the New Creation with application for today’s church.
Likewise Hoffemeier writes in the introduction to his book how we must move from the biblical text to the contemporary application following the pattern of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation if we are to rightly discern the biblical teaching on immigration. Appealing to the example of C.J.H. Wright, Hoffemeier uses a “comprehensive approach” that moves from biblical theology to objective/subjective principles to practical ethical applications. Mere analogy and principalization that fail to recognize historical differences, cultural settings, and situational incongruities are unhelpful, but a well-ordered biblical theology that recognizes these complicating factors lays the groundwork for ethical conundrums and modern-day decision-making. (While I haven’t read his book, his proposed methodology is sound. You can read the whole first chapter online to see where Hoffmeier is going.)
These are just two more examples of how reading the Bible with an eye to the storyline of Scripture helps us make sense of the world around us. Really, we do not have a better option? God has given us a book that makes us wise unto salvation and that helps us proceed in an ever-complicating world!
Sola Deo Gloria, dss
(HT: Jim Hamilton; Justin Taylor)
Via Emmaus 