Ethics Quotes

“We often translate it “law,” yet it comes from a root meaning “to give a direction,” “to point the way.” In the Bible, it means first a particular oracle showing God’s direction for conduct, and in time it refers to the entire Pentateuch (cf. Neh. 8:1). So the law, the Torah, is the Way—and it is no accident that the chief Hebrew word for sin, chatah, means not as we might say to “break” the law, but literally, to “miss the way.”
― James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1, Revised

“What did Jonathan Edwards mean in sending word to his wife that their union was “uncommon”? Was it that? And how was a union that had issued in eleven offspring “spiritual”? Of one thing we may be sure: Jonathan Edwards was not using his last words carelessly. This “major artist and chief American philosopher” (Miller, 1949:225) had not yet discarded his palette. His message to her had—all his words had—an exact, uncoded meaning, Lockean in its empirical force, that is there for us to recover if we will attend. Our path is to discover if we can the substance of this “uncommon” and “spiritual” union that was at the same time unquestionably an erotic bond. Something greater than curiosity is at stake for us here. Jonathan Edwards is preeminently a theologian of the heart and of the affections; to discover the kind of love that was central between these two may provide an exact clue to his own theological ethics—a bonus not to be disdained.”
― James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1, Revised

“Presence is one of the profound forms of Christian witness.”
― James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1, Revised

“Even when only partly understood, the Bible remained bigger than the niches to which it was relegated. For it requires that we be hearers of the Word, listening for what it asks us, not bringing our questions to find the Bible’s answers, but prepared to have our current questions revised or even discredited by its own. Scripture confronts its readers with another world and asks if it is not in truth their world; it confronts them with another hope than their own hopes, and thus teaches readers to ask, “What wait I for? my hope is in thee” (Ps. 39:7 KJV). In at least that sense, the Bible is the Book of a story that claims to be our real story”
― James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1, Revised