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Ethics without substance

Cornelius A. Buller

Spirit Ethics: Scripture and the Moral Life
Paul Jersild. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2000. 204 pp.

Reading this book demands much patience and fortitude. Unfortunately, the insights, summaries and applications that we hope for when reading a book such as this one on ethics never materializes.

The aim of the first five chapters is to develop a “spirit” ethics. The following chapters are intended to show how this ethics is applied to three contemporary issues: euthanasia, homosexuality and genetic manipulation. These chapters confirm what the disappointed reader fears: there is no ethics to be applied and neither does Scripture have a significant role.

The promised “spirit ethics” is almost present in two chapters, but Jersild quickly retreats from what he might have discovered. What he offers, via relativism and pluralism of postmodernity, are reasons that free him from struggling more deeply with the biblical texts. If we follow his lead, we would become distanced from Scripture and buy into the whims of our culture.

Throughout the book, Jersild attempts to engage in a scholarly debate. However, he never manages to pull all the strands of information together into sustained or coherent arguments. For this reason, the book is not worth reading. It simply fails to offer anything substantive or coherent to those interested in ethics, Scripture or the Spirit.

Cornelius A. Buller is staff ethicist at the Salvation Army Ethics Centre in Winnipeg and a member of Mcivor Ave. MB Church.

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Last modified November 7, 2000.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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