Ethics in the Presence of Christ [Paperback]

By casting the identity of Christ as the One-Who-Is-Present, Holmes concentrates on how Christ ministers his power, truth, and love in the Spirit for the sake of the transformation of human life.
As present, Christ's work is both finished and unfinished, complete and open-ended; as endlessly contemporary, it is constitutive of reality and so (re-)shapes the ethical landscape and the moral life. In revisiting the doctrine of Christ's contemporaneity with its ethical implications firmly in view, Holmes's work fills a lacuna in the contemporary literature on Christian ethics. In conversation with John's Gospel, the priority of Christology comes to drive the very shape of moral questions for today. Here the compelling task of ethics is a matter ofbecoming aligned with and transparent to Christ's own presence and so to Christ's work of making all things new.

An exploration
of how the truth, love, and power of God revealed in Jesus Christ are
contemporary to and transformative of human life.

This is an elegant and absorbing essay in moral theology, the fruit of sustained reflection on the presence of Jesus Christ as the principle of human life before God. John Webster, University of Aberdeen, UK

'Avoiding Pelagian views that assume we need to make Christ present by the way we act, Christopher Holmes here offers us a perceptive and persuasive vision of a scripturally rooted evangelical ethics that is shaped at every point by its dogmatic commitment to the fact that the risen, ascended and advent Lord has not left us to our own devices but is present in the power of his Spirit as prophet, priest and king enabling our actions as those who are part of the new creation. Informed by the thinking of Bonhoeffer, Barth and T. F. Torrance, this is a book of deep insight, a strictly theologicalÃ0