Yiu Sing LUCAS CHAN, James F. KEENAN, Ronaldo ZACHARIAS, eds. The Bible and Catholic Theological Ethics. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2017. Pp. 299. $45.00 pb. ISBN 978-1-62698-218-5. Reviewed by Matthew R. PETRUSECK, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

The diverse set of essays that constitute The Bible and Catholic Theological Ethics provide a valuable and distinctively global contribution to the question of how the fields of biblical studies and moral theology can and should constructively engage each other under the inter-disciplinary umbrella of “Biblical Ethics.”  The volume’s three editors tighten the otherwise broad scope of the twenty-four essays to the period since the publication of the Vatican II document, Optatam Totius, which called the Church to reassess and reaffirm the role of the Bible in moral teaching.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which contains several subsections: 1) Foundational Concerns, 2) Perspectives, and 3) The Bible and Contemporary Issues. Sections two and three in particular provide a multi-textured analysis of Biblical ethics from different cultural perspectives (contributors come from Europe, Asia-Oceania, Africa, Latin America, and North America; some essays were also translated into English by other scholars). Each author in these latter sections engages hermeneutical and moral questions drawing on their particular socio-political locations and sets of concern. So, for example, one essay examines Old Testament conceptions of love through the perspective of recent migrants to Costa Rica; another, written by a scholar from the Democratic Republic of Congo, provides a feminist interpretation on two Pauline passages and applies it to the question of how women dress in Africa; another searches Biblical texts for overarching values that can be employed to understand and address religious diversity, poverty, and caste hierarchies in India.

These and similar essays provide the field of Biblical ethics a welcome contextualization and enrichment, demonstrating how particular (and often excluded) perspectives can illuminate fresh interpretive possibilities for the Scriptures. In this respect, the volume aptly accomplishes the goal of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), the larger series of which The Bible and Catholic Theological Ethics is a part, to, in the words of series editor James Kennan, “[recognize] the need to appreciate the challenge of pluralism, to dialogue from and beyond local culture, and to interconnect within a world church not dominated solely by a northern paradigm” (ii).

Yet perhaps one of the most valuable conclusions that emerges from a large number of the essays is the need for the Church, in all of its diversity, to continue working towards a unified normative understanding of Biblical ethics, both methodologically and in its substantive interpretations. The alternative—letting the field drift into exclusively contextualist interpretations—potentially undermines not only the coherence of the discipline itself, but also one of its constitutive goals: to build a world that conforms more closely to the explicit and implicit moral principles of the Gospel.  As Aristide Fumagalli writes in his essay, “Biblical Ethics and the Proclamation of the Gospel,” “Without a shared truth, each one lays claim to be his or her own truth…it is [thus] the truth of the one who is strongest that imposes itself on the truth of the weak person, and the truth of those who are equal, if they manage to refrain from conflict, achieve nothing more than a negotiation of their survival” (100).

A prophetic reminder in an age of alternative facts.