This is an elegant, learned, absorbing, and rewarding book by a theologian at the height of his powers. Taking advantage of the detachment and perspective provided by the pandemic, Luke Bretherton has produced a deeply hospitable, generous, and wise overview of Christian ethics—not so much an introduction, as a meditation from an expert in the field, full of insights, and proposals to ponder and digest. No one at any location in the subject—theoretician or practitioner, undergraduate, graduate student or professor, insider to institutions, or campaigner from outside—could fail to be enriched, challenged, or enlightened by Bretherton’s careful, erudite and expansive treatment.

Much of the elegance comes in the helpful division of the argument into three parts, addressing the three questions: what is going on, what is to be done, and how we should live together, (17) through which Bretherton judiciously harmonizes Catholic social teaching and liberation approaches. He starts with description, humbly recognizing that we can only act in the world that we see. He convincingly insists that this is a truly theological ethic: “Christian ethics begins with the attempt to discover with others what God is doing today” (14)—thus decentring the task from its endemic anthropocentrism. He conceives of description in terms of listening—to creation, scripture, strangers, cries for liberation, and ancestors. The sequence is provocative—beginning with creation rather than scripture or cries for liberation—and the nomenclature is curious: “ancestors” turns out to be not so much an indicator of animism but more a way of naming tradition.

The account of creaturely life is persuasive because it introduces metaphors such as metabolism that have synthetic effect: “the Americas are still metabolizing slavery ecologically, socially, economically, politically in ways that affect everyone who lives there.” (37) Again, “Salvation is literally and metaphorically a metabolic process of gestation and birth, a process Christians recall and participate in at baptism and Eucharist.” (45) A rich chapter on the stranger offers an unsentimental account of the promise and challenge of dwelling with difference. In a book of this kind, the liberation chapter is bound to be scrutinized closely, because so much of the field is now characterized by multifarious voices of the excluded. Bretherton takes poverty as the normative kind of exclusion and incorporates figures and insights concerning race and gender within that scope. He chooses not to disrupt his harmonious presentation with extensive consideration of whether such perspectives derail the conventional project of Christian ethics altogether; it is intriguing to wonder whether he considered doing so, as a gesture towards those who might scrutinize the social location of the account. Instead, he trusts his enormous abilities to encompass dissonant voices within a comprehensive sweep. His treatment of tradition is especially enjoyable, in that it couches incisive questions about authority, and coins the attractive notion of being a good ancestor.

The second part of the book addresses action. This is where Bretherton offers his survey of the conventional territory of deontological, consequential and virtue ethics and makes his choices about which avenues to pursue. He acknowledges (130) that he ends up with “a somewhat untidy, mixed economy of frameworks” with a regular recognition of the reality of human sin. Accordingly, he begins with three dimensions of finitude: temporality, change, and the recognition of changed structures alongside changed persons. Here we find one of the most prominent ways Bretherton incorporates the contemporary wave in ethics and the culture of suspicion: frequent reference to structural oppression and systemic domination, employing vocabulary that was largely absent from a volume like this a generation ago. Helpfully, and with theological and pastoral deftness, Bretherton observes “we often conflate finitude with fallenness and read what is creaturely limit to be lived through into a problem to be overcome.” (138)

What makes the book such an attractive read is the vivid illustration that pervades this section of the book, in this case an excellent brief treatment of artificial intelligence; yet what makes it more dynamic for the accomplished reader makes it less suitable for the beginner, who, led on by the title “Primer,” may be wondering at many points where to find a simple outline of different moral approaches—which turns out, despite the title, to be not what this book is about. From time to time, Bretherton’s passionate convictions surface: he suggests Christ calls us to “a fierce desire to participate in and bear witness to reality as determined by the loving presence of God in a world of suffering.” (151) But his wisdom is equally assertive: in many circumstances, “a desire for moral certainty and clarity is itself morally wrong.” (151) In a fascinating passage, Bretherton seeks to rehabilitate the notion of divine command by demonstrating it does not mean externally imposed regulation but a liberating condition, which he connects to vocation, within a covenantal framework. He goes on to maintain that the Old Testament understanding of law is one not of regulative code of conduct but as constitutive for walking in God’s ways (178). This is a highly nuanced and a fertile proposal, breaking the unhelpful but widespread binary between law and gospel. Meanwhile in a very brief treatment of deontology and consequentialism (which might have taken half the book 50 years ago), he consigns them with a flourish to the dustbin of proceduralism, since they treat morality as an “algorithmic problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived.” (184)

A truly helpful and characteristically honest section addresses what Bretherton perceives as the need to integrate the cultivation of virtue with the pursuit of liberation. Here he acknowledges that “virtue for the oppressed can look like immorality to those who oppress, since the latter expect civility within and loyalty to an unjust status quo.” (201) He cites Katie Cannon’s qualities of invisible dignity, quiet grace and unshouted courage. This exhibits Bretherton’s community-organizing comfort with sometimes abrasive forms of social holiness in pursuit of just goals, which he calls the distinction between prospering and flourishing. (202) Often he can put a transformative insight in a single sentence: thus he speaks the shift from medieval notions of happiness as contemplative, communal and eternal in contrast to modern assumptions that it be active, individual and this-worldly. (205)

The third part of the book, living well with others, is the closest to Bretherton’s heart, and consequently, the territory he has thoroughly traversed in his previous works. Forswearing any urge to be comprehensive, he selects three themes, intimacy, work, and politics that broadly survey the domestic, collective, and public dimensions of life. The chapter on intimacy is brave in both intent and content and inevitably discloses assumptions in tender spaces that most treatments eschew. No reader could say the author has hidden behind arm’s-length abstractions. The treatment of work gives further opportunity to consider economics and the constituents of human flourishing. Here Bretherton is on more familiar ground. And the final chapter on politics not only gives him the opportunity to pluck highlights from his earlier work but brings the book to a suitable crescendo—indeed, its telos, since Bretherton is so dedicated to revitalizing “democratic politics as a means to respond to new technocratic and totalizing systems and the ways these atomize, surveil, exploit, and polarize society.” (351)

In his final chapter Bretherton defines the secular as “that which is not eternal.” (344) The whole volume is a model of what it means for a theologian to be appropriately secular in the cause of focusing the reader on what is ultimately eternal. As elsewhere, one sometimes wants the author to configure a compelling, memorable, Christological rallying call in the midst of his endlessly nuanced, hugely researched, and engagingly conversational distinctions and observations. But this is surely the outstanding book on the subject of “What is Christian ethics?” for many years, and I shall frequently return to it for framing, articulating and nuancing a host of subjects for a long time to come.