What Would Jesus Really Do?

The Power & Limits of Jesus' Moral Teachings

By: Andrew Fiala

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eText | 20 March 2007 | Edition Number 1

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For many years many Christians have exhibited bumper stickers and wrist bands challenging themselves to live up to WWJD-What Would Jesus Do? Now Andrew Fiala, a professor who has encountered many such students in his classes, objectively assesses just what it actually is that Jesus does (and doesn't) say about the essential moral issues that face us today.

Andrew Fiala appreciates Jesus as a moral teacher with an ethical vision centered in love, generosity, forgiveness, tolerance, and peace. But he argues that it is often difficult to determine exactly what Jesus would say or do about tough contemporary issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, war, homosexuality, and politics. Hence, Fiala believes we need to engage in philosophical reflection and critical thinking to arrive at answers to today's ethical questions that Jesus never anticipated, such as those involving technology, scientific discoveries, ethical advances.

The book shows how philosophers and psychologists-from Kant and Mill to Nietzsche and Freud-struggled to make sense of the ethics of Jesus. The book concludes by arguing that we cannot pretend that Jesus and the Bible provide all the answers to our ethical dilemmas, although Jesus does provide perennial moral wisdom. Thus, Fiala shows that Jesus' moral teachings must be filled out with contemporary ethical reflection to determine what Jesus, as a moral ideal, would really do today.

Industry Reviews

Fiala synthesizes years of teaching and debate into an objective ethics textbook. He carefully elaborates on Jesus's fundamental moral teachings, as articulated in the New Testament, and extrapolates from these principles a moral system extending to modern situations like abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, human sexuality, and social welfare-situations unfamiliar to the historical Jesus. He also incorporates the ethical reflections of great philosophers and psychologists like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. His concisely written and succinctly argued survey of ethical studies is complete with chapter conclusions, notes, and a helpful index.