The letters of Colossians and Ephesians explore cosmic questions about the shape of the world, its origin and its goal: which god controls history so as to bring salvation and blessing? What kind of political body does this god shape? And how could this community live in such a way that this god could be seen in their midst?

Legal reasoning is a vast topic. In principle, it includes the reasoning of lawyers, judges, and even lawmakers, in every area of law, from family law to contracts, from criminal law to constitutional adjudication. And it is thoroughly global, encompassing enormously different national and regional understandings. Bringing the topic down to a size compatible with saying anything useful means leaving out most of it. Accordingly, this chapter will be confined to countries with a common law legal system, and its primary focus will be judicial reasoning. Most of its examples will be drawn from just two areas of law, criminal and constitutional law. Its argument will focus on the philosophical underpinnings of an ongoing debate between defenders of common law legal reasoning and a variety of utilitarian challengers.

Historically the end of law has often been taken to be something like this: to secure the realisation of moral goals or to promote the well-being of persons. The law is (or should be) based on what a well-known opponent of such a view, John Rawls, would describe as a ‘comprehensive moral doctrine’. As Rawls puts it, a comprehensive moral conception ‘includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct and in the limit to our life as a whole’.1 He has in mind many ethical and philosophical doctrines that prescribe how one ought to act and live.

Philosophical (as distinct from sociological or historical) theories of criminal law display both analytical and normative dimensions. Analytically, they investigate the defining features of criminal law, as a distinctive kind of law. Normatively, they examine the proper structure and aims of criminal law: what principles should govern it? Toward what goals should it be oriented? Why should we maintain a system of criminal law?

Paul’s letters were written to communities of Christ-followers of the first century. This essay outlines some of the overarching features that shaped the Roman world in which Paul’s communities lived.

For centuries discussions of justice and ethics were closely linked in European thought and culture, but they have now diverged in marked, interesting and unsettling ways. European traditions had seen them as contributing distinct but parallel answers to the classic question ‘what ought we to do?’1 Duties of justice were widely seen as requirements both on individuals and on institutions that could, and in many cases should, be backed by legal sanctions, and could in some cases also define counterpart rights. Ethical duties were widely seen as requirements on individuals and certain institutions that did not need to be, and indeed on many views should not be, backed by legal sanctions and did not define counterpart rights. Yet by the start of the twenty-first century claims that justice and ethics were complementary and linked domains of duty – although still deeply embedded in European languages and culture – were often questioned, ignored or even explicitly rejected.

Pauline theology has often been defined in ostensible contrast to Judaism, especially Jewish monotheism and Jewish law observance. This essay reconsiders the evidence for this contrast, looking again at key Pauline texts and interrogating scholarly assumptions about Judaism and monotheism in antiquity.

Consider two ways in which the existence of political authorities is morally problematic. Do not think only about tyrannical or unjust authorities, for example, states that persecute minorities, unjustly expropriate property or wage unnecessary wars. These authorities are morally problematic in a number of obvious ways that will not be discussed here. Think about good political authorities: the peaceful ones that protect human rights, respect minorities and enact reasonable distributive policies. To begin with, all political authorities, good and bad ones, regularly interfere with our liberty, using coercion to prevent us from acting in certain ways and ensure that we act in others. This is obviously problematic since we value our liberty and we normally think that it can be constrained only when we exercise it in ways that are morally wrongful. But political authorities do not stop at that. In addition to using coercion, they also claim the right to impose obligations on us. Thus, they interfere not only with our liberty, but also with our autonomy, that is, with our capacity to decide for ourselves how best to respond to the reasons for action that we have. We might think that this second form of interference is even more worrisome, because it constrains not only our freedom to act in accordance with what we think is right, but our very capacity to determine for ourselves how to act by exercising our autonomy. And is this not one of the capacities we should cherish the most, and be more reluctant to abdicate?

This essay discusses the texts that, through their commonalities and differences, illustrate various ways in which early forms of Jesus-devotion were relating to their contexts within the Roman world and how Paul addressed particular issues that arose within those communities

International law was a subject of interest for philosophers from the early modern period to the Enlightenment – from the Spanish Scholastics and Grotius to Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant. With a few exceptions (most notably Jeremy Bentham and Hans Kelsen), however, it has not been a principal object of philosophical inquiry for much of the last two centuries. Why?

Through the coming, death, and resurrection/exaltation of the Messiah Jesus, God has graciously determined to rescue humanity from the powers of Sin and Death, thereby creating a forgiven, liberated, and reconciled people: the community of the new creation and new covenant. By faith and baptism, and through the work of God’s empowering, indwelling Spirit, people may participate in this saving, transformative event and thus live “in Christ,” experiencing the fullness of life with God and others for which they were created, in anticipation of the restoration of the entire creation.

Is property in some way basic to our moral lives? Many have thought so. For Aristotle, moral virtues, like liberality, presuppose some idea of property, for one can display liberality only with respect to what is one’s own. For Kant, property is a requirement of freedom in the external world. For Locke, property, allocated according to principles of labour and desert, is basic to the very idea of justice that our political institutions are meant to secure. Others have denied that property is foundational in this way, suggesting rather that property is one strategy available to us in meeting the demands of our general theories of justice but is not itself morally basic.1

For Paul, the social ethos of Christian communities grows directly out of Christ’s movement into the sphere of sin and death, there to rescue derelict humanity through the radical solidarity of the cross and the power of the resurrection. This movement reverses hierarchies and destabilizes social norms, in visible, counterintuitive ways: the inclusion of socially incompatible members, the redistribution of resources, solidarity with all humanity in its most desperate cry for liberation, and the creation of a fellowship in which diverse people with divergent backgrounds and different gifts grow together into moral agents shaped by Christ’s self-giving love.