Law and Gospel: The Basis of Christian Ethics demonstrates how to view ethics through an evangelical lens, incorporating both good works and the gospel, to model the life of Jesus Christ. It analyzes a variety of OT, NT, and historical texts to explore the relationship between love and law. While examining the dangers of legalism and antinomianism, the course considers how love fulfills the law and enables those who are in Christ to live an evangelical, ethical life.
In this course Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), provides an introduction to Christian ethics. After an overview of the scope of ethics, Dr. Moore focuses on wisdom and how the biblical narrative forms and reorders the conscience. He then explores a variety of important contemporary topics showing how they relate to different aspects of Christian ethics. Dr. Moore covers topics like religious liberty, gender, marriage and divorce, sexual ethics, human dignity, race, immigration, war and peace, capital punishment, the environment, poverty, and political economy.
The course was part of a two-day ethics seminar by the ERLC Academy and was filmed in Nashville, TN in 2019. It includes two breakout sessions. In the first breakout session, Dr. Andrew T. Walker addresses ethical issues regarding biological sex, gender, and transgenderism. In the second breakout session, Dr. Michael P. Farris provides an overview of religious liberty in the US, with special attention to the Supreme Court’s view on this matter.