Revisioning Lúcás Chan's Biblical Ethics as an Ethics of Discipleship

Abstract

Lúcás Chan was a pioneer of biblical ethics who accepted the Vatican II call for the reform of moral theology. Building on his few twentieth century forebears and integrating the work of Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars and ethicists, Chan applied virtue theory as a hermeneutic for deriving a biblical ethic. His method insisted upon a dual competency for first exegeting a biblical text and then employing virtue theory as a framework for applying the scripture to contemporary issues. This paper adds another layer of hermeneutics, derived from Jesus's words in Luke's gospel, to read the whole of scripture through the lens of Christ. This Christological hermeneutic builds on and adapts Chan's method into an ethics of discipleship.