Christianity teaches that the world is in a state of what it describes as 'fallen' disorder. There have been two classic attempts to understand why this is the case. The first, by Irenaeus, claimed that God intended it to be so that God's creatures could live lives of 'recapitulation' in which they constantly grew in grace. The second, by Augustine, claimed that human disobedience caused the disorder. Neither of these attempted explanations is satisfactory. Disorder and evil have to be lived with for the mystery they are. According to one biblical view, the state of conflict is represented by the 'principalities and powers' which are part of the created order (Rom. 8:38), and they are variously described in the Bible and its translations. Although they were among the 'all things' redeemed by Christ's death (Col. 1:20), they will remain in existence until Christ's return in glory. (1 Cor. 15:24). Only then will the struggle cease. This is a biblical way of describing the world's disorder. Human beings are part of this. They are seen as fallen creatures. Though they were created in and still bear the image of God as an alien dignity, their propensity to sin manifests itself in all that they do. Nothing remains untainted. Human beings are, however, the agents of God's grace in the world, but at the same time they remain part of its essential problem.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS’?

The moral teaching of the New Testament epistles may be summed up as a radical reinterpretation of the scriptures and the story of Israel in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This teaching took shape to serve the needs of groups of believers in the first century seeking to live out their Christian discipleship in the towns and cities of the Roman empire, from Palestine and Syria in the east to Rome in the west. Taken together, it is a body of practical wisdom on how to live in holiness as the people of God in the time between the resurrection and parousia of Christ. This practical wisdom covers matters like Jew-Gentile relations,how to avoid idolatry, food and sex rules, household order, work and obligations to those in authority. It is indebted to the moral traditions of Israel on the one hand and Greece and Rome on the other, all refracted through the lens of the story of Jesus and the experience of the Holy Spirit in daily life and in gatherings for worship.

John Elford's chapter has set the broad context of Christian approaches to war and of attempts over the centuries to establish just war criteria. In this chapter I will focus, instead, upon the arms trade (or, more accurately, international arms transfer) set in the specific context of the wars or conflicts in the 1990s, first in the Gulf, then in Iraq and finally in the Balkans.

Christian versions of just war theory are essentially attempts to limit the horrors of warfare rather than means of justifying particular wars. Although initially derived by Ambrose and Augustine from pre-Christian, Greek and Roman sources, as John Elford has shown, just war theory has long been shaped by Christian theologians and now represents one of the more abiding theological heirlooms in the modern world. It is intentionally a limiting framework. Given that countries are, and always have been, tempted on occasion to go to war, just war theory introduces notes of moral caution into a situation. It offers broad criteria in order to encourage people to see some forms of warfare as considerably less justified than others. Down the centuries many Christians have voiced strong anxieties about warfare and have sought to constrain countries from going lightly into battle and then to limit the horrors of war once it starts.

From its beginnings, Christianity has encouraged and provided health care, an activity featured in Jesus' healing and in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Over the centuries Christian traditions have also provided guidance for physicians, other health care providers, familial caregivers and patients. While often distinctive, this guidance sometimes overlapped with or incorporated, with modifications, guidance in professional oaths and codes. 'Medical ethics', which was largely physician ethics until nursing emerged in the nineteenth century, was subsumed in the 1960s and 70s under 'bioethics' or 'biomedical ethics', a broader conception for new developments and a variety of felt problems in biomedicine. For instance, medical technologies could prolong life far beyond previous possibilities, transplant organs from one living or dead person to another, detect certain fetal defects in utero and offer new reproductive opportunities. Bioethics or biomedical ethics involves an interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to ethical issues in the life sciences, medicine and health care.

Every gospel implies an ethic, and every positive ethic (unlike nihilism) implies some sort of good news (if only that life can be made bearable). But whose gospel and which ethic should engage us? 'The gospels' once referred more or less uncontroversially to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the canonical New Testament, with 'Christian ethics' being the more ambiguous or problematic phrase. Significant differences between the synoptics and John, and among the synoptics themselves, were admitted, as were tensions between their literal and allegorical readings.Yet the traditional gospels were assumed to be four perspectives on one and the same Christ, such that the gospels could be singularised and capitalised to 'the Gospel'. The central questions for ethics concerned how to interpret and apply scripture to concrete issues (war, sexuality, medicine, political authority, economic justice etc.), and the answers differed across denominational lines. As revealed truth, nonetheless, the canon was the essentially fixed variable. Alternative scriptures were known about, but these existed largely as fragmentary manuscripts or partial quotations from their critics (e.g. Irenaeus and Tertullian).

In their daily lives, human beings make decisions about what and how and why they want to do things. Sometimes such decisions are practical; for example, whether one walks to work or takes the train. On occasion such decisions are simply emotional ones; for example, whether one feels like wearing the red or the green dress to tonight's party. And sometimes they are ethical decisions; for example, deciding not to drink and drive. With each of these examples most people will agree that there are certain straightforward motives that explain why people make the decisions they do: it makes more sense; it feels better; it is 'the right thing to do', respectively.

On closer examination, however, one can see that such decisions are not as straightforward as they might at first appear. Walking to work can be a decision made for environmental as much as practical reasons. One might wear the red dress to avoid clashing with the hostess. And not drinking and driving is a very practical thing to do if one already has ten points on one’s driving licence. The reasons why we make certain decisions, therefore – even, perhaps especially, ethical ones – are complex. We might appeal to such concepts as justice, equality, freedom and civic consideration, but the ways in which such concepts justify or authorise our decisions always raise significant epistemological questions.1 That we normally answer these questions without too much thought does not mean that the questions disappear. It means, rather, that we are too often unreflective at just that point where we need to do most of our thinking.

What is it like to make a choice? The temptation we easily give way to is to think that it's always the same kind of thing; or that there's one kind of decision-making that's serious and authentic, and all other kinds ought to be like this. In our modern climate, the tendency is to imagine that choices are made by something called the individual will, faced with a series of clear alternatives, as if we were standing in front of the supermarket shelf. There may still be disagreement about what the 'right' choice would be, but we'd know what making the choice was all about. Perhaps for some people the right choice would be the one that best expressed my own individual and independent preference: I would be saying no to all attempts from outside to influence me or determine what I should do, so that my choice would really be mine. Or perhaps I would be wondering which alternative was the one that best corresponded to a code of rules: somewhere there would be one thing I could do that would be in accord with the system, and the challenge would be to spot which it was - though it might sometimes feel a bit like guessing which egg-cup had the coin under it in a game. But in any case the basic model would be much the same: the will looks hard at the range of options and settles for one.