ABSTRACT
Many theologians have explored the Christian life as the performance of the Christian story. Both the tradition of improvisation and the Christian story are as interested in disrupting any static notions of this kind as they are in upholding them. To the Christian disciple, by contrast, prayer can either be moral training in the disciplines of listening to God, or it can be an experience of the grace of 'being obvious' in God's presence. The great cry of liberation theology is a cry for theology to take seriously its context. This turn towards context is a significant step in uniting ethics and theology. Throughout Christian history there have always been groups that said no to some or all 'gifts' that came their way from wider society. Christian ethics seen from an eschatological perspective is always profoundly aware of the end of the story, and of the way this end reincorporates earlier parts of the narrative.
