ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s two literary anniversaries slipped by without comment. The tercentenary of Thomas Watson's A Body of Practical Divinity might have been observed in 1992. The second bypassed literary anniversary is of considerably less significance: indeed, it is of scarcely any importance at all. Among more recent works on Christian ethics is Philip Wogaman's Christian Ethics. Ironically, the continued evaporation of theoretical ethics from Christian ethics results in part from the boom in the discipline. To cut a long story disgracefully short, we may say that while Augustine construed the Platonist understanding of virtue in terms of the perfect love of God, and Aquinas laid an ethic heavily influenced by Aristotelian categories alongside his dogmatic utterances, neither allowed Christian doctrine its full weight in the formulation of Christian ethical theory. Christian ethics is a growth area, of that there is no doubt. It also displays certain characteristics of a bomb site.
