Dirt, Greed And Sex

Dirt, Greed And Sex by L. William Countryman (Professor of New Testament, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, USA) was published by SCM in November 2001 and is our 30976th best seller. The ISBN for Dirt, Greed And Sex is 9780334028574.

Conducting a thorough examination of sexual ethics in the New Testament, this work argues that the New Testament writers did not construct a new sexual ethic from the ground up, but took over existing cultural patterns and refocused them, pushing some elements from the centre to the periphery. This suggests a pattern of ethics for contemporary life. Discussing biblical notions of purity and property, which dominate ethical ideas in the New Testament, the author characterizes sex as one of the rich blessings of creation, "to be received with delight and thanksgiving".;Countryman's generous and eirenic views on sexual matters, based as they are on solid biblical research, are a welcome intervention in an area which unfortunately, in Christian circles, tends still to be dominated by conservatism and misinformation, rather than by liberal principle.