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of Christ upon ethics. It is not mistaken to think that both created order and the Ten Commandments remain normative for Christians, nor to see, as others have done, a correlation between the Ten Commandments and the order of creation (see p. 242). Grudem is right on both fronts, I believe. What he does not sufficiently recognise, however, is the part of Christian ethics that is not in the Decalogue: the revelation of the kingdom of God and the way it determines Christian appropriation of the law and the created order. This lacuna is evident in the way, throughout the book, New Testament emphases that ought to be central in any Christian ethic play a strangely minor role: where, in this ethics, is the call to forgive? Where are the beatitudes? Where, indeed, is the command to love? Rom. 13.8–10 appears in order to validate Christian interest in the Ten Commandments and to help us think about debt, but not to tell us that ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’ (see pp. 257, 1045–47). Grudem’s discussion of self-defence (ch. 20) illustrates this marginalisation of the distinctive, Christological features of Christian ethics. Jesus’ teaching in Matt. 5:38-39 is dismissed on the basis that the slap on the cheek referred to here is one of insult, not a violent attack. This exegetical strategy brushes aside the first part of Jesus’ teaching, including its reference to the Old Testament law of returns. Grudem has already argued that Jesus’ teaching in this part of the Sermon on the Mount is not a challenge to the Old Testament as such, but only to its misinterpretation (pp. 231–32). Perhaps this is right. The problem, however, is that it minimises the way in which Jesus is setting out a strikingly new moral stance. The radical nature of Jesus’ teaching here is entirely muted in Grudem’s argument. The weight of the discussion is carried by Prov. 25:26. It is instructive to compare Grudem, at this point, with another Christian thinker who recognised the connection between the Decalogue and the created order—Thomas Aquinas (see e.g. Summa Theologiae I-II 98.5). Whereas for Grudem their correspondence is only evidence for the Decalogue’s continuing validity for Christians, for Aquinas this correspondence also indicates the Decalogue’s limitations for Christian ethics. Something more perfect than the ‘old law’ is needed, because something more than nature is needed: the ‘new law’, which teaches us the way of redemption in Christ, and which can be found within the ‘old law’ only implicitly. The problem with Grudem’s Christian Ethics is not simply that a particular moral and political outlook looms too large in it, but that this outlook has not yet been sufficiently subjected to the discipline of the gospel. The shape of this problem should prompt selfreflection even from those who do not share many of Grudem’s basic assumptions, and especially from those who do.