Christians have arrived at five different models for making ethical decisions. Each of them asks different questions and these different questions bring different insights to the ethical question. Yet each has the same goal of pleasing and honoring God. The book is framed around these models, with each receiving a chapter-length treatment.
Over the course of a lifetime, not to mention over the course of any given month or week, we have to make many decisions. Some of them are consequential and some insignificant, some change the course of our lives and some barely even register. Yet as Christians we know we are responsible before God to make good decisions in matters both good and small. The question is, what constitutes a good decision? And on what basis do we make them?
T. David Gordon’s brief and reader-friendly new book Choose Better: Five Biblical Models for Making Ethical Decisions is a fascinating look at the different models of decision-making. As such, it is not a book about how to make decisions (in the vein, for example, of Dave Swavely’s Decisions, Decisions or Kevin DeYoung’s Just Do Something) but about the basis on which we make them. This makes it a unique and uniquely helpful book.
Gordon begins with a very brief discussion of ethics and says “ethics is about living as God our Maker intended us to live. The ethical task is to think, in a disciplined and faithful way, about human choices in light of human nature, the human condition, human potential, and the divine creational mandate for humans.” In this sense every decision we make is ethical—“it either contributes to or detracts from human life as God created it.” The ethical task is to distinguish good from bad and good from better—to be disciplined and deliberate in making choices.
Over time, Christians have arrived at five different models for making ethical decisions. Each of them asks different questions and these different questions bring different insights to the ethical question. Yet each has the same goal of pleasing and honoring God. The book is framed around these models, with each receiving a chapter-length treatment. They are:
- The Imitation Model. This model understands human life to consist, ideally, in imitating God to the degree possible for a mere creature.