Paul Ramsey's Political Ethics.

Paul Ramsey died in 1988, and he was extremely prolific to the end. Thus it is premature to estimate what lasting influence his writings will have. Yet the signs to date show what a formidable figure he is in Christian ethics, the likes of whom we rarely see. Charles Curran paid him book-length attention in 1973, in Politics, Medicine and Christian Ethics. Various authors contributed to a volume that appeared in 1974, entitled Love and Society: Essays in the Ethics of Paul Ramsey. James Gustafson, in the second volume of his Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, published in 1984, discusses Ramsey alongside Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Rahner, under the heading, 'Benchmarks from Theology'. An entire issue of The Journal of Religious Ethics in the Fall of 1991 was devoted to Ramsey's ethics. Yale University Press will shortly publish an anthology that will give a new generation of students access to some of his best work.

Now we have the benefit of David Attwood's first-rate study as well. Although he ventures an occasional internal criticism of obscure or uncertain formulations in Ramsey's writings, his volume overall is a deeply sympathetic study. He announces at the start that Ramsey 'offers the most coherent and theological approach …