Another gem from the O’Don, this time on the relation of Christian ethics to Scripture:

“Ethics reflects on the conditions of good moral thinking .  Were it to posit an ideal relation of text to action which, in the name of obedience to scriptural authority, effectively abolished thinking, it would abolish morality, and thereby abolish itself.  There is a necessary indeterminacy in the obedient action required by the faithful reading of the text.  Acts are ordered in a basic repertoire of kinds and types, and of these kinds and types Scripture has a great deal of normative force to tell us; but Scripture does not determine the concrete act itself , the act we must perform now .  If Scripture totally determined our actions, there would be no obedience, for there would be no deliberation.  Deliberation does not simply repeat what it has heard; it  pursues the goal of faithful and obedient action by searching out actions, possible within the material conditions that prevail, which will accord with the content of the testimony of Scripture.  On the conditions of success in this pursuit Ethics as a theological discipline reflects.  Those Anglicans between the Reformation and the English Civil War who took issue with the Puritan use of Scripture, did so in defense of faithful and obedient discipleship as they understood it.  Hooker’s advocacy of ‘reason,’ often misunderstood in later generations, saw it as a hermeneutic servant of the text, giving concrete deliberative form to the normative demand:

‘For whereas God hath left sundry kinds of laws unto men, and by all those laws the actions of men are in some sort directed; they [the Puritans] hold that one only law, the Scripture, must be the rule to direct in all things, even so far as to the “taking up of a rush or a straw.”  About which point there should not need any question to grow . . . if they did but yield to these two restraints: the first is, not to extend the actions whereof they speak so law as that instance doth import of taking up a straw . . . the second, not to exact at our hands for every action the knowledge of some place of Scripture out of which we stand bound to deduce it, as by divers testimonies they seek to enforce; but rather as the truth is, so to acknowledge, that it sufficeth if such actions be framed according to the law of Reason; the general axioms, rules, and principles of which law being so frequent in Holy Scripture, there is no let but in that regard even out of Scripture such duties may be deduced by some kind of consequence.’ (LEP II.1.2).”
—O’Donovan, Self, World, and Time , p. 77

(See also “Obedience Without Cost: The Necessity of Moral Thinking“)