Christian Oughtness for Today: Biblical Perspectives for Christian Living

Abstract

The world has traveled on a path that has presented inherent complexities and untold challenges as well as difficulties to the living of the ‘religious’ life in general and the Christian life in particular. Often, modern-day values offer a contradiction to traditional, religious, and biblical values which most of the time eclipses the Christian understanding of how one ought to live in the awareness of one’s Christian identity and vocation. This has culminated in the laxity of awareness in the Christian oughtness, in other words, of how the Christian ought to live in response to one’s identity and calling. This paper has sought to re-present the Christian oughtness anew situating it in its biblical-ethical perspectives. The paper used a narrative paradigm to reflect on biblical Christian ethics in the light of imperatives from the Old and New testaments. The paper envisages deepening a treatise on the awareness of the Christian oughtness from the biblical ethical perspective as a new paradigm through which Christians and people of goodwill would live as they ought to live, in promoting justice, progress and development of all people and their nations.

Keywords

• christian oughtness
• ethics
• biblico-imperatives