Introduction
Introduction
Biblical Ethics
Source
These lectures were given by Oswald Chambers at:
The Bible Training College,1 1911–1915.
League of Prayer meetings in Britain, 1909–1915.
Zeitoun YMCA Huts, classes for soldiers in Egypt, 1917.2
Publication History
This material was first published as articles in the Bible Training Course (BTC) Monthly Journal,3 1932–1945.
It was first published as a book in 1947.
Shortly after the Bible Training College4 opened in January 1911, Oswald Chambers began teaching a class on biblical ethics. The class was open to resident and visiting students alike, and reflected Chambers’ deep belief in the importance of thinking.
“We must never forget that God is a great deal bigger than our experience of Him; that Jesus Christ is a great deal bigger than our experience of Him,” Oswald said. “It is because people won’t take the labour to think, that the snare gets hold of them; and remember thinking is a tremendous labour” (“Thinking,” Tongues of Fire, January 1914, p. 5).
Noted London pastor Dr. G. Campbell Morgan5 spoke at the College’s first anniversary celebration and made special mention of the classes on biblical ethics and biblical philosophy, saying that such classes were unusual in a Bible college of that day.
Throughout the years of the BTC6 (1911–1915), Biblical Ethics remained a part of the syllabus, with Chambers sometimes using James Stalker’s7 book The Ethic of Jesus according to the Synoptic Gospels (1909) as a text.
Additional material on ethics and thinking appears in The Moral Foundations of Life in this volume.