In this important work Paul Lehmann answers the vital question for church people today: "What am I as a believer in Jesus Christ and a member of His Church to do?" Professor Lehmann works out a comprehensive and creative ethic rooted in the koinonia, the new community of believers which God has created in history through Jesus Christ. The reader is made acutely aware of how the Christian faith affects the behavior and brings to full stature the life of those who accept and undertake to live by that faith. In his preface the author says: "PART ONE undertakes to describe what the method of a Christian ethic as a theological discipline involves.
PART TWO seeks to extended the methodological description by a careful differentiation of Christian thinking about ethics from the way of dealing with ethics which has emerged in Western thought through the tradition of Moral Philosophy. This differentiation is external to the Christian koinonia. There is however, an internal differentiation which must also be made. This is occasioned by another and no less formidable way of thinking about ethics from within the community of Christian faith and life. The tradition of Moral Theology offers a kind of koinonia-ethic which carries the methodological clarification of ethical theory to a crucial culmination with the question of conscience.