Abstract

David Errington brings the Book of Proverbs into discussion with two significant accounts of the nature and foundation of practical reason in Christian ethics: Thomas Aquinas and Oliver O'Donovan. Aiming to set out a coherent account of the structure of Christian moral reasoning, this book provides the first scholarly engagement with Oliver O'Donovan's moral theology. Errington argues that the way the Book of Proverbs conceives of wisdom presents an important challenge to the way practical reason has been understood in the Western theological and philosophical tradition, and that instead a perfection of speculative knowledge, wisdom in the Book of Proverbs is a practical knowledge of how to act well, grounded in the reality of the world God has made.