Henry Wansbrough is a monk of Ampleforth. He has been Chairman of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University, and served on the Pope’s Biblical Commission for eleven years. He is General Editor of The New Jerusalem Bible, and has written a number of books on biblical subjects.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission had felt for some time that it would be opportune to make some statement about the use of the Bible in moral teaching. After all, the teaching of the Church should be founded on the Bible as understood in the tradition of the Church. But what has the Bible to say on the burning moral questions of the day? It is striking that, while in modern parlance of today ‘morals’ and ‘morality’ refers almost exclusively to sexual morality, the Bible is seldom even mentioned on such issues. Is not the church’s teaching on sexual ethics founded on the Bible? What has the Bible to say on the wider questions of medical ethics, questions from birth control to euthanasia, questions about social inequality, about war, about responsible government and the rights of individuals? Already at the quinquennial renewal of half the membership the moral teaching of the Bible had been proposed as a possible topic of study, but in the end the Commission decided to respond to the Pope’s request for something on Judaism, in preparation for his proposed visit to the Holy Land. So in 2001 a report The Jewish People and its Sacred Writings in the Christian Bible was produced.

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