Christian ethics is a matter of grace, present to us in Jesus Christ. But so often Jesus is reduced to a kind of role model. This book intends to account for the ways in which the revealed truth, love, and power of God revealed in Jesus Christ are contemporary to human life and transformative of human life.

By casting the identity of Christ as the One-Who-Is-Present, Holmes concentrates on how Christ ministers his power, truth, and love in the Spirit for the sake of the transformation of human life.
As present, Christ's work is both finished and unfinished, complete and open-ended; as endlessly contemporary, it is constitutive of reality and so (re-)shapes the ethical landscape and the moral life. In revisiting the doctrine of Christ's contemporaneity with its ethical implications firmly in view, Holmes's work fills a lacuna in the contemporary literature on Christian ethics. In conversation with John's Gospel, the priority of Christology comes to drive the very shape of moral questions for today. Here the compelling task of ethics is a matter ofbecoming aligned with and transparent to Christ's own presence and so to Christ's work of making all things new.

[Ethics in the Presence of Christ] does make an important contribution to the literature on Christian ethics by reminding Christian ethicists that their proposals for ethical agency are not only formulated on the basis of scriptural reflection or philosophical study but also on the continuing power of the risen Christ at work in the world.