Christian Moral Principles

• Sola Scruipture: the Bible is treated as a book with rules that are to be obeyed and therefore, it is not necessary to use reason to work out what to do in a given situation.
• ‘God Breathed’: The Bible is directly inspired by God as it was written via divine inspiration.
• Theonomous Christians believe that an individual is capable of being morally good if they only follow the Bible as the Bible reveals God’s will, thus only biblical ethical commands must be followed
• Propositional knowledge:  Knowing or accepting something, it has truth value and can be true or false
• Non- propositional knowledge: Knowing how to do something and gain skills through the experience.
• • Propositional approach of the Bible: 

  Accepts truth that the words of the Bible are messages from God and is revealed directly to the reader on the page. some argue that the Bible provides Propositional knowledge, They would state the Bible is the truth – the commandments and beatitudes are fixed moral principles so it is all you need
• Non-propositional approach of the Bible: 

  Some argue it provides Non-propositional knowledge as it contains revealed knowledge through Jesus’ teachings which provided a gateway to understand how to live. When God revealed himself in Jesus he didn’t write a book or a set of rules to follow, he lived a human life and died a human death. This can be seen as a more personal and experiential approach to the Bible. The Bible is a gateway into encountering God.
• Biblicists

  Argue that the Bible is easy to understand how you should act morally by reading the Bible as it is God’s word and writer were divinely inspired.
• Biblicism – The belief that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that the writers of the Bible were directly inspired by God. It is the preferred term to fundamentalism which has gained negative connotations.
• The Bible offers propositional revelation

  • It is the ‘sola scriptura’ so has supreme authority
  • It is self-authenticating – any rational reader can clearly see the commands scripture, we don’t need any other interpretation
  • It is a comprehensive moral guide revealing God’s will
• ‘All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching’ (2 Timothy 3:16)
• ‘Prophets… spoke from God as they were carried along by the holy spirit’ (2 Peter)
• The Bible contains really clear guidance for some moral situations. Yet some argue that the bible does not adequately aid moral decision making given that it does not address modern advancements such as IVF, Genetic Engenieering and Business Ethics.

  Protestant Christians argue you can still use the Bible as a comprehensive guide because it can teach them the overarching values that can be applied to contemporary debates.
• Moral decision making is the task of finding correlations between Biblical revelation and moral issues, using different things in the Bible to teach us how to act.
• Richard Mouw

  In his book is ‘Biblical Imperatives’, he argues that the Bible is a statement of what is, of what God has already done for us through Christ, so all we need to do is follow what it says. Just because we are not directly guided on these more modern ideas within Biblical laws we are through stories within the Bible. 
• Rowan Williams 

  The Bible is a sort of parable in which God is saying “this is how people saw me, heard me and responded to me, this is a gift I gave them, this is the response they made, where are you in this?” 
• Rowan Williams argues that the Bible is a sort of parable in which God is saying “this is how people saw me, heard me and responded to me, this is a gift I gave them, this is the response they made, where are you in this?”
• • Calvin – the Bible is a form of revelation to provide us with sound knowledge of God.
• Biblicists - The Bible in tangible and empirical as it is written down and you can constantly keep picking it up and referring to it – It is the Word of God – has no errors in the Bible and therefore will always provide the correct guidance, ‘God breathed’
• • Catholicism Cathecism “God is the author of sacred scripture” and as the sola scripture it is clear and direct guidance on how to act - Bible is the only authority we need
• The Bible has contradictions so not dictated by God (would not make mistakes)

  • It includes lots of different writing styles (the gospels) which seem to point towards human authorship (for example Matthew implies Jewish heritage for the readers whereas Luke stops to explain Jewish culture as if the readers were not Jewish)
  • Sermon on the mount – contraction with teachings from Old Testament (Eye for Eye, replaced with ‘turn the other cheek)
  • Leviticus included rules that are not moral concerns so many Christians do not actually follow them (not allowed to cut certain facial hair)
• Calvin – Sensus Divinititas – We should take authority from out natural instincts as these are also God Given and our reason can interpret them effectively.
• Aquinas – Natural Law, four tiers of law, make God’s law available to us even though we are at epistemic distance so we know the synderesis principle and can apply it in order to achieve telos without reading scripture.
• Augustine – Humans wrote the Bible so they are flawed and therefore the Bible will never give us enough knowledge and we will never really understand as we are tainted by orginal sin so we will never we truly good.
• The Heteronomous approach utilises a combination of the Church, The Bible and reason
• ‘whoever hears you, hears me. Whoever rejects you, rejects me’. 
• The apostles and their successors created the ‘sacred tradition’

  Roman Catholics now follow the Magisterium as God Given guidance - The ‘deposit of faith’. Led by the Pope. These are teachings which were separate from the Bible, yet meant to help interpret and explain it for the laity.
•  Heteronomous Christians believe that it is the job of the Pope to help to clear things up for people – the Pope makes infallible statements as he Divinely chosen into that position of interpretation. 

  Christian moral principals should be influenced in the following manner:

  1. Church tradition 
  2. Then scripture
  3. Then guidance from The Magisterium 
  4. Then their own reason
• The authority of the pope comes with the following assumptions:

  • Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture are closely linked and both have the same source; God. 
  • Sacred Scripture - word of God which humans wrote under the guide of the Holy Spirit. 
  • Sacred Tradition transmits the word of God that Christ and the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles who, through evangelism, formed the Church
• Aquinas – Natural Law.

  What makes humans different from all other creatures is our ability to know God eternal law through reason. 

  This knowledge enables humans to use their reason to determine the morally correct way to act in accordance to God’s will.  
• Augustine and Barth: argued that Aquinas’ natural law theory was a false natural theology which placed a dangerous overreliance on human reason.
• For Aquinas human reason can gain knowledge of God in these three ways:

  1. The teleological (design) and cosmological arguments prove God’s existence
  2. God’s natural moral law through the ability of human reason to know the synderesis rule and primary precepts.
  3. God’s nature by analogy, through the analogies of attribution and proportion.
• Richard Hays 

  • “The interpretation of Scripture can never occur in a vacuum” You cannot examine scripture without reference to the Church communities and traditions in which it functions. 

  When faced with a moral decision, people should not be asking ‘how do I use this text?’ but rather ‘how do we as Christians, as part of a living Christian community and tradition interpret this text?’

  Ultimately, tradition is not a fixed entity, but, a healthy debate as the living church has sought throughout the ages to make sense of the context that it is in.
• Neil Messer 

  The Church provides a place of shared understanding within the Christian community and it informs it’s members how they ought to live their lives
• Barth:

  our finite minds cannot grasp God’s infinite being. Whatever humans discover through reason is therefore not divine so to think it is must then amount to idolatry – the worship of earthly things. Barth argued idolatry can lead to worship of nations and then even to movements like the Nazis. It follows for Barth that after the corruption of the fall, human reason cannot reach God or figure out right and wrong by itself. Only faith in God’s revelation in the bible is valid.
• “the finite has no capacity for the infinite” - Barth
• “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself, there is no commandment greater than these”
• “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:4)
• “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8)
• Joseph Fletcher rejects heteronomy as a form of legalism which don’t take situations into account. Inspired by the example of Jesus, argues that in any given situation, people should always act in the most loving way, according to the principle of agape. Places love at the centre of all decisions and rejects legalistic approaches.