Christian Ethics

• Theonomous Christian Ethics

  • place God at the centre, God‘s commandments are what is required for living morally
  • humans are sinful from the Fall, they can’t make decisions themselves so they must use the direct words of God, found in the Bible
• Heteronomous Christian Ethics

  • a variety of sources of authority for morals
  • the Bible remains important, although is old so mortality requires additional support to be understood, eg. from the Church or from reason, or both
• Autonomous Christian Ethics

  • the authority is placed onto the individual
  • love as a guiding force to make moral decisions
• Analysing Theonomous Ethics

  some suggest that the Bible contains contradictions, eg. a change in approach to revenge and violence between the Old and New Testaments
• Analysing Heteronomous Ethics

  the Bible is a form of “non-propositional revelation“ (the idea that God does not reveal himself through truth statements, so the revelation might need interpretation)
• Analysing autonomous ethics: Is life sufficient to live a good life? - YES

  • love gives us all we need to have the confidence to follow our instincts
  • love is the only force that can fully recognise the ever-changing moral situations we find ourselves in
  • live is a fundamental and extreme human emotion and so God could well have expected that to drive us
  • love can empower Christians to put others first in challenging times
  • Jesus promoted love, his authority cannot be denied for Christians
• Analysing autonomous ethics: Is life sufficient to live a good life? - NO

  • it is over-simplistic to suggest that Jesus’ teachings were only about love
  • it is naive to assume that we have a universal idea of love
  • love requires reason to understand how to live life, it is too complicated to be the solution on its own
  • love becomes an excuse for people to do what they want
  • agape love is not achievable to most humans, it is unlikely that God would expect the unachievable from him people
• Are Christian ethics distinctive?

  • theonomous ethics will have lots in common with deontological ethics
  • heteronomous ethics overlap with utilitarianism and situation ethics
• Hauerwas - Heteronomous Christian Ethics

  • Christian ethics can only be done within the Christian worshipping community
  • Christian ethics are part of a narrative which develops out of the Bible and continues on through Christian history and tradition