Alternatives within Christian Ethics

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Alternatives within Christian Ethics
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Roman Catholic

• Begin with philosophy
• Vatican Council II, 1962-1965
• Morality based on law divine, natural, human
• Objective right and wrong
• Double effect to resolve conflicts
• nature of act is good
• good effect be intended (evil is indirect)
• simultaneous
• proportionality

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(contd.)

• Other methods hierarchy of values
• prima facie claims
• Faith affects vision and motive, but not
• content. Morality is the same for
• all people.

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Protestant approaches

• Begin with Bible
• Ethical Center
• Reinhold Niebuhr impossible possibility
• Sacrificial love
• Paul Ramsey Christocentric Ethics.
• Obedience to Jesus

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(contd.)

• Situation Ethics
• Joseph Fletcher. Love is only absolute
• Four working principles
• pragmatism
• relativism
• positivism
• personalism
• Paul Lehman. Matter of faith rather of ethics

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(contd.)

• Absolutist Ethics
• Robertson McQuilkin. Bible has all the answers
• We need only to search the Scriptures
• No need for Philosophy or Science

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(contd.)

• Evangelical Ethics
• Lewis Smedes. Mere Morality. Morality is
  universal
• Gods demands apply to all, even to
• nonbelievers
• Ten Commandments starting point
• direct commands vs. abiding laws

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(contd.)

• Justice and Love
• Respect for values
• Focus on commands, not on exceptions

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(contd.)

• Theocentric Ethics
• James Gustafson
• Eight central emphases
• humankind is not central in creation
• human life and rest of creation are
  interdependent
• moral thinking vs. judging over natural impulses
• piety as natural response

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(contd.)

• everything described within larger whole context
• concern for common good is essential
• awareness of moral ambiguity in life
• strong emphasis on self-denial and self-sacrifice
• Powerful sense of the Other,
• piety, order (?Gods purposes)

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Liberation Ethics

• Begin with the experience of the poor
• and oppressed
• Commit oneself to liberation
• Read Bible texts that speak of Liberation
• (especially Exodus)

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(contd.)

• African-American Themes
• James Cone denounces evils, sees them in
• white church. Blackness of Jesus
• J. Deotis Roberts ignores white church,
• emphasizes what black churches have done
• and ought to do

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(contd.)

• Feminist Themes
• reaction against patriarchal order of society,
  and of the church
• want a renewed vision of the community
• womanist term used by black women
• Julian of Norwich motherhood of Jesus