A Defence Of Theological Ethics

This book addresses questions about the nature and status of moral personal being and the challenges the humanist poses to the Christian.

Annotation What are the practical and theoretical issues that concern and shape theological ethics? This handbook offers a guide to the discipline. Written by an international group of 30 scholars, the book is aimed at all students and academics who want to explore more fully essential topics in Christian ethics.

This book endorses feminist critiques of gender, yet upholds the insight of traditional Christianity that sex, commitment and parenthood are fulfilling human relations. Their unity is a positive ideal, though not an absolute norm. Women and men should enjoy equal personal respect and social power. In reply to feminist critics of oppressive gender and sex norms and to communitarian proponents of Christian morality, Cahill argues that effective intercultural criticism of injustice requires a modest defence of moral objectivity. She thus adopts a critical realism as its moral foundation, drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas. Moral judgment should be based on reasonable, practical, prudent and cross-culturally nuanced reflection on human experience. This is combined with a New Testament model of community, centred on solidarity, compassion and inclusion of the economically or socially marginalised.

Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Moralists and American Legal Thought shows how methods and doctrines drawn from the American legal tradition can constructively advance the discussion of key issues in Christian ethics. More broadly, the book argues that religious ethicists should consider legal thought to be a valuable conversation partner on a par with philosophical thought. Each of the chapters places the work of an important contemporary figure in Christian ethics in conversation with particular legal cases and questions. The book is divided into three major parts: “Narratives and Norms,” “Love, Justice, and Law,” and “Legal Categories and Theological Problems.” Ethicists considered include John Noonan Jr., Stanley Hauerwas, Jeffrey Stout, Gene Outka, Margaret Farley, Paul Ramsey, Robert E. Rodes Jr., Walter Kasper, Germain Grisez and H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. Legal topics explored include the development of the common law as a morally rich tradition, the relationship between rules and particular cases, and the role of individual experience in formulating generally applicable norms. Theological issues discussed include the meaning of covenant fidelity, the requirements of compassion, and the demands of neighbor love. Fruitful intersections between law and theological ethics are developed by considering particular examples and cases from contract law, criminal law, and health-care law. Ethics at the Edges of Law ends by examining the various and often conflicting meanings of the term “legalism,” which has long been considered a derogatory term in Christian moral thought.

This book addresses an important topic and fills a major gap in developments in modern theology and Christian ethics. Significant treatments include Wolfhart Pannenberg's historical overview of the relationship between modernism and Christian faith, John Webster's meticulous analysis of Christian theology's contribution to modern conceptions of conscience, J. L. O'Donovan's critique of liberal contractarian theory, and Alasdair MacIntyre's examination of the critical issues which Christianity raises for secular philosophy.

A study in Catholic moral theology, this work argues for a focus not on behaviour but on intent, and draws on thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to the Second Vatican Council.

The philosophical revival of virtue ethics has not gone unnoticed by theologians, who have made some of the most important contributions to the 'turn to virtue'. Largely absent, though, is a theological response to the many criticisms that have been levelled at modern virtue ethics. This book fills that gap, addressing various concerns including claims that virtue ethics is incomplete and inconsistent; that it flies in the face of psychological reality; and that it commits itself to unpalatable moral positions such as egoism, relativism and particularism. To each of these it gives a response grounded in moral and metaphysical theological commitments, often suggesting new approaches not explored by secular thinkers. In doing so it refutes the criticisms at hand and makes a positive case for a distinctively theological virtue ethics.