Faith And Moral Authority

This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.

A modern-day cleansing of the temple takes place as this author tracks down the major objections to and criticisms of the Christian faith. Many, perhaps most, of the great critics of Christianity have rejected it largely on moral grounds. What Dean Cupitt planned was a study of these moral criticisms with an evaluation of how strong they yare. What emerges from his study is a picture of how confused and complex the Christian tradition is. Christianity has lost moral authority, he discovers, not only by teaching the wrong moral principles, but also by teaching too many different ones. What is needed is a moral purge of the Christian tradition itself. Dean Cupitt suggests some of the lines such a purge should take: The harsh old anthropomorphic story theology must go.; Much in the ascetical tradition is simply morbid and should be end.; The doctrine of male supremacy that is causing much feminist finger-pointing today must be subdued.; A more genuinely liberal theology may be able to renounce physical and, even more importantly, psychological terrorism; but only if the old authoritarian imagery is discarded, imagery which suggests that the church, in its heart of hearts, would like to take the world back into the cruel past.; Christianity's alliance with the state led it to make a mistaken claim that it could underwrite or validate moral principles; in reality, it crowns them.; Theology must abandon the notion of a single, authoritative, orthodox faith, and there must be higher standards of intellectual honesty in church life. Moral criticism of the condition of contemporary religion is the first step in renewal, and Dean Cupitt's book is an excellent starting point for anyone seriously interested in the Christian faith and its future. -Publisher

In Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, theologian David Wells argues that the Church is in danger of losing its moral authority to speak to a culture whose moral fabric is torn. Although much of the Church has enjoyed success and growth over the past years, Wells laments a "hollowing out of evangelical conviction, a loss of the biblical word in its authoritative function, and an erosion of character to the point that today, no discernible ethical differences are evident in behavior when those claiming to have been reborn and secularists are compared." The assurance of the Good News of the gospel has been traded for mere good feelings, truth has given way to perception, and morality has slid into personal preference. Losing Our Virtue is about the disintegrating moral culture that is contemporary society and what this disturbing loss means for the church. Wells covers the following in this bold critique: how the theologically emptied spirituality of the church is causing it to lose its moral bearings; an exploration of the wider dynamic at work in contemporary society between license and law; an exposition of the secular notion of salvation as heralded by our most trusted gurus -- advertisers and psychotherapists; a discussion of the contemporary view of the self; how guilt and sin have been replaced by empty psychological shame; an examination of the contradiction between the way we view ourselves in the midst of our own culture and the biblical view of persons as created, moral beings. Can the church still speak effectively to a culture that has become morally unraveled? Wells believes it can. In fact, says Wells, no time in this century has been more opportune for the Christian faith -- if the church can muster the courage to regain its moral weight and become a missionary of truth once more to a foundering world. - Publisher.

Why churches in some democratic nations wield enormous political power while churches in other democracies don't In some religious countries, churches have drafted constitutions, restricted abortion, and controlled education. In others, church influence on public policy is far weaker. Why? Nations under God argues that where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gain enormous moral authority—and covert institutional access. These powerful churches then shape policy in backrooms and secret meetings instead of through open democratic channels such as political parties or the ballot box. Through an in-depth historical analysis of six Christian democracies that share similar religious profiles yet differ in their policy outcomes—Ireland and Italy, Poland and Croatia, and the United States and Canada—Anna Grzymała-Busse examines how churches influenced education, abortion, divorce, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage. She argues that churches gain the greatest political advantage when they appear to be above politics. Because institutional access is covert, they retain their moral authority and their reputation as defenders of the national interest and the common good. Nations under God shows how powerful church officials in Ireland, Canada, and Poland have directly written legislation, vetoed policies, and vetted high-ranking officials. It demonstrates that religiosity itself is not enough for churches to influence politics—churches in Italy and Croatia, for example, are not as influential as we might think—and that churches allied to political parties, such as in the United States, have less influence than their notoriety suggests.

This book was written in 1970, in the days when even the Church Times was welcoming Don Cupitt as a stalwart believer. However, as the author now points out, it is an important pointer to the future. The straitlaced early Cupitt is obviously struggling to prevent the later Cupitt from bursting out.' Its starting point was straightforward enough. Many, perhaps most of the great critics of Christianity have rejected it chiefly on moral grounds. Yet, because they have tended to suffer from an entrenched sense of their own moral superiority, Christians have never really taken this fact seriously enough and so have failed fully to understand one very important factor in the modern world's rejection of faith, The idea was therefore to outline the principal moral criticisms of Christianity, in order to discover how strong they are and what should be done about them. This was the beginning of a course which took Don Cupitt, as he himself confesses, much further than he ever expected.Many have parted company on the way at various stages; they, and those who find what Don Cupitt says speaks to them more than most modern theology, will find that these early stages, in retrospect, make fascinating reading.

Jeffrey Stout argues that modern thought was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired to autonomy from all traditional influence. The quest for autonomy was an attempt to begin completely anew. As such it was bound to fail. Stout traces the secularization of public discourse and its effect on the relation between theism and culture as well as the severance of morality from traditional moorings in favor of autonomy. He is unabashedly historical in his approach, defending the thesis that all thought is historically conditioned and that historical insight is essential to self-understanding. Each section of the book takes up a major problem in contemporary philosophy - the nature of knowledge, the rationality of religious belief, the autonomy of morality- and sets that problem against the background of early modern disputes over authority. The result is simultaneously a critique of ahistorical biases, a survey of major developments in modern thought, and a normative treatment of the problems addressed. The book culminates in the final section with an account of post-Kantian concern with the autonomy of morals. Morality attained relative independence as a form of discourse only in the modern period, but the nature of this independence is distorted when construed in foundationalist or Kantian terms. After criticizing methodological assumptions in recent moral philosophy and religious ethics, Stout sketches his own account of the emergence of autonomy for morality, stressing the need for substantial rethinking of the relationship between religion and ethics. In a concluding chapter, he places his own position in relation to the philosophical tradition descendant from Hegel.

Religion and Morality addresses central issues arising from religion's relation to morality. Part I offers a sympathetic but critical appraisal of the claim that features of morality provide evidence for the truth of religious belief. Part II examines divine command theories, objections to them, and positive arguments in their support. Part III explores tensions between human morality, as ordinarily understood, and religious requirements by discussing such issues as the conflict between Buddhist and Christian pacifism and requirements of justice, whether 'virtue' without a love of God is really a vice, whether the God of the Abrahamic religions could require us to do something that seems clearly immoral, and the ambiguous relations between religious mysticism and moral behavior. Covering a broad range of topics, this book draws on both historical and contemporary literature, and explores afresh central issues of morality and religion offering new insights for students, academics and the general reader interested in philosophy and religion.