CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Christian Ethics

Christian Ethics

Introduction

The three primary manifestations of Christianity—Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—have recognized that Christian faith involves a particular way of life. The good news of salvation in Jesus Christ calls for a life of discipleship. The scriptures point out that Christian believers are to live and act in certain ways. Conversion to Jesus Christ and membership in the Christian community involve moral exigencies.

Christian Ethics In General

The Bible is the book of Christianity, but it does not contain Christian ethics as such. The Bible does include moral teachings and descriptions of the moral life of believers in Yahveh and in Jesus. The distinction between morality and ethics is significant. Morality refers to the actions, dispositions, attitudes, virtues, and ways of life that should characterize the moral person and society, in this case the Christian person and the Christian community [1]. Christian ethics operates on the level of the theoretical and the scientific and tries to explain the Christian moral life in a thematic, systematic, coherent, and consistent manner. It is possible for one to attempt a biblical ethic that makes such an explanation of biblical morality, but that ethic would be based on the moral teaching found in Scripture. Biblical ethics and Christian ethics are not coextensive. The subject matter of Christian ethics is the Christian moral life and teaching, which is much broader than biblical moral life and teaching.

Sources

What distinguishes Christian ethics from philosophical ethics and other religious ethics are the sources of wisdom and knowledge that contribute to Christian ethics. All Christian ethics recognizes the Christian scriptures, tradition, and church teaching as the revelatory sources of moral wisdom and knowledge [2]. However, there is much discussion as to how these sources relate to one another and to the no revelatory sources of Christian ethics. The three major expressions of Christianity—Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—and their corresponding ethical traditions emphasize different sources of Christian ethics.

Early History

In the first one thousand years of Christianity, there was no discipline of Christian ethics as such. Moral teaching was primarily pastoral, apologetically, homiletically, and catechetical, although at times there were systematic studies of particular issues. An early problem for the Christian church was the relationship of Christian mores to the culture and mores of the wider society. Pedagogical devices such as "the two ways" (elaborated on in the Didache and Shepherd of Hermas) and catalogs of virtues and vices were used by the early Christian writers. Often the patristic authors borrowed from Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophies of the times.

In the West after the third century, the most significant figures were Ambrose, Augustine, and Pope Gregory I. Ambrose's De officiis is perhaps the most systematic, scientific approach to Christian morality, with its basis in the treatise of Cicero. Gregory, in his homilies and his Moralia in Job, often relies on the moral teaching of Augustine but emphasizes the practical and pastoral aspects of Christian morality. Augustine defends a Christian moral understanding against the dualism and pessimism of Manichaeans ...