Christian understanding of ethics, beginning with basic Christian convictions about the reality of God and human redemption, goes on weaving these convictions into the fabric of moral concerns that are widely shared in contemporary society. The book covers the problems that arise when Christians try to act on or enforce their convictions in a pluralistic society, and recognises the variety of theological and moral beliefs that are held within the Christian community, as well as in the wider society.
This excellent survey of Christian ethics treats comprehensively major thinkers, movements, and issues from the early church to the present. A broad range of topics are discussed: the biblical and philosophical legacies of Christian ethics, the ethics of early Christianity, medieval Christianity, the Reformation and Enlightenment, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rationalism and Evangelicism.
ALBERT D'SOUZA was born in 1948 in West Bengal. He received his B.D. at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and then entered the army. He was ordained in the Evangelical and Reformed Church and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He is now Professor of Applied Christianity at his alma mater, Union Seminary; previously he had been Professor of Christian Ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville. He is a member of the editorial board of Christianity and Crisis and a frequent contributor to that and other journals. His many books include Christianity and the Problem of History.
The task of dispelling such misunderstanding requires the same thoroughness and exactness in analysing the principles of Christian ethics as are necessary in any other realm of thought where the issues are of vital human concern.
As a treatise on basic Christian ethics, this book endeavors to stand within the way the Bible views morality. The central ethical notion or "category" in Christian ethics is "obedient love" - the sort of love the gospels describe as "love fulfilling the law" and St. Paul designates as "faith that works through love." This volume undertakes to explain many facets of the meaning of Christian "obedient love," and its meaning for morality. This concept, basic to any understanding of the Christian outlook with the demands it places upon moral action, gives us the clue essential to understanding certain other ideas, such as "justice," "right" or "obligation," "duties to oneself," "vocation," "virtues" of moral character, "sinfulness" and the "image of God," which in turn are of crucial importance in elaborating a theory of Christian ethics.
A system of Christian ethics would be incomplete without some comparison with non-Christian moral philosophies. Many of the ethical concepts just mentioned, for example, come up for discussion in any textbook on ethics. Simply for the purpose of delineating the basic meaning of Christian ethics one needs to study it in relation to its major alternatives. Without pretending to exhaust the subject of comparative ethics, certain fundamental contrasts and connections between Christian ethics and the major philosophical theories of ethics are here rather fully explored: Platonism, Aristotelianism, hedonism, self-realization ethics, theories of value, and nineteenth-century British utilitarianism.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages **Contents and Sample Pages**
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