Abstract
Christian ethics cannot be reduced to one normative philosophical framework. Instead, given its unique motive and end, Christian ethics appropriates a variety of methods in its implementation. Turning to Augustine and Reformed Augustinianisms, I offer a constructive interpretation that argues the root of Christian ethics lies in a relationship founded in Christ. A brief look at figures such as Augustine, Calvin, Edwards, and Barth locates the centrality of Christology in their respective ethics. Here the Christian moral life is one of reception and action or union with the Divine while loving the neighbor in ways that entail virtue, obligation, and sometimes consequentialist reasoning. The construal I propose is relational in structure and thus also involves feminist components.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, see Hollenbach (2002). This statement must be qualified given the focus of Hollenbach and many others concern the broad interests of justice and pluralism in relation to human rights while still recognizing the particular claims within the Christian tradition. James Keenan, Moral Wisdom (2010), and more recently, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Global Justice: Christology and Christian Ethics (2013), continue development on the Catholic common good while shifting their focus more to union with God and Christology respectively.
- 2.
For a broader and more in-depth analysis of Christological virtue ethics in Augustine and vocation in Barth, see my work entitled Sabbath Rest as Vocation: Aging Toward Death (2018). The seeds of thought on Augustine, Barth, and union with Christ were initially pursued there while I later developed these ideas in relation to the Reformed figures represented in this work. In addition, given the emphasis placed here on reception and action or contemplation and practice, further comparative work across traditions would be beneficial, though outside the scope of this particular paper. The third wave of comparative religious ethics that focuses on how practices shape character would be beneficial in conversation with Buddhism in particular. See Thomas A. Lewis (2012) on practice, habits, and character.
- 3.
Billings offers a historical overview of the Belhar Confession drafted as a response to the racially divided communion context of the Dutch Reformed Church during South African apartheid in 1982. The spirit of the confession emphasizes unity as gift and obligation across racial divides. However, appropriating the confession involved a complex narrative given the racially divided context of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa and the movement toward justice and racial reconciliation over time. See Chapter 4 in Billings, Union with Christ, 98–107.
- 4.
Perhaps my description of “negative” self-interest might be associated with illegitimate self-interest as opposed to legitimate self-love described by Robert Merrihew Adams (1999).
- 5.
See also Paul Helm who describes the Spirit’s work in offering gifts of nature, science, medicine, and the arts in Helm (2004, 387).
- 6.
- 7.
The reason Edwards is not included in this list is because of his varying passages describing justification by faith alone on the one hand with hints of Thomism in his emphasis on the role of obedience for ongoing union with God on the other. See McClymond and McDermott (2012, 6–7).
- 8.
- 9.
Also, while Augustine does not write of actualism or dynamism in God or human activity, he does emphasize the Christian life as one of ongoing repentance and faith, dying and rising that implies growth through time—though perfection is delayed until the Eschaton.
- 10.
Here Simone de Beauvoir would depart from Augustine and his Reformed followers in her explicit rejection of the “mystic” approach to identity as one dependent on religious conceptions of God. While Beauvoir acknowledges the subjective self is never devoid of society or extrinsic objects for forging one’s identity, she seemingly rejects religious ways of conceiving the self as harmful to women. See Simone de Beavoir, The Second Sex (1989, 670).
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Ridenour, A.A. (2019). Union with Christ: Participation as the Ground of Christian Ethics in Augustine and Reformed Augustinianisms. In: Ranganathan, B., Woodard-Lehman, D. (eds) Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25193-2_9
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