No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Of all our theological disciplines Christian ethics appears to be the one most open to attack. However careful the modern exponents of Calvinism have been in setting forth the truths of God's sovereignty and human depravity, they have sometimes used language which suggests that, since all good actions are the outcome of God's grace, ‘Christianity transcends morality altogether, and there is no such thing as a Christian ethic’. Again the apparently rigorous determinism of both Dialectical Materialism and Freudian Psychology has been interpreted in popular thought as removing every possibility of moral responsibility, for men's actions are thought to be as mechanistically determined as all other events in physical nature. Today the emphasis on personal decision in much existentialist thought is a welcome reaction against such determinisms whether theological or scientific. Yet the very demand for a new recognition of human freedom has sparked off a new attack on the Christian ethic, at any rate as this has been taught in the tradition of the Church. This ethic is now being labelled authoritarian, puritan, legalistic, rigoristic, heteronomous and the like, and it is taken for granted that these are all derogatory terms. If we are to seek a slogan for this new attack, we cannot find a better one than the familiar, if not quite accurate, translation of the saying of St. Augustine, ‘Love and do what you like’, and it is by examining this principle, that we shall try to gain some light on the position of Christian ethics today.
page 444 note 1 Baillie, D. M., God was in Christ (London, 1948), p. 115.Google Scholar
page 444 note 2 In Epist. Ioannis Tract. VII.8 (‘Dilige et quod vis fac’).
page 445 note 1 Robinson, J. A. T., Honest to God (London, 1963), p. 47.Google Scholar
page 445 note 2 ibid., p. 49.
page 445 note 3 ibid., p. 49.
page 446 note 1 God, Sex and War (ed. MacKinnon, D. M.) (London, 1963), p. 78.Google Scholar
page 446 note 2 MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Moral Objections’ in Objections to Christian Belief (London, 1963). PP. 13–15.Google Scholar
page 446 note 3 Shorter Catechism, Q. 19.
page 447 note 1 Contra Julianum, lib. III, cap. cii.
page 448 note 1 Plato, Symposium, 181.
page 448 note 2 Honest to God, p. 115.
page 449 note 1 Nygren, A., Agape and Eros (English translation by Watson, P. S., London, 1939), Pt. II, Vol. II, p. 281.Google Scholar
page 449 note 2 Honest to God, p. 118.
page 449 note 3 Objections to Christian Belief, p. 16f.
page 450 note 1 Objections to Christian Belief, p. 24.
page 450 note 2 God, Sex and War, p. 78.
page 451 note 1 Objections to Christian Belief, p. 14.
page 451 note 2 This Island Now (London, 1963).
page 452 note 1 Root, H. E. in God, Sex and War, p. 33.Google Scholar
page 452 note 2 Objections to Christian Belief, p. 29.
page 452 note 3 Soundings, ed. Vidler, A. R. (Cambridge, 1962), p. 81f.Google Scholar
page 454 note 1 Kant, , Theory of Ethics, translated Abbott, T. K. (3rd ed., London, 1883), pp. 296–302.Google Scholar
page 454 note 2 London, 1961.
page 454 note 3 Towards a Quaker View of Sex.
page 454 note 4 Objections to Christian Belief, p. 27.
page 455 note 1 Where One Man Stands (Edinburgh, 1960), p. 56.Google Scholar
page 455 note 2 Aberdeen University Review, Vol. XXXIX, 4 (Autumn 1962), p. 304.Google Scholar