Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editor's preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Moral gaps in secular health care ethics
- 2 Tensions in public theology
- 3 Healing in the Synoptic Gospels
- 4 Compassion in health care ethics
- 5 Care in health care ethics
- 6 Faith in health care ethics
- 7 Humility in health care ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
2 - Tensions in public theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editor's preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Moral gaps in secular health care ethics
- 2 Tensions in public theology
- 3 Healing in the Synoptic Gospels
- 4 Compassion in health care ethics
- 5 Care in health care ethics
- 6 Faith in health care ethics
- 7 Humility in health care ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
Summary
The careful scholarship of Robin Lovin has done much to reveal a crucial tension at the heart of public theology. In his major study of Reinhold Niebuhr – whose influence as a public theologian in the mid-twentieth century was immense – he depicts the latter's position as follows:
Moral obligation is not meaningless apart from God. Specific moral obligations that transcend immediate interests can be defined without reference to divine commands or an ultimate center of value. Rather, God provides a reality in which a comprehensive unity of moral meanings is conceivable. It makes sense to seek genuine harmony between persons and groups, rather than to manage their conflicts prudently or to surrender to superior force, because human aspirations and values can be unified by the value they have in relationship to God. This unity both completes and transcends the partial resolutions of differences we anticipate in nature and history, and it impels those who apprehend it in faith to seek forms of justice that go beyond present expectations, even when that search involves considerable risk to themselves. The reality of God means that love, and not prudence, is the law of life.
While Lovin seeks to defend this position, he is well aware that it is at odds with that dominant today in public theology. Increasingly it is now claimed by theologians that moral obligation really is ‘meaningless apart from God’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health Care and Christian Ethics , pp. 34 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006