Doing Justice to Justice: Competing Frameworks of Interpretation in Christian Social Ethics

This freedom is a by-product of the Spirit's presence; it is a gift from God. The freedom that the Spirit gives the church, however, is not the freedom of individual choice. The Spirit instead, binds believers to 'the other'. Jones in Gill The presence of the Spirit within believers, and the subsequent 'fruit of the Spirit' that shows itself through the actions and dispositions of believers, ultimately also challenges the free agency of the moral actors that all ethical systems require.

As we have seen, the freedom that the Spirit offers is not the freedom to choose between 'good' and 'bad', but rather to be free from such choices. In Christ believers are free from sin and free to serve God. Believers can, however, never own their good character or behaviour. They cannot improve themselves. They can only 'remain' within the vine Jn 15 and look to the Spirit to bear fruit in and through them. It is theological' Hoose A second limitation that the good news about Christ places on utilising the concept of ethics within the context of the Christian faith lies in the gospel's message of grace.

Those who are under grace know that they belong on the side of those who are shown to be in the wrong. Grace does not allow those affected by it to take up the position of judging other people or even themselves. Christian ethicists, according to Wogaman He further comments that: The recurring dilemma is that moral rules and even moral activism, apart from grace, derive from self-centredness; but grace apart from moral actions is empty - indeed, it is not even grace.

Somehow Christian ethics must link grace and moral action, even while it affirms the priority of grace. In contrast to this, grace should be seen as first of all linking those who experience it to a deep awareness of being in the wrong; to the conviction that they, themselves, are in need of forgiveness. Christians do experience this forgiveness; by grace they do believe that they have been put right with God. Grace, however, always binds them to the confession that they do not possess this 'righteousness' in and of themselves, but only indirectly in Christ.

Without faith in Christ, the resurrected human, has no possibility of being in the right with God or with other people. Grace thus places the righteous next to the sinner. The righteous remains a sinner - simul iustus et peccator - the phrase that Luther famously used to describe the position of believers. Luther , in his classic work Concerning Christian liberty correctly indicates that grace frees the Christian from external moral works by which to earn salvation In his discussion Luther still continues to use moral categories for describing the Christian life, even though 'with Luther there is no longer an objective content to morality' Wogaman This is because grace, when correctly perceived, only knows the confession of guilt when focused on the self, and forgiveness and righteousness when focused, by faith, on Christ.

Grace strips away all moral righteousness; moral and religious righteousness are instead shown to be the enemies of the gospel of grace. It is the man who delights in not being like the robbers, evildoers, adulterers Lk There is no objective distance between Christians and those who do wrong. Christians cannot set themselves apart from, or over against the sins of others, for the grace of God convicts them that they too, are in the wrong; they have to confess their own wrongdoing before God even while becoming aware of the sins of others.

Grace convicts Christians that they too are -and will continue to be - in need of God's forgiveness. The role of conscience. Conscience, the voice of morality, is often linked to the voice of God.

Doing Justice to Justice: Competing Frameworks of Interpretation in Christian Social Ethics

Jerome used the term syneidesis to refer to a holy transcendent element that is present as a moral ability in all humans, driving them to a good conscience. It is surely unacceptable to say that Christian ethics here find one of its most important concepts, that of a special moral organ through which man can escape the effects of the corruption and can respond in obedience, with the whole of his existence, to God's command.

The term syneidesis does occur in the New Testament, but then mostly in a positive context such as in 1 Peter 3: Conscience does not refer to some form of 'moral organ', Berkhouwer notes: This consciousness is closely related to salvation, to baptism, to sanctification, to purification Heb. We find ourselves not in the context of an autonomous moral organ but rather in that of practical action.

The conscience is not an organ wholly separate from the heart with which men believe. The conscience expresses the richness of life in communion with God and the prospect of salvation, which resonates into the deepest regions of man's heart and life, and so leads to godly boldness.

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This transformation of the conscience, from condemning to affirming is closely linked to God's gracious forgiveness of sinners Rm 8: It can praise and blame, but never forgive. The act of forgiveness needs the personal dimensions of grace and love.

Doing justice to justice :

Morality may call for sacrificial actions to enable the guilty to redeem him or herself for past transgressions, but morality can never deliver a free pardon to the guilty. This is, however, exactly what God does. The scandal that the unjust are forgiven without having to do anything to deserve it stands at the very heart of the gospel. It is the task of human beings, MacIntyre quoted in McMylor suggests: To forgive the guilty, however, is to shatter the moral concept of justice. Forgiveness is always subversive, an act of sabotage against the very edifice of morality.

The church, as the gathering of the forgiven, is by definition called to be a forgiving community. Christians are to forgive as they have been forgiven Mt 6: The church continues to live out of the forgiveness of God: The Christian is certainly in some sense a new creature, but that clearly means not another species altogether, but a creature, a man transformed or renewed, whose transformation and renewal cannot be articulated apart from some understanding of his existence as a creature independent of that renewal.

This means that the individual Christian as well as the church as a whole has no supernatural access to God enabling them to always only do what is right; the individual Christian and the church remain fallible, open to making the wrong decisions, leaving them at the mercy of God's forgiveness alone.

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Sometimes, in a broken world, there are no 'right' decisions to make. Morality insists that one should be able to make judgements that, though difficult, ultimately do not condemn you. By following the right process; or acting from the right motives; or having the right goal in mind, people's decisions can be excused, exculpated; and they themselves exonerated, even turned into heroes. Christians have no such luxury, Christians have to acknowledge that, within this broken reality, they sometimes only have the option of making a wrong decision before them; that none of the choices that are open to them are compatible with the will of God; that any decision they make will ultimately lead to hurting and damaging some innocent party.

In making their decisions Christians are not able to shift the blame away from themselves. They have to take responsibility for their decisions, they have to own their guilt, confess their personal sin and liability for the consequences that flow from their decisions: Against orthodox Christianity, the prophetic tradition of Christianity must insist on the relevance of the ideal of love to the moral experience of mankind on every conceivable level But every conceivable order in the historical world contains an element of anarchy.

Its world rests on contingency and caprice. The obligation to support and enhance it can therefore only arise and maintain itself upon the basis of a faith that it is the partial fruit of a deeper unity and the promise of a more perfect harmony than is revealed in any immediate situation. Christians can only make God's choices on the basis that God forgives sins. God's forgiveness is itself, based on an act of injustice, that of the innocent Jesus dying on a cross in the place of evildoers.

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Instead of trying to find reasons to be shown to be 'in the right', Christians expect to be declared righteous by their faith in Christ alone, the one who embodies God's love for those who are in the wrong and in need of forgiveness. Postmodernism has forced ethics to reconsider its underlying foundations. It was shown that there is no meta-ethical unanimity concerning any such foundation.

As the foundation for ethics ultimately determines the whole ethical enterprise, this has led many ethicists to the option of non-foundational ethics. The problem with non-foundational ethics, I have argued, is that it too easily falls prey to fideism and thus to uncontrolled relativity.

I reflected on the underlying similarities between ethics and religion and then argued that the Christian faith operates with a unique set of presuppositions which may enable it to overcome some key meta-ethical issues. I have shown that the Christian theological meta-ethical framework set up a unique Christian theological operational theory which transforms broken reality through actions marked by faith, grace, forgiveness and love.

The way in which the Christian faith operates when confronted with a broken reality was shown to be radically different from the operations of ethics. The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article. New transcendental arguments in moral philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Critic of modernity, Routledge, London.

It needs more science', Acta Biotheoretica 59 1 , Essays on its history, philosophy, and religious implications, Routledge, London. A defense of ethical contextualism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. An eschatological ontological model for interpreting the Sermon on the Mount', Verbum et Ecclesia 35 1 , 7 pages.

Morals or morality is used as an alternative term and is derived from the Latin term mores which encompasses the semantic fields of custom, approval, good, obligatory, right and worthy see Kimmel What values, principles of conduct, ideals and aspirations, are rules grounded in, backed by or based upon our understanding of God and God's relation to the world? They do not presuppose any particular position on moral ontology or on moral epistemology.

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Presumably, a deontologist can be a moral realist of either the natural moral properties are identical to natural properties or nonnatural moral properties are not themselves natural properties even if they are nonreductively related to natural properties variety. These overlap and meet at the edges, but much confusion has come about from failure to see clearly that they are different frames of reference.

Christian ethics may mean 1 the best in the moral philosophy of all ages and places, 2 the moral standards of Christendom, 3 the ethics of the Christian Church and its many churches, 4 the ethics of the Bible, 5 the ethics of the New Testament, and 6 the ethical insights of Jesus' Harkness In this paper the notion of Christian ethics is aligned to the obedient, hopeful and loving actions of Christian believers in the praxis, as a consequence of their faith in God in response to his grace in Christ; and flowing from the presence of his Spirit's presence in and work through the church and individual believers to put up signs of the Kingdom of God, within this broken world, of the alternative reality inaugurated through the person and work of Christ.

It can be argued that ethics is the critical process by which people seek to gain some neutral place from which to choose between right and wrong. While the judiciary endeavours to find a neutral foundation in the law, ethics does so on the deeper philosophical distinction between right and wrong. View online Borrow Buy. Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

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