The author argues that to explore what is distinctly Christian about Christian bioethics requires clarity about what is Christian. He distinguishes between the Christian (that which can be identified as authentically Christian), Christianity (the sum of that which is authentically Christian), and ecclesiastical traditions (the historic communities of faith and practice that are predicated upon both Christian and extra-Christian tradition) to critically assess what is to be declared Christian. In addition to exploring the role of New Testament scripture in identifying (...) the Christian, the author emphasizes the need to recognize the extent to which the content of Christianity is Hebraic and Jewish. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 4, Page 694-714, December 2021.

This paper explores the problem of universalism and particularism in contemporary ethics, and its relationship to Christian bioethics in particular. An ethic of human dignity is outlined, which, it is argued, constrains moral discourse in the broad sense – thus meeting the demands of universalism – but which is at the same time amenable to a variety of particularist interpretations – thus acknowledging the current shift toward historicism, traditionalism, and culture. The particularist interpretations that are of central concern here are (...) those provided by historic Christianity. The eventual goal is to indicate how a Christian conception of human dignity can have universal normative relevance both as a standard against which to assess competing particularist conceptions, and as a practical guide for everyday living. A Christian conception of dignity will in turn have significant implications when addressing contemporary issues in bioethics. These are ambitious goals, and a full explication of the ideas presented will not be possible in this context. Nevertheless, there is value in getting a bird's-eye view of the landscape before one goes about scaling the mountains and exploring the valleys. The present essay is intended as a general geography of the moral terrain in which an ethic of dignity in general, and a Christian perspective on dignity in particular, can provide normative guidance. (shrink)

One of the central tasks of meta-ethical inquiry is to accommodate the common-sense assumptions deeply embedded in our moral discourse. A comparison of the potential of secular and theistic ethics shows that, in the end, theists have a greater facility in achieving this accommodation task; it is easier to appreciate the action-guiding authority and binding nature of morality in a theistic rather than in a secular context. Theistic ethics has a further advantage in being able to accommodate not only this (...) essential conceptual feature of morality, but also the existence of moral requirements and their source of normativity. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the (...) ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism. (shrink)

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter-narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper-Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On (...) Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term. (shrink)

This brief response aims to contextualize and reflect further on James Gustafson's new essay regarding “participation” in relation to God, nature, and human beings. In it I attempt to address Gustafson's innovative method and the difference it makes for interpreting some of his previous work. For the first time Gustafson's direct mode of access to the meaning and implications of human participation is through his own experience. I argue that he breaks new ground with what might be called descriptive experiential (...) analysis, moving forward yet harking back to longtime central themes regarding knowledge of God, moral discernment, theocentrism and anthropocentrism, relationalism and unity. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a (...) problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular‐religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 7-19, March 2022.

Although James Gustafson's use of the Christian Bible and tradition is not fully displayed in the essays published here, Bible and tradition are a crucial part of a composite rationale, which includes experience and the sciences, for his theocentric ethics. Gustafson's theocentric ethics employs the sciences to back, inform, and correct the Christian tradition and offers grounds for respecting the natural piety and morality of “nonreligious” persons while explaining and justifying why Christians draw on major themes and metaphors from their (...) tradition that should penetrate their piety and morality. His proposal should reorient the thinking of theological ethics more than it has thus far. (shrink)

This article assesses the similarity and difference between the Western European style of doing bioethics and the Scandinavian one. First, it reviews the introductory article by the editor, C. Delkeskamp-Hayes in the first issue of Christian Bioethics (2008), devoted to the possibility of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe. Second, it analyses bioethics debates in Scandinavian today. In light of Delkeskamp-Hayes' article, the main similarity is that both regions are facing secularization as a threat to basic Christian values, for example, (...) to the Christian view of the sanctity and dignity of the human life. But the Scandinavian tends to reduce Christian bioethics to Luther's concept of the worldly kingdom, supposed to foster a dialogue between Christians and non-Christians on controversial ethical issues. Despite the positive value of the dialogue, this strategy renders Christian ethics powerless. Third, from an evangelical theological standpoint, it proposes some strategies for enhancing the influence of Christian commitments on bioethical laws and policies. (shrink)