This course proceeds on the assumption that the exercise of Christian theology depends on the sacred deposit of faith , and that the Church is the guarantor of the faith handed on by the apostles. In the first lesson, you will learn about the Church as Moral Teacher and about moral theology as a sacred science. Christ came so that we may know the truth about God and about the kind of life that leads to God. The Christian must learn to appreciate the value that revealed truth communicates to the world. In addition to imparting knowledge about God, divine revelation serves as an instrument of liberation from unsatisfactory accounts of human existence.
Moral theology forms part of the sacra doctrina .
This means that every authentic exercise in moral theology depends on divine revelation, which is the sole source of the seven truths listed in the preceding paragraph. This text indicates the place that practical science, such as moral theology, holds within the overall communication of divine truth. It also points out that dogmatic theology and moral theology stand together but in an order that places the primacy on the revelation of truths about God. Moral theology is not the same thing as philosophical ethics, even though historically there are those who argued that the practical sciences should be considered separately and eventually as purely secular studies. Hume's prediction, however, has not come true.