Changing Emphases in Courses in Christian Ethics

HE last several decades have seen the rise of interest in the field of Christian Ethics as a distinct but not separate discipline lying between philosophical ethics on the one hand and theology on the other. This emergence has been greeted with astonishment if not alarm, especially by some working in philosophical ethics. It is asked how, as ethics proper deals with the notion of the rational good and right, there can legitimately be both a Christian ethic and a philosophical ethic, both of universal scope. The ideal of the unity of truth and universal norms appears threatened by the introduction of a discipline which avowedly accepts the uniqueness of an alleged divine revelation, an authoritative literature, the preeminence of a personality and the continuing normative influence of a particular community, the church. To root ethical judgments, which aspire to universality, upon these particularities would seem to give over both the hope of universal standards and the autonomy of the moral consciousness. There can be but one valid approach to ethical problems, that which proceeds on the assumption of man's rationality working solely in the field of intra-human relations. To bring into ethical discourse man's relation to God, and to open the question of man's rational capacities in the light of revelation is to make havoc of,ethics. Thus a genuine tension has developed between philosophical and Christian ethics, varying from the attempts of each to eliminate the other or to absorb the other, to the effort to let each congenially supplement the other.' The first problem with which Christian ethics has been faced is that of delineating its own field of inquiry and its distinctive categories. Without attempting anything approaching a survey of the field of philosophical ethics, it is perhaps safe to state that philosophical ethics has normally either treated Christian ethics as a subspecies of its field or as being of little or no distinctive consequence to it. So Nicolai Hartmann in his three-volume work, Ethics, finds the Christian affirmation of God incompatible with the moral freedom of man, a deterrent to moral action and an uni telligible and otiose hypothesis. For him, "The moral being is not the Absolute nor the State nor anything else in the world, but singly and alone, man, the primal carrier of moral values and disvalues."2 When Dr. Jay W. Hudson reviewed the scene of ethics in 1940, he pointed out that there had been a decisive shift from Formalistic ethics, with its notion of "right for right's sake," to Teleological ethics, with its emphasis on self-realization, fulfillment of human capacities and eudaemonism. The basis of moral obligation, he affirmed, no longer was widely conceived to be founded on divine will, or for that matter, on metaphysics. "Any formalism based up n the will of God, expressed either through revelation or the so-called laws of nature vanishes utterly before science's fundamental assumption, the scientific method and the scientific temper."3 The decline of religious faith, upon which he suggests formalism is based, leaves the province of ethics st ic ly within an anthropocentric framework. These negative opinions are modified by another author who argues that "ethics as theory needs to be implemented by the emotional drive and institutional power of religions in * CLYDE A. HOLBROOK has been since 1951 Professor of Religion and Chairman of the Department of Religion and Professor of Christian Ethics in Oberlin College.