Christian ethics

This spring semester I’m piloting a course in theological ethics for upper-level students at ACU. Wednesday this week wrapped up our fourth week as well as part 1 of the course. To begin the work of synthesis I wrote up a series of ten theses on Christian ethics and distributed copies to the class. Here’s what I wrote:

1. Christian ethics pertains to followers of Christ.

2. The community of Christ-followers is the church.

3. The church is thus the context, audience, and agent of Christian ethics.

4. Christian ethics is for “the world” in the sense that those outside the church are invited to visit and to join the church; but the church does not expect the world to live according to Christian ethics.

5. The church is the teacher of Christian ethics; the Spirit’s pedagogy or “moral epistemology” is housed there.

6. The vehicle or living source of the church’s teaching is its sacred tradition, governed and normed by Holy Scripture, inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit.

7. Human beings develop good character, or virtue, through belonging to the common life of the church, which is centered on the corporate worship of God.

8. If ethics is about flourishing as a human being, then it follows that knowing and worshiping God is the height of human flourishing; our final end is friendship with God.

9. Virtuous character in community is ordered by and to imitation of an ideal or exemplar; in the case of the Christian community, the one truly human being worthy of imitation is Jesus Christ: he is the pattern or paradigm of “the good man.”

10. In sum, therefore, Christian ethics is about:

    1. journeying in and with the life of the worshiping community of the church toward the eternal life of the triune God;

    2. learning the moral life in humble obedience to the church’s teaching;

    3. developing good character over time and through practice by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit;

    4. and, ultimately, being conformed to the image of Christ.