The crucial question that has to be asked in the Christian moral evaluation of act or character is, does it speak of the God whose nature is self-dispossession for the sake of the life of the other? of the commitment and dependability of the divine action towards the creation? of the divine relinquishment of ‘interest’ and claim as embodied in the life of Jesus? These are not, I think, issues that leave us with an individualized or uncritical ethic. They are matters capable of being raised in the context of sexual ethics as much as the ethics of business or international relations. And it may be that something like this is rather badly needed as the discourses of Christian ethics polarize increasingly between legalism based on the injunctions of the text and a vacuous experientialism, appealing to precisely the wrong sort of interiority for its criteria.
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 263.
Comments are closed.