Three Theological Mistakes by Machuga Ric;

Author:Machuga, Ric; [Machuga, Ric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781630877774
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-01-27T08:00:00+00:00

The church is to Christian ethics what the family and community are to virtue ethics. As we said earlier, all babies are born helpless because they are biologically speaking about seventeen months premature. At one time, we were all utterly dependent upon the family and community into which we were born. While other mammals are richly “hardwired” with abilities and instincts for survival, we are not. Just as we cannot learn virtue without instruction from family and friends, we cannot learn the ethics of grace without the church.201

If a person were born into the kind of good society we’ll describe in the next chapter, even if it knew nothing about Christianity, then that person could expect to receive instruction in the universal human struggle to overcome the fear of pain (courage) and the temptations of sensual pleasure (temperance). But the Christian has an additional struggle. As St. Paul says, we are contending against “principalities and powers” (Eph 6:12). Barth describes these as

the hidden wirepullers in man’s great and small enterprises, movements, achievements, and revolutions. They are not just potencies but the real factors and agents of human progress, regress, and stagnation in politics, economics, scholarship, technology, and art, and also of the evolutions and retardations in all the personal life of the individual. It is not really people who do things, whether leaders or the masses. Through mankind’s fault, things are invisibly done without and above man, even above the human individual in all his uniqueness, by the host of absolutisms, of powers that seek to be lordless and that make an impressive enough attempt to exhibit and present themselves as such.202

It is only in the church and its sacraments that we are continually reminded that Jesus “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross” (Col 2:15). If this is ever forgotten, the ethics of grace will die.

Most importantly, it is within the church that we are instructed in the indicatives of Christian doctrine so that the imperatives of grace become obvious. But how, we are tempted to ask, can the imperative for Mrs. Bergmeier become obvious? Isn’t it pure folly, or perhaps arrogance, to think that inside the church all moral dilemmas simply melt away?

Not if we understand the most frequent command in the New Testament—Be not anxious!—and the syllogism from which it follows:

1. The imperative always follows the indicative.

2. God is for us.

3. Therefore, be not anxious.

First, by definition, a moral dilemma requires that there be at least two moral rules in opposition. By focusing our ethical reflection on the above syllogism this definitional requirement for a dilemma is eliminated. Certainly there is no biblical injunction to be fearful. Yet, what other command could be in opposition to the command: Be not anxious?203

Second, what is true of Aristotelian virtue ethics is all the more true of Christian ethics: our understanding of virtue is always tested in an essay; never by a true or false question. The thing that gives “moral dilemmas”

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