Morality Truly Christian, Truly African by Odozor Paulinus Ikechukwu;

Author:Odozor, Paulinus Ikechukwu; [Odozor, Paulinus Ikechukwu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI005000 Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy
ISBN: 3441178
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2014-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

The important thing here is the acceptance of revelation and the authority of scripture since only thus can the truth of revelation be manifested.7 The exitus-reditus schema is supported by a tripod: first, God, from whom all finite beings proceed, then the return of the human person to God through human actions that compose an individual life, and then Christ, through whom all things return to God. As Jean Porter points out, “Moral theology is located in the second part of this three-part schema; that is, morality, broadly construed to include all aspects of human activity, is placed under the rubric of the person’s return to God.”8 Therefore, for Aquinas, Christian ethics is God-talk, although it is also an effort of human reason to find solutions to human problems or to construct a humane ethical order not in spite of God but with God as the principal cause and enabler of human life.

Aquinas’s principle has been manhandled in various ways down the centuries by many in the ethics community. There are those especially in the philosophical community who have completely ignored the heavy theological or metaphysical underpinning of his ethical theory. The schema also made its way into the moral manuals in a truncated way: “Questions related to creation (the exitus theme) and the role of Christ, the mediator, were relegated to dogmatic theology,” while leaving the practical aspects of the human being’s return to the creator, now without much theological mooring, to moral theology.9 Aquinas is instructive here as a theologian who sets out with the intention to make clear the understanding of God that is at the basis of such ethics and to help the community draw out implications for such understanding of God for daily living. The Trinitarian emphasis of this theology brings into sharp focus what is distinctive about God in Christian consciousness. This view of God corrects or completes other ideas of God everywhere else and must constitute the foundation for any theological discourse that claims to be Christian, whether in Africa or elsewhere.

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