No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
Not all the discussion between progressive and conservative wings in the Church is about doctrine and liturgy. As the Humanae Vitae affair revealed there are growing areas of disagreement on questions of morality. Though the ones I want to write about are found in acute form in Roman Catholic circles where there is a sharper clash between individual and authority, they are also frequent wherever any strong doctrine of revelation, particularly of a fundamentalist kind, prevails. This essay aims simply to elucidate some of the questions which do not always get properly examined in the heat of debate and to analyse some of the presuppositions behind popularly held and taught views which lay some claim to being representative of ‘traditional Christian morality’. Not infrequently the views of serious moral thinkers are dubbed ‘situation ethics’ or ‘purely subjective morality’ and by being so labelled are accounted suitably disposed of along with the rest of the contents of the bin marked ‘new theology’. There is a risk that more than garbage is disposed of in this way. I want in this essay to do a bit of ‘cool looking’ at some of the presuppositions of the supporters of ‘traditional Christian morality’ (self-styled) and also to look at a problem that crops up frequently in these discussions: what can be reckoned as specifically ‘Christian’ in a moral view which does not understand moral imperatives to have been delivered timeless and eternal in some earlier period of history?
This essay grew out of a paper delivered to the National Theological Commission o England and Wales and later expanded for the Conference at Spode House in January 1970: The Teaching Church and the Taught Church.
1 This essay grew out of a paper delivered to the National Theological Commission o England and Wales and later expanded for the Conference at Spode House in January 1970: The Teaching Church and the Taught Church.
1 Cf. Pastoral Costitution, Gaudium et spes, Paras 16 and 17; Declaration on Religious Freedom, Particularly paras 1 and 3; Declaration on Christian Education, para. 1.
2 I do not here want ot enter into the debate about monastic obedience under vow or its equivalent in other forms of religious life. This seems to me to be a separate question about the validity of monasticism as a way of life, though doubtless the monastic tradition has not been without influence in other forms of Christian life.
1 I have had to limit the scope of this essay to the field of personal morality. The separation of such questions form those of social morality becomes increasingly difficult and it is in here purely methodologically to tread certain limited questions. In fact it is in study of community responsibility that the most important developments are likely to take place in the coming years with important consequences for questions of personal morality.
You have
Access