The relationship between theology and ethics in modern Christian thought

Contemporary Christian theologians and thinkers frequently acknowledge the importance of the relationship between theology and ethics. However, no real consensus exists concerning that relationship’s precise significance, and little work has been done to map the different approaches taken to it. Consequently, most treatments of the relationship proceed without sufficient critical interrogation of their assumptions, or awareness of possible alternatives. This produces further problems downstream for theological or ethical methodology. The present thesis intends to rectify that deficiency. It first develops a typology of the three principal approaches taken in contemporary Christian thought with respect to the theology/ethics relationship. These are: (1) an interpretation of the relationship in terms of a dualism between theory and practice (“the theory/practice type”); (2) an endeavour to transcend the relationship through a third category which synthesises theology and ethics (“the metahistorical type”); and (3) an argument that theology and ethics reflect discrete aspects of a divinely revealed reality (“the theo ontological type”). I evaluate these approaches through readings of systematic, liberation and practical theologians and Christian ethicists, including Karl Barth, Clodovis Boff, Sarah Coakley, Gerhard Ebeling, John Finnis, Stanley Hauerwas, Bonnie Miller McLemore, Oliver O’Donovan and John Howard Yoder. Following this diagnostic task, I outline a constructive way forward, by proposing a “critique of the Christian life”. I argue each type above has persisted not merely due to entrenched disciplinary divides in the modern theological academy, but also because it captures an essential facet of that life. No type, however, has obtained a monopoly, given other facets of the Christian life which the competing types have better preserved. Those facets are the responsibility of the Christian moral agent, the particular situations in which that agent is embedded, the coherence of the agent’s life, and that life’s distinctively Christian identity. A key error of modern Christian thought, accordingly, is either to disregard the irreducible integrity of each facet, or alternatively, to assume these facets can be considered apart from one another.