Why Christians are not people of principle

I read a terrific book by Stanley Fish once, called The Trouble with Principle.

That was a while ago; but for some reason I was thinking about it again this morning. Principled people - and there are Christians among them, granted - are some of the most dangerous people there are. That is: everything in moral reasoning becomes ordered to a set of ideals (or even a single ideal). That means, in practice that anything is justifiable in the name of these ideals or principles. You can invade Iraq and torture prisoners in the name of freedom, for example. In the name of fairer and better government with more integrity you can knife your political opponents in the back. Do evil, that good may result. It is (so the calculation runs) a lesser evil than the evil that may result if the ultimate good is not defended.

There is, naturally, a deal of suspicion of these kind of principles, too. What alternative is there to them is the problem - to be unprincipled?

But Christian discipleship is not the following of a set of principles. It is discipleship: it is following a master, imitation of an example (while at the same time being spiritually united to this master). It isn't a set of truths (though it is TRUE, and it trades in TRUTH, for sure) from which all else must be deduced in some process of ethical calculation. Even 'love' can't be held as a mere principle: it must be worked out in the light of the example of love given to us and worked in us.

Away then with principles!

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VI

The Immanent Frame In trying to describe the 'conditions of belief' which now obtain in the modern West, Taylor coins the term 'The Immanent Frame'. The buffered self which arises in the age of Reform (of which more later) moves in a constructed social space 'where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular' (The Secular Age, p. 542).

In addition, this frame constitutes now the 'natural' order as distinct from the 'supernatural' one. Instead of the two orders being intertwined, the transcendent is now seen as quite separate from the immanent - which condition of course makes it possible later on to disavow the transcendent altogether.

So, the rise of the individual, now called to a more rigorous and disciplined life in the affirmed ordinary world, coupled with the emphasis on constructive action (because Providence itself now works via the medium of human action) and seen in the context of time now measured accurately by machines rather than charted by prophets or seers in epochal terms - these conditions comprise 'the immanent frame'.

If you are to be a religious believer, you have to believe against the backdrop of these conditions of belief, then.

Ricoeur on Literature & Ethics

A moment of clarity looms up through the fog:

There is no ethically neutral narrative. Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics. Oneself as Another, p. 115

[propaedeutic = 'a prelimary body of knowledge or rules necessary for the study of some art or science']

Emotions and ethics

Once, a while back, I mused about cuteness and its relevance for ethics. It seems to me that our affective reactions are by and large not part of the way we frame discussion of ethics, in the churches or in the West in general.

Charles Taylor writes this:

Modern enlightened culture is very theory-oriented. We tend to live in our heads, trusting our disengaged understandings: of experience, of beauty (we can't really accept that it's telling us anything, unless about our own feelings); even the ethical: we think that the only valid form of ethical self-directon is through rational mazims or understanding. We can't accept that part of being good is opening oursleves to certain feelings; either the horror at infacticide, or agape as a gut feeling. The Secular Age, p. 555

Of course, the picture is more complicated than this. In one sense, the West celebrates and even sacralises the expression of feelings.

Reading the Bible in the old South Africa

Richard Burridge, who wrote a remarkable work on the genre of the gospels, has a new book called Imitating Jesus - An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. While I have yet to discover what he means by 'inclusive' - a word that normally makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term - I have been impressed by his determination to recover the role of the Bible, and of the Biblical Jesus, in ethics. He relates the problem to the apartheid era in South Africa, when genuine Christians prayerfully earnestly and intelligently reading their Bibles decided that it supported racism. Does this mean that the Bible ought to be rejected, because it is open to such uses? By no means: though merely appealing to the Bible does not guarantee good reading of it.

Interestingly, he quotes CESA Bishop Frank Retief's submission, made in 1997, to a hearing of 'Faith Communities'.

...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society...We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle...Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us....The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today...It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society... p. 397-8

I have met Bishop Frank and heard him speak, and I find this an impressive and moving statement. But, Burridge asks, what gives him and others (and the rest of us) confidence that we aren't making similar mistakes now?

Burridge gives an analysis of how the South African churches got into this mess - and notes on the one hand a lack of self-criticism and on the other a theology which overlooked the central place of Jesus for all Christian ethics. Could a church that was actually prioritising Jesus - the Jesus of the gospels, but also the Jesus of Paul and the other authors of the NT - have allowed itself to lapse so badly? Make no mistake, there was some sophisticated theological and exegetical work done in the theological faculties of South Africa in the apartheid era... but, says Burridge, the voice of Jesus was strangely silent even so.

So, argues Burridge, if churches want to avoid falling into the group-think which has resulted in such terrible misusing the Bible, they need to practice self-reflection and self-criticism as a matter of course. And also, they ought to pay attention to Jesus.

[Note: to any South African readers - I am only here reporting from Burridge. I cannot know and do not pretend to know what it was to live in those times and to be a Christian in those times. Nor do I know what it is to live as a Christian with this as a legacy - though Australian Christians have made their own mistakes of course.]

O'Donovan on the foundations of ethics

O'Donovan speaks mucho truth:

The foundations of Christian ethics must be evangelical foundations; or, to put it more simply, Christian ethics must arise from the gospel of Jesus Christ. Otherwise it could not be Christian ethics. Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 11

A belief in Christian ethics is a belif that certain ethical and moral judgements belong to the gospel itself; a belief, in other words, that the church can be commited to ethics without moderating the tone of its voice as a bearer of glad tidings. RMO p. 12

That is, the question has to be, how can we preach/do ethics, and at the same time preach the good news?

Can Morality Be Christian? John Milbank

I have only come lately to this essay by Milbank, and what a piece of provocation it is! The answer is, in short, no: morality cannot be Christian! It is quite a Protestant piece for him. He ends thus, with his best impersonation of Luther in full cry:

So no, the Christian man is not a moral man, not a man of good conscience, who acts with what he knows of death, scarcity and duty to totalities. He has a bad conscience, but a good confidence: for he acts ith what he does not know but has faith in. In absolute trust he gives up trying to be good, to sustain a right order of government within himself. The Romans that Paul wrote to did this already, but they still needed a letter from Paul - to hear what? Simply to hear the other, receive the other, and through the other receive the gratuitous God. Cease to be self-sufficient in the face of scarcity. Instead to be good as first receiving from the all-sufficiency of God, and acting excessively out of this excess.

Barth and Kant

We cannot deal evasively with Jesus Christ as one does with an idea.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.ii.660

While Barth concedes that Kant 'has expressed the essential concern of Christian ethic by pointing out that of itself the concept of what is pleasing and useful and valuable does not give us the concept of what is obligatory', he also takes Kant to task for not acknowledging the reality that God's command may indeed result in what is pleasing and good:

The obligation revealed and grounded in the person and work and lordship of Jesus Christ fulfils the idea in all its strictness. It is a categorical imperative, not merely in name, but in fact. And as such - unlike the Kantian imperative - it reveals the fact that to obey it is not merely the highest duty but also the highest good.

Jesus Christ is our categorical imperative!

Barth and responsibility

This week: a chance to get a handle on Barth's 'divine command' ethics. Very refreshing after wallowing about in rather dry natural law thought. Of course the divine command is the gospel of Jesus Christ (Barth would say 'Jesus', but I am happy to offer him modest correction!) For Barth, ‘responsibility’ sums up the human situation before God who addresses us:

‘It is the idea of responsibility which gives us the most exact definition of the human situation in face of the absolute transcendence of the divine judgment. We live in responsibility, which means that our being and willing, what we do and what we do not do, is a continuous answer to the Word of God spoken to us as a command.’

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas Forsyth Torrance, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas Forsyth Torrance, 2d ed., 14 vols. (London ; New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), II.ii, p. 641.

Humanae Vitae - Paul VI

I am reading Humanae Vitae for a seminar this afternoon on Natural Law. It is a stirring document, as many of the papal encyclicals are. But this is probably the most controversial one of them all. Some passages that caught my eye (in blue, with my comments in black):







This kind of question requires from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection on the principles of the moral teaching on marriage—a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation.

I think this is interesting: first we have to establish the teaching authority of the Church as the interpreter of the natural law. Secondly, the teaching of this encyclical BEGINS with natural law as illumined by Revelation, not the other way around.


No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law. It is in fact indisputable, as Our predecessors have many times declared, (l) that Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments, (2) constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law. For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful observance is necessary for men's eternal salvation. (3)



Again the authority of the papacy as inheritors of the apostolate and thus the true interpreters of the moral law is asserted. This is a strategy to protect from arbitrariness. 'Necessary for men's eternal salvation'? Hmm...




With regard to man's innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man's reason and will must exert control over them.

A curious feature of Thomistic thought: the emphasis on 'reason' in anthropology, over and against the other drives and emotions. Maybe not so curious: it was interesting to see Kant saying exactly the same thing.

Responsible parenthood, as we use the term here, has one further essential aspect of paramount importance. It concerns the objective moral order which was established by God, and of which a right conscience is the true interpreter

Here 'right conscience' comes in. Interestingly Cardinal Pell of Sydney has talked about this 'conscience' idea in order to defend it from rampant individualism. He says conscience must be taught rightly and is not a somehow inward part of the human sealed off from church teaching. I think this reveals the problem with the conscience thing, though I am sympathetic to Pell's reasons.



The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.



Strangely Paul doesn't give us much about this 'intrinsic relationship' idea. It is unexplained really... is it to do with the intention to procreate? Well, no, because he will allow for natural birth control later on. You could complain to, that the 'wisely ordered laws of nature' is a problematic teaching: women die in childbirth; successive births aren't 'spaced', etc. That is, the curse has had an effect on the natural world, and it is now not as 'natural' as it once was.

...the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman.



I take it he means our bodily nature and desires for one another have the nature of laws. How do they become 'laws' from being our actual nature?

If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.

This is the get-out clause and I have never understood it. To me, this is like a vegetarian eating meat substitute. The rhythm method is still a matter of birth 'control', is it not?



No one can, without being grossly unfair, make divine Providence responsible for what clearly seems to be the result of misguided governmental policies, of an insufficient sense of social justice, of a selfish accumulation of material goods, and finally of a culpable failure to undertake those initiatives and responsibilities which would raise the standard of living of peoples and their children.

Well, fair enough. The whole population control thing has a very sinister side to it.

Still reeling from reading Kant

I am still somewhat agape at the sheer scope of what Kant attempts in his Groundwork and the impressive rationality of it all. One thought that came to me was this: in debating against atheists, I have noticed Christian apologists still resort to the argument from morality. It is something like this (actually it isn't an argument so much as a challenge or observation): atheists have no grounds for a particular morality; yet human beings have a strong moral instinct. So: if you are an atheist, you can say something is morally wrong, but not consistently.

But Kant was attempting to find exactly these grounds. In other words, he claimed to have found a way in which moral truth was discoverable by reason alone, with or without divine help. By means if the categorical imperative, Kant was (he thought) able to put morality on a consistent footing that enables a moral discussion to ensue on the basis of rationality. The immoral would also be the irrational, on this basis.

Now, there are problems here of course, but I am just painfully aware that Christian apologists don't seem to address this claim to have found a universal basis for morality aside from divine revelation. Mind you, their opponents don't seem to be very good at putting the argument back to Christians either...

The other thing from Kant was this. Kant tries to sheer all manner of self-interest away from moral consideration. Intentions must be as pure as possible to bring about a truly moral act. As he says:

From love of humankind I am willing to admit that even most of our actuons are in confimrity with duty; but if we look more closely at the intentions and aspiratons in them we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this their purpose is based, not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial.

My problem with his instance on the lack of self-interest in creation is that this actually dehumanises the moral agent. Why should self-interest always be corrupting in this way, so long as it is not the wrong kind of self-interest? This is what Augustine might say: one ought to love oneself IN GOD, just as one ought to love one's neighbour in God. The right kind of benefits accruing need not entirely sour a moral act. It is impossible to love, in a way, without some form of self-interest. Without self-interest of a kind, love itself disappears... it becomes merely formal, or dutiful, and not loving.

Kant's 'Groundwork'

I have put off reading Kant directly for too long, though of course I am familiar with his ideas.

But, I have been set to read his 'Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals'. Of course, one discovery was that by 'metaphysics' he means something like 'rational concepts not empirically derived at all'.

Anyhow, this from him:

Nor could one give worse advice to morality than by wanting to derive it from examples. For, exvery example of it represented to me must itself first be appraised in accordance with principles of morality, as to whether it is alos worthy to serve as an original example, that is, as a model; it can by no means authoritavitively provide the concept of morality. Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is cognized as such; even he say of himself: why do you call me (whome you see) good?...But whence have we the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the idea of moral perection that reason frames a priori and connects inseparabloy with the concept of a free will. Imitation has no place at all in matters of morality, and examples serve only for exnouragement, that is, they put beyond doubt the practicability of what the law commands and make intuitive what the pratcice rule expresses more generally, but they can never justify setting aside thier true original, which lies in reason, and guiding oneself by examples.

Wow, one thing you have to give him is his determination to be consistently rational at all times. But to assert that imitation has no place in morality? My goodness! Also, here we see the old Euthyphro debate about whether God is good or good is God. Is good subject to some concept or law of the good? Or, is he somehow more arbirtrarily sovereign over it, such that what is 'good' may be subject to change or alteration in some way?

Shh! It's the Quietists!

Is pure self-lessness really possible? Is anyone really 'pure in heart'? In commanding pure unselfishness, doesn't Christianity become the rankest of paradoxes, the absurdest of faiths?

Well, the Quietists of 17th Century Europe weren't happy to admit that complete disinterestedness was impossible. Rather, they claimed that disinterest was the essential condition which alone gives any action eternal worth. If heaven and hell are put forward as motives of right conduct, then selfishness has gained a toehold. Meister Eckhardt once said: 'He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing'. Madame Guyon in the 17th Century wrote: 'We must suppress all desire, even the desire for the joys of Paradise'. So, the Quietists even spoke of wishing for one's own damnation, because this would be the truly self-less path. This is to make, of course, Judas the hero of the gospels...after all, it was he who really sacrificed everything and received nothing in return, not even ultimately his thirty pieces of silver...

The debate, in the end, was between two bishops, Fenelon and Bosseut. Fenelon explained that the Quietists set out to acquire disinterestedness by the methods of formalism, 'training themselves not to think of themselves, trying even to desire the pains of hell that they might stifle all longings for the joys of heaven.' (KE Kirk). Fenelon didn't want to go this far - a self-conscious ACT of self-abnegation is surely not very far from extreme egoism. For Fenelon, disinterestedness can only happen as a gift of God: the human subject's responsibility is only to contemplate as best he can, and leave the rest to God. Worship alone will disinfect our service from egotism, but not worship as self-examination. As Kirk says 'only by discharging the immediate duties honestly and without presumption shall we become disinterested, not by close scrutiny of our spiritual attainments'.

Cuteness and its relevance for ethics

Yesterday I killed a baby.

It was a baby squirrel. I saw it on the grass, its cute head poking out with its big doey eyes. Only then I noticed that it had fallen from a tree and had broken its back and was obviously dying a slow and painful death. So, I pulled off my right boot and administered the coup de grace - a violent and savage act which felt very unfamiliar to me in my protected suburban experience. Its little body lies on the lawn now, drenched with the overnight rain.

In discussions about abortion and other ethical issues the emotive and splenetic reactions of those involved are often discarded. To be thoroughly rational and modern people, we are supposed to relativise our emotional responses, or protect ourselves from them. We can accept abortion but not infanticide because we can easily protect ourselves from the cuteness of the baby involved: it is a face hidden from us, a ghostly presence we can shield ourselves from. We are afraid that we will love what we see, so we try hard not to look. Strangely, we know our own 'weakness' - our recidivism as far as guilt goes and so on, and our attachment to cute things. There is a feeling of contempt for those who act merely out of emotion.

But shouldn't our feelings - whether of compassion or disgust or sorrow - be rather a guide for us ? Isn't our capacity for empathy one of the best things that human beings have to help us make moral decisions? To be sure, we can manipulate this tendency: the animal rights/anti-abortion campaigners who show us shocking images of dismembered babies and tortured animals play on our disgust as much as our tenderness. But they are onto something, aren't they? Not to say of course that we should act only out of our visceral reactions to things; only rather to suggest that this visceral reaction is not as unhelpful and distorting as we might think. We are meant, as new parents (for example) to fall for our babies, because we are meant to care for them. Cuteness protects children from infanticide, or ought to.

Jesus himself was often moved by the plight of those he encountered. He appears rather prone to follow his gut reaction, if truth be told! He sees the leaderlessness of Israel, or the corruption of the temple courts, or the pain-racked body before him, and he is quite clearly - and physically - 'moved' to action.

As for the squirrel: I noticed that in deciding to end its life I had to both feel and think. My response to its cuteness and then shock at its pain meant that I had think how to act in a way that cared (in a small way) for it. It wasn't the dilemma of the century of course! And, I don't feel that its cuteness is overcome or put aside by thinking through what the most practical and reasonable thing to do was. I still feel a small sorrow for the squirrel.

Alasdair MacIntyre on 'morality'

MacIntyre makes a great critique of what we call 'ethics' or 'morality': which these days seems to be shunted off into committees, of all things...

...there is no word correctly translated by our moder word 'morality' in any ancient or medieval language. And this lack of a word is a symptom of the different way s in which different forms and aspects of social life were classified in the societies in which those languages were spken and written.... [ he notes that this is true of 'art' as well...] ... so when later modern historians of ethics...have extracted from the writings of ancient or medieval authors that which, according to the modern conception, belongs to ethics, we have too often projected back on to the past categories alien to that past with two highly misleading results. p. 191

In sum:

1 - we detach arbitrarily parts from wholes without which they become distorted, and;

2 - we obscure that moment when 'morality' becomes a distinct category from ourselves.

'Too many Thomisms?' Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre introduces the 'third way' in his Gifford lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: not encylopeadia or genealogy, but Thomism... The sample text is the Aeterni Patris of 1879, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.

How does this 'Thomism' differ? Well, it recognises that philosophy is a virtue-guided craft, in which the business of being a teacher and an apprentice is integral:

...there emerges a conception of rational teaching authority internal to the practice of the craft of moral enquiry, as indeed such conceptions emerge in such other crafts as furniture making and fishing, where, just as in moral enquiry, they partially define the relationship of master-craftsman to apprentice. p. 63

Partly what is interesting and helpful about this version of Thomism is that it ignores questions of epistemology which are ultimately so, well, boring...

Of course, as Thomism was received in Catholic teaching following the encyclical, this was not the case. So, in Jacques Maritain and others there is a much more epistemologically driven version of Thomism, one that doesn't reckon with Thomas's own dependence on divine revelation. As MacIntyre writes:

What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas's thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divien law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain prephilosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities thourgh assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the 18th century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas' thought. For on Aquinas' view the rights which are normative for human relationships are derived from and warranted only by divine law, apprehended by those without the resources afforded by God's self-revelation as the natural law. Law is primary, rights are secondary. But for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity, human rights provide a standard prior to all law. p. 76

I find this fascinating, as I have heard Thomists crowing about the emergence of human rights as if this was proof of the obviousness of their reading of Thomism. Evidently, not.

Honour... and other catastrophes?

Is there a place for an ethics of honour in Christians conceptions of how to live righteously? Or does a notion of honour corrupt Christian ethics?

Critics of the honour ethic have a very ancient heritage indeed: Plato himself posited the citizen’s reason above the military value of honour as the ground for the highest kind of life.[1] The Stoics, too, spoke strongly against the desire for honour because they held that it put value in mere appearance. Since the Enlightenment, honour has largely been a suppressed discourse because it does not fit well with the romantic ethic of personal authenticity or the rationalist/utilitarian appeal to ‘reason’. That is, it would be allowing others’ opinions too much influence to speak of the self in terms of what is honourable. What is more, it is viewed as being undemocratic. It is an ethic of kings in an age of parliaments.

For his part, Charles Taylor argues that the modern notion of ‘dignity’ ought to replace ‘honour’ in modern democratic society. He argues that honour differs from dignity in that honour is what only exceptional men achieve, whereas dignity can be ascribed to all. It is the importance of the assertion of the will that the two hold in common.[2] Recognition is, for Taylor, absolutely vital and inescapable as a necessary constituent of identity; and a democratic society has no business recognizing some of its citizens more than others, which is what the honour ethic at least seems to promote.

However, honour does have its contemporary advocates, such as Sharon Krause[3] and Michael Walzer.[4] Walzer has argued that honour is not incompatible at all with a modern liberal democratic society, especially if it is viewed as a quality of character. On his account of honour, it would seem not corrosive of equal recognition at all if some, albeit fixed, concept of desert for honourable behaviour were to be held within a democratic society. In particular these standards could relate to particular types of activity, such as voluntary organizations – vocational and professional associations, political parties, advocacy groups and even families. These groups are vital sources of shared identity and by dint of their voluntary nature allow a domain appropriate for a code of honour. These groups are resources for inspiring honour: for motivating virtuous activity from which the whole community and indeed the political order benefits. Krause writes:

The power of honour lies in the fact that it is a mixed motive. It builds on the particular attachments and private desires that make us who we are and move us to act. It channels and directs personal ambitions, rather than suppressing them in the name of a comprehensive common good or a universal standpoint. Nor does it require the state to cultivate character, or submerge diverse identities into a homogenous collective one.

One problem for Krause and Walzer is that the 'fixed' codes are only arbitrarily fixed: honour, as they admit can be cruel or tyrannical if bound by the wrong code. Think of so called 'honour killings' after all...

[1] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press., 1989), p. 20. Aristotle for his part saw honour as the goal and completion of the virtuous life: Nicomachean Ethics 1115b13.
[2] Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 46-7
[3] Sharon Krause, "The Politics of Distinction and Disobedience: Honor and the Defense of Liberty in Montesquieu," Polity 31, no. 3 (1999)
[4] Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Robertson, 1983)

Christ - the FORM of the Christian life

Some Lutheran perspectives on the Christian life: martyrdom is properly a reflection of the form (or to use Luther's term the sacramentum) of the Christian life.

My own doktorvater, Bernd Wannenwetsch:

The whole of our Christian lives as agents is rooted in Christ’s action, which not only provides a model (exemplum) or an impulse (motivatio) or a mere “foundation”, but precisely the proper “form” (sacramentum) of the Christian life. Hence, for Luther, there is no prior “relationship with God” or a priori Glaubensbewusstsein (‘religious-consciousness’: Schleiermacher) that would “set free” the believing individual to engage then in social relationships of a political kind. Instead, there is only a political worship, which simultaneously relates the believers to God and their fellow citizens. (From his article on Luther's Ethics in the Cambridge Companion to Luther)

And in the same vein, Eberhard Jungel: Even those exemplary narratives of Jesus which are oriented toward action, which end with ‘go and do likewise’, only formulate with this imperative a newly discovered indicative, that is, something which the listener must say to himself. They make something self-understandable in a new way which ought always to have been self-understandable but was not. But in order for this to happen anew, man must apparently first be liberated from the pressure to concentrate on himself. It is for that reason that man first becomes a “hearer of the word,” who cannot do anything at all as long as he is listening, and then on the basis of his hearing he can act out of the newly gained freedom so that his action, precisely as activity, remains a doing of the word.

This is especially true with regard to the telling of the Christological story, which bursts apart everything which is obvious and matter of course, in that this story God identifies himself with a crucified person so that there is a story to be told about a crucified God and a man who has been awakened to a new life. The hearer must be drawn existentially into this story through the word, precisely because it is also his story, and this much happen before he can do what corresponds to the story. The story of Jesus Christ, through the word which emerges from it and tells it, becomes a ‘sacrament’ (to speak along the lines of Augustine and Luther) before it can function as an ‘example’ (sacramentum, exemplum). It is the sacramental function of the telling of the Christological story to let the hearer win freedom from himself. …before Jesus Christ comes to be considered an exemplum for our behaviour he must be affirmed as the sacramentum that changes our being…. from God as the Mystery of the World p. 308-9

Show no mercy...?

Moses says to Israel:

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.

What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?

Calvin - from the Nursing Mothers' Association

John Calvin, commenting on Gen 2 writes:

". . .the Lord does not in vain prepare nutriment for children in their mothers' bosoms, before they are born. But those on whom he confers the honor of mothers, he, in this way, constitutes nurses; and they who deem it a hardship to nourish their own offspring, break, as far as they are able, the sacred bond of nature. If disease, or anything of that kind, is the hindrance, they have a just excuse; but for mothers voluntarily, and for their own pleasure, to avoid the trouble of nursing, and thus to make themselves only half-mothers, is a shameful corruption."

Interesting theological/ethical method here: he takes a feature of women's bodily nature and derives an ethical imperative from that alone... hmm. What other imperatives could you derive from the same method?