The Christian who lives by faith has the right to justify his moral actions on the basis of his faith. (77)
It would be wrong to use the term "ethics from above" for an ethics that sets out from the full brilliance of the light of revelation and works backwards to the fumbling preliminary stages, as opposed to an ethics "from below," which takes anthropology as its foundation--this because Christ has become fully human, adopting both the form and the guilt of the First Adam, as well as the constrictions, perplexities and crises of the latter's existence. (77)
1. Christ as the Concrete Norm
Christ carried out the entire will of God (i.e., every "ought") in the world. (79)
Christ the concrete categorical imperative. He is the formally universal norm of ethical action, applicable to everyone. But he is also the personal and concrete norm, who, in virtue of his suffering for us and his eucharistic surrender of his life for us empowers us inwardly to do the Father's will together with him. (79)
The Christian imperative lifts us beyond the problems involved in autonomy and heteronomy: while the Son of God, begotten of the Father, is "heteros" vis-a-vis him, he is not "heteron." The Father's will ("heteronomy") is the ground of his existence and the inner source of his personal action ("autonomy"). (80)
All Christian action is a privilege, not an obligation, since we are God's children. (81)
The Church's precepts are intended to lead the believer out of the alienation of sin to his true identity and freedom, whereas they can (and often must) seem hard and legalistic to those who are imperfect, just as the Father's will seemed to the Crucified. (81)
2. The Universality of the Concrete Norm
The norm provided by Christ is personal, and as such is universal: he unites all persons (in their uniqueness and freedom) in his own Person. (82)
Insofar as Christ is the incarnate Word and Son of God the Father, he transcends in himself the clear separation into two sides that characterizes the Old Testament "covenant." He is more than the "mediator" who comes between the two parties; he is their personified encounter, and hence he is "One." (83)
As a result of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of Father and Son--the Spirit of the divine "We"--into the hearts of believers, this "being-for-one-another" that is the meaning of Jesus' new commandment is an even more fundamental a priori assumption. At the more-than-organic--that is, the personal--level of the Church, our membership in the "one body" means that we are given a personal awareness of being a "we;" implementing it in terms of life is the Christian's ethical task. (84)
3. The Christian Meaning of the "Golden Rule"
The "prophets" looked to a fulfillment of the law that would not be possible until God removed all heteronomy and set his law in the form of his Spirit deep in the hearts of men. (86)
In Christian terms no personal or social ethics can be envisaged apart from God's effectual and bountiful invitation to man. Dialogue between human beings, if it is to be morally in order, presupposes a dialogue between God and man. (86)
All Christian ethics is therefore cruciform--that is, vertical and horizontal--but this "shape" cannot for a moment be abstracted from its concrete content; namely, from him who stands, crucified, between God and man. It is he who makes himself present as the sole norm in every particular relationship, in every situation. (86)
4. Sin
The uniqueness and concreteness of the personal moral norm implies that all moral guilt must be referred to Christ. It is because the Christian, with his moral conduct, is so close to the principle of divine holiness that animates him as a Christian, that guilt becomes sin, as compared to the infringement of a mere "law" (in Judaism) or a mere "idea" (in Greek thought). (87)
The presence of absolute love in the world deepens man's guilty No and makes it a demonic No, more negative than man appreciates, that tries to draw man into the anti-Christian current. (87)
5. The Promise (Abraham)
All biblical ethics is based on the call of the personal God and man's believing response (obedience). (89)
The "covenant" established by God's call and faith's response addresses the moral subject in all the dimensions of his life, that is, in the risk of faith, but also in the flesh and its possibilities. (90-91)
The existence of Abraham (and hence of the entire Old Covenant, including the period of the law) can only be a clinging to God by faith without being able to change God's promise into fulfillment. The ancient people can only "wait" and "seek," having seen the promise and "greeted it from afar." It was precisely in their intermediate state, not being able to reach what was promised and yet persisting in waiting for it, that the ancients were commended by God. (91)
6. The Law
Though in a provisional manner, from "outside" and "above," the Law expressly reveals God's inner disposition in order to deepen the covenant response to him: "You shall be holy, for I am holy." (92)
The law is subsequent to the promise and does not abrogate it in its implications; thus, it can only be intended as a more detailed definition of faith's "waiting" attitude. It illuminates from various angles the attitude of the man who is "righteous before God." This attitude no doubt corresponds to the constitutive structure of human nature ("natural law"), because God is not only Creator but the continual Giver of blessing. But the theme of this righteousness is not man himself, but the deeper unveiling of God's holiness in his covenant faithfulness. (92)
Since, however, the perfect response remains the subject of the promise, the law remains dialectical: it is good in itself, but yields transgression, and to that extent it is both negatively and positively a "tutor" leading to Christ. (93)
From God's perspective the law's imperative offers the opportunity of living in a godly way before him in the proximity created by the covenant. Initially, however, in indicating the precise shape of the response that God expects (the positive side), the drama only serves to uncover man's inability to respond (the negative side). Thus, the promise still awaits fulfillment. (93)
By trying to fulfill the abstract letter literally, the Pharisee imagines he can manufacture the elusive response. This erection of an abstract, formal imperative has given rise to many forms of ethics, which all tend to set up the human subject as his own lawgiver, as an autonomous subject along Idealist lines, accepting limitation in order to realize himself--such as we find in Kant's ethical formalism. (93-94)
7. Conscience
Man's whole constitution is unconditionally predisposed toward goodness as it reveals itself in a light of transcendence (synderesis, primal conscience). He tends toward it in some way even in the sensual parts of his spirit-directed nature. (96)
Abstract formulations of man's attraction to the good in terms of "natural law"--for example, the "categorical imperative" governing relations between fellow men--are derivative and point toward their source. (97)
The call that comes from the absolute is identical, transcendentally speaking, with that which comes from one's fellow man, but differentiation occurs a posteriori in view of the realization that one's fellow man, too, has "only" been awakened in the same manner [i.e. granted access]. (97-98)
Freedom, understood as autonomy, and grace, which grants participation in itself, are side by side in the original identity of being and radiance. Similarly, in the awakened, dependent identity, freedom and inclination (toward the primal Good) are inseparable. The active attraction of the unconditionally good imparts to the act of free response an element of "passivity" that does not interfere with its freedom. (98)
The whole man is permeated by this predisposition to submit to the power of the good, and this includes his senses, informed as they are by spirit. The distinctive ethical task laid upon man is that of ethicizing his entire spiritual-bodily nature; success is called virtue. (98)
"Signposts" are provided against the time when there will be an obscuring of the original brilliance of the Good (under the form of grace and love) that looks for the free response of loving gratitude. As such, these signposts do not replace the Good in itself, nor yet do they represent it; they only call it to mind. Insofar as they refer to the most important situations of incarnated and socially constituted spirit, they develop along the lines of "natural law." This must not be divinized; if it is not to ossify, it must clearly preserve its essentially relative character as a point, indicating the vitality and self-giving nature of the Good. This also applies to Kant's categorical imperative: because of its formalism, it is obliged to oppose abstract "duty" against the "inclination"of the senses, whereas in reality it is a question of encouraging the person's absolute "inclination" toward the absolute good to triumph over contrary particular affections. What man appropriates to himself with a view to the absolute norm coincides with self-expropriation in favor of the divine good and the good of one's fellow man. (100)
8. The Prebiblical Natural Order
The human good of a prebiblical ethics which takes its bearing from physis will be part of an all-embracing world order that, while it has an absolute (divine) dimension and hence gives scope for ordered moral action, retains a worldly and finite dimension and to that extent hinders human freedom of decision from attaining its full stature. Thus, the goals of action remain partly political and partly individualistic and intellectualist insofar as theoria and knowledge of the rhythms of the universe seem to be the most desirable aims. (101)
Once the biblical fact has come into view, on the free initiative of God--who is radically distinct from created nature--man is raised to a freedom that can no longer take its pattern of behavior from subhuman nature. If this freedom will not render thanks to the God of grace in the Christian understanding, it will logically seek its source in itself. It will understand ethical action as self-legislation. (101-102)
9. Post-Christian Anthropological Ethics
The human "nature" or "structure" that remains in a post-Christian stage is constituted by the reciprocity of freedoms, where each freedom is only awakened and aroused to respond (and to issue a challenge in turn) by some other freedom. However, because the particular freedom addressed cannot simply acknowledge its debt to the fellow freedom that has elicited it (otherwise it would be ultimately heteronomous), and since God's challenge, which grounds both freedoms, is denied, the degree of give and take and self-surrender on the part of each of them is limited and calculated. The subjects remain monads, impenetrable to one another. (103)
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