While it would be an overstatement to say that there are as many liberation theologies as there are practitioners, it is certainly true that liberation theology is not all of a piece. This is not just to point to the varieties of liberation theology – black, Asian, African, Jewish, feminist, womanist and so forth – but to the variety of standpoints even within Latin America, where the movement started. Juan Luis Segundo, for example, had an essentially evolutionary understanding of reality that he shared with his fellow Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin. He can cite with approval the view that every vice was probably at some time a virtue, and that what we call ‘human beings’ are only slowly emerging from the tangle of primitive drives and instincts. He frankly avows a situation ethic, an ethic in which the ends justify the means, but on the understanding that Christian ends are the most communitarian and generous-hearted imaginable. José Míguez Bonino, on the other hand, offers us a survey of twentieth-century social ethics, but allows himself to formulate a principle that is virtually identical with utilitarianism: ‘The basic ethical criterion is the maximizing of universal human possibilities and the minimizing of human costs.’ Any economist would recognise this as a version of Pareto optimality. Enrique Dussel, for his part, who represents an appropriation of the work of Levinas long before that thinker became fashionable in Europe, describes ethics as ‘fundamental theology’, that which constitutes both the rationality and the possibility of theology.

From its beginnings, Christianity has encouraged and provided health care, an activity featured in Jesus’ healing and in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Over the centuries Christian traditions have also offered guidance for physicians, other health care providers, familial caregivers and patients. While often distinctive, this guidance has sometimes overlapped with or incorporated, with modifications, directives in professional oaths and codes. ‘Medical ethics’, which was largely physician ethics until nursing emerged in the nineteenth century, was subsumed in the 1960s and 1970s under ‘bioethics’ or ‘biomedical ethics’, a broader conception that emerged to address new developments and problems in biomedicine. For instance, medical technologies could prolong life far beyond previous possibilities, transplant organs from one living or dead person to another, detect certain fetal defects in utero and offer new reproductive opportunities. Bioethics or biomedical ethics involves an interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to ethical issues in the life sciences, medicine and health care.

Christian reflections on these developments build, to varying degrees, on scripture and tradition, along with appeals to experience and reason, sometimes expressed in the language of natural law. How various Christian churches rely on and rank these different bases of authority has important implications for their views in bioethics – for example, whether they are distinctive or overlap with secular perspectives.

What is it like to make a choice? The temptation we easily give way to is to think that it's always the same kind of thing; or that there's one kind of decision-making that's serious and authentic, and all other kinds ought to be like this. In our modern climate, the tendency is to imagine that choices are made by something called the individual will, faced with a series of clear alternatives, as if we were standing in front of the supermarket shelf. There may still be disagreement about what the ‘right’ choice would be, but we'd know what making the choice was all about. Perhaps for some people the right choice would be the one that best expressed my own individual and independent preference: I would be saying no to all attempts from outside to influence me or determine what I should do, so that my choice would really be mine. Or perhaps I would be wondering which alternative was the one that best corresponded to a code of rules: somewhere there would be one thing I could do that would be in accord with the system, and the challenge would be to spot which it was – though it might sometimes feel a bit like guessing which egg cup had the coin under it in a game. But in any case the basic model would be much the same: the will looks hard at the range of options and settles for one.

Christianity teaches that the world is in a state of what it describes as ‘fallen’ disorder. There have been two classic attempts to understand why this is the case. The first, by Irenaeus, claimed that God intended it to be so that God's creatures could live lives of ‘recapitulation’ in which they constantly grew in grace. The second, by Augustine, claimed that human disobedience caused the disorder. Neither of these attempted explanations is satisfactory. Disorder and evil have to be lived with for the mystery they are. According to one biblical view, the state of conflict is represented by the ‘principalities and powers’ that are part of the created order (Romans 8:38), and they are variously described in the Bible and its translations. Although they were among the ‘all things’ redeemed by Christ's death (Colossians 1:20), they will remain in existence until Christ's return in glory. (1 Corinthians 15:24). Only then will the struggle cease. This is a biblical way of describing the world's disorder. Human beings are part of this. They are seen as fallen creatures. Though they were created in and still bear the image of God as an alien dignity, their propensity to sin manifests itself in all that they do. Nothing remains untainted. Human beings are, however, the agents of God's grace in the world, but at the same time they remain part of its essential problem.

All this requires Christians to live in ways that bring the powers of redemption that were wrought on the cross to bear on every area of practical politics, including and especially areas of human conflict and suffering. This is why they are enjoined to be active ‘peacemakers’ in the present and are not permitted to believe that peace will occur only in some messianic future. For this reason, peacemaking is a central Christian spiritual obligation. This alone explains its prominence in the New Testament and the contrast that that bears to the Jewish Bible in this respect. In this way, Christian approaches to war and peace are derived from its basic tenets.

DEFINING THE TOPIC

The term ‘gender’ refers to the personality characteristics, behaviours and social roles that are expected of or assigned to an individual, depending on whether that individual is a male or a female.

Gender is different from biological sex. Although some individuals have ambiguous sex characteristics, the human species is in general sexually dimorphic. Humans come in two sexes, male and female, that cooperate for reproduction. Thus the sexual differentiation of individuals into male and female is taken for granted in virtually all societies, and some biologically based behaviours and roles are almost as universally associated with sexual differentiation. These are the behaviours and roles required for reproduction through sexual intercourse, pregnancy, birthing, and lactation and the associated care of infants.

Because pregnancy, birth and infant care require a protected environment, and because these activities have historically tended to reduce the ability of pregnant and child-bearing females to fend off enemies and obtain food for themselves and their young, corresponding male roles of hunter and protector have also developed. But it is precisely here that gender enters the picture as a problematic category. Even if some gender differentiation in the reproductive sphere is the natural consequence of sexual dimorphism, how far need gender difference extend in prescribing different psychological and cognitive traits in women and men, or different social roles in other areas? To what degree are women by nature designed for child-bearing and child care, and men for warfare and material productivity?

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS’?

The moral teaching of the New Testament epistles may be summed up as a radical reinterpretation of the scriptures and the story of Israel in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This teaching took shape to serve the needs of groups of believers in the fi rst century seeking to live out their Christian discipleship in the towns and cities of the Roman empire, from Palestine and Syria in the east to Rome in the west. Taken together, it is a body of practical wisdom on how to live in holiness as the people of God in the time between the resurrection and parousia of Christ. This practical wisdom covers matters like Jew–Gentile relations, idolatry, eating and fasting, sex and marriage, household order, work, and obligations to those in authority. It is indebted to the moral traditions of Israel on the one hand and of Greece and Rome on the other, 1 all refracted through the lens of the story of Jesus and the experience of the Holy Spirit in daily life and in gatherings for worship.

Against this background, it is not possible to talk about ‘ethics’ in the normal sense of the word. The New Testament does not present abstract reflection of a philosophical kind on the nature and grounds of moral action. It is not a compendium of systematic reflection on the good. Rather, it represents a variety of attempts to articulate the implications of conversion and baptism.

Down the centuries and across the divisions of the Christian church, the story of Jesus has always been acknowledged as somehow normative for moral reflection and formation in the church. How could it be otherwise? The church began with the conviction that God had raised the crucified Jesus from the dead and that by that resurrection ‘God has made him both Lord and Messiah’ (Acts 2:36). The claim was that by raising Jesus from the dead God had vindicated Jesus. He had walked among people. He had announced the good future of God, ‘the kingdom of God’ (Mark 1:15). He had made its power felt already in his words of blessing and in his works of healing, in his readiness to forgive and in his friendship with sinners, in his confidence in God and in his loyalty to the cause of God. He had been put to death as a messianic pretender on a Roman cross, but God raised him up. By that great act of power God vindicated both Jesus and God's own faithfulness to the promises. In this Jesus the cause and character of God had been made known. In this Jesus our own humanity had been finally revealed. How could it be otherwise, then, that the story of Jesus would be acknowledged as somehow normative for the life and the common life of the Christian community? Even before the gospels were written the stories and sayings of Jesus were used to form and to reform the lives of Christians, and the gospels themselves witness to the confidence of the church that the story of Jesus can and should shape community, character and conduct.

ORIGINS

Themes akin to natural law emerged in Greek civilisation. The tragedian Sophocles (497–406 bce), for example, gave some indication of it in his depiction of the conflict between Antigone's obedience to King Creon and her stronger obligation to a higher law. Plato (428–348 bce) countered the relativism of the Sophists by arguing that goodness consists in living a life in accord with our rational nature and not in thoughtless social conformity. Aristotle (383–322 bce) followed suit in distinguishing the deeper ‘natural justice’ from what is legally just. For Aristotle, the good for every organism is ‘to attain fully its natural activity’. Living ‘according to nature’ (kata physin) for human beings means living virtuously.

The cosmopolitan Stoics distinguished the human nature that pertains to all human beings as such from laws instituted by particular societies. They held that the right way to live can be discovered by intelligently conforming to the order residing in human nature. Their characteristic maxim – that we ought to live ‘according to nature’ – was an injunction to live virtuously rather than at the whim of fluctuating emotions or social approval.

Stoic notions were assimilated and popularised by the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 bce), who maintained that ‘True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.’

I am a Jewish Christian ethicist. I realise that this professional self-description admits of multiple interpretations, so let me explain. Both my parents were Jewish and I was raised in a home steeped in Jewish values. At the same time, neither parent was particularly devout in terms of religious practice. Hence, the word ‘Jewish’ in my self-description should be understood in broad cultural rather than explicitly religious terms. At university I studied moral philosophy and Christian ethics, continuing both emphases in my graduate work. As a result, I probably know more about the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry Sidgwick than I do about Solomon ibn Gabirol and Moses Maimonides.

Nevertheless, my Jewish background remains a permanent influence in my life. Over the years, it has led me back to issues or questions in Jewish ethics and has resulted in numerous publications in which I have tried to interpret Jewish ethics to a non-Jewish audience or apply Jewish ethical thinking to emergent issues in applied ethics. Although I certainly lack the intense formal training in Jewish thought and philosophy of some who are professionally identified as Jewish ethicists, I am perhaps better qualified than many of them to think about Christian ethics from a philosophically informed Jewish perspective.

In what follows I want to look at Christian ethics from a Jewish point of view. Specifically, I want to draw on my understanding of the Jewish tradition to compare and contrast these two traditions. My aim is to highlight some of the ways in which these two daughter traditions of biblical faith have come to differ over key features of the moral life. Of course, there are many important similarities between these religious-ethical traditions. Both believe that moral righteousness is an essential expression of faith in God. Both stress adherence to the most basic moral norms found in the Hebrew Bible. Reflecting their common debt to the Exodus traditions, both exhibit a special concern for the marginal and oppressed.

Thirty years ago Alasdair MacIntyre made his seismic challenge to moral theory in After Virtue:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.

As an example of such interminable debate he set out the following different positions on abortion :

(a) Everybody has certain rights over his or her own person, including his or her own body. It follows from the nature of these rights that at the stage when the embryo is essentially part of the mother's body, the mother has the right to make her own uncoerced decision on whether she will have an abortion or not. Therefore abortion is morally permissible and ought to be allowed by law.

(b) I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case, how can I consistently deny to others the right to life that I claim for myself? I would break the so-called Golden Rule unless I denied that a mother has in general a right to an abortion. I am not of course thereby committed to the view that an abortion ought to be legally prohibited.

(c) Murder is wrong. Murder is the taking of innocent life. An embryo is an identifiable individual, differing from a newborn infant only in being at an earlier stage on the long road to adult capacities and, if any life is innocent, that of an embryo is. If infanticide is murder, as it is, abortion is murder. So abortion is not only morally wrong, but ought to be legally prohibited.

The area ‘other faiths and Christian ethics’ raises many questions, only three of which I shall deal with in this chapter. The three areas overlap and the divisions are artificial, but they serve a pedagogical purpose. First, there is a phenomenological question: Do other faiths have similar material ethical goals to those of Christianity? The allied question is whether other faiths also share formal similarities, in terms of ethical reasoning and the understanding of ethics. The way in which these questions are answered on an empirical-historical basis may or may not affect theological considerations, and it may well be the case that theological assumptions generate a particular way of reading the significance of empirical findings. I believe the latter is true. This leads to the second area: are Christian ethics sui generis? On the one hand, there are those who would argue that whatever the historical-empirical findings, Christian ethics are sui generis and phenomenological comparisons are of limited value, and especially so in coming to theological assessments of other religions. On the other hand, there are those who argue that Christian ethics have much in common with ethics from other religions, and therefore the phenomenological findings are important theologically and feed into broader questions. For example, can Christianity make unique claims about ‘holiness’ and ‘salvation’, when other religions have the capacity to produce ‘saints’ that equal or better Christian saints? The third area has, in part, developed out of the second: can the religions support a common understanding of universal human rights? This question feeds into broader philosophical discussion as to whether human rights is a child of modernity and actually inimical to religious conceptions of virtue and duty.

John Elford [see Chapter 13] has set the broad context of Christian approaches to war and of attempts over the centuries to establish just war criteria. In this chapter I will focus, instead, upon the arms trade (or, more accurately, international arms transfer) set in the specific context of recent wars and conflicts.

Christian versions of just war theory are essentially attempts to limit the horrors of warfare rather than the means of justifying particular wars. Although initially derived by Ambrose and Augustine from pre-Christian, Greek and Roman sources, as John Elford has shown, just war theory has long been shaped by Christian theologians and now represents one of the more abiding theological heirlooms in the modern world. It is intentionally a limiting framework. Given that countries are, and always have been, tempted on occasion to go to war, just war theory introduces notes of moral caution into a situation. It offers broad criteria in order to encourage people to see some forms of warfare as considerably less justified than others. Down the centuries many Christians have voiced strong anxieties about warfare and have sought to constrain countries from going lightly into battle and then to limit the horrors of war once it starts.

Many of the debates that have preoccupied the public generally and Christian ethics specifically with regard to business are in desperate need of modulation – especially by recalling and recasting the deeper theological resources, now widely forgotten, that have shaped contemporary economic life. Without understanding the roots of what we have, the dynamics of the present will not be accurately grasped and the capacity to direct the present toward a humane and just future will be limited. The problem is that theological and ethical assessments of economic life have largely accepted secular, materialist and political views of our past. That perception has distorted our moral vision.

In the long, slow process of ‘modernisation’, the nation-state gradually asserted its dominance over the household-based economy of feudal society. Both traditional households and governments were later threatened by the rise of an industrial economy, but only the nation-state was understood to have the wherewithal to control it. The socially and politically short twentieth century, which lasted basically from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 until the fall of the Wall in 1989, was thus a century dominated by issues of political economy, especially of tensions between the haves and the have-nots. The struggles between and within nations about economic matters had essentially to do with the role of government in guiding industrial development and controlling its consequences. Most modern conventional understandings of business and economic ethics are shaped by these issues.

VARIETIES OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT ON JUSTICE

The cultures in which Christianity flourished prior to the missionary expansion of recent centuries were deeply influenced by Christian notions, and in their turn shaped and perhaps sometimes distorted the expression of the Christian faith. It should not then be surprising if we discover that distinctively Christian ideas about justice that Christians, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would wish to support and affirm have been deeply implanted in many modern cultures. The boundary between the religious and the secular in such matters is not always clearcut or easy to discern. Themes like human equality that the American Declaration of Independence thought ‘self-evident’ were not accepted as at all obviously true in a very different cultural environment such as that of traditional India. Indeed, in the course of time ideas and values absorbed from religious sources can become the almost unquestioned assumptions of later generations, commonly believed to be axiomatic, or the conclusion of a purely rational argument.

The complicated interaction between Christian thought on social justice and its intellectual, social, ecclesial and political context continues today. It is at this point that the first, and most obvious, distinction between Protestant and Roman Catholic thought on social justice emerges. In general terms Roman Catholic thought draws on classical Aristotelian philosophy as mediated and moderated by St Thomas Aquinas, whereas Protestants tend to be suspicious of secular reason and seek to ground their thought on justice on revelation contained in scripture.