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12 - Other faiths and Christian ethics

from Part II - Approaches to Christian ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2012

Robin Gill
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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