How I Teach Christian Ethics: First Steps

Clearing the Ground, Naming the Terms

I’ve written (or rather, chit-chatted about) why Christian ethics is unlike other disciplines: it works with a lot of the same sources as theology, but is not itself theology. But I’ve not pulled back the curtain on how I go about doing teaching this.

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The Land of Confusion: What Exactly is Ethics?

“You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me.”

On the board, scrawled in dry erase marker is the first and greatest commandment. The preamble to the Decalogue is something most of us don’t remember, reading in Deuteronomy that

⁴ The Lord spoke to you face to face out of the fire on the mountain. ⁵ (At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the mountain.) And he said: ⁶ “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. ⁷ “You shall have no other gods before me.”

In other words, the encounter with God in which we encounter the fire of God—as many have noted—is already one freighted with moral content. It calls us to be something. Before we begin, the relation of us to both the world before us and to God has been set out in this two-fold fashion: to be a people and to be a people bound by moral direction are one and the same.

There is no city in view yet: only the desert through which we led.

But even this is just prolegomena. To begin the journey of Christian Ethics is to undertake a three-fold exploration: