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All Blog Posts With Tag: ethics
The human heart is an idol factory: a modern critique of John Calvin (August 6, 2019)
John Calvin famously said "the human heart is a perpetual idol factory" (hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam) [Institutes I.11.8]. Calvin's Latin phrase from the definitive 1559 edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion has received meaning that may be lost to Post-Enlightenment people. A modern […]
In Christianity: Essence, History, Future, Hans Küng provides two full page charts comparing famous ethical codes from Judaism, Christianity and Islam to demonstrate that these Abrahamic religions share the same "basic common ethic" [1]: the first compares the Ten Commandments (i.e. the Decalogue in Exodus 20:1-21 RSV, c.f. Deuteronomy 5:4-21) […]
[Brittany Maynard holding the prescription medicine she used to end her life peacefully and painlessly in 2014]
Does assisted suicide violate Christian ethics? Swiss Catholic priest and renown theologian Hans Küng says no in his book Eternal Life?: Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem. Küng argues that […]
Jurgen Moltmann's "Ethics of Hope"
Jürgen Moltmann wrote his recent book, The Ethics of Hope, as a companion to his infamous, Theology of Hope. Karl Barth requested such a book as this in his review of the Theology of Hope in his personal letter reviewing it, where Barth wrote: "your book […]
Karl Barth On The Three Well-Known Theories for Capital Punishment. (October 4, 2013)
Jean-Léon Gérôme - The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer
In Karl Barth's criticism of Capital Punishment, he provides a very good summary of the three best arguments for Capital Punishment, because he continues on to criticize and deconstruct each of them.
1) According to the first theory, which is not only the oldest and […]
Third Use of the Law (Tertius Usus Legis) (November 7, 2012)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
At the end of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics, there is an analysis of the Lutheran symbolic literature (ie. the Book of Concord: the Augsburg Confession, Luther's Catechisms, etc.) Bonhoeffer, therein, discussed the Lutheran understand of the Law and asks whether there is one primary use of the Law (primus usus legis) or three?
I'll summarize Bonhoeffer's three […]
Christ And Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr (review) (October 20, 2011)
It's almost impossible to engage in a conversation about culture without someone mentioning H. Richard Niehbur's Christ & Culture. I learned about Niehbur through D.A. Carson's magisterial Christ & Culture: Revisited, which I unfortunately read before ...