# Resurrection and Moral Order: Evangelical Ethics (O'Donovan)



## RamistThomist (Jul 31, 2018)

Christian ethics depends upon Christ's resurrection from the dead. It affirms both the kingship of Christ and natural law, for creation is affirmed in Christ's resurrection. O'Donovan argues that "evangelical" ethics is ethical living in light of the renewed and renewing creation. The created order--the order of creation, the purpose for which it was established--is vindicated in the cross/resurrection of Christ and is given back to God's people. 

He then proceeds to critique historicist ethics, particularly the Marxist form. Following, he argues that a corollary of ethics is epistemology: the Christian's knowledge is in key and in part a *knowledge in Christ.* While not a primary or exhaustive part of knowledge, *experience* is a factor in knowing. For the Christian knowledge often comes in light of suffering and the way of the Cross (my favorite part of the book).

Difference with Hauerwas: OO begins ethics with the Christ-event and resurrection; hauerwas with the practices of the Church.

Ethics and final redemption: Jesus sits at God’s right hand and gives the spirit as a guarantee. We can be confident about reconciliation because of Christ’s work on the cross.

The Spirit and Christian Freedom

The resurrection focuses our participation forward. It allows me to respond as a moral agent to God’s order (23). The gift of subjective freedom must be an aspect of our being-in-Christ. The coming of Christ throws off the law as pedagaigos. It makes us adults in God’s order.

OBJECTIVE REALITY

Created Order

creation: the order and coherence in which the world is composed (31). It generates an ethical terminology:

1. end–A is ordered to serve B;
2. Creation’s being for Christ is related to being in Christ
3. kind: creates which have generic equivalence in Christ can be ordered to one another teleologically (here O’Donovan avoids the scale of being, but allows at the same time that man is probably more important than rocks).
4. Here OO (34-36) tries to navigate the problems of how creation’s subordinate ends are ordered to each other (per Hegel, Hume, etc).

he attack upon ends: the polarity of will and nature

reality without “kinds” is nominalism. Reality without ends is voluntarism. Abstracting man from teleological concerns opens the danger to a mechanization of man (52).

ESCHATOLOGY AND HISTORY

Created order cannot be itself while it lacks the Christ-redeemed rule of man that was intended to it (55). Eschatology answers the question of what creation’s temporal extensions mean. The ascension is an unfolding of the significance of the resurrection (57). This means Christian ethics looks both backwards and forwards. 

Natural Ends and History

historicism: all teleology is time-bound, historical teleology. It implies that the fulfillment of history is generated from within history (64). The Reformers’ insistence on sola fide/gratia cut this move off at the pass. “Grace alone” means God is at work from the outside. 

1. Platonic form: per Pannenberg it incorporates not only the Parmenidean arche, but the Socratic arete. The notion of the good contains an element of futurity. 
2. criticism: when history is made the categorical matrix for understanding reality, then it can no longer be history. For a story to be a story, it has to be a story about something (and not just a story about the idea of story).
3. The patristic response: if creation is extended infinitely in time, then it has infinite possibilities. By speaking of creation ex nihilo, as finite, they could say the possibilities in history were defined in terms of creation’s being God’s gift (63). 

Historicist Ethics: strong tendency to manipulate and intervene. Nature does not have meaning from some transhistorical given, but arises from within history by natural forces. 

Western political theology was able to keep a distance from historicist conclusions (for a while, anyway). It starts from the assertion that the kingdoms of this world are not yet the kingdoms of the Christ, since they do not reflect his judgments. This allows the believer, who is absolutely subject to Christ, to be relatively subject to earthly powers. This relative subjectivity opens a “space” between the believer and the powers. Further, since politics does not have to reconcile the world, it can get along with its own God-ordained business (72). 

If there is no locus of value outside of history, then history will supply its own. In this case the kingdom of God becomes a form without content. 

KNOWLEDGE IN Christ

Knowledge has subjective/objective aspects. 

1. knowledge of things in their relation to the totality of things (77). Grasping the shape of the whole.
2. The NT contrasts faith/sight, not faith/reason. 
3. subjective aspect: the more encompassing an object is, the harder it is to transcend it and remain neutral. 
4. universals: our conception of “kinds” (genera) is always open to new particulars. However, the knowledge of the created order from within avoids the empiricist’s dilemma opposed to a knowledge of universals from above. 
5. knowledge is a human way of participating in the created order (81). knowledge is therefore tied to man’s faithful performance of a task.

In summary, knowledge is a knowledge-of-things from within the created order and is vindicated by the resurrection of Christ, who vindicates the created order and gives it back. Knowledge is a knowledge hidden in Christ. 

Exclusive Knowledge

This knowledge of things in Christ is not of an ethereal Logos, but a particular human. It is a particular knowledge of the whole order of things created and transformed (85). 

Natural Law: how to avoid the ambiguity which attributes universality, not only to knowledge, but to being. First principles, for Thomas, are self-evident (ST II.I.94.2)
It is moral knowledge of the natural order co-ordinated with obedience (87). It is known by participation, not transcendence. 

The Authority of Christ

The spirit bears witness to the Resurrected Christ’s authority. Spontainety and tradition are dual aspects of the same error: failure to critically evaluate the Spirits. What is tradition but spontaneity in slow motion? They are not necessarily wrong; just not self-evident. 

The authority of God is located in the public realm (Resurrection). Moral authority is the authority of the renewed created order where ends and kinds participate. 

Evangelical Authority

* “When the apostle contrasted law and gospel, he was pointing to the dialectical tension in Israel’s history between the experience of God through promise and the experience of God through command” (151).

Some criticisms:

The book left me with questions concerning "what to do?" Having read it, what should be my response? This is probably the fault of the reader, and thus I need to reread it.


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