Derek Woodard-Lehman

The contributors to this volume are motivated by two concerns. First, we want to clarify the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics. Second, we want to specify the contributions that Christian ethics makes to religious ethics. Apart from this Introduction, however, our respective contributions are not methodological essays. Some of us directly address these concerns. For others, these concerns are part of the intellectual landscape that informs our implicit background assumptions. But for all of us, our primary aim is to show, rather than say, what normative Christian ethics is and why it matters for contemporary religious ethics.

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the "body politics" of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as "constantinian" entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as "racelessness," by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopolitical alternative to the nation- state's politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of "nonviolent violence." Th...

This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral philosophy is oppositional. It demonstrates that Barth appropriates the central insights of his philosophical predecessors and incorporates them into his ethics, even as he anticipates one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary moral philosophy: Stephen Darwall’s ‘second-personal ethics’. Rather than casting autonomy as sin, he recasts obedience to the Word of God as a form of autonomy. Barth incorporates the rational form of Kantian self-legislation and the social form of Hegelian mutual recognition into his account of subjective reception of revelation. Because Barth does not separate the sovereignty of revelation from the sociality of the church’s interpretation of Scripture and confession of faith, we—Barth’s readers—must not separate his account of hearing the Word of God from his account of hearing the divine command. In fact, we should take his account of the subjective rec...

The contributors to this volume are motivated by two concerns. First, we want to clarify the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics. Second, we want to specify the contributions that Christian ethics makes to religious ethics. Apart from this Introduction, however, our respective contributions are not methodological essays. Some of us directly address these concerns. For others, these concerns are part of the intellectual landscape that informs our implicit background assumptions. But for all of us, our primary aim is to show, rather than say, what normative Christian ethics is and why it matters for contemporary religious ethics.