Course Description
Modern moral theology faces an epidemic of reducing ethical discourse to applied ethics at the neglect of systematic philosophical questions. What is “good”? How does ethics relate to the chief end of man? Is duty, virtue, or consequence primary in deliberation? The result is a hermeneutic that treats the Bible as an encyclopedia of answers and yields a list of rules in a duty-based ethic that lends itself to legalism in the church.
The alternative is to recover philosophical questions and their traditional Chrisitan answers through the study of our own historic virtue tradition. Virtue was the only framework for thinking about morality up until the fracturing of theology and philosophy by early modern thinkers.
While foundations in virtue ethics rely on Aristotle and Aquinas, an ethic that fully considers the severity of sin and reliance on grace must be developed. This course introduces reformed virtue ethics through the study of Peter Vermigli’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue. No prior courses or knowledge of Aristotle is required. This course will include highlights from the prior course Foundations of Virtue: Aristotle & Aquinas.