Assign No 1-pama, Christine

Christine Joy D. Pama

The Distinctiveness of Christian Morality

Christian morality involves living one’s life with guidance and inspiration from the Christian scriptures and traditions. The scripture itself function to guide people to what is right or wrong, good or evil. It consists of turning to the Bible for answers and direct moral guidance which the true moral teaching comes from for Christians are called to live Christ. To be distinguished from other religious perspectives, Christian morality is shaped by such Biblical revelations. Hence, being done by Christians in the context of their relationship with Christ through the scriptures, they made Christian moral thinking unique leading to discovering a moral path of Christ. Through natural law and reason, humans can know some or most of morality, but the scripture provides distinctive emphases and features for moral and spiritual life. It teaches people to love, including one’s enemies; to emphasize stewardship and discipleship; to economic justice; and to forgive and have mercy. This love commandment makes Christian morality unique. Through this, Christian experiences and sees the world in a different light – the reality of conversion. God would not command anything unless God had made it possible for humans to understand what these moral demands were. Humans should be able to discern correct moral laws and demands by understanding the nature of created reality. In Christian tradition, God sent prophets like Jesus to the children of Israel to comfort, heal, challenge and call people to a renewed life of reconciliation with Him in a way that death cannot defeat; He did not abandon us to vice, victimization, illness, and extermination. These prophets are means on how God transmits his rules, as written on the scriptures. Christians have seen scriptures as the revelation of God or containing a revelation of God. A disclosive and revelatory of God, as an honest letter would be written by someone perfectly dependable and trustworthy. Specific rules are given by God through the scriptures to affirm a distinctly Christian content for morality. This includes the ten commandments and the basic virtue of fruits and spirit by St. Paul (as in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) which are teaching Christians more by stories of the past than rules. Through this, things are no longer an abstraction, but something experienced in history and embodied in the teaching and life of Jesus. In the inspiration of grace of the spirit of God, the Christian respect for human life manifests itself, as a respect for all human beings together with Jesus’ special consciousness to those easily overlooked in the perfect equality’s abstract system such as those poor and marginalized. True Christian morality is trying to live faithfully in Christ as what the Christian community discovered. It cannot be denied that religion is inclined with history for great ethical and moral teachers tended to be founders of religion, and most of human antiquity of influential ethical authorities tended to be religious authorities. History also tells us that the country’s majority religion is Christianity, and learning such religion will make people, whether religious or not, understand morality with written basis through the scriptures. Since there is no universal moral law and every

religion have their interpretation of what morality is, and have their different beliefs on which rule and ruler to follow, Christian morality lets society to meet in half-ways. As reiterated, distinctively than other religions, Christians discover moral truth through the scriptures and revelation as well as tradition for the scripture itself has been seen by Christians as holy and an instrument for doing good (Col 3:16; Heb 4:12, 2 Tim 3:16); they share most of these moral insights with other ethnicities and traditions, and sometimes they prophetically proclaim a truth that the rest of the world has ignored.

Sources: Miller, M. (March 1999). Living Ethically in Christ. Vol.27 Edinburg, J. (2001). Living the Christian Story Langerak, E. (n.d). What is Christian Ethics