Ethics can claim no primacy in theology, then, but neither should it be willing to grant one, however much it may accept that it can speak only after Doctrine has spoken. The two branches of theology are mutually complementary: Doctrine completes Ethics by speaking of an end of God’s works; Ethics completes Doctrine by offering it an understanding of itself as a practice of praise. Yet the two still proceed in a certain independence. If the truths they attend to are the same, the rational order in which they place them is different. Ethics, watching reflectively over practical reason, orders
...more
