Jacob Moore’s Reviews > Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics > Status Update

A life considered solely as fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession ... so the variety of forms of life are unified within... the life of love.

We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint
There may be resistance from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian theological construction which will legislate where it would be better to respect the Bible's silence. When such doubts have been raised, we are doomed to think the Scriptures inconclusive for questions worth doubting about in the first place.

The church may command with the sanctions of discipline in matters where a theological argument alone seems to require a certain conclusion. For example, the practice of euthanasia is inconsistent with biblical ethics, even though not explicitly condemned in the biblical text... So long as the argument commands general agreement among those who accept Christ's authority, a disciplinary sanction may be appropriate.

The teaching & life of Jesus must be morally authoritative if we are not to be thrown back upon the gnostic gospel of a visitor from heaven who summons us out of the world... Though the redemption of the world had to be wrought from outside it by God's gracious intervention, it had still to be the redemption of the world.

The exercise of political authority is the search for a compromise which, while bearing the fullest witness to the truth that can in the circumstances be borne, will, nevertheless, lie within the scope of possible public action in the particular community of fallen men which it has to serve.

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Moral freedom can never be established on a basis of self-sufficiency & independence of the world. Freedom, if it is freedom to act within the world, must itself be of the world. Man's status as agent is part and parcel of his created being in the world... therefore, he has nothing to fear from the world-order.. He has only to fear being cut off from it. God has given him his freedom ... & a world in which to be free

We may say that a development poses new moral questions... but this is only a rhetorical performance. If a moral 'issue' has arisen about this new technique, it has arisen not because the technique has put it to us, but of questions which we have put to the technique.

Historicism with its incapacity to distinguish natural from historical teleology, will always tend to confuse the goodness of natural structures with sin & disorder. For if all teleology is historical teleology, & the natural structures have no integrity as totalities within themselves, then actual good & evil alike stand together under the judgment of historical fulfilment, as 'imperfect.'

All ordering becomes deliberative ordering & scientific observation, failing to report the teleological order within nature, becomes the servant of techne. Of course, man continues to eat vegetables; but he no longer does so because vegetables are food, & comes to imagine that he has devised a use for them. So he looks for other uses of them, which will seem to him to have as much validity as the use given by nature.

And so it is that as man is given by the Spirit to share Christ's authority, he cannot do so without love, both for the created order in general and for the particular beings, human and other, which stand within it in various problematic relationships... It achieves its creativity by being perceptive. It attempts to act for any being only on the basis of an appreciation of that being.