Herbert McCabe uses football (soccer) as an analogy for Christian ethics, the sports game being an illuminating abstraction from the concreteness of moral life. This paper explores three authorities in the life-abstraction that is sport: the referee, the coach, and the exemplary player. (1) The referee bears practical epistemic authority: he declares what counts as a play within the rules, and what shall be excluded as an invalid (non-rule-following) play. There are interesting authority-problems that arise when referees err. In ethics, (...) epistemic authority is found in casuistry. (2) The coach bears social authority: she works to make her team function as a team, and at the same time to draw each player to her own excellence. Christian ethics values social authority in every truly human dimension. (3) The exemplary player is a personal authority. He demonstrates excellence of play, which goes beyond conformance to the rules and also goes beyond coaching. A complexification here is the relation of deliberate rule-breaking to excellence of performance. In Christian ethics, exemplary authority is held by the saint living in koinonia. The paper closes with the disanalogy that Christian ethics hopes for excellence in every person. (shrink)

Christian ethics is a most perplexing subject. This Guide takes the reader through the most fundamental issues surrounding the question of Ethics from a Christian perspective: Is ethics a meaningful topic of discourse and can there be such a thing as an ethical argument or ethical persuasion? What is the meaning of the adjective in Christian Ethics?Could right behavior be different for Christians than it is for others? Can we turn to the Bible for help? Does the Bible tell us (...) what to do, or give us insight into the good we should aim to achieve, or give us a narrative by which to live? Is it best to think of ethics as a matter of duty, or good, or excellence? If we take the virtue line and say that ethics is about human excellence, doing well as a human being or succeeding at being a good human being then what will we say about humans who cannot achieve excellence? The virtue approach leads us to place friendship as the goal of ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society by Patricia Lamoureux, Paul J. WadellVictor Lee AustinThe Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society Patricia Lamoureux and Paul J. Wadell Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. 306pp. $27.00In ten chapters, the authors provide what is in effect an introductory college textbook in Roman Catholic moral theology. They aim to ground their exposition in scripture and to (...) reach a broad audience by drawing on ecumenical and interfaith perspectives. Their organization is clear: they summarize each chapter in advance and then conclude it with a list of main points and questions for reflection. The index is extensive, the bibliography is large, and the table of contents is quite detailed. In short, the book aims to be accessible to undergraduates and helpful to more advanced students. (There is, unfortunately, no index of scriptural citations.) [End Page 201]The arc of their approach to moral theology is as follows. One should begin with discipleship and more specifically with its dynamic of call and response. Discipleship is a process in which one learns to see, particularly to see the reign of God. Sin and repentance are continually involved in discipleship. The development of the virtues is central because through them we learn to be good at being human. In the moral life, conscience is the central gift by which we learn to live by love in a Eucharistic life. Such life is informed by the resurrection as understood both “analogically and dialectically” (206), it is guided by the Spirit, and it is anchored in the shared resources and discernment of Christian community. Finally, the moral life is not private. Thus, the authors conclude with a chapter that draws out the implications for public discipleship.I venture three critiques that arise in part from my place as an Anglican moral theologian. The first deals with scripture. The authors are aware of the characteristic biases of preconciliar Roman Catholic moral theology. I am less certain that they are self-conscious of some of their own presuppositions. Commendably, they provide a verse of scripture at the head of each chapter, and they conceive of what they are doing as working from scripture throughout. Yet it is not clear to me that they present us with a moral theology that comes out of a prayerful wrestling with scripture. For example, their statement, “Jesus praises the [good] Samaritan” (46) is not strictly true. Rather, in telling that parable, Jesus holds back from stating a conclusion. Moreover, the authors are correct to say that parables are useful in transforming our vision. They make that point over eight pages (39–47), in which there are seventeen citations of secondary literature from six different authors. Yet, I would have preferred to see how the authors themselves digested, synthesized, and struggled with the parables, rather than simply discussing the conclusions of others.My second critique deals with conscience. When students start to think about how the moral life is grounded in scripture, they will at some point ask: What if my conscience tells me that something is right that scripture says is wrong (or vice versa)? This question, however, does not appear in this book. In their chapter on the centrality of conscience, it becomes clear that the authors see the primary challenge to the primacy of the conscience as coming from “church leaders.” This is, I think, a regrettable continuation of the tired struggle of Roman moral theologians with their church’s magisterium. At least to this outsider—who lives within an ecclesial context marked by extreme weakness of teaching—there seems to be a highly important and positive use of obedience, which is different from the “mystique of obedience” that these authors criticize (170–71). To be precise, “church leaders” can help us learn something about the relationship of conscience and scripture. This book does not show the place of obedience in the Christian moral life.My last point is a comment on textbooks. Although this book is quite long (I estimate it at 150,000 words), it has that textbook quality of passing lightly [End Page 202] from one thing to the next... (shrink)