If the Modernity of the 19th and 20th Centuries, initiated by the Enlightenment in the late 17th and 18th Centuries, produced the philosophical and cultural tsunamis that currently threaten the church in the West, postmodernity is debris left as the waters have receded. Common to modern and post-modernistic ethical systems, to varying degrees, is the centrality of reason or the authority of experience, with experience now taking the lead culturally. In neither modernity nor the various iterations of postmodernity does God or Revelation have a place of any significance, if at all, in ethical discourse in the public square. Consequently, moral authority tends to default to the secularizing effects of critical philosophy, sociology, psychology, and the natural and political sciences. In popular culture, with its strengthening influence on churches in the West, ethics tends to focus exclusively on subjective choices driven by individual desires or the relative authorities of communities, often bracketing the display of moral goodness and right choices that should follow from robust ethical deliberations refined by a proper understanding of God.
In this paper, as an exercise of theological ethics, I will argue for a Paradigm that grounds ethics and morality on the Reality of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As authoritative ground, the Trinity gives an appropriate and qualified place to deontological, teleological, and consequential ethical concerns.
Engaging works in biblical and theological ethics and systematic and historical theology, I will do the following:
1) Present a theological/ethical paradigm as a way to map the moral landscape so that the church can discern how to make disciples of those entangled in secularizing and relativizing cultures.
2) Argue for a robust ethic that incorporates the language of command and virtue and accounts objectively for the continencies of consequences.
3) Demonstrate the significance of creedal theology to the moral life and witness of the Church.