To Delight in His Will and Walk in His Ways

A New Anglican Moral Theology

Daniel Westberg

Nashotah House

Chapter 1

The Past and Future of Anglican Moral Theology

D R A F T

“Moral Theology” is the term often used in Catholic and Anglican circles for what other traditions call Christian ethics or theological ethics. Sometimes Anglicans have defined Christian ethics as the more general and foundational part of a theology of Christian behavior, dealing with matters such as the human person, psychology, general moral principles, and norms, while moral theology is concerned with moral problems, focusing on the application of principles to specific cases.¹

In this book Christian ethics and moral theology will be used more or less interchangeably, as is common elsewhere. This is not so much because of contemporary slackness, but because the methods of approaching the field have changed so considerably in the last fifty years, that the starting points, assumptions, and methodology no longer fit the traditional terminology.

Anglican moral theology developed as a method of handling the inherited Catholic model but from a perspective influenced by key insights of the Protestant reformation (especially the doctrine of justification). There were benefits in the continued use of Roman Catholic sources in ethics: the scholastic method offered definitions, a theoretic basis for analyzing the moral character of actions, and a methodology for handling and resolving difficult cases (casuistry). But with this inheritance came also the danger of the flaws of the Roman approach: a philosophical rather than biblical character, a rigid scholastic framework, and a spirit of legalism.

Vatican II summoned the next generation of theologians to give moral theology “a more vivid contact with the Mystery of Christ” and to “draw more fully on the teaching of holy scripture,”² and their response has certainly changed the character of Catholic ethics both in tone and substance. Our purpose here is to assess briefly the character of Anglican moral theology when the Roman moral handbooks provided a seemingly reliable touchstone, how that character changed, and the prospects for a rehabilitation of Anglican moral theology.

I The Distinctive Characteristics of Anglican Moral Theology

Even a brief sketch of the history of the leading Anglican figures is not possible here. But we can point to certain key characteristics and contributions which parallel or contrast with Roman Catholic moral theology.

Richard Hooker to Jeremy Taylor

Hooker wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity not as a general systematic or moral theology (it is far from an Anglican Summa as some have praised it). It had a polemical purpose and limited scope. Hooker is rightly celebrated for transmitting to Anglican thought a keen perception of the essence of Thomistic natural law and its connection to right reason. At a time when Roman Catholic moral theologians were shifting the emphasis to the centrality of the will, Hooker, following Aquinas, defined human choice as a product of both reason and will, and maintained the Thomistic view of law as a dictate of reason rather than law as imposed by the will of another. This puts Hooker in continuity with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of an ethics of right reason.

We must emphasize, however, that Hooker presented only a very small–even if important–aspect of Thomistic ethics, on the nature of choice and law. If the natural law is seen as the basis for Thomistic ethics (which used to be very common), then Hooker’s transmission of natural law is magnified in importance. In a revised view of Aquinas’ ethics which stress the importance of the virtues in the moral life, then Hooker’s accomplishment is less significant for a complete moral theology, since he paid almost no attention to the virtues.

The seventeenth century “Caroline divines” are often thought to represent a kind of golden age for Anglican moral theology, because this was when the most extensive and systematic treatment of moral theology was produced, and there was considerable interest in providing a careful analysis of moral reasoning with the analysis of a wide range of “cases of conscience.”

The aim was to provide for the Church of England handbooks to parallel (if not actually to imitate) the Roman Catholic moral theologies. There were key differences, which have been noted³: the distinction made by the Romans between “precepts” (which applied to all Christians) and “counsels of perfection” (which represented a higher standard of moral behavior for monastics, priests and others) was rejected: all Christians are called to a life of holiness. It is worth nothing the clear but recent rejection by Pope John Paul II of this two-tier morality.⁴

The distinction between mortal and venial sin was also denied, on the grounds that all sin is offensive to God, and that no sin has “an inherent right to pardon by reason of the nature of the act.”⁵ The Caroline moralists were wary of the streak of laxness in contemporary Roman moral theology (familiar in literary history through Pascals brilliant jabs at the reasoning of Spanish Jesuit moral theologians).

The desire to avoid laxness was a commendable feature of the Carolines, but their zeal to avoid a compromised and minimalist Christian discipleship led to a kind of rigorism, not only setting the standard of Christian conduct at a high level, but specifying it in a legalistic fashion. This was also characteristic of the Puritan ethics of William Ames and Richard Baxter.

On the other hand, there was a strong emphasis on what may be called ascetical theology or spirituality. Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying is one of the classics of Anglican spirituality, combining the challenge to a disciplined Christian life with an emphasis on prayer and meditation and spiritual development. This provides another strong contrast with Roman Catholic moral theology of the time which had split apart from ascetic theology and developed on a pattern of scholastic philosophy without the emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life which is found in the Summa Theologiae.⁶

Fitzsimons Allison has presented us with an unresolved conflict between the more orthodox and attractive Taylor writing on the life of prayer, and the rigorist, moralistic Taylor who seems almost Pelagian, with little grasp of the centrality of the gospel of forgiveness.⁷ There have been more recent and sympathetic readings of Taylor which see the spiritual writing of Taylor–especially his meditations on the ethical implications of the life of Christ in The Great Exemplar-- at least partly overlapping with his moral theology.⁸ More thorough study of Jeremy Taylor and the contribution of the Caroline divines will need to be done, in the light of a fresh reading of Roman Catholic moral theology, to be able to assess clearly the quality of their contribution to Anglican ethics.

One major difficulty is already obvious: the shift from an ethics of right reason to the system of conscience characteristic of the Roman manuals. Where Richard Hooker (following Aquinas) had described freedom involving both reason and will in choice for the good, the question of freedom is now transferred to the confrontation of conscience before the law. The difficult decisions of the moral life become a matter of assessing one’s authority to mitigate the requirements of the law.

The framing of the moral life around the problems facing the obedience of conscience to the law is one of the leading indicators of the shift away from Thomistic ethics.⁹ The Caroline divines, at least in this fundamental aspect of the structure of moral theology, were operating with the same model of a range of positions between laxism and rigorism.

The difference from Thomistic ethics is partly in the definition of conscience, but mostly in the role it has in choosing and acting. The treatment of conscience in the Summa Theologiae is in the anthropology section of the first part, before the beginning of the long ethical section of the second part. This means that in the detailed description of deciding and acting, it is practical reason and not conscience that plays the pivotal role. The very titles and methodological starting points of Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor indicate a shift. Sanderson’s chief contribution to ethics was De obligatione conscientiae, “On the obligation of conscience,” a later English version of which, prescribed for ordination candidates, was entitled Bishop Sanderson’s Lectures on Conscience and Law.

Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium (“A Guide for Moral Difficulties”) has been called “the greatest single treatise on moral theology produced by an English churchman.”¹⁰ In the opening section on the rule of conscience in general, Taylor links human conscience to God’s providential governing of the world: “God is in our hearts by His laws: He rules in us by His substitute our conscience. God sits there and gives us laws. . .”¹¹

The central problem of the Caroline divines’ depiction of the Christian moral life was not so much the inclination to rigorism as its conception of moral reasoning as the sense of obligation that is generated when the conscience is faced by law. The more laid-back Jesuit moral theologians who sometimes came to laxist conclusions were operating within the same structure of conscience and law, but were willing to cut a little more slack for the ordinary Christian. It is the fashioning of the Christian moral life as a series of difficulties in the degree to which one must adhere to law–a mode common to Roman Catholic, Puritan and Anglican ethics alike–which indicates the distance moral theology had wandered from the Thomistic path.

It is not clear the degree to which the Caroline divines picked up the legalistic view of the Christian life from contemporary Roman Catholic handbooks. It is quite likely that the explanation lies in a much more general shift in western philosophy and theology to an emphasis on law and authority, because the Puritan theologians had the same law-conscience structure with much less input from the Roman Catholic moral manuals. Further, only such a general and pervasive shift can fully account for the countless Roman theologians exposed to the Summa Theologiae and yet missing the very different overall structure of the moral in the account of St. Thomas. It was not until the last fifty years when this gap between Aquinas and the centuries old tradition of moral theology became so painfully obvious.

From the Oxford Movement to Situation Ethics

The creative contributions of the Catholic renewal in Anglicanism were centred on church history, the reappropriation of patristic theology, ecclesiology and sacramentology, and not in moral theology. When Pusey wanted to provide a manul for the hearing of confessions by priests in the Church of England he translated the Roman Catholic Manual for Confessors of Jean-Joseph Gaumé.

Nevertheless the healthy Anglican inclination to return to the sources rather than merely import from the Roman Church prevailed sufficiently for the production of two versions of moral theology squarely based on a thorough reading and summary of the moral section of the Summa Theologiae. James Skinner published in 1882 his Synopsis of Moral and Ascetical Theology, even the title of which indicates an understanding of the close relationship between ethics and spirituality found in St. Thomas but had disappeared in the Roman Catholic manuals.

John Elmendorf, not much later, produced for the Episcopal Church his Elements of Moral Theology ¹² in which he fairly faithfully summarized, in proper order, pretty much the content of the entire Secunda Secundae, deliberately minimizing where he could the scholastic “peripatetic” (i.e. Aristotelian) elements. A number of minor sections were omitted, and there are some topics which are obscured by too much compression. But most revealing is what Elmendorf thought he needed to supply by way of a lengthy supplement on the grounds that the Summa was left unfinished. He added sections on the decalogue, matters of ethics and civil law, and a treatment of the sacraments, all prefaced with a chapter on conscience! (these are subjects commonly included in the Roman manuals). Elmendorf drew on Sanderson and Taylor for his elucidation of conscience, and it is clear that despite his good intentions–and concentration on the text-- in presenting the ethical system of Aquinas, his framework for understanding the dynamics of the moral life was that of law and conscience. Indeed, he asserts in his preface that “Moral Theology can only enunciate, systematize, and apply the Law of God.”¹³

In the first half of the twentieth century the works of Kenneth Kirk professor at Oxford and later bishop of that diocese, were influential, commonly used in Anglican seminaries. One of his chief contributions was demonstrating the link between moral, ascetic and mystical theology, especially in The Vision of God, but also in Some Principles of Moral Theology. Kirk’s stress on beatitude as the goal of the moral life, and the importance of the Holy Spirit are in contrast to the Roman Catholic treatment in the handbooks. But Kirk could not make a break with the prevailing structure of conscience and obedience to law (see Conscience and its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry).

In The Elements of Moral Theology R. C. Mortimer provides an extensive coverage of the virtues which is recognizably Thomistic, apart from a revealing inversion of the moral virtues with prudence coming last (and treated more slightly than the others), when for Aquinas it was the key moral virtue. That we are dealing with the faulty emphasis on conscience and law is clearly indicated by (1) the topics of the first half are: the end of man, law, human action, the morality of actions, and conscience; and (2) Mortimer’s own admission of relying heavily on contemporary Roman Catholic manuals.¹⁴

On the eve of the revolution in ethics of the 1960s, Lindsay Dewar in a short series of lectures to Anglican clergy, still considered that the “moral difficulties” of the Christian life were to be analyzed in terms of cases of conscience. There is a certain quaint unreality in Dewar’s concern to avoid rigorism, his sensitivity to the dangers of an over-scrupulous conscience; in his remarks on contraception; and especially in his main example of a moral difficulty to be resolved:

Here is a young man who is invited to play a game of tennis on a Sunday afternoon with some friends with whom he is spending what is commonly but misleadingly called ‘the week-end.’ We may suppose that he has been brought up in such a way that he has never done this, and has been taught to think that this is wrong. But now he becomes genuinely doubtful. If he refuses to make a fourth, the game will be spoiled for his friends. What is he to do?¹⁵

There is no doubt that the church in the modern world would do well to abandon its increasingly secular indifference to the sabbath principle and recover a renewed emphasis on properly honoring the Lord’s Day–but that is not at all the concern of Dewar. He sees the problem only in terms of the young man having proper authority (which he might get from his vicar) for his conscience to allow him to play tennis on Sunday afternoon. It is hard not to be reminded of the tithing of mint and cummin.

A blast of fresh moral air was certainly needed! What we got in the 1960s was “situation ethics,” an impossibly reductionist attempt to clear away all the clutter of moral theology except for the single principle of doing the loving thing. The severe defects in the method of Joseph Fletcher (an Episcopal moral theology professor at the time) were certainly noted. A secular professor of philosophical ethics called it “a very bad book, poorly written, weakly argued, astonishingly ignorant, and incredibly inaccurate,”¹⁶ and many other theologians and ethicists pointed out numerous flaws and weak points;¹⁷ but the argument that rules and norms should be regarded as merely vague rules of thumb and that we would do best by obeying only the rule of love was immensely persuasive. Many Christian people at that time (and many more since) who have never heard of Joseph Fletcher probably think about ethical problems in the anti-authoritarian, individualistic, and impatient way that Fletcher was recommending, and resolve morally difficult situations with their own bottom-line confidence that their own intentions are loving. Nevertheless we may say that Fletcher grasped two points which the traditional moral theology obscured: (1) the primacy of Christian love (setting aside the problem of his reductionism); and (2) the impoverishment of an ethic which conceives moral decisions primarily in terms of fulfilling an obligation to obey the law, or otherwise securing proper authority to set the rule aside.

II. Recent Developments and Resources for Rehabilitating Moral Theology

1. The Recovery of Aristotle and the Rise of Virtue Ethics.

The rejection of classic moral theology in the 1960s was due to many factors, including impatience with scholasticism, legalism, and the lack of spirituality. In addition, the Thomistic and scholastic traditions were so different from the ethical systems of the day: utilitarianism, Kantianism, emotivism and linguistic analysis prevailed, and were not very sympathetic to the world of pre-modern moral philosophy. But the thin results and limitations of the Enlightenment-inspired ethical methods became obvious. Aristotle’s teleological ethics, with its account of intellect, choice, friendship, and the virtues enjoyed a revival and became relevant again. Especially after the publication of Alister MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, a large volume of work on practical reason, emotion, virtue, and friendship has been produced in both philosophical and theological ethics.

This is not to say that interest in Aristotle would translate into interest in the old moral handbooks, because the Aristotelian elements are often unrecognizable. But it does mean that when we encounter an account of the moral and theological virtues such as in Mortimer’s Elements of Moral Theology it is not a strange moral world.

2. A Richer View of Biblical Ethics.

When Christian ethics was conceived principally as obedience to the will of God expressed through law, it followed that the reading of the Bible would concentrate on the decalogue, the relevance of other Jewish law, and the passage in the gospel and epistles in the form of commands and norms. In works of scholars as Richard Hays we are led to pay attention to the moral implications of scripture in a much wider way: one can discern principles which should govern our decisions; the many stories and accounts of peoples’ actions provide paradigms for conduct (both positive and negative); and the “symbolic world” created by different authors presents us with attitudes and frameworks for understanding our relationship to God, the created order and to each other.¹⁸ Interest in virtue ethics has led to more fruitful explorations of biblical perspectives on character formation and moral development.¹⁹

We should mention Stanley Hauerwas who has developed especially for Christian ethics the narrative mode of reading scripture. He made an early contribution to a sympathetic reading of Thomas Aquinas’ ethics (with comparison to Karl Barth),²⁰ but has moved on to a church-centered type of narrative ethics which centers on the importance of forming communal identity, shaped by a common understanding and practical expression of the gospel, the pattern of the life of Christ. There may be a rather selective use of scripture in his approach, ²¹ but even so, Hauerwas has expressed fundamental features of the outlook and motivation of a contemporary Christian virtue ethics.

3. Reassessment of the History of Moral Theology

For centuries it was assumed that the moral theology of the neo-scholastic manuals was basically the same system developed by Thomas Aquinas with further developments and applications to new cases. It was natural for Anglican theologians to assume that they could be aided in their study of Aquinas by consulting contemporary Roman handbooks. But the true character of Thomistic ethics was not represented, in spite of many citations from the Summa, any more than the true ethos of scripture was being faithfully transmitted through the citation of numerous biblical proof-texts in the manuals..

The discordance of the moral handbooks from St. Thomas was apparent to some theologians before Vatican II. Gérard Gilleman wrote of the standard manuals that “Law rather than love is their dominant theme. Where there should be a spiritual impulse, we find a fixed body of doctrine. Even inspiration and liberty are precisely codified.”²²

More recently Servais Pinckaers has pointed out forcefully and systematically the points where moral theology departed from authentic Thomism: the shift from practical reason to conscience, the eclipse of virtues, a false view of freedom, the atomization of human action into individual cases needing resolution, the tendency to define the minimal fulfilling of the law, and above all, the development of an ethics of obligation.²³

While many of the factors behind the departures from Thomas Aquinas are complex and need further reflection, this conclusion for our purposes is eminently valid: most of the faults associated with classic Anglican moral theology are not the faults of Thomas Aquinas but lie in the later distortions of the Roman Catholic manuals. The way has been made clear to reappropriate the ethics of Thomas Aquinas with its combination of Aristotelianism and spiritual insight in an authentic Anglican way.

4. Recent Roman Catholic Moral Theology

The Roman Catholic Church experienced a major overhaul, not to say dismantling of its traditional approach to moral theology after Vatican II. The approach of the old handbooks had been criticized for some time as legalistic, scholastic, and excessively relying on a natural law view asserting that the basic norms of morality were accessible to people by use of reason.

Many Catholic moral theologians responded to the call for a more scripture-based and Christ-centered ethics. Enda McDonagh in his essay on “The Quest for Moral Theology” wrote that “Where the manuals of almost four centuries treated Jesus as at best an authority for the occasional moral pronouncement such as that on divorce, recent works of renewal sought to establish him at the source and centre of moral life and thought for Christians.”²⁴

Naturally there are various schools of liberal, revisionist and conservative approaches resulting from the abandonment of the old manuals. But it should be noted that there is a certain momentum to the traditional subject matter, and that handbooks of more liberal moral theologies still deal with human action, mortal and venial sin, conscience, natural law, and so on, even if their conclusions are at variance from the tradition.²⁵

There are two interesting approaches worthy of note for our purposes, because they represent more thorough attempts to re-appropriate Thomistic ethics for contemporary Christian ethics. There is the “new natural law” approach represented by John Finnis and Germain Grisez substituting a phenomenological view of human nature for the old scholastic metaphysics and terminology, usually arriving at positions supporting the Magisterium, but with a completely re-organized methodology. ²⁶ How faithful this approach is to St. Thomas is a topic for lively debate.

The second approach, represented by Romanus Cessario and others, is centered on recapturing the “realist” moral theology of St. Thomas, locating it within sacred doctrine as a whole, stressing the virtues and the role of the Spirit in the Christian moral life. Human action and natural law are certainly part of this description, but put in a theological context of the human being as the image of God.²⁷ This way of reading St. Thomas preserves the necessary elements of moral reasoning, and gives them the proper theological and spiritual context.

III The Elements of a new Anglican Moral Theology

It is clear that a new moral theology for Anglicanism and for the wider church will need to look very different from our “classical” versions. Yet what is required is not so radical that it can dispense entirely with the matters of the theory of action, law, the nature of sin, virtues and vices, and casuistry. In other words the Thomistic description of ethics in the Summa Theologiae, properly understood, can still furnish us with the foundation for a moral theology based on reality, psychologically and morally rich, and instructive for contemporary Christian people.

At the same time, the Thomistic basis needs to be treated as merely that, the best starting point in our moral theological tradition for describing certain key aspects of moral theory, but not sufficient. The historical pattern was to focus on the “ethical mid-section” of the Summa, i.e. the secunda pars, which in its extensive treatment is extremely hard to digest. It is understandable that certain sections were left unread, and other sections excerpted and focused on, with the tendency to distort and misunderstand. Thus the theology and anthropology of the prima pars and the Christology and soteriology of the tertia pars were simply not integrated with the ethical treatment. Even with that said, however, we can note certain unfortunate flaws arising from the decisions Aquinas made in constructing the Summa. With the doctrine of Christ postponed to the final section (on the grounds that salvation in Christ is the basis for our final return to God), there is little sense of Christian identity in the ethical section. It may be the case that Thomas assumed this as foundational at the outset, just as he assumed a basic acceptance of the truth of revelation, and one’s commitment to it, at the outset of the work. But a robust moral theology cannot be content with Christ’s importance implied as a “hidden center” and made explicit later on.

We can now articulate what should be the main distinctive elements of a new moral theology.

1. A renewed biblical basis.

The many contributions to our reading of the biblical texts, the different modes in which scripture communicates topics for ethical reflection provide an opportunity to enrich moral theology. New understandings of the role of law in Judaism and in Pauline theology, new appreciation for the themes of virtue and character in the scriptures will enable us to make clear that a proper moral theology for the church is only an explication of what is implied by reflection on the biblical witness.

2. A sound moral psychology.

The scriptural vocabulary includes such terms as mind, heart, will and conscience, but in no systematic way. Moral theology requires definitions and theories of how thoughts and desires become actions and behavior. Because of the widespread conviction today of the value of Aristotle’s treatment of ethics, we can be more confident of the soundness of its Christian appropriation by Thomas Aquinas in his account of moral reasoning. Further, the role that emotions play in relation to intellect and will was highly developed by Aquinas, and supplies not only a more complete moral psychology, but also illuminates the nature of virtue and character and the connection to spirituality.

3. The Proper Place for Law in Ethics.

Law is a central aspect of scripture and must figure in any account of our relationships to God, to society and to each other. The concept of law is often affected by prevailing social, political and philosophical views, which partly explains the distortions of law, freedom, and conscience which arose in Christian moral theology described above. Among the challenges for any new moral theology are these: how to do justice to the biblical revelation of law; how to incorporate law into an Aristotelian account of moral reasoning which had little need for it; and also how to understand the traditional Lutheran separation of law and Gospel with its resistance to a positive role for law in Christian discipleship.

4. Spirituality.

Like some other aspects of the ethics of Aquinas, this is a feature that was either developed completely separate from moral theology, or simply neglected in the centuries following St. Thomas, especially as moral theology centered on law, obedience and disobedience, and scholastic casuistry. The retrieval and incorporation of human emotion within moral psychology and the discussion of virtues will demonstrate the importance of the handling of emotion and of the role of the Holy Spirit in the formation of Christian character.

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¹ Herbert Waddams, A New Introduction to Moral Theology, revised ed. (SCM, 1972), p. 29.

² “Decree on the Training of Priests” ¶ 16, in A. Flannery, (ed.), Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (Liturgical Press, 1984) p. 720.

³ See Ronald Preston, The Future of Christian Ethics (SCM, 1989), p. 40; and Paul Lehmann, “A Critique of Moral Theology,” in Ethics in a Christian Context (Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 306-7.

⁴ Veritatis Splendor, ¶ 18.

⁵ Jeremy Taylor, cited by H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London, 1949), pp. 103, 110.

⁶ On the Carolines see Lehmann, “A Critique,” p. 306; on the Roman tradition see Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr Mary T. Noble (Catholic University of America, 1995), p. 231.

⁷ See C. Fitzsimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (Morehouse Barlow, 1966), pp. 82-95.

⁸ See David A. Scott, Christian Character: Jeremy Taylor and Christian Ethics Today (Oxford: Latimer House, Latimer Studies 38), and H. McAdoo, First of its Kind: Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ: A Study in the Functioning of a Moral Theology (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1994), pp. 24-25.

⁹ See Pinckaers, Sources, esp. p. 267.

¹⁰ Thomas Wood, in the Dictionary of Christian Ethics ed. J. Macquarrie (Philadelphia, 1967), p. 338.

¹¹ Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, vol. IX in The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor (London, 1851), p. 3.

¹² John Elmnedorf, The Elements of Moral Theology Based on the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. (New York, 1892).

¹³ Elements of Moral Theology, p. xiv.

¹⁴ R. C. Mortimer, The Elements of Moral Theology (London, 1961 [1947]), preface, p. v.

¹⁵ Lindsay Dewar, A Short Introduction to Moral Theology (London, 1956), p. 37.

¹⁶ Marcus Singer, Morals and Values: Readidngs in Theoretical and Practical Ethics (New York, 1977), p. 452.

¹⁷ See e.g. Harvey Cox (ed.), The Situation Ethics Debate (Philadelphia, 1968).

¹⁸ Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperCollins, 1996), summary on p. 209.

¹⁹ See for example William P. Brown (ed.), Character and Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

²⁰ S. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1985 [1975]).

²¹ See Hays, Moral Vision, pp.258-266.

²² Gerard Gilleman, The Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1959), xxviii-xxix.

²³ Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, translated from the French by Sr. Mary T. Noble (Catholic University Press of America, 1995).

²⁴ Enda McDonagh, Doing the Truth: The Quest for Moral Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 32.

²⁵ See for example Timothy O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality, revised ed. (HarperCollins, 1990).

²⁶ An impressive production is Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus 3 vols. (Chicago: The Franciscan Herald Press, 1983- )

²⁷ See Romanus Cessario, The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), and Introduction to Moral Theology (Catholic University Press of America, 2001).