The New Morality (contd)

Tillich seeks to push beyond 'supranaturalism and naturalism' to a third position, in which they transcendent is nothing external or 'out there' but is encountered in, with and under the Thou of all finite relationships as their ultimate depth and ground and meaning. In ethics this means accepting as the basis of moral judgments the actual concrete relationship in all its particularity, refusing to subordinate it to any universal norm or to treat it merely as a case, but yet, in the depth of that unique relationship, meeting and responding to the claims of the sacred, the holy and the absolutely unconditional.

Life in Christ Jesus, in the new being, in the Spirit, means having no absolutes but his love, being totally uncommitted in every other respect but totally committed in this. The claim of the Christ may come to others, as indeed it often comes to the Christian, incognito: but since it is the claim of home, of the personal ground of our very being, it does not come as anything foreign. Love alone, because, as it were, it has a built-in moral compass, enabling it to 'home' intuitively upon the deepest need of the other, can allow itself to be directed completely by the situation. It is able to embrace an ethic of radical responsiveness, meeting every situation on its own merits, with no prescriptive laws. For this reason it is the only ethic which offers a point of constancy in a world of flux and yet remains absolutely free for, and free over, the changing situation. It is prepared to see every moment as a fresh creation from God's hand demanding its own and perhaps wholly unprecedented response.

Brunner argues that Christian ethics is not a scheme of codified conduct. It is a purposive effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry obedient to love. It is a radical 'ethic of the situation' with prescribed-except love. It is love which is the constitutive principle-and law, at most, is only the regulative one, if it is even that.

It is of course a highly dangerous ethic and the representatives of supranaturalistic legalism will, like the Pharisees, always fear it. Seeing it a licence to laxity and to the broadest possible living. But love's gate is strict and narrow and its requirements infinitely deeper and more penetrating. This 'new morality' is, of course, none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. But love is the end of the law precisely because it does respect persons-the unique, individual person-unconditionally. 'The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns'. Whatever the pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no 'packaged' moral judgments-for persons are more important even than 'standards'.