ETHICS AND FAITH

How do we reason what to do in

the light of our faith?
Source: Richard M. Gula, Reason
Informed by Faith
FAITH
 Faith is a commitment to God.
 Christian faith is following Christ, to be
His disciple.
 To follow Jesus is to be informed and
animated by loving God, neighbor, and
self.
FAITH
 Christian moral living
summarized in the
commandment: Love God and
love your neighbor as you love
yourself.
Christian Morality
 Christian morality is grounded in God’s self-
giving love in Jesus.
 Our response of faith to God’s self-giving love
must show itself in love.
 But what love demands must be specified in
each area of our life.
 The work of conscience is to discover the call
of God in each situation, what God is asking
of us in the here and now.
CONSCIENCE
 Conscience is not the super-ego.
 Super-ego commands with should’s or
have-to’s for the sake of gaining
approval or out of fear of losing love.
 Conscience responds to invitation to
love, wants to respond to value
irregardless of whether authority
recognize it or not.
CONSCIENCE
St. Paul: conscience is our fundamental
awareness of the difference between
good and evil, as a guide to loving
decisions, and as judge of actions
unbecoming of a Christian.
CONSCIENCE
 Rooted in the biblical notion of heart as
the center of feeling and reason,
decision and action, intention and
consciousness.
 Voice of conscience is the voice of God.
CONSCIENCE
 THREE DIMENSIONS OF CONSCIENCE:
 1) a capacity: ability to discern good
and evil.
 2) a process of discovering what makes
for being a good person, and what
particular action is morally right or
wrong.
 3) a judgment that is the result of #2.
CONSCIENCE
 “Conscience is the whole person’s
commitment to value and the judgment
one makes in the light of that
commitment of who one ought to be
and what one ought to do or not do.”
 (R. Gula, p. 18).
CONSCIENCE
 2nd dimension of conscience is process of
discernment, a process of continual
conversion to what is true and good, the
search for who we ought to be, and what we
ought to do in faithful response to God’s call.
 Shaped by society, and aims at forming
character, a person with a mature
conscience.
CONSCIENCE
 Mature conscience requires some degree of:
 1) knowledge, evaluative knowledge involving
high degree of self-knowledge.
 2) freedom: fundamental option & freedom of
choice.
 3) affective capacity to care for others and to
commit oneself to moral values.
MORAL DISCERNMENT
 Practical reasoning of moral
discernment is more than a linear
sequence of logical procedures, but a
process of back-and-forth, around-and-
about movement of faith, reason,
emotion, and intuition.
MORAL DISCERNMENT
 Faith gives us perspective for interpreting
what is going on & setting priorities.
 Reason assesses scope of moral experience &
relationships of multiple factors.
 Emotion and intuition gives first evaluation of
what is going on and an idea of obligations
and responsibilities we have towards the
situation.
MORAL DISCERNMENT
 In the process of harmonizing faith,
reason, emotion, and intuition, we need
to appeal to three realms of inquiry:
 1) social context
 2) situational context
 3) personal context
SOCIAL CONTEXT
 Religious sources: bible, Jesus, Church
 Non-religious sources: communities of
influence, friends, role models, expert
authority, laws, and principles.
 Principles need to be interpreted.
SITUATIONAL CONTEXT
Thorough investigation of situation by asking:
 What?

 Why? And How?

 Who?

 When? And Where?

 What if?

 What else?
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Everyday morality is largely a matter of
character.
 “Character” refers to unique set of traits that
characterize the kind of person one is and the
action one does.
 Christian character develops to extent that we
commit ourselves to Christ and are informed
by stories, traditions that witness to his way
of life.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
“Watch our your thoughts; they become your
words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”
Anonymous
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Virtues: habits of the heart.
 Virtues enable us to fulfill the richest
potential of human nature.
 To understand our moral choices, we
need to attend to aspects of our
character.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Emotions and Intuitions are aspects
closest to our decisions. They give us
immediate, initial interpretive response
to our situation before the critical
reflection of it.
 Closely aligned with emotions and
intuition are somatic reactions: e.g.
racing heart, lightness, aches, etc.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Beliefs are our stable convictions, the
truths we live by, e.g. belief in the value
of persons, belief in God.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Imagination is great instrument of moral good.
 The capacity to construct a moral world.
 By imagination, we bring together diverse
aspects of our experience into a meaningful
whole. It is how we make sense of things.
 Good discernment needs imagination to
recognize complex web of responsibilities, to
entertain alternative course of action, to
anticipate consequences.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Prayer is our indispensable context for
discernment.
 Without prayer, hard to keep our love
of God foremost in consciousness.
 Without prayer, process of discernment
just a disciplined method of solving a
problem.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 Prayer is “downtime” for patterns to emerge
from interplay of faith, reason, emotions, and
intuitions.
 Takes the form of listening, paying attention
not only to what is going on outside but also
to what is happening within us as we face the
situation.
 A way of freeing ourselves from external
pressures and selfish preferences.
PERSONAL CONTEXT
 For prayerful discernment, we need
time, leisure, and quiet.
 We also need to be in reasonable
physical health and sufficient moral,
spiritual, and psychological maturity.

 To use all these resources, we need

sufficient self-knowledge.
 CONCLUSION
 Discernment gives not logical but moral
certitude, that with great probability we
are moving in the right direction.
 Sense of inner harmony and wholeness
is interior sign that we are responding
to grace of God in the moment.
 PRAYER OF GENEROSITY
Lord, teach me to be generous
To serve You as You deserve
To give and not to count the cost
To fight and not to heed the wounds
To toil and not to seek for rest
To labor and not ask for reward
Save that I am doing your most holy will.