Christian Ethics

Abstract This essay considers Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics, identifying how its achievement is comparable to the better-known Christian Faith. The latter work is regarded as inaugurating modern Protestant theology. Christian Ethics, at once distinctively Christian and consonant with modern critical and historical consciousness, similarly transcends contemporaneous options in ethics. Grounded in the pious apprehension of redemption in Christ, Christian Ethics describes the life of the church and its engagement with the larger society and culture. Christian Ethics completes Schleiermacher’s theological system, setting forth the actions that constitute the ongoing manifestation of Christ through the church as it lives toward the Reign of God.