Christian Morality Module 1 PDF

**SAINT JOSEPH COLLEGE** THEOLOGY DEPARTMENT Maasin City, Southern Leyte **MODULE 1** THEO 3A: CHRISTIAN MORALITY **Course Description** This course focuses on some principles of ethics & Christian Morality to limit parameters on how one lives the faith. This reveals the basic norms of the la...

**SAINT JOSEPH COLLEGE** THEOLOGY DEPARTMENT Maasin City, Southern Leyte **MODULE 1** THEO 3A: CHRISTIAN MORALITY **Course Description** This course focuses on some principles of ethics & Christian Morality to limit parameters on how one lives the faith. This reveals the basic norms of the law written into human nature, the natural law, to act w/ understanding and to develop in the students a sense of Christian freedom & responsibility. These laws guide the students in making moral decisions based upon their consciousness of their dignity as persons. **Grading System** Each student shall be assessed on the following: 100% **Learning Outcomes** At the end of the semester, the students must be able: - To discover the right ways of Christian Morality - To incorporate into their lives Catholic Morals as related to God, self & neighbour - To become better acquainted w/ desirable attitudes necessary for total Christian life - To actualize lived values based on moral conscience **MODULE 1** **Topic Outline** I. **The Meaning & Spirit of Christian Living** - Understanding Morality - Filipino Context - Recent Phenomenon of Morality - St. John Paul II's *Veritatis Splendor* II. **The Nature of Human Person** - Man's Creation in God's Image & Likeness and His Call to Love - The Fall into Sin - Man's Freedom - The Morality of Human Acts **Lesson 1: [The Meaning & Spirit of Christian Living]** **I. OBJECTIVES:** At the end of the lesson, you must be able: - To share ideas on theories of moral theology and morality - To express thanksgiving to God and men they loved - To engage in concrete action that makes people experience the love of God - **Activity:** Write your observation on what is happening in our Filipino society today in terms of economic, political, social and spiritual aspects. - Christian living is simply "**following Christ**"= Morality - → The usual thinking on morality is about laws, commandments, a series of don'ts and corresponding punishments if fail to comply. - → But Christian Faith is more than a set of truths to be believed, it is the **way of Christ which leads to life** (everlasting). - → Salvation History - Call to Love: from Adam to Christ and to Church - Christian moral person experiences the liberating and transforming presence of Christ through the grace of His Spirit. Thus, he **commits** himself in **his moral attitudes, decisions and acts** to the **ongoing process of liberating and transforming into a disciple of Christ**. - → Following Christ is **not easy due to sin**. Yet God strengthens us by letting us share the life of Christ through the Holy Spirit received in Baptism. - → And, as disciples of Christ, we mutually support each other through the grace of Holy Spirit and come to exercise **responsible freedom**. **[Filipino Context]** - 86% of population are Catholics -- only big Catholic country in Asia - Churches are crowded on Sundays and special fiestas. - Filipinos are fond of religious processions, novenas and numerous devotions to Christ, Mary and other saints. - Proliferation of religious movements has clearly shown a yearning for closer union w/ God. - Yet this yearning for spiritual intimacy w/ God often does not touch the daily words and actions. - There is serious gap between external ritual expression of Christian Faith and concrete daily life. **[Recent Phenomenon of Morality]** Unease of Modernity - project of diluting the problem of morality to the point of rendering it non-existent (C. Taylor). - Because morality is seen as lacking a reference to an ultimate meaning and less understood as a way to perfection due to moralism of rules that is oppressive. - An effect of unilateral and reductive way on questions of normative morality that resulted to proportionalism or consequentialism which is often impersonal. - Influenced by post-Tridentine manualism. - As reaction, there is that autonomous ethics which presents a domain of morality constituted by a series of opinions from among which each individual may choose according to taste and point of view. - This leads to subjectivism or relativism. **[St. John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor]** St. John Paul II's encyclical *Veritatis Splendor* has identified two deep-seated roots that led into this crisis: - Rupture of the connection between freedom and truth that resulted to legalism/manualism, and - Rupture of the connection between faith and morality that resulted to autonomous ethics. - To overcome this framework is to reestablish the **constitutive relations** between **freedom and truth, faith and morality** by looking not so much for list of principles but for a new light that illuminates fully in the mystery of Christ to **grasp the meaning of action and the way it implicates the acting subject.** **[3 Rays and 3 Colors of Light in Treating the Acting Person ]** - Three Rays - **Originality of moral truth →** This is not just any truth but it is about the very meaning of life. By this, freedom is neither indifferent nor extraneous to this truth but always involved in its perception. - **Light of Christ →** must illuminate the mystery of human action. Faith, as a supreme expression of freedom, is the acceptance of Christ's action in us that is possible only in communion with Church and has God's kingdom as its end. This faith is sustained through the Spirit in the Church. - **Love** → leads to inter-personality, the new dimension, as what happened in the intertwining of gazes between Jesus & rich young man in the gospel story. In love, objective communication of good appears in the inter-subjective polarity. Through moral good, love clarifies the problem of relationship between the person and nature. - The three rays correspond to three fundamental colors: **truth of love**, **its theological dimension** and **interpersonal element of love**. - → These 3 colors & 3 rays of light do not present themselves in the form of clear and distinct ideas but in the unity of a new perspective, in one focusing on the **acting person.** **Lesson 2:** **[The Nature of the Human Person]** **I. OBJECTIVES** At the end of the lesson, you must be able: - To know the human person according to reason and Christian faith. - To imitate Jesus Christ to become loving persons, in the fullness of life with others in community before God. **II. INTRODUCTION** Engage/ Explore - **Activity**: Make a research on characteristics of human beings and animals Explain/Elaborate **Man's Creation in God's Image & Likeness and His Call to Love** Man is deemed very important in the whole creation due to the fact that he is the only one created according to the image and likeness of God (Cfr.Gen.1,26). This man's uniqueness which is referred by St. John Paul II as "**original solitude**" makes him *being alone amidst the varied kinds of plants and* *animals and it still remains even after the existence of Eve,* a similar to him. This man's experience of original solitude puts him into special relationship with his Creator. This singles him out from the other kinds of beings which do not have the same magnitude as he has. *This special dignity brings him to the unique privilege* *as partner of God in the dialogue of love.* God created man in this reality in order to let him share the love which the Trinity is experiencing. Such love of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit overflows into man. As the only rational among the creatures, man is conscious of this experience of love from the Trinity as he enjoys the whole creation entrusted to him in his stewardship, which, for St. John Paul II, flows from his covenant partnership with God. Since man is created through the love of the Trinity, he is also called to love as what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are doing that leads into a loving communion. *By this call to love, man is to be in a* *loving communion with his Creator and with his partner, the woman*. Because God loves man and woman, He **gives Himself** (Being) to them **during creation** and even wonderfully does it **in His sacrifice and death on the Cross.** As fashioned in the "image and likeness" of God, man/woman is called to imitate God's love. To use the distinction made by the Fathers of the Church, **man,** **as image, is born to have the given similarity with his Creator as a human copy of the divine Original** while **as likeness, he is called to perfect *imago Dei* in him by growing ever closer to God in love**. Having received the similarity (image) of God Who is love, man is challenged **to let that likeness of God in him grow and bear fruit in his daily undertaking in himself and with others.** So man and woman are called to grow in their spousal love to each other in the way God loves them. When God formed Eve from Adam's rib and presented her to him, **a new horizon of love was opened for Adam wherein to love is to share his world with Eve who is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones.** This interpersonal encounter between Adam and Eve, which is graphically illustrated in Adam's words "flesh" and "bones", reveals that love happens in the body. The body's openness makes love happen in them. The body with its emotions and feelings enables Adam to enter Eve's world and to see it with his eyes. St. John Paul II calls this mutual indwelling in one another's experience as "**original unity**." Here, the body becomes a bridge that unites each other and enables each lover to experience each other's inner space. Though St. John Paul II insists that man and woman are both whole in each of their own self, he still considers that the creation of man or of woman becomes complete because there already exists male and female and the two are one which he calls it a *"communion of persons*". In his original solitude, man does not only reach personal consciousness by being distinct from the rest of creation but also opens himself toward a being defined by Genesis 2:18 & 20 as "a help similar to himself" (*keneqdo)*. In this communion, there is always that **interplay of identity and difference** which attains a special degree of intensity in the love between man and woman, which lives in the **interchange between the masculinity of the male body and the femininity of the female body.** Eve's existence makes Adam realize that he is male and vice versa. Their **difference keeps them aware of their need for each other**. Their difference keeps them aware of their need for each other. Their masculinity and femininity are not only diverse but more importantly **complementary so as to understand each sex by referring with the other.** Persons are open and relational. We, Filipinos, are excellent in this regard because we are never alone. We realize being a person means being by others (our conception, birth, and upbringing), being w/ others (our family, friends), and being for others (love, service). → I sense that it is in this sociability that we are facilitated on how that call to love be lived by. → going out of oneself for and w/ others **The Fall into Sin** Gen. 3:1 -- The serpent whispers, *"Did God really say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?* → Notice how the serpent subtly accuses God of forbidding man access to "**any of the trees**" in Paradise. → This accusation is, of course, a lie because God did not forbid man to eat from all the trees of the Garden as clarified in Eve's answer, "We may eat the fruit of the trees in the Garden but of the fruit of the **tree that is in the middle of the Garden** for God said: You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, neither shall you touch it or you will die (Gen 3:2-3). → Eve's answer is inaccurate and already shows that she has already accepted the language of mistrust thrown by the devil to them.\ → They were forbidden only to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil which the bible account clearly distinguishes from the tree of life \> Gen. 2:9 → The serpent's temptation consists in blurring the distinction in the minds of Adam and Eve between the two trees so as to make the first couple doubt God's goodness, that God is jealous of man to become like Him. → The serpent has done his work of insinuating a plausible caricature of God as a tyrant who is out to prevent man from attaining true life. Gen. 3:4 -- The serpent said to the woman, "*You will not die but God knows that the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."* → When the serpent has succeeded in sowing mistrust in God's goodness on Adam and Eve, he has able to lead them to believe that they can truly live only by deciding for themselves and to shun God out of their life. → What is happening nowadays is re-doing the Eden experience. In Gen. 2:25, "*the man & his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed,*" St. John Paul II calls this experience **"original nakedness."** Unlike some modern thinkers, however, John Paul argues that the absence of shame in the original state did not proceed from some sort of psychological underdevelopment, as if Edenic humanity were still in a state of immaturity. On the contrary, original nakedness, like all of man's original experiences, contains a fullness that we have yet to grow into. If we have lost the ability to encounter one another w/o shame, it is not because we have grown up but because we have fallen away from the foundation of our existence and become separated from the true Source of our maturity as human beings. If Adam & Eve were naked and unashamed before the Fall, it was because they knew how to discern the dignity of the human body and to recognize its difference from everything else in the visible world, both animate & inanimate. In a word, their original nakedness was nothing less than their clear-eyed realization that masculinity & femininity are made for a journey of communion toward the Source of the Gift. Just as original nakedness has nothing to do w/ moral under development; it is also worlds removed from nudism. In fact, wearing clothes actually expresses original nakedness because clothing underscores special status of the body as an expression of the unique dignity of the human being. Living in harmony w/ original nakedness, then, does not mean going around in the nude but dressing in a way that conforms to one's dignity. The most fitting reflection of original nakedness is **not nudity but a purity that reveals the mystery of our being w/o profaning it.** To sum up, original nakedness is ultimately human body's capacity to image God as love. Accordingly, living in original nakedness simply means learning to discern *imago Dei* with eyes of the Creator Who always sees body's connection w/ the whole person it expresses. **[Man's Freedom]** - stems from God's creation of man as rational being. - is mostly confused w/ simply "do what I want" (licentiousness) - effect of subjectivism. What then is authentic freedom? - It is not the right to say or do anything but to do the good. - It is not an individual private possession but shared with others in community. - It is found in the truth; which sets both a condition for it and a warning against every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom and every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man & the world. - It involves **freedom from** everything that opposes our true self-becoming w/ others in community. Its impediments are traced commonly to 3 sources: - biological sources, w/c include inherited handicaps & defects as well as external substances like drugs; - psychological or internal compulsions, including that originating in the unconscious, like ignorance, disordered passions, fears, personality defects, bad habits, prejudices or psycho-emotional disturbances; - Social pressures, such as economic, political & cultural barriers. - It is above all to be freed from its greatest single obstacle -- Sin. - It involves **freedom for** growing as full persons & children of God, sharing in the life of Christ, our Liberator, through His Spirit. It is found in authentic love. **[The Morality of Human Acts]** - depends on three constitutive elements: 1. **Object chosen** -- is a good toward w/c the will deliberately directs itself. It morally specifies the act of the will insofar as reason recognizes and judges it to be or not to be in conformity w/ the true good. 2. **Intention or end in view** -- resides in the acting subject. It indicates the purpose pursued in the action. It aims at the good anticipated from the action undertaken. It is not limited to directing individual actions, but can guide several actions toward one & the same purpose. 3. **Circumstances** -- contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evilness of human acts. They can also diminish or increase the agent's responsibility. Circumstances of themselves can't change the moral quality of the acts themselves. (object chosen) (intention) (circumstance) Rules: - A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. - Any defect of either one of the three can make the whole act evil. \* There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances & intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object, such as adultery, blasphemy, murder & perjury. -End of module 1-