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Document Details : Title: De moraaltheologie gestrand Author(s): VOSMAN, Frans , LEGET, Carlo Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 47 Issue: 3 Date: 2007 Pages: 233-244 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.47.3.3203527 Abstract : Moral theology has run aground and is currently defaulting on its theological task. This essay first outlines how the pull of ‘applied ethics’ and the push for submission from a repositioning church magisterium are tearing moral theology apart. On neither flank can moral theology pose fundamental questions. Then it describes two fertile contrasts that moral theological reflection creates when it is consciously pursued. These are (1) the contrast between morally relevant experiences of people and institutions and prudent moral norms that the church guarded and (2) the contrast between God’s revealed word and human acts in highly complex systematic contexts. Both are continuously threatened with premature abolition. Third, the authors look back at how the current situation came to be. After a fertile period of theological debate with other disciplines that lasted several decades, the ranks seems to have closed. This bars moral theology from both the academic and the social debates. Finally the authors sketch a narrow path out of the present crisis. It is a path that allows moral theologians to address moral question in a specific domain within these fertile contrasts (e.g. politics, health) and to wrestle with moral issues, but above all with the people, groups and institutions active in that domain. The essay uses organ donorship as an example in developing this line of thinking. |
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