Soloist wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:48 pm
I would hazard a guess that almost all of us have slightly different/to extremely different views.
Well then it probably would not do much good for each person to state their preferred foundation. The question might then be pushed back one level to the examination of the methodology one accepts for doing theology. For example, how do you go about distinguishing the content of divine revelation from personal opinions? And in a thread on "the sorry condition of Christian ethics," it is probably enough just to note that these levels are usually what determine severe ethical disagreements.
A quote from Alasdair MacIntyre in
After Virtue seems relevant:
The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on —although they do —but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.
I would extract this quote from his intended context and rewrite the final sentence: "There seems to be no rational way of securing [ethical and theological] agreement in [contemporary Christian] culture."
MacIntyre goes on to say, after looking at some moral arguments:
Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another. For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. ... It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.
Again, the reader can make the necessary substitutions to apply this to ethical and theological debates within the context of contemporary Christian culture, broadly speaking.