CHRISTIAN MORAL PRINCIPLES

Chapter 2: Free Choice, Self-Determination, Community, and Character

Introduction

Chapter one explained what moral theology is and why it needs renewal. The remainder of the first half of this book will deal with topics, beginning with free choice, traditionally treated in the fundamental part of classical moral theology. This treatment will, however, be a fresh synthesis, shaped by a theological framework which will be made fully explicit in the book’s second half.

Created in God’s image, human persons can make free choices. By this ability they live in the existential world—that is, the world of moral good and evil. By free choices persons also determine themselves individually and together, thus forming personal identities and communities.