1. The New Life or Rules?
Stephen Bilynskyj

2. What Is Christian ethics?

4. Ethical Questions & Dilemmas
Is it right for a Christian to dance?
Is it O.K. to break the law to get food for my family?
Should I lie to the Nazis if I’m hiding Jews in my basement?
May I end my life if I am suffering horribly and there’s no hope of getting better?
Should a Christian smoke marijuana if it helps relieve terrible pain?

5. How to Make Good Choices
Find the right principles in Scripture.
Apply those principles to your situation.
Make the right choice.

6. Problems What if I can’t find a principle that applies?
What if I just can’t do what the principle says?
Will following all the rules make me a good person?
What if the principles I find are different from what another Christian finds or different from what my non-Christian neighbor follows?

7. Being Before Doing
Christian ethics is not first of all about making right choices.
It’s not about doing the right thing.
Christian ethics is about being a good person.
What is good comes before what is right.

8. Character
Romans 5:3, 4 “…we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
God is aiming at a people who are changed internally, who have good character.
Remember the Pharisees!

9. The Virtues Natural virtues Wisdom Courage Moderation justice
Supernatural virtues
Faith
Hope
Love

10. Virtue Ethics Stanley Hauerwas
Virtue Ethics is the science of developing human character through the fostering of the virtues

11. Being and Doing Dilemmas are resolved out of character.
“What shall I be?” or “What am I?” comes before “What shall I do? “
Decisions and principles grow out of a history (a narrative).

12. Virtues Are Like Skills
How do we learn a skill?
Can we do it with just a list of rules?
We need models, examples.

13. Christian ethics Is the practice of being a certain kind of people.
It is to learn to embody a character which is defined in relation to the life of Jesus Christ.

14. Circularity we acquire a virtue by acting virtuously
yet we must possess the virtue in order to to be able to act virtuously.
Biblical principles will only carry weight within a community for which the Bible is formative.

15. How is it that we learn and become who we are as the Church of Jesus Christ?

16. The Church as Story-formed Community
there is no such things as an unqualified ethic, an ethic in the abstract that applies to all people simply because they are human.
An ethic is always qualified by the story of a particular community.
ethics for the Christian must always be Christian ethics.

17. The Christian Narrative
is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It is by being true to that story that we find ourselves to be people of character, people who embody certain virtues

18. We Christians are not called on to be ‘moral’ but faithful to the true story, the story that we are creatures under the Lordship of God."
–Stanley Hauerwas

19. How NOT to do it
we may not simply read off from the story as we find it in the Bible a list of principles, rules, or even virtues which are definitive for Christian ethics

20. Learning to be Virtuous
Since virtue is a practice rather than a principle the way it is learned is closer to the way one learns a skill as opposed to learning a set of facts.
Virtue is learned from the person who already possesses it.
Not “what would Jesus do?”
ask what kind of person I must be if my life is to be a continued telling of the story of Jesus

21. By being itself the Church offers to the world an alternative approach to the world's own problems.
Thus the ethic being proposed is not one of withdrawal from the world. By being itself the Church shows the world that the skills, that is, the virtues, exist which are necessary to survive in a sinful world .

22. A Community of Character
If the Church is to truly be a social ethic it must not offer principles to live by but must offer training in the skills for living, training in faith, hope, love, patience, etc.