Kant believes natural law is written in the human heart. For him, the highest good can be understood as happiness, which is distributed in exact proportion to morality (First Critique). Therefore, in a sense, the highest good can be defined as the combination of happiness and virtue. However, this definition is not clearly held in all Kantian writings, something which arises an ambiguity that has been the object of ongoing research. For instance, in the Second Critique, Kant also speaks of the supreme good as a consummated or transcended good. A widespread way to approach the issue has been claiming …

For Aquinas, everything is regulated by eternal law or God’s creation order (I-II, Q.91, a.3), so it is no surprise that he understands natural law as participation of the eternal law, where natural law is of a general and teleological character (See I-II, Q.91, a.2). In Aquinas’s vision, natural law is linked with divine reason rather than with the will of God, as theologians such as Calvin would suggest. This opens the door for considering Aquinas’s notion of natural law to be expansive in the sense that natural law is associated with human’s capacity to reason and producing reflection. When …

First, it is important to note that Prof. Hauerwas is doing sexual ethics outside of the mainstream Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas. Therefore, his position and discussion must be understood as a reaction against the Western moral tradition. Bearing in mind these clarifications could help us to avoid misunderstanding him. Hauerwas is very critical of the Christian large tradition on this topic. He believes the tradition has failed when discussing human sexuality/sexual ethics in a very broad sense by clinging exclusively to natural law. This is something that the church must correct if she wants to avoid confusion …

Although Aquinas has certain similarities with Augustine regarding sexuality, he departs from him in some other particular respects. Aquinas’s discussions in Summa Theologia about sexuality are brief; one clearly sees, however, how Aquinas interpreted human sexuality through the lens of natural law and rational abstraction. Through his holistic view of the human being as a composite of soul and body, Aquinas does not leave room for a separation between gender and sex. The soul informs the human body of this essential information. For instance, the gender or sex is randomly assigned by the soul. In addition, without a doubt, Aquinas …

The purpose of this study is exploring John Calvin’s two-fold notion of faith in the 1559 Institutes and its central implications for pastoral theology in the emerging Reformed tradition in order to reclaim a broader and contextualized understanding of pastoral care and its relation with faith formation. To that end, this paper will focus on the ways the emerging Reformed church of second mid-sixteenth century in Geneva applied the Calvinian notion of faith to pastoral theology. It also explores some applications of such an understanding, especially for the modern American-Dutch reformed church. In the Reformed faith Calvin’s two-fold notion of …

Traditionally, the formal origin of covenant theology goes back to Cocceius. However, elements of the covenant theology can be found throughout the whole Scriptures in a broad sense. The notion and language of covenant, grace, works, and promise were well known by the early Church and Catholic theologians before the Reformation. Passages such as Gen. 3:15, Rom. 11, Deut. 29;1, and Hos. 6:7, show such language, for example. Nonetheless, properly speaking, the theology of covenant as we know it today has its origin in the larger development of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Zwingli, a contemporary of Luther, is known for defending …