Living in God Without God

Leadership in the Church has still not taken account of atheistic modernity and its values. God still appears as a majestic figure on a throne up above, promulgating laws like any earthly monarch, and judging and punishing the guilty. Traditional ethics, based on the Ten Commandments which God is supposed to have given to Moses, therefore remains an ethics based on law. In a modern Christian conception of God, however, God is no longer seen as a lawgiver outside the cosmos but as dynamic fundamental love, whose dynamism is manifested in cosmic evolution. Of its very nature this dynamism continually drives man to act out of love and in this way to grow in love. Precisely this drive forms the root of the ethical imperative. The earlier ethics based on law should now make way for an ethics based on love, the being: everything is good if it is born of love. This book shows the consequences this principle moral teaching about sex, a teaching which has long outlived its usefulness. There are also consequences for bioethics, as the final chapter shows in dealing with the example of the very controversial theme of euthanasia.