Receptive Human Virtues

Elizabeth Agnew Cochran is Assistant Professor of Theology at Duquesne University.

• ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgments1.An Ethic of Receptive Human Virtues2.Love as Necessary and Volitional: Edwards’s Account of True Virtue in God3.Charity as a Human Virtue: The Moral Accountability of a Necessary Nature4.Humility as a Human Virtue: Imaging God’s Mercy Through Creaturely Capacities5.Virtuous Repentance: Apprehending and Approving God’s Moral Excellence6.Justice and Partial Loves: The Natural Goodness of Incomplete VirtuesConclusionVirtues, Accountability, and Dependence: Edwards’s Significance for Contemporary Christian EthicsNotesWorks CitedIndex

“Elizabeth Agnew Cochran’s examination of Jonathan Edwards and the human virtues engages questions of interest both to contemporary ethicists and to historians of eighteenth-century American and British thought. No other scholar has focused so intently on Edwards’s views of the human virtues or illustrated so carefully the problems inherent in their articulation in his theology or the solutions he devised to overcome those problems. The style is lucid and unpretentious, and Cochran contributes to a lively continuing conversation among ethicists and historians about the plausibility of an ethics of virtue in a Christian moral theology. By arguing skillfully that an ethics of virtue can have, as it did for Edwards, Christian rather than exclusively Aristotelian presuppositions, she stakes out a forceful position in a continuing debate.”—E. Brooks Holifield, Charles Howard Candler Professor, Emory University