The relationship between narrative ethics and Christian moral realism

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relationship between narrative ethics and Christian moral realism. It professes that narrative ethics cannot stand alone and to realize its own objectives it needs to function together with a complementary scheme of principle and rule-based moral deliberation. It notes that a Christian realist theory presents itself as a strong candidate possessing a common account of the fundamental nature of ethics in which the moral acceptability of a particular course of action is determined by the adequacy with which it directs a person towards the form of human wholeness revealed in the gospels and in the life of the Church. The chapter explains further that it is also an account which begins, epistemologically, with a vision of reality that arises from reflection upon Scripture and which is open to the notion that such reflection should take seriously the narrative quality of the material contained in the Scripture.