a beer and Christian ethics

Tonight's "beer of choice" is cheap (thanks to low funds due to school loans and a trip to Cincinnati tomorrow) but delicious: blancahe de namur, a smooth and mild Belgian white beer laden with the scent and taste of fruits (notably orange) and notes of coriander and clove. Not the best but pretty good. Tonight I drink in celebration of finishing yet another chapter in "Re:framing Repentance." 

It's the first of a two-part chapter regarding Christian ethics. In this chapter I look at two polar opposite ways of viewing Christian ethics: the existentialist's fascination with authenticity and spontaneity in "living by the Spirit" and the legalist's adherence to a revised and updated "Mosaic Law" called "the law of Christ." Throughout this book I've examined different perceptions on different subjects and dealt with them in different ways. For some issues, I've picked bits and pieces from certain viewpoints and reconstructed them to what I believe to be a better view. On others, I've taken the foundations of different views and reworked them in lieu of a different foundation, making the foundations themselves more like pillars emerging from a different foundation. In this chapter, I took a different route: instead of embracing a paradigm shift, I advocated total deconstruction and reconstruction: new foundation and new pillars all! The foundation to understanding Christian ethics, I think, is two-fold, and they fit together: first, there is eschatology; and second, there is the rescue and renewal of human beings. The latter fits into the former. The latter approaches Christian ethics as what it looks like to live as a genuine human being, with Jesus being the true human being (of whom Adam was a type), and being "conformed to the image of Christ" is "being rebuilt into the fashion of a genuine human being." The former approaches Christian ethics as what it looks like to live in God's kingdom, God's new world, which was inaugurated with Jesus' resurrection and is advancing, and which will be completed in the future in a cataclysmic and beautiful act of God (what we call the "final judgment"). For the last two weeks I have agonized over this chapter, and I'm excited about how it turned out. 

Now I'm going to continue celebrating by polishing off this wonderful beer!