Perspectief 2013-21

2013-21 Christian Social Ethics in An Economy of Life, Justice and Peace for All (2013) 43 R eageer about social ethics: is it sufficient if they formulate moral principles and values, or do they have to say something on specific issues as well? In this article I will comment the most recent Agape document 'An Economy of Life, Justice and Peace for All’. It will appear that this document reproduces all key problems of insti- tution based Christian social ethics mentioned above. The comment will be a critical one, but it is an solely exemplary analysis, and its focus is upon the requirements for a higher quality of institution based Christian social ethics. If the churches do not succeed in im- proving this quality, there will be – or remain – a gap between the language of Canaan – religious language and religion based moral language - on one hand and the secular lan- guage of economics and politics on the other hand. Social ethics can contribute to bridging these languages and the domains they refer to, or it can even be the bridge. That's why this article will build up a plea for improving the quality of Christian social ethics, and it will do so in an ecumenical sense and spirit. 1 Reading the Agape document Before one even starts reading a document like the Agape document 2013, it is extremely important to reach clarity about the reader's expectations. My expectation, which I had as a catholic moral theologian with substantial knowledge of Christian social ethics and as a practitioner of teaching catholic social doctrine, was, that the Agape document would go into theology, ethics, economy and finance, and into politics – but that it would go into these areas of reflection as different and relatively separate, autonomous, areas of social practice that may be connected with each other after a first description and analysis of the separate areas and their present challenges. In other words: my expectation was to find a 'multilingual' document in which all of the 'languages' of theology, ethics, economy and finance would have their own proper domain, place and role in the document, in such a way that they can be understood within their own domain and that, at the same time, they can be related to the other domains. 2 Monolingual witnessing and appeal to conversion Starting from this expectation, any reader of this Agape document will be disappointed. The reason for this is obvious: this is a merely 'monolingual' document, expressing the basic religious and religion-based moral attitudes and convictions of the co-authors and

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