Incarnational Ethics

Abstract What follows for morality if orthodox Christianity is true? More specifically, what conclusions we should draw from the Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation, on which Christ is both fully human and fully divine and is ‘like us in all respects except for sin’? A couple of desiderata for moral theory should be drawn from the Chalcedonian understanding: first, because Christ’s being like us in all ways but sin includes Christ’s being like us with respect to normative features, Christ is under the moral law in the same way that the rest of us are; and second, because we are to take Christ’s exhibiting both a divine and a human nature to be marvellous and astonishing, we should prefer a moral theory on which being human places one under the moral law but being divine does not. These desiderata give some support to a natural law understanding of the moral law.