Jesse Couenhoven

The impassible God of traditional theology has always been thought to be free, but it has not always been clear how to conceive of God’s eternal freedom. This chapter makes two proposals. First, ‘non-volitionalist’ theories of responsibility—which do not think of freedom or responsibility as the result of an act of choice—are in a better position to account for the nature of divine freedom and responsibility than their competitors. Second, although a non-volitionalist conception of divine responsibility is necessary in order to make sense of the freedom of the immanent Trinity, it is not sufficient. To understand the traditional claim that God is free, it is helpful to retrieve the notion that God’s freedom has a normative component. Both compatibilists and incompatibilists are able to take advantage of these proposals, which suggests that there are significant questions about freedom that cross-cut the compatibility debates.

Those who reject “ought implies can” (OIC) may have good reason to do so, but their case has been weakened by their reluctance to offer an alternative to that dictum. Jesse Couenhoven shows how OIC plays an important role in moral theory because it limits moral demands by excusing agents from wrongdoing under certain circumstances. Opponents of OIC would strengthen their case by offering a replacement dictum that plays the same theoretical role. Drawing on the compatibilist thought of Augustine, Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, this essay offers a replacement, dubbed “ought implies apt.” Thus, what an agent ought to do is tied to what is fitting for that agent, given the agent’s design plan. The fruitfulness and plausibility of this proposal are tested by its ability to illuminate a number of cases often used in discussion of OIC, including moral dilemmas.

St. Augustine famously argued that those who do not orient their loves toward God lack true virtue, offering as a test case pagan sages who cared too much for their own honor. For this polemic he has been lauded and lambasted; however, in significant ways, I contend, he has been misunderstood. A close reading of Augustine in his historical context helps us understand him as a revisionary yet committed classical eudaimonist, whose attack on pagan virtue was an immanent critique of views attractive to many Christians, including his younger self. This approach reveals the complexity of his relationship to pagan virtue theory and suggests that Augustine's modern readers have overestimated the severity of his critique. Although Augustine came to think of true virtue as a theological good that can only be had in grateful dependence on God, he also drew on little-noticed neo-Platonic traditions that distinguished perfect, true virtue, from civic virtues that are imperfect but nonetheless worthy of praise. This allowed him to admire pagan exemplars while critiquing the lack of compassion and humility that vitiated both their understanding of greatness and their ability to promote lasting communal flourishing.

Augustine’s theology of divine forgiveness has received surprisingly little sustained attention. This is unfortunate, not least because his approach offers a thought-provoking contrast to the way forgiveness is typically conceived in our own day. We commonly understand forgiveness in therapeutic terms, as overcoming resentment or anger. For Augustine, God’s forgiveness is “metaphysical”—an other-oriented action that changes the moral and spiritual status of those who are forgiven. God forgives preveniently, to free sinners from their sin, so that they can be who they were meant to be. Forgiveness, therefore, is a divine attempt to restore sinners to the good. Yet although God acts out of love, Augustine did not consider forgiveness incompatible with paternalistic anger or punishment. This essay draws on Augustine’s theologies of baptism and the cross to explore these ideas, and their implications for the relationship between human and divine agency in giving and receiving forgiveness. It concludes by raising some questions about how Christians should think about human forgiveness in light of Augustine’s account of God’s transformative love.

It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hopeful upshot, since our unfortunate condition makes it appropriate to respond to one another mercifully. I suggest that this response can take two forms. Without collapsing justice into mercy, it is right to make our approach to justice and punishment more merciful and to recognize the fittingness of “erring” on the side of mercy when we are uncertain how to apportion blame.

This essay introduces some of the key topics at stake in the ongoing controversies about the place of eudaimonism in Christian ethics and theology. Whether and in what way a person should seek her or his own happiness and flourishing has been a central question in ethics for centuries. Here I summarize the contributions the essays in this focus issue make to that conversation, and conclude by briefly sketching a Neoplatonist approach to eudaimonism that may offer a way to build on the insights and concerns articulated in the focus essays.

This essay addresses common misunderstandings about the part of Augustine’s theological anthropology one might call his “moral psychology.” It particularly seeks to distance Augustine’s mature account of human agency from influential faculty psychologies. I argue that it is misleading to talk about Augustine’s view of the “will,” given what we typically mean by that term, and that “choice” is not central to Augustine’s account of human freedom. These claims hold not least because of the way Augustine thought about what he called the uoluntas, in which affect and rationality are combined. The disunity of the Augustinian self is found, as a result, not in battles between “higher” and “lower” faculties but in the tensions that exist within whole persons. Such insights influence Augustine’s interest in the complexity of intentional and unintentional desires—sexual and otherwise—and the essential role played by relationships in making us who we are.

In this study I engage St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin, both to understand what that doctrine really is, and to see whether it can still be believed. While the doctrine has been disputed on many fronts, I focus on a central, moral worry: it seems unfair to hold people responsible for an inherited fault. This leads me to explore enduring questions about the nature of freedom and responsibility, human and divine. My main contention is that currently popular accounts of responsibility that imply original sin is morally indefensible are wrong-headed; an Augustinian view of responsibility that implies we can be accountable for inherited faults is more persuasive. ;I begin by expositing Augustine's doctrine of original sin, thereby clarifying the issues at stake in a critique of the doctrine and correcting misunderstandings about what the doctrine is or implies. In Chapter Two I explore the recurring scandal of the conceptual core of the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we are born sinners because of an inherited fault. With the help of theological and philosophical discussion partners, I compile a list of reasons for holding that it is unfair to consider persons responsible for original sin. ;Chapter Three presents Augustine's own defense of original sin by giving a reading of his late views about freedom and responsibility. In essence, he argues that necessity can be compatible with responsibility, since God, for instance, both necessarily and responsibly wills the good. In Chapters Four and Five I appropriate and systematize Augustine's views, first offering an array of criticisms regarding assumptions commonly made about freedom and responsibility, and then providing an alternate account of responsibility as self-disclosure, on which we can be responsible for inherited sins. I close by arguing that we can appropriate the conceptual core, if not the rest of the doctrine of original sin, in a doctrine of "original sins" that states we each meet our first moral choices with fundamentally disordered loves and beliefs. This view has a compassionate upshot, since it makes us more realistic and humane in our understanding of and response to sin.

In the article "What Sin Is: A Differential Analysis," Jesse Couenhoven delves into the definitions and categorizations of sin according to various Christian doctrines. The author critically examines traditional definitions, such as those provided by the Westminster Confession and catechisms, and argues that they fail to adequately distinguish between sin and evil, often conflating natural evils with sinful acts. Couenhoven also considers gray areas of ethical behavior, such as the actions of a schizophrenic who curses against God or the mistakes made by medical residents that result in harm to patients, and questions whether these actions should be classified as sin. The primary question driving the article is how sin is differentiated from that which is "merely" evil. To address this, Couenhoven analyzes and evaluates three views of sin, testing their coherence with Christian beliefs and practices. The article aims to provide a more nuanced and sufficient understanding of sin within the Christian tradition, going beyond the necessary elements of the doctrine of sin to better identify and differentiate sin from evil.

Christians have long understood grace both as a declaration of acceptance and as a power that transforms. This article illumines two theses while investigating the relationship between these understandings of grace in Luther, Calvin, and Barth's development of the law/gospel dialectic and the doctrines of justification and sanctification. First, though each theologian makes use of both understandings of grace, each also tends to emphasize one over the other. The unity and tension within and between these perspectives help to show that while both pictures are of the greatest importance for each other and cannot be separated, they also exist in tension, as long as they are worked out in the lives of sinners. Second, the author claims that the positions of Luther and Barth are more alike than is generally recognized

Virtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects that abandon the former or latter, are bound to leave us with a sadly diminished map of the moral territories crucial to our lives. Thus, it is better for the two parties to seek a more cordial and equal relationship, one that permits metaethical pluralism, and acknowledges mutual dependence. I do not seek to prescribe how that relationship should look: this essay offers less a positive metaethical position than a prolegomenon to such a position, one that attempts to head off harmful attempts to reduce the territory of the aretaic to that of the deontic, or that of the deontic to the aretaic.

This essay is an attempt to understand the significance of Barth's redefinition of the "law/gospel" rubric for political theology. Barth's thought is exposited at length, and illumined by comparison with Luther and Calvin. Luther emphasizes the distance between gospel and the law, distinguishing between serving God in the secular regiment, and serving Christ in the spiritual regiment. He thereby challenges the improper relation of state and church, but does so in a manner that can lead to a passive dualism. Calvin holds that preaching the law to the state includes preaching the gospel; thus, the church has a positive vision against which it can evaluate the state's service to God in Christ. This leads, however, to the danger of a 'clerical guardianship' of the state. Barth finds a positive connection between the two governments in the fact that both communities are based in Christ, in whom the gospel is their law. This grounds his high view of the state as predecessor to the heavenly kingdom, as well as a prophetic mission of the church to the state. This does not lead to a new Christendom, however, first, because Barth hopes not for a kingdom wrought by human hands, but for the Theocracy of God, and second, because Barth sees the fallen reality of both church and state, the state pagan and violent, and the church a poor witness. In the end, though Barth makes a strong case for supporting theological critique of the state, while avoiding Constantinianism, he is unable to solve the problem of how to connect the gospel and the law in the civil community