Power and Christian Ethics

James P. Mackey, one of Britain's foremeost theologians, offers a penetrating and controversial analysis of morality and of the legitimate power of authority in both secular states and the Christian churches. Such power is contrasted forcefully with the ultimate Christian power working in human beings for their final well-being.

In the conventional analysis of human behaviour, power and ethics are frequently considered contrary principles, in that power enforces, while ethics elicits a free response. But, as James Mackey forcefully shows, a more adventurous philosophical study of human morality escapes the sense of contraries, and sets us on a quest for the kind of power that liberates human creativity. It then becomes possible to establish the framework for a critical assessment of the kind of power that ought to be operative in the major structures of human society, civil or ecclesiastical, state governments and church hierarchies. Mackey analyses the religious question which then quite naturally emerges, as to whether this Eros-type power so manifest in human society originates from beyond the more empirical structures of churches, states and 'nature'; and the effort to detect the specifically Christian characterisation of an allegedly ultimate power working in us for final well-being finds its natural context.