Thomas K. Johnson hat in seinem Buch zum Naturrecht die Einseitigkeit einer Ethik innerhalb der christlichen Gemeinschaft scharf herausgearbeitet. Das Hauptproblem: Sie wird ausserhalb nicht mehr aufgenommen bzw. verstanden.
Once general revelation and natural law is rejected or ignored, a probable echo one can expect to hear in the Protestant movement will be a recasting of Christian ethics into the ethics of a separate or holy community that has little to say to society as a whole in the realm of ethics. This tendency arises because of two related reasons. First, Christians are not sure they have anything to say to the great moral questions of our age. Second, without any use of general revelation and natural law, Christian language about ethics is very hard to understand for people of other religions or for people of no defined religion. Some Christians may opt for a christological approach to ethics (similar to Barth), whereas other Christians may opt for a biblicistic approach to ethics (probably pietists and fundamentalists), but either approach makes it very difficult for Christians to address the deep moral questions arising in medicine, business and politics in a manner that is understandable to those who do not identify with the Christian message and tradition.
Die dringend nötige Auseinandersetzung findet nicht mehr statt, und damit kann die herrschende Dekonstruktion und Verzweiflung nicht mehr adressiert werden:
The main weakness of the “ethics of community” approach is that it does not sufficiently challenge the destructive plausibility structure of the developed world. That plausibility structure separates facts from values, and “truth” (usually meaning information in the natural sciences) from opinion, putting any religiously based ethics into the realm of opinions about values. Christian belief and Christian ethics are notseen as public truth; the faith is interpreted as being private opinion. This not only makes Christians doubt the relevance of the faith to important areas of public life, but also leaves western society with a plausibility structure of a highly individualistic relativism that destroys people and communities, leaving a despair of meaning.
Aus: Thomas K. Johnson. Natural Law Ethics. VKW: Bonn 2005. (9-11)
