Pre-ethical

In a 2010 article in the Lutheran Quarterly , Oswald Bayer examines the pre-ethical conditions for Christian ethics: “Over against a prescriptive overheating of ethics which has taken place since Kant, and the actualism and activism often bound up with this overheating, it is necessary to make clear the significance of the pre-ethical for the ethical, the priority of gift over task. Language, by which we perceive the world, is prior to morality—at least whenever a conception of behavior in terms of activity determines the understanding of ‘morality.’ Consequently, aesthetics (understood as the reflection of perception of the world in an encompassing sense) together with poetics precede ethics. Every human being is planted in a certain “world of language” (the world as it is constituted by language), moves about within that world, and is antecedently and inescapably determined by it in the basic orientation of his or her thoughts, words, and deeds. It is of decisive importance, of course, in which ‘world of language’ we live.”

Bayer enumerates some of the pre-ethical practices that shape the ethos of Christian living: “Fundamental acts such as astonishment and reverence, thanksgiving, kindness and mercy belong to this linguistically formed pre-ethical reality. They are not self-sufficient, moral convictions, virtues and life-styles which may be taken for granted, but are rather created and renewed continually through the divine promise of God’s own goodness and mercy alone.”