ABSTRACT
Within the magisterial wing of the Protestant reformation, Lutheran and Reformed thinkers alike inherited and continued to employ the natural law tradition. Aristotelian virtue ethics, interpreted through the Decalogue, as a revealed restatement of the natural law, offered a flexible framework for conceiving a civic space of common morality while also insisting that grace is necessary for individuals and communities to reach their final end in obeying and honouring God. Protestant thinkers today thus have good reason to be interested – albeit not uncritically – in contemporary forms of virtue-based ethical reflection descended from Aristotle. In particular, the Aristotelian naturalism of Michael Thompson, along with the pluralist-expressivist theories of value developed by Elizabeth Anderson, offer helpful tools for exploring how life-forms or natures can be understood as supplying normative standards for flourishing, how natural teleology, final causes in nature, can be intelligibly retrieved, and how the capacity for moral agency, for reflexive evaluation of one’s own and other’s valuations, bears with it the capacity for accountability and obligation. Theologically understood, the task of accountability is finally accountability to God, made possible by the ways in which our fallible and finite socially embodied practical reasoning participates in the eternal law of God.
