Free for Christ: Religious Obedience and Thomistic Moral Theology
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
What is it about the practice of obedience to God that makes it significant for human happiness and sanctity? And how should the obedience proper to vowed religious life be understood relative to the responsibilities of conscience and personal freedom? In the present day, religious obedience is often viewed either as a negative cramping of personal autonomy by an external authority, or as a positive submission to law that somehow assures one’s fidelity, but the common thread for both perspectives is a distinctly modern approach to obedience characterized by legalism and voluntarism. In Free for Christ, Mother Mary Christa Nutt, R.S.M., proposes a different approach to religious obedience that foregrounds virtue-based moral agency rooted in metaphysics and the mystery of God, examining obedience not simply in relation to commands and laws but as a spiritual, philosophical, and theological reality—one that situates the human person in relation to God, the Church, and those others who share this religious life. Taking her starting point from Thomas Aquinas, Nutt examines obedience as a dimension of prudence and worship, that is, as a way that the human being can become relative to God as first source and final end, and thus as a way that the grace of Christ can take deeper root as a path to authentic freedom and interiority. From this ground of Thomistic metaphysics and ethics emerges a theological anthropology of obedience closely tied to Aquinas’s teaching on providence and religion.
- Proposes a different approach to religious obedience.
- Examines obedience as a dimension of prudence and worship
- Emerges a theological anthropology of obedience closely tied to Aquinas’s teaching.
Does religious life have a future? Should it? Mother Mary Christa Nutt takes a serious look at the challenges posed by contemporary redefinitions of the vow of obedience and of religious life itself, vis-à-vis the universal call to holiness. In this very comprehensive philosophical and theological treatise, she draws on the recent reappropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s moral theology to defend the thesis that vowed obedience can contribute to the freedom and spiritual maturity of religious. She finds ample support for the distinctive value of religious life in St. Thomas’s teaching on the Beatitudes and on the saving obedience of Christ. Mother Mary Christa has done her homework. Free for Christ is a learned and eloquent defense of religious life. This should open a new conversation and give courage to all who believe religious life is a gift to the Church.
--Sr. Sara Butler, M.S.B.T. Mundelein Seminary
Viewing moral theology from the perspective of the new law of grace, Mother Christa Nutt superbly locates religious obedience within charity, the Beatitudes, personal liberty, and Christian maturity. She shows how the fixing of the will by a vow strengthens the focus on God and reaffirms the interior balance of the person. Thus, the vow does not paralyse freedom. It enhances it.
--Fr. Wojciech Giertych, O.P. Theologian of the Papal Household
- Title: Free for Christ: Religious Obedience and Thomistic Moral Theology
- Author: Mother Mary Christa Nutt
- Publisher: Emmaus Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Pages: 392
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- ISBNs: 9781645853909, 164585390X
- Resource ID: LLS:FRCHRSTRLGMRLTH
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-10-02T19:57:48Z