VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

The church as an earthly institution assumed the particular authority of interpretingand teaching the message of the good news of God’s kingdom. The Kingdom of Goddescribes those who intend to pattern their lives on Christ. The church’s duty is that ofcommunicating Christ. In Christ, we recover a relationship with God and with oneanother. A people who are in a right relationship with God and with one another, formthe new community - the community of believers. This the community of the wise,held together by a common moral vision, passing on and building stories by theirvirtuous living.These are the ideal notions invested in the Judeo-Christian traditions. MacIntyre is ofcourse critical of the Church, and I hope by the church MacIntyre implies the churchestablishment. I maintain that the custodians of the church might have failed, but notthe ideal notions for which the church of Christ stands.By the Middle Ages the church had assumed such authority in moral matters that ithad almost succeeded in dismissing “all pagan teaching as the devil’s work andsought to find in the Bible an all-sufficient guide” (MacIntyre 1981:156). During theReformation led by Martin Luther (16th century), this authority, among other issues,was questioned. The authority of the church and with it, its Scripture, as moralsources, suffered further catastrophe during the age of Enlightenment – that is therejection by [the] utilitarianism of the premise that what is to be counted as a correctmoral rule or principle is laid on us by God (cf Anscombe 1958:5).The result of this moral system is summarised in MacIntyre’s observations:According to his (MacIntyre) thesis, the interrelatedness of all aspects ofreality, and of all people within an objective moral system, was destroyed asmorality was uprooted from its traditional and divinely sanctioned context (inChapman 1998:379)From here onwards, morality was “dislocated” from its “inherited modes of thought”and “reality fragmented into distinctive and competing spheres” (Chapman 1998:379).Chapman takes on the observation of Colin Gunton, an English systematic theologian,who analyses the individual’s isolation “from his or her embeddedness in a social149