The following, in a series of steps, attempts to summarize and then comment upon the chapter of Alberto Múnera in order to join his search for the deeper meaning of the theme of this volume. The presentation here follows the same order as his report.

INTRODUCTION

The context of this discussion is the university's task to investigate from various angles the complex and important theme of moral education with a view to developing an architectonic design and plan for the foundations of tomorrow's society. A cultural heritage is subject to critical social changes that radically question traditional moral education. Latin American culture is in many ways a mixture, resulting so from the fusion of three previous cultures: Amerindian, African and Iberian. The maturation of the resulting culture of the new world is not yet finished; it is young and still seeking its own identity. Similar to North American culture, the cultural inheritance of Latin America is not closed.

Every culture develops and changes in a rhythm which is asynchronous to its strata or levels. The most superficial strata change more easily and quickly. The most profound part of a culture is its fundamental distinctive and distinguishing character, its soul or ethos. This grows and changes only slowly over centuries and millennia.

The succession of ever deeper changes in a cultural inheritance frequently accompany social changes which, in turn, derive from scientific-technological developments. In the Inter-American context the pace of change deepens and accelerates, for the impact of these social changes is magnified when their source is exogenous and effects a weak culture in search of its own identity. In this situation our inheritance and ethos is profoundly attacked.

As one's moral authenticity is linked with one's cultural ethos, the social changes create moral confusion. Hence, the search for designs for moral education in the midst of social changes will have to correspond to the ethos of our cultural inheritance. Founding the new moral education must relate to this problematic of the history of our culture.

A global approximation of the present moral reality can be verified through the contributions of the diverse sciences which are then interpreted in moral terms. Although the resulting concepts are not precise, they reflect, in terms of the Christian Commandment of Love, the realization of the human being and of the common welfare.

The resulting sketch is very negative, almost apocalyptic: wars, fratricide, institutional injustice, inequalities of all kinds, violence, exploitation, powerless popular masses, hunger, sicknesses, insufficient education, deficient health services, family weaknesses and ethnic oppression: the picture is desolating. From whatever science, the judgment arrived at is very negative.

While agreeing with this globally negative apocalyptic vision, should one consider only the negative aspects; is such historic pessimism justified; are there live moral forces acting in our society?

Further, as the social changes seem to affect profoundly the cultural inheritance, perhaps the cultural ethos is being affected, and with this the most profound moral elements.

CHRISTIAN MORAL EDUCATION

It is deplorable that the above moral situation is found in societies with a Christian and Catholic inheritance, and that it is produced by people who consider themselves Christians. In view of this situation moral theology suggests some causes of the moral insufficiency on the part of Christians and proposes a Christian moral education. Critical analysis of traditional moral education manifests these characteristics: a) a total predominance of ethics over morals, that is to say, of philosophy over theology, b) almost total abstraction from scientific advances, projecting an eminently abstract moral disconnected from history, and c) juridicism.

The philosophy found in traditional moral education has been of an Aristotelian-Thomistic nature marked by universal principles, immutable and inflexible postulates, essentialist withdrawal from existential phenomena, fixed and deterministic moral rules and an inexorable objectivism.

The Christian moral is influenced also by Platonism, Stoicism and Manichaeism. Its epistemological postulates have affected the fundamental concepts of revelation and faith with an emphasis upon knowledge and objectivity. Hence, moral education has been above all ethical, without clarifying the specifically Christian faith experience. The influence of this philosophy has been pervasive: literalism in the interpretation of earlier texts, absolutization of magisterial authority, mythification of tradition, a perception of revelation as an immutable eternal transmission, a philosophic concept of God, a Christianity derived from the history of Jesus of Nazareth, an anthropology saturated with ecclesiastical distinctions, etc.

This description of the theological panorama caricaturizes the negative aspects of Christian moral formation with the evident intention of pointing out these weak points in past education to which the paradoxical deficiencies in Christian moral behavior might be traced. This is not to deny the "marvelous theological thought developed during centuries in the Church" and its great positive results. But the conclusion which imposes itself is that the synthesis of Christian moral thought based upon the Christian commandment of love was dissolved by an academic moral perfectly elaborated in all its levels through a moral education transmitted especially through the notional instruction in catechetics and preaching, rather than through authentic education. This auto-criticism of the traditional moral is made with a view to its purification and to recuperating lost ground.

This is an honest and courageous auto-criticism of moral theology, recognized as the major cause of the moral inefficiency of Christianity. But is this critical judgment appropriate if the tradition was efficient in a rural traditional society? Thus, the moral tradition seems not always to have been inefficient, but only in view of the actual changes in society.

The philosophical approach to Christianity has claimed continuous validity applicable to all history; this has marginalized history. Originally, the Christian faith enlarged past philosophical vision, which was then able to serve in the elaboration of theology. This inculturation was frozen, however, and has not been opened sufficiently to the new morality arising from science and modern philosophy.

The traditional philosophical-theological vision of moral theology seems almost totally responsible for the moral ineffectiveness of Christianity, to which should be added the traditional separation of moral from spiritual theology which orients the development of an authentic Christian life. As the great spiritualities gather and promote the ascetic strength and mysticism of authentic Christian life, the separation of moral from spiritual theology has done damage to both; the ineffectiveness of Christianity seems due to the weakness of its spiritual theology. Religious and lay spiritual theology are in need of the same auto-criticism as has been made on the moral theology. This is in keeping with the recommendation below to develop the Christian experience of faith as a source for the renovation of modern moral education.

PRESENT SOURCES OF CHANGE

Two sources, namely, the Second Vatican Council and liberation theology, derive from the same source, namely, the Christian experience of committed faith in the face of the historic demands of today's world. This must assist in the discernment of Christian identity and in the development of the moral theology to be transmitted through a new moral education.

Vatican II

The Council made it possible to appreciate the ineffectiveness of traditional moral education for the modern world. As a result there developed a new awareness of Christian moral identity and of the need for a new moral education.

The basic issues were the principal epistemological and hermeneutic principles, namely, the new scientific developments, the contributions of new biblical exegesis, the new concept of revelation and its influence in the moral theology, theological pluralism in contrast to the fixism of the traditional patrimony and experience as a privileged source (a locus theologicus) for faith and Christian revelation.

This global vision of Vatican II suggests the following as important for present changes:

- Interdisciplinarity: This reflects both the opening of the Church and the development of modern sciences. This interdisciplinarity of the positive sciences between themselves and with philosophy and theology is still in its beginning and requires the development of a new epistemology. At present, though the sciences and philosophy and theology make their contributions, these are not articulated methodologically. This is a challenge in the elaboration of a new moral.

- Theological pluralism: within theology there exists today a new pluralism which raises a series of problems which still remain unsolved. Though theological univocity exists no longer, theological pluralism creates contributions which are so varied as to cause confusion, especially in the moral field. A subterranean moral theology is being proposed, but has not been accepted; there is notable distance between the official moral and what is being developed on the investigative level.

- Return to the sources: this is a return not to the archaic life or to the simplicity of the pre-modern world, but to the foundations of all Christian life. Instead of traditionalism, there is now a turn to the tradition, including in the first place, biblical exegesis. This itself has constituted a better relation of teachers and tradition. Return to the Scriptures has brought also a new understanding of Judeo-Christian Revelation, as the auto-communicating of God to man in history. With this one passes from the metaphysics of "eternal and immutable truths" to the historic: from the notional to the experiential, etc.

- Religious experience: the center of all Christian life and of moral experience is faith, rather than reasoning in abstract philosophic or scientific concepts. Moral education will have to deal more with the spiritual religious experience than with such concepts.

Theology of liberation

The theology of the liberation is a Latin American phenomenon, although it has broader antecedents. It makes a fundamental contribution to the reconsideration of Christian identity and moral action, as well as to theological method. It begins from the Christian praxis of faith in history which it reflects upon and systematizes as in primitive Christianity.

The analysis of reality which is central to its epistemology of reflection in moral theology is interdisciplinary, above all with the social sciences and technology. This makes new contributions to theological anthropology and gives new expression to the Christian commandment of love as the synthesis of Christian morals.

The theology of liberation, on one hand, insists on the historical praxis of the faith, but, on the other hand, has not yet elaborated a systematic moral theology, especially a fundamental moral theology. It provides some solid hints on conceiving the fundamental moral as a following of the historic Jesus under the influence of the Spirit. To follow Jesus is not to imitate him at 20 centuries' distance, but to continue in history his life and works in constructing the kingdom.

On the other hand, North-American theologians have made distinguished contributions to moral theology, though not precisely in fundamental moral. Their contributions could be be useful, above all as North-South inter-american relations leave leave much to be desired in the moral field.

THE COMMANDMENT LOVE ONE ANOTHER AND THE FUTURE

Recent theology, combining the thrusts of Vatican II and the theology of liberation, has delineated a fundamental Christian identity, locating the command to love one another at the center of all theological reality, whence flows the dynamic of the entire Christian world. Alberto Munera, in this volume, elaborates this proposal in four stages.

The Christian Historic-Existential Process

From two postulates, one philosophical and the other theological, a new concept of Christian anthropology can be elaborated. Modern philosophy perceives man as historical and in continuous and permanent evolution; he constructs himself through permanent relations with past history, with the present social atmosphere and in creative projection towards the future. In this way the static and essentialist vision of Aristotelian philosophy is overcome.

On the one hand, theology in keeping with the contributions of the human sciences, and based upon biblical data, develops a revealed anthropology: created in the "image and likeness" of God: in the project of his historic existence man is expected to reproduce the divine qualities. On the other hand, the existence of man has a component of sinfulness which disfigures his similarity to God. Following Pauline theology, the ontological justification of the man is a continuous Pascal passage from death to life until man reproduces completely the qualities of Christ and feels, with him, as a new man.

This transforming experience of the Christian faith does not happen through a noetic or notional acceptance of abstract truths, but in the religious experience of one's vital incorporation into the Life of the Holy Trinity. No one can be constituted as a Christian without experiencing this marvelous process of total transformation. No one can pretend to have a Christian moral capability without having lived this experience. Christian identity cannot be lived only as a culture if it does not include a deliberate existential acceptance of transforming grace.

Overcoming the essentialist and unchanging mold of the Aristotelian anthropology, philosophy and technology together enter the process constitutive of man. The perspective shifts from metaphysics to the historicity of this process. There is a modern vision of a new man; its great discovery is subjectivity. The central proposition is then that there is no Christian moral without the constitutive experience of the new man. This constitutes a theological process of grace accepted in freedom. Without a Christian subject, there can be no Christian moral, for the moral of extrinsic precepts is not Christian.

Conscience and Liberty

The Christian experience of the transformation of the subject as a child of God effects continuously all human reality by the personal presence of the infinite love of God in one's heart and its resulting impulses to Christian action. Moral theology is centered especially in two specific elements of Christian identity: conscience and liberty. Conscience, as the cognitive limits of the subject, is deeply affected by Christian love which gives it a particular manner of grasping all from a Christian angle. The Christian conscience discerns everything in terms of the Spirit, that is, of love embedded in one's heart.

The Christian freedom of the child of God is not just a simple human capacity to decide, but a voluntary stance in terms of the infinite and personal love of God within the Christian. Under this impulse, freedom consists in the capacity of self-giving for others. Christian liberty has inevitable communitary and social implications for overcoming moral inertia and serving the common welfare.

Though there are occasional coincidences, the primitive Christian did not take as reference the Decalogue or the Jewish law, but the law of love inscribed in the heart. This impulse of Christian moral theology can overcome and even contradict the precepts of the Jewish moral law. Modernity has discovered and deepened subjectivity, and thus conscience and the liberty. The affirmation of a fall of subjectivity into subjectivism should be questioned, but guarded against.

Munera's legitimate central preoccupation has been the inefficiency of traditional moral education. The solution proposed is the experience of faith as constitutive of the new man who consciously and freely acts under the impulse of love. The problem, of both traditional and modern moral, however, is not only inefficiency but the falsification of conscience and freedom. What is a true and correct conscience?

The founding theological experience of the Christian moral is necessary, but not sufficient, for it lacks reflection on the eventual necessity of an objective of morality which should not be able to be manipulated and falsified. Without the objectivity of a moral rule the subject can fall into subjectivism. Is it sufficient to say that the Spirit of love illumines the Christian conscience and drives it toward the Good? Does not the capacity of discernment given by the Spirit include objective and lasting rules? Without some objective rule morals can fall into "situationism."

Traditional morality holds a natural law written in man's ontic-existential nature. This foundation of the objective rule for traditional morality assumes the ethical philosophy of pagan origin, whereas the modern conscience and sense of freedom reject obedience to this rule. If natural law is well understood, does "natural" mean non-Christian? If that be rejected, is there no other Christian rule to serve as the last criterion for morality?

Latin American Christology proposes as a Christian rule of morality the following of the historic Jesus. This implies the constitution of an historic rule to assist in rearticulating in historical terms certain basic values of Christianity (Cfr. Jon Sobrino, Christology from Latin America [Mexico: Edition CER, 1976] pp. 94-111) Without entering further into the problem, we can say that fundamental morality implies, apart from the constitution of the Christian subject by the gifts of the Spirit, an objective Christian rule founded in the subject and obligatory for his personal realization and the common welfare. Fundamental moral theology must study the historization of the generic value of Christian love. What shapes the principle or fundamental rules for the historization of the Christian commandment of love is not metaphysics or an essentialist anthropology, but the historic situatedness of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Theology of Liberation suggests the following principles: 1) the conversion of the subject, which implies a passage from egoism as the soul and motor of the false realization of the person to a love for each other and for the common welfare; 2) a preferential option for the poor in order to build from their historic situation towards the common welfare, which implies the good for the majority of the poor; and 3) acceptance of the conflict implied in realizing the commandment of love as leading to the construction of the kingdom.

Final application of these principles consists not only in an intellectual deduction, but in a charismatic exercise of the Spirit of Love.

Realization of the Person and the Common Welfare

As in primitive Christianity, the living experience of God urges one towards an operative and effective moral. It embraces also the realization of both the person and the common welfare. Moreover, it proposes that the realization of the human being in the common welfare is possible only by means of the transformation of man into a child of God who lives the commandment of Christian love.

In the modern mind, unfortunately, the realization of the person frequently has been conceived in opposition to the common welfare. Individualism considers the realization of the person to be distant from or even contrary to the common welfare. On the other hand, collectivism's affirmation of the common welfare weakens the realization of the human being.

Between these two contrary "isms," the renewed Christian moral affirms that personal well-being and the common welfare grow in direct proportion one to the other: there is no authentic personal realization without giving of oneself to the common welfare.

This bipolar realization, person-common welfare, is possible only within the Christian experience of faith. Modern atheist or other secularist propositions which cut out the experience of God affirm a false realization of one of the poles at the expense of the other.

Future Christian Moral Education

Christian moral education is not principally instruction or transmission of values for rational and cultural motives. The experience of Christian faith is necessary as a foundation for the moral strength growing out of theological love. This experience is living and self-conscious (not only religious and cultural); it reflects a personal encounter with God in Christ, which embraces the community and society.

This education by means of experience considers the subject to be in charge of his own education, for his life is a permanent, practical training process. Such education has some common characteristics: a critical attitude toward the social reality which grows out of love, appreciation for the sciences and their progress, and the preferential option for the poor.

In the Christian moral field, education as instruction or transmission of knowledge is insufficient; the importance of experience is rightly underlined. Christian identity has been weakened by a traditional moral education which was satisfied with instruction regarding "eternal or permanent truths" or moral behavior. It is necessary to recognize, on the other hand, that traditional moral education has not been limited to intellectualist instruction, especially if one takes into account all that has been contributed by spiritual theology.

In any case, experience must not fall into an intimist personalism, typical of anti-Christian individualism, for which personalism has been rightly criticized. Authentic personal experience is situated historically and committed to the common welfare. In proposing its understanding of the commandment of love, Christianity does not propose a magical and spiritualist solution in the place of efforts coming from the other sciences. Christian experience is not all, but it is fundamental and the foundation of Christian morality.