Stephanos Nirmalendu Ghosh Lectures 1930-31. The Contribution of Christianity to Ethics

It is related in the Gospel of Mark,* the earliest in date, as scholars are now agreed, of the four lives of Jesus which are contained in the New Testament, that Jesus, being asked by a scribe, that is, by one of the professional interpreters of the sacred law of the Jews, which commandment is the first of all, replied as follows : ' Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One ; and thou sha [...] Even by the minority among Christians which has dissented from this view of the Founder of their reiigion the God whom they have set before themselves as the object of the love enjoined in the first great commandment has been a Being describable in the phraseology of the apostle Paul as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the nature of whose attitude toward us is to be gathered from the t [...] III THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS In my last lecture I tried to give an account of the ethi- cal teaching to be found in the New Testament, that is to say, in the written record of that wonderful experience of the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ, which sent those who had enjoyed it out into the world, full of zeal to proclaim to all men the good news of the salvation which the [...] 24. "44 THE CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY TO ETHICS Jews, in which its Founder and first teachers had been bred ; those expressed in the philosophy and science of the Greeks whose culture at that time dominated the higher life of the nations inhabiting the shores of the Mediterranean ; and those which were reflected in the political institutions of the Roman empire to the government of which those s [...] thus transferred from the one kind of knowledge of God to the other, been attached, in the minds of the Chrii3tiaxis who were led to make this transference, to the active' exercise of thought by the scientific intelligence upon the problems suggested by their religious experience of a divine revelation, the resulting intellectualism would have been of the same kind with that of the ancient Greeks