How Did This Way of Reasoning Arise?
TECHNICAL ARTICLE 2
This article forms the second part of a technical trilogy, tracing the historical and conceptual development of the patterns of reasoning identified in the first essay.
How Did This Way of Reasoning Arise?
From Creation as Meaningful Order to Meaning as Hermeneutical Construction
This second article examines how a gradual thinning of ontology—especially with respect to creation and embodiment—has reshaped Christian ethical reasoning, producing recurrent tensions in contemporary church debates.
1. From diagnosis to explanation
In the first article, we suggested that contemporary church debates may increasingly converge with the prevailing culture at the level of reasoning, even where they diverge at the level of doctrinal conclusions. That claim was intentionally diagnostic. It identified patterns without yet explaining how they came to exert such influence.
The present task is explanatory. If particular ways of reasoning about meaning, authority, and embodiment now feel natural—even inevitable—within the church, then those habits did not arise accidentally. They are the result of identifiable theological shifts, often well-intentioned, that have altered how creation, Scripture, and ethics are related to one another.
The central contention of this article is that ethical instability follows ontological thinning. Where creation is no longer treated as intrinsically meaningful, interpretation and function are forced to compensate. Over time, this reconfiguration reshapes how Scripture is read and how theological judgments are justified.
2. Creation as order, not mere fact
Classical Christian theology did not treat creation as a collection of neutral facts. Creation was understood as ordered: purposive, intelligible, and communicative. Its meaning derived not from human projection but from divine intention.
This conviction is evident not only in the doctrine of creation but in the way Scripture reasons ethically. Biblical imperatives regularly presuppose an already meaningful world. Commands do not create reality; they address agents situated within a reality that already bears moral and theological significance.
When Paul appeals to creation, he does not do so as a rhetorical afterthought. Creation functions as a source of moral intelligibility. Ethical exhortation assumes that the created order can be read, not merely regulated.
Once this assumption weakens, Scripture’s ethical force must be re-grounded elsewhere.
3. The rise of hermeneutical mediation
As modern thought increasingly questioned whether creation could reliably disclose meaning, theology responded by elevating hermeneutics. Interpretation became not merely the means by which meaning is accessed, but the site at which meaning is constituted.
Within the church, this shift was often justified as a necessary corrective. Historical distance, cultural diversity, and the reality of sin were rightly emphasised. Appeals to “context” were meant to protect Scripture from naïve literalism and theological reductionism.
Yet over time, hermeneutics began to displace ontology rather than serve it. Creation was no longer assumed to speak clearly enough to ground ethical reasoning. Meaning was increasingly located in interpretive frameworks rather than in the givenness of the created order itself.
At this point, theological disagreement no longer turned primarily on what is, but on how texts should be read.
4. Scripture as arbiter rather than disclosure
One consequence of this development is a subtle reconfiguration of Scripture’s authority. Scripture remains authoritative, but the mode of its authority shifts.
Rather than disclosing the structure of reality, Scripture increasingly functions as an adjudicator within disputes whose underlying ontology is left implicit or contested. Biblical texts are appealed to as permissions or prohibitions rather than as windows into a meaningful order.
In such a framework:
- Ethical reasoning becomes reactive rather than formative
- Appeals to Scripture focus on boundary-setting rather than on moral vision
- Disagreement narrows to competing interpretations detached from shared ontological assumptions
This helps explain why appeals to Scripture often fail to resolve debates. The disagreement lies not only in exegesis, but in what Scripture is assumed to be doing when it speaks.
5. The functional turn in ethics
As ontology recedes and hermeneutics proliferates, ethical reasoning increasingly turns to function. Theological judgments are justified by outcomes: pastoral effectiveness, inclusion, harm reduction, or perceived justice.
Again, such concerns are not illegitimate. Christian ethics has always been attentive to fruit and neighbour-love. But when function becomes the primary criterion, it fills a vacuum left by weakened ontological confidence.
Function is inherently comparative and provisional. It requires constant reassessment as circumstances change. Without a stable account of what human beings are, ethical reasoning becomes adaptive rather than directive.
This is why ethical debates accelerate. New situations demand new judgments, and without a shared ontological anchor, those judgments must be continually renegotiated.
6. Embodiment and the limits of thin ontology
Nowhere are the consequences of ontological thinning more visible than in debates about embodiment.
When the body is treated as theologically under-determinative, it becomes difficult to explain why bodily realities should carry normative weight. Distinctions may be acknowledged descriptively while remaining ethically negotiable.
Within such a framework, appeals to experience, identity, or harm carry increasing force—not because they are intrinsically superior, but because they are among the few remaining sources of moral clarity.
The result is not necessarily the denial of embodiment, but its relativisation. The body is affirmed in principle while being displaced in practice.
7. Why good intentions intensify the problem
It is crucial to note that these developments are rarely driven by indifference to Scripture or by a rejection of Christian faith. On the contrary, they are often motivated by pastoral concern, moral seriousness, and a desire to respond faithfully to complex situations.
Yet when ethical urgency outruns ontological clarity, theology becomes reactive. Decisions are made under pressure, and the conceptual framework that might have stabilised those decisions is left unexamined.
This is why drift can occur without deliberate revisionism. The logic of reasoning shifts first; conclusions follow later.
8. An explanatory claim (and its scope)
The explanatory claim advanced here is this:
many contemporary theological tensions arise not from explicit doctrinal denial, but from a loss of confidence in creation as a source of moral and theological intelligibility.
This does not imply that earlier theology was naïve, nor that context and interpretation are irrelevant. It does suggest, however, that when ontology thins, ethics becomes unstable, and Scripture is burdened with work it was never meant to do alone.
If this analysis is sound, then neither stricter rules nor more nuanced hermeneutics will suffice to resolve the tensions now facing the church.
9. The question that remains
If the church’s ethical reasoning has been reshaped by a thinning of ontology—particularly with respect to creation and embodiment—then the path forward cannot be merely corrective or defensive.
The remaining question is therefore constructive:
Is there a thicker account of creation, order, and relation available within Scripture itself—one capable of re-grounding ethical reasoning without collapsing into either rigid hierarchy or interpretive relativism?
That question requires not only theological retrieval but careful attention to how Scripture itself reasons about being, order, and identity.
That is the task of the final article.
In Technical Article 3, we will turn explicitly to Pauline theology and the scriptural logic of creation, order, and relation, articulating a constructive ontological framework capable of sustaining Christian ethical reasoning in a late-modern context.
This article is part of a three-part technical investigation. The full series is introduced here: Is There a Thicker Alternative? – A Technical Continuation