Loading...
Prudentia for the Protestants: Reclaiming Aquinas’s Prudence in Protestant Public Ethics
Beamer, Martin Ross
Beamer, Martin Ross
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
The diversity of Protestant responses to COVID-19 pandemic exposed asignificant weakness within contemporary Protestant public ethics. While Protestants largely agreed on the importance of virtue, justice, love, and faithful Christian witness in the public square, they often disagreed sharply about how these commitments should be embodied in concrete circumstances. Questions concerning the nature of virtuous action, the contextual demands of justice and love, and the appropriate limits of obedience and resistance to civil authority revealed a deeper problem: Protestants possess strong moral convictions but lack a robust account of how those convictions should be prudently applied in complex social contexts. This dissertation argues that Thomas Aquinas’s virtue of prudence (prudentia), as properly understood and retrieved within a Protestant framework, supplies a missing and necessary resource for Protestant public ethics. Prudence is the God-given virtue that governs moral reasoning by directing agents to discern and apply moral truth faithfully amid contingent, particular, and often competing circumstances. It enables Christians not merely to affirm biblical norms but also to judge how those norms ought to be embodied in concrete contexts. Concerns for justice, for example, are insufficient without prudential judgment regarding what justice requires in specific situations and how it may be rightly pursued. Such judgment and application are the distinctive work of prudence. Recovering prudence, this dissertation contends, enables Protestants to pursue a more coherent, faithful, and hopeful public ethic—one capable of navigating moral complexity without surrendering biblical authority or Christian conviction.
Description
Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026
Date
2026-05
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary