Abstract

In the preface to his 1889 translation of Christoph Ernst Luthardt’s History of Christian Ethics, William Hastie welcomes the ‘methodical cultivation of Christian Ethics’ as one of the achievements of the modern German research university. ¹ Every age, says Hastie, faces its own ethical problems, and ‘[t]he student of Christian Ethics is thus thrown back upon the whole historical movement as the natural enlargement of his own individuality and experience’. ² Only by studying the past can Christians understand what Christian ethics should be today.