it is not only that we need absolutes in morals and values; we need absolutes if our existence is to have meaning--my existence, your existence, Man's existence. Even more profoundly, we must have absolutes if we are to have a solid epistemology (a theory of knowing--how we know, or how we know we know).How Should We Then Live?, 160-161
The Church has been trying to preach morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis; it has been preaching morality without godliness; and it simply does not work. It never has done, and it never will. And the result is that the Church, having abandoned her real task, has left humanity more or less to its own devices.
If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values.How Should We Then Live?, 160
But though the moral law be thus far abolished, it remains a perpetual guide. Though it be not foedus, a covenant of life; yet is is norma, a rule of life. Every Christian is bound to conform to it; and to write, as exactly as he can, after this copy.
As Theo Hobson describes it, for a full moral reversal to take place three conditions must be met. The first is this: what was condemned must be celebrated. The second is that what was celebrated must now be condemned. And thirdly, those who will not join in the celebration will be condemned.
the Achilles' heel of [the harm principle] is the assumption that we all know what "harm" is or that it can be defined without recourse to deep beliefs about right and wrong. One person says that it harms no one for a man to consume pornography privately in his own home. Others counter, however, that pornography will shape how he talks and acts with others, especially with women.Preaching, 141
Western secularists insist that their view of equal rights is simply self-evident to any rational person, but non-Western cultures do not agree... Because truly secular people can't admit the source of their main moral values in their Christian history, it makes them imperialistic.Preaching, 151