{"id":12638,"date":"2026-05-27T14:27:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T21:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tiu.edu\/law\/?post_type=articles&p=12638"},"modified":"2026-05-27T14:27:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T21:27:59","slug":"the-ambrose-option-toward-human-flourishing-christian-calling-and-the-common-good","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.tiu.edu\/law\/articles\/the-ambrose-option-toward-human-flourishing-christian-calling-and-the-common-good\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ambrose Option: Toward Human Flourishing, Christian Calling, and the Common Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do we understand the preconditions for human flourishing?\u00a0 What should a well-ordered society and public justice look like? Let\u2019s consider a story, a true story, a Christian story.<\/p>\n

With the Edict of Milan (313) the practice of Christianity ceased to be illegal.\u00a0 This became known as the \u201cConstantinian settlement.\u201d1<\/sup> The empire continued thereafter, albeit with a new aroma of tolerance, liberty, including religious liberty, furnished by the budding public application of Christian precepts societally.<\/p>\n

70 years later (383), another emperor, Theodosius permitted immigration in the empire\u2019s Eastern region \u2013 this policy of welcoming aliens and strangers also derives from Christian precepts rooted in the Old Testament and now being applied to Roman society.<\/p>\n

A few years later in 387 a cleric from Milan performed a now common and routine \u201creligious, spiritual, and heavenly\u201d ritual of initiation:\u00a0 baptizing a disciple named Augustine.\u00a0 That\u2019s what clerics do and supposedly only do: spiritual and \u201cother worldly\u201d good . . . again, supposedly, at least according to dualistic sacred\/secular assumptions.<\/p>\n

In 390 the empire experienced an uprising in the East, specifically involving the immigrants in the city of Thessaloniki.\u00a0 This riot resulted in the death of a Roman military officer.\u00a0 Full stop.<\/p>\n

When the news reached Empower Theodosius\u2019s ear, he immediately sent troops to quell the riot and in the process sent a message by indiscriminately slaughtering about 7000 immigrants:\u00a0 Men, women, and children.\u00a0 The message conveyed?\u00a0 Don\u2019t mess with Rome.<\/p>\n

However, that baptizing cleric who had discharged his \u201cspiritual\u201d duty by preaching and performing the sacraments, learned of these killings.\u00a0 What did he do?\u00a0 Was he satisfied by doing his \u201chigher calling\u201d of conducting spiritual rituals?\u00a0 Hardly.\u00a0 Instead, he confronted Emperor Theodosius to his face.2<\/sup> This cleric, Bishop Ambrose, possessed the moral clarity, moral conviction, and moral courage to engage the temporal in the public square for public justice and the common good.\u00a0 He rejected the dualistic fable that his Christian calling confined him to only doing supposedly otherworldly \u201ceternal\u201d tasks in \u201cspiritual heavenly\u201d spaces involving rituals, preaching, and other \u201cchurch stuff.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, without hesitating or flinching he informed the great emperor that as a Christian man, taking one innocent life violates the Lord\u2019s law; how much more does taking 7000 innocent lives compound his sin?\u00a0 Ambrose then barred the emperor from the eucharist until he repented.\u00a0 And Theodosius did so, by God\u2019s grace seven months later.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the key point:\u00a0 Ambrose\u2019s action was not optional, outside, or beyond his vocation as Bishop, but rather cohered with and expressed it.\u00a0 What he believed (theology) and how he acted (ethics) correlated.\u00a0 The lesson here is plain and negates all dualistic formulae: Religious conviction should actuate and generate public religious exercise for the common good.3<\/sup> This incident supplies a big hint about how ordered liberty should look.\u00a0 There must be public and civic space \u2013 aka liberty – for the Faith to be proclaimed and practiced, including its moral precepts beyond the church\u2019s doors.<\/p>\n

A rightly formed Christian, like Ambrose, will reject any dualism that pits law against gospel, sacred against secular, nature against grace, clergy against laity, et al.\u00a0 Dualism at best privatizes the faith and over time will at worst subject society to increasing injustice.\u00a0 Neither is an option for ordered liberty.<\/p>\n

This Ambrose Option illustrates a course of conduct that reflects Christian calling, protects human flourishing, and promotes the common good for all, while avoiding the invocation of and reliance upon an overreaching Leviathan State.4<\/sup> In fact, the State comprised the problem here. Classical Liberalism \u201cincarnates\u201d these precepts at many points.<\/p>\n

This Christian conception of the public sphere, as this incident illustrates, provides the foundation for ordered liberty.\u00a0 That foundation in particular, establishes that (1) no ruler is above God\u2019s law; (2) arbitrarily destroying humans made in God\u2019s image and likeness \u2013 irrespective of tribe, clan, citizenship, et al, — manifests injustice, and therefore (3) the State, and thus its positive law, have roles as well as limits\/boundaries.\u00a0 This is a crucial recognition as Benjamin Wiker explains:<\/p>\n

By recognizing a moral code that stood above all merely human laws<\/i> and judged them, the Christian Roman civil law instilled<\/i> in the minds of the converted the<\/i> profoundly revolutionary truth<\/i> that the sovereign\u2019s will is only law insofar as it conforms to God\u2019s revealed moral law \u2013 and no farther.<\/i>5<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notably, Ambrose did not invent or improvise his actions.\u00a0 Rather, he applied the developing Christian practice of public justice based on God\u2019s universal moral standards.\u00a0 Glimpses of this began emerging soon after Christ\u2019s Ascension.\u00a0 For example, perhaps the earliest non-inspired Christian writing, The Didache (AD 70??), conjoins religious conviction with religious exercise, including retraining murder, abortion, adultery, et al.6<\/sup> Church father (and lawyer) Tertullian coined the term and advocated for \u201creligious liberty.\u201d7<\/sup> Gregory of Nyssa preached boldly against a predominant social evil:\u00a0 chattel slavery.8<\/sup> Emperor Justinian\u2019s Christian-based legal code protected conscience and religious liberty among both pagans and Jews.9<\/sup><\/p>\n

These Christian predicates and examples point the way toward human flourishing, showing that it is best achieved \u2013 and protected \u2013 by ordered liberty.\u00a0 This liberty recognizes (1) a knowable law above the positive law, which provides standards for evaluating all assertions of coercive power; (2) the inherent dignity of every human person, which provides the basis for equal treatment under the law; (3) the key roles of civil society, which provides community and the predicate and agents for informed subsidiary and sphere sovereignty; and recognized the legitimacy – and limits – of the State.\u00a0 This is the Ambrose Option and it shows the way forward for our conflicted times, privately, socially, and publicly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false},"publisher":[28],"class_list":["post-12638","articles","type-articles","status-publish","hentry","publisher-center-public-legal-theology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ambrose Option: Toward Human Flourishing, Christian Calling, and the Common Good - Trinity Law School<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tiu.edu\/law\/articles\/the-ambrose-option-toward-human-flourishing-christian-calling-and-the-common-good\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Ambrose Option: Toward Human Flourishing, Christian Calling, and the Common Good\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How do we understand the preconditions for human flourishing?\u00a0 What should a well-ordered society and public justice look like? 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