What do you think?
Rate this book
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life: An Introduction to Christian Ethics
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life suggests that the heart of Christian ethics are not elements such as laws and rules and principles and obligations, but is an ongoing initiation into a way of life capable of making a person good and therefore, happy. These elements are important, but they should never overshadow what ought to be the principal concern of Christian how to form us into people who love the good and seek it in everything we do. Paul Wadell re-envisions the basic elements of Christian morality in light of the conviction that the Christian moral life can be most promisingly described as 'training in happiness.' This book explores the place of friendship in the Christian moral life, the role of the virtues in our quest for happiness, a Christian understanding of the person, the meaning of freedom in the Christian life, and the importance of narrative for Christian ethics, including what it might mean to 'put on' the story that comes to us in Jesus. Also examined are the role of conscience and prudence, its primary virtue; a Christian understanding of love; and why in the Christian life, happiness is impossible without justice.
274 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 2007
18 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 28, 2010
This morning on National Public Radio’s "Speaking of Faith" I just heard Krista Tippett’s guest Dr. Mike Rose UCLA an expert on educational application and philosophy quote his cousin. His cousin was dealing with a technical problem and said, "It took a guy with a college education to screw this thing up and a guy with a high school education to fix it." I don't think Rose's point is merely anti-intellectual but speaks to the great divide between analytic reasoning and practical wisdom. Nowhere is this gap as blatant as it is in theology and especially ethics. For someone studying Christian ethics this quote could easily become a clear call for a new way of approaching values, virtues, and the practical problems we encounter. Profoundly wise but simple words such as: happiness, character, virtues and habit take centre stage, in this new for us but extremely ancient way of discovering our ethical bearings.
In Happiness and the Christian Moral life Paul J. Wadell manages to weave his way between analysis and practice with the right balance. The book starts with a commiseration for those who enter an academic study of ethics weighted down by principles, precedent, rights, obligations all applied to modern problems. Instead Wadell, like the moral philosopher of the Hellenistic period and later Augustine and Aquinas, starts with something much closer at hand, our experience of happiness. Excavating happiness beyond the shallow surface of pleasure, describing it:
Happiness is something deeper, something much more lasting and stable than pleasure, because happiness comes from the excellence of goodness... Augustine and Aquinas believed that happiness is not so much an emotional state, but a discernible and distinctive way of life that brought joy because it made one good. Thus, Christian morality is not a set of theories and ideas, it is an initiation into a way of life that itself constitutes happiness because it unites us with the most perfect and perfecting good.
The term goodness, might turn off the modern reader because it connotes the childish refrain, “I’ve been good.” or worse, a prudish rule keeping behaviour that sees goodness in following authority. Wadell’s definition of goodness would follow the lines of Plato’s Good meaning the fitting, the circumstantially and ultimate appropriate or integral response. From a Christian perspective this good is represented in the person of Jesus Christ and our goodness is in a sense derivative by our union with him through grace. Ethics seems to be the practical putting on of this nascent self, already present through our deep connection with Christ and his community.
Unlike the Stoics the Christian life of virtue that leads to happiness carries within it the paradox of suffering mingled with deep joy. It is the full release and purification of the emotions not the avoidance of them and more important it is a fully embodied life. Such happiness could called joyful contentment.
Wadel’s chapters reminds us to enter and sustain such a life: we need each other (2 Not Going It Alone), we avoid ethical catastrophe through the practise of virtue (3 Facing Shipwreck and Bandits), we are called to a vocation
(4 Every Person’s Truth), we are invited to risky freedom (5 Freedom). Chapter six (False Steps on the Path To Happiness) describes the difficulty in maintaining consistency on the path: sinfulness. Although he says we are fashioned for bliss every environmental temptation will tempt us to lose our way and forgiveness is something par for the course in this sort journey. Opening our eyes in the midst of the light of God’s creational intention for us may cause us to squint suggesting that darkness is preferable. Such a squinting causes illusions of what would make us happy in lieu of God’s call to integrity.
The chief way to stay on the path of happiness that leads to integrity is to have a story that can sustain our lives
(5 Finding as Story Worth Handing On). Wadel reminds us that such a narrative is available in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures and in the various exemplars of the path through literature, art and philosophy. It is worth quoting Wadel about the excellence of following the Christ story:
It is a story that says joy and confidence are more in step with reality than depression and despair, that goodness is the power that sustains the world, and that love offered to anybody, even and enemy, is always the right way to go. It’s a story that gives us freedom to fail because God who brought us to life in the beginning will do so again and again. p. 136
Wadel believes that it is better to say that we are a conscience rather than we have one. (8 Doing What The Good Requires) The ability to register right from wrong is a complex process condition by social, religious, upbringing and temperamental factors that form the totality of who we are. No little angel and devil figures here. In his chapter (8 Doing What the Good Requires) the difficult question of the differences between people’s consciences is addressed, as is the momentous quandry for those who apparently do not have conscience and how to possibly restore the one they once had.
The last two chapters position love, (9 The Gift that Makes All Gifts Possible), justice and the imagination, as core building blocks in a Christian moral philosophy (10 Reimaging the World) . The ground of all three of these virtues consists of a deep connection to the Creator and a willingness to allow his Spirit to challenge our customary ways of seeing and dealing with our world.
Connection, empathy and love are tools of compassion giving us the familiarity with those who might remain forever foreign. Wadel ends the book with a very simple but sincere letter from his African friends who pray for him as much as he prays for them; mutuality and respect overcome distance, class, race and many other barriers to love. Such simplicity from a university graduate who speaks the language of us all.
In Happiness and the Christian Moral life Paul J. Wadell manages to weave his way between analysis and practice with the right balance. The book starts with a commiseration for those who enter an academic study of ethics weighted down by principles, precedent, rights, obligations all applied to modern problems. Instead Wadell, like the moral philosopher of the Hellenistic period and later Augustine and Aquinas, starts with something much closer at hand, our experience of happiness. Excavating happiness beyond the shallow surface of pleasure, describing it:
Happiness is something deeper, something much more lasting and stable than pleasure, because happiness comes from the excellence of goodness... Augustine and Aquinas believed that happiness is not so much an emotional state, but a discernible and distinctive way of life that brought joy because it made one good. Thus, Christian morality is not a set of theories and ideas, it is an initiation into a way of life that itself constitutes happiness because it unites us with the most perfect and perfecting good.
The term goodness, might turn off the modern reader because it connotes the childish refrain, “I’ve been good.” or worse, a prudish rule keeping behaviour that sees goodness in following authority. Wadell’s definition of goodness would follow the lines of Plato’s Good meaning the fitting, the circumstantially and ultimate appropriate or integral response. From a Christian perspective this good is represented in the person of Jesus Christ and our goodness is in a sense derivative by our union with him through grace. Ethics seems to be the practical putting on of this nascent self, already present through our deep connection with Christ and his community.
Unlike the Stoics the Christian life of virtue that leads to happiness carries within it the paradox of suffering mingled with deep joy. It is the full release and purification of the emotions not the avoidance of them and more important it is a fully embodied life. Such happiness could called joyful contentment.
Wadel’s chapters reminds us to enter and sustain such a life: we need each other (2 Not Going It Alone), we avoid ethical catastrophe through the practise of virtue (3 Facing Shipwreck and Bandits), we are called to a vocation
(4 Every Person’s Truth), we are invited to risky freedom (5 Freedom). Chapter six (False Steps on the Path To Happiness) describes the difficulty in maintaining consistency on the path: sinfulness. Although he says we are fashioned for bliss every environmental temptation will tempt us to lose our way and forgiveness is something par for the course in this sort journey. Opening our eyes in the midst of the light of God’s creational intention for us may cause us to squint suggesting that darkness is preferable. Such a squinting causes illusions of what would make us happy in lieu of God’s call to integrity.
The chief way to stay on the path of happiness that leads to integrity is to have a story that can sustain our lives
(5 Finding as Story Worth Handing On). Wadel reminds us that such a narrative is available in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures and in the various exemplars of the path through literature, art and philosophy. It is worth quoting Wadel about the excellence of following the Christ story:
It is a story that says joy and confidence are more in step with reality than depression and despair, that goodness is the power that sustains the world, and that love offered to anybody, even and enemy, is always the right way to go. It’s a story that gives us freedom to fail because God who brought us to life in the beginning will do so again and again. p. 136
Wadel believes that it is better to say that we are a conscience rather than we have one. (8 Doing What The Good Requires) The ability to register right from wrong is a complex process condition by social, religious, upbringing and temperamental factors that form the totality of who we are. No little angel and devil figures here. In his chapter (8 Doing What the Good Requires) the difficult question of the differences between people’s consciences is addressed, as is the momentous quandry for those who apparently do not have conscience and how to possibly restore the one they once had.
The last two chapters position love, (9 The Gift that Makes All Gifts Possible), justice and the imagination, as core building blocks in a Christian moral philosophy (10 Reimaging the World) . The ground of all three of these virtues consists of a deep connection to the Creator and a willingness to allow his Spirit to challenge our customary ways of seeing and dealing with our world.
Connection, empathy and love are tools of compassion giving us the familiarity with those who might remain forever foreign. Wadel ends the book with a very simple but sincere letter from his African friends who pray for him as much as he prays for them; mutuality and respect overcome distance, class, race and many other barriers to love. Such simplicity from a university graduate who speaks the language of us all.
January 29, 2018
I liked the approach that the author had when dealing with morality from a Christian perspective. From the axiom that happiness is what everyone is going after as foundation and the ideas of Aquinas guiding most of the initial chapters, Wadell builds up the convincing case that “Christian ethics is training in happiness, and in the Gospels we discover what said training is about”.
Virtue ethics, Jesus’ teachings, the appropriate role of freedom, etc. are combined in the book to explore what a Christian approach to morality should look like. I was disappointed with the last chapter, in which the author takes really good thoughts and turns them into a less convincing liberation theology narrative. But it was a good book overall.
Virtue ethics, Jesus’ teachings, the appropriate role of freedom, etc. are combined in the book to explore what a Christian approach to morality should look like. I was disappointed with the last chapter, in which the author takes really good thoughts and turns them into a less convincing liberation theology narrative. But it was a good book overall.
September 21, 2025
Stupendous. One of my favorite reads all year. Though I’d recommend going w the 3rd edition. The 4th edition was filled with all these random asides about gender and sexuality and me too and George Floyd - like every hot button issue from 2020-2022 — which made it suffer because those sections just didn’t have much relevance to the overarching concept.
January 10, 2018
Buku ini cocok dibaca orang awam yang ingin belajar tentang teologi moral. Namun bagi mereka yang lebih serius, maka buku Father Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, dan Pinckaera Readers tetap menjadi buku wajib.
October 30, 2018
A compelling look at the way a search for lasting happiness is the center of the Christian moral life— although much of what was written struck me as more “Catholic” than general “Christian.” But overall, Waddell made very well-constructed and interesting arguments.
April 21, 2021
This book very much felt like a textbook in all the bad ways. I am very interested in theology, so reading this kind of book tends not to bore me but I struggled to finish this one.
There were a few good chapters that I will remember for the rest of my life thus this rating.
There were a few good chapters that I will remember for the rest of my life thus this rating.
August 13, 2013
When I rate books on goodreads, I think, "Would I recommend this to some random person?" And honestly, unless you have a special interest in ethics from a Christian perspective, you probably would not appreciate Happiness and the Christian Moral Life. It was (as 2 stars indicate) okay - not great, but not bad. By and large, almost everything of what Wadell had to say is what you would expect for a Christian primer on ethics. So, if that's what you're looking for, this would be a good choice. He does a fine job of introducing ethics from a Christian perspective (as the subtitle indicates).
He began the book with the premise that ethics (i.e. the moral life) are fundamentally shaped by the universal motivation of happiness. We do what we think will make us happy, and when done right, this will lead to happiness. Happiness and goodness are connected - for Wadell "the study of morality can best be understood as training in happiness (4)." Everything else he has to say stems from this idea. Parts of the book were insightful, particularly his chapters on freedom and conscience.
He began the book with the premise that ethics (i.e. the moral life) are fundamentally shaped by the universal motivation of happiness. We do what we think will make us happy, and when done right, this will lead to happiness. Happiness and goodness are connected - for Wadell "the study of morality can best be understood as training in happiness (4)." Everything else he has to say stems from this idea. Parts of the book were insightful, particularly his chapters on freedom and conscience.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews