Vez tras vez las Escrituras revelan que las actividades humanas obedientes son actividades de Dios. “Si Dios no edifica la casa, en vano trabajan los que la edifican” (Sal. 127). Ridículamente el hombre moderno y muchos creyentes tienden a considerar dichas declaraciones como una simple metáfora. Los no creyentes construyen casas que siguen de pie. De hecho, los no creyentes generalmente se muestran superiores en actividades culturales. “No importa” dicen los salmistas y con ellos, los cristianos. A menos que la casa sea construida por aquellos que confiesan que su fuerza está en el Señor dicha construcción estaría carente de significado y valor. Esto no significa que no permanecerá físicamente hablando, pero todo trabajo o producto que no está hecho en el hombre del Señor o dedicado a su Gloria no es lo que debería ser y será finalmente juzgado como carente de peso (gloria).

For Levinas, “To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. The ethical [f]ace to face remains an ultimate situation … and in it things figure not as what one builds but as what one gives.” This allows human sensitivity to pain, wounding, and suffering to be immediately ethically relevant. Ethics in this view is grounded in corporeality, in creatureliness, with a special marking because of pain, suffering, lapse, delay, and fissure. It is sensitive bodies in proximity that are the space of ethics, the fields of meeting. In my very hearing of the child’s cries I am ethically claimed. Face-to-face, flesh-to-flesh, I am wounded by thee other’s wounding—and responsible for it. There is no need for a reasoning process to discover or erect a rational reason to provide the moral force. Responsibility is prior to freedom.

Reason is the instrument by which an ego or society of egos makes same that which is different, possessing and domesticating it. reason reduces the other, appropriates, disempowers, totalizes. What is foreign, what is different, is subsumed within my system. It is made the same to remove its threat. This is ontology. Before ontology, however, exclaims Levinas, there is ethics, the relationship of responsibility to the other. The other can never be present within my thought, my ontology. Unless I allow myself to be instructed by the face of the other, I do not “relate” at all, but only dominate in terms of my paradigms. The face of the other commands me: Thou shalt not kill. For Levinas the face is not a presence, but a trace, a trace that marks the escape of the other who cannot be contained, who has escaped the reduction to my Being. The face is the epiphany of the nakedness of the other, a visitation, a coming, a saying that comes in the passivity of the face, not threatening, but obligating. I encounter a face, my world is ruptured, my contentment interrupted; I am already obligated. Here is an appeal from which there is no escape, a responsibility, a state of being hostage. It is looking into the face of the other that reveals the call to responsibility as an-archic, that is, before any beginning, decision, or initiative on my part.

In modern ethical theory, a justified moral judgment needs to take a form that can and must be made from anyone’s point of view, independent of time and place. Problems emerge and are solved only within the comprehensive framework of a unified “encyclopaedic rationality,” as MacIntyre names it. However, not only has "objective" agreement remained out of reach, but the result has been indifference to the real life situations of many people, particularly women, children, and the otherwise marginalized. In general, the abstraction of the full flesh-and-blood person from an ethical case, and the case from its full historical and developmental context, has made the whole exercise of Enlightenment ethics artificial, futile, and alienating. As Hauerwas put it, “What I am morally obligated to do is not what derives from being a father, or a son, or an American, or a teacher, or a doctor, or a Christian, but what follows from my being a person constituted by reason.” When moral decisions are to be based on rationally grounded principles that are not relative to the character, motives, history, context, interests, gender, body, and worldview of the agents, moral agents are separated not only from all that makes them unique, but from the very corporeality and embeddedness that makes them human persons. There is no other word for such depersonalization than violence.

I want to pay particular attention to Emmanuel Levinas’ plea for a different ethics, an ethics as “first philosophy” that begins with responsibility rather than freedom...

We were made good and designed for love. At the same time, we perniciously cling to evil, are unwilling and unable to do the good, and need to receive in the Spirit of God deliverance from self, a transforming which re-connects us with God, self, neighbor and the rest of creation