Chester L. Gillis

Chester Gillis

Amaturo Chair of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University.

"On Faith" panelist Chester Gillis is the Amaturo Chair of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University where he has served on the faculty since 1988. He was chair of the Department of Theology from 2001 to 2005. He holds degrees in philosophy and religious studies from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His research interests include comparative religion and contemporary Roman Catholicism. He is the author of "A Question of Final Belief: John Hick’s Pluralistic Theory of Salvation" (1989), "Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology" (1993), "Roman Catholicism in America" (1999), "Catholic Faith in America" (2003) and editor of "The Political Papacy" (2006). He is co-editor of the Columbia University series Religion and Politics. He is a Fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown, and is the Director of Georgetown’s Program on the Church and Interreligious Dialogue. Close.

Chester Gillis

Amaturo Chair of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University.

"On Faith" panelist Chester Gillis is the Amaturo Chair of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University where he has served on the faculty since 1988. He was chair of the Department of Theology from 2001 to 2005. more »

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January 2008 Archives



January 29, 2008 6:24 AM

God's Standards Cannot be Changed

How do we arrive at God’s standards? By relying upon the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada? Candidate Huckabee seems to have some implicit standard in mind, likely the Christian scriptures. However, all Americans do not subscribe to Christianity, and even for those who do, differences of interpretation complicate attempts to know “Gods standards.”

If one relies upon a deductive method of determining God’s standards for moral behavior, a static view of human nature emerges. All one has to do is know what God wants and apply it to the human situation. However, competing theories, derived mostly from the social sciences and social philosophy, do not view humans as static. Thus, [moral] standards evolve with the development of society and the individual, that is, “some contemporary view” in Huckabee’s words.

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