Responsibility Before Freedom

Christian ethic holds "love the Lord your God" and "love your neighbor as yourself as its basic criteria. In a belief ethical system, religious belief offers value neumann to ethical practices. Holding Christian religious belief, every individual considers Jesus as ethical perfect model and imitates him. There is no one to consider himself to be the highest moral behavior. The trust to God's righteousness and the knowledge of original sin provide form spiritual support and ultimate guarantee for ethical practices. However, these moral frameworks have been lacking support for ethical practices and been challenging in modern society.This paper starts from thinking of above-mentioned conditions. Through explaining, in modern social cultural context, the relation of "the first law" that you should love the Lord your God and "the second law" that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and analyzing some important concepts, such as "Original sin", "Hardship", "Evil of human nature", the paper tried to present predicaments and questions of Christian ethic:On the one hand, human-centered thinking of modern ethic, emphasized self-reason, excluded the relation to "the Other", and cut off the connection of belief and morality. Hence, Christian ethic was unable to cultivate new structure to solve predicament of secularism and overcome several weaknesses of modern ethic. Both ultimate value of belief and internal value of ethics have been facing with dangerous situation.On the other hand, in modern society, historic particularities, such as lack of self-questioning , extended human evils, desalination of guilty sense, and rationality of evil, put discussion on existential God in a tight despair. At the same time, it was difficult to built sincere relations between "I" and "the Other". "The first law" wasn't strong enough to undertake the ethical responsibilities of "the second law". It was urgent need to built new theoretic framework, thus helping to endow significance to belief and morality.The paper wanted to, through combing above-mentioned questions, show the relations between self-recognizing and moral senses. How does Christian ethic providenew convictive idea to build good relation with "the Other", practice "love the other as yourself in complex modern social life, and preserve its ultimate ideal and cultivate new transcendent structure, considering modern social context?Levinas criticized ethics of modernity and, through clarifying limited body and limited relations with "the Other", presented the significance of "absolute other" and "otherness" for Christian ethic. Only by building limited relations with "the Other", I would move towards God, and obtain new transcendent significance. That is where possibility of realizing real ethics lies. Transcendent structure was based on limited human relations with each other. "I" am sentenced to "insignificant being" and own inescapable relations with "the Other". "Otherness" emphasized joint relationship beyond experiential appearances. Levinas' thoughts on "the Other" provided persuasiveness, not only logical links but also deep foundation of ontology.However, subsistent experiences have been preventing us from obtaining sincere listening to others' voices, and turn God's words into consolation and supporter for my own behaviors. We have always been looking for excusing support instead of rethinking. Therefore, there is an essential task for discussing ethical philosophy and passive responsibility in order to break through subsistent experience , modern secular predicament, and spread possible practices of understanding through dialogue with each other.