HTH-330: Christian Ethics

Assessment Brief

Course: HTH-330 Christian Ethics
Program: Bachelor of Arts in Christian Ministry, Grand Canyon University
Study session: Fall 2026
Assessment type: Benchmark written essay
Word count: 1,200–1,500 words, excluding title page and references
Referencing style: APA 7th edition
Submission: LopesWrite via the course LMS

1. Assessment Context

HTH-330 is a writing-intensive course that examines the biblical, theological, and philosophical foundations of Christian moral reasoning. The course prepares students to move from ethical theory to applied judgement without collapsing one into the other. This benchmark assessment asks you to demonstrate that movement. You will select one contemporary social issue, analyse it through two distinct Christian ethical frameworks, and defend a course of action that a faith community could plausibly adopt. The task rewards precision over breadth. A narrow issue analysed well scores higher than a broad survey of several issues. The essay carries a 200-point weighting and aligns with program competencies in critical thinking, effective communication, and Christian worldview knowledge.

2. Task Description

Select one of the following contemporary social issues:

1. Systemic poverty and wage inequality in urban contexts.

2. Mass incarceration and restorative justice.

3. Housing displacement and community land use.

4. Environmental degradation and creation care.

Write a 1,200–1,500-word essay with the following five sections, using the subheadings below. Each section should run at least one substantive paragraph.

Issue Framing. Define the issue and explain why it constitutes an ethical problem rather than merely a policy disagreement. Identify the parties affected and the competing goods at stake. Avoid advocacy language; the task is analysis, not campaigning.

Framework One. Select one Christian ethical framework from the course: Christian Realism (drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr), Liberation Theology, or Natural Law reasoning. Explain the framework’s central claims about sin, power, and moral obligation. Apply those claims to the issue you have chosen.

Framework Two. Select a second framework from the same list. Explain its central claims and apply them to the same issue. The two frameworks must be genuinely distinct in their starting points. Comparing Christian Realism with Natural Law is acceptable; comparing two variants of the same tradition is not.

Critical Comparison. Identify where the two frameworks converge on the issue and where they generate divergent prescriptions. Explain the theological or anthropological reason for the divergence. This section carries the heaviest analytic weight.

Proposed Response. Propose one concrete course of action for a local congregation or faith-based organisation. Ground the proposal in the framework you judge more persuasive, and acknowledge the strongest objection the other framework would raise against your proposal.

3. Requirements

• Cite at least four scholarly sources from the GCU library or peer-reviewed journals. Course textbooks and the Bible may be cited but do not count toward the four.

• Include a title page and a reference list in APA 7th edition format.

• Use the section subheadings exactly as given above. Do not substitute your own headings.

• Write in the third person. First-person reflection belongs in discussion posts, not this benchmark essay.

• Submit through LopesWrite. A similarity score above 20 percent, excluding references, will be reviewed before grading.

4. Marking Rubric

5. Sample Answer Excerpt

The most defensible starting point for a Christian ethics essay is the recognition that every framework carries an anthropology, and that anthropology determines what the framework can see. Christian Realism, following Niebuhr, treats human sinfulness as a structural problem rather than a private failing; the same pride that corrupts individual motives also corrupts institutions, which means that love alone cannot govern political life. Liberation Theology begins from a different place. It reads the gospel from the perspective of the poor and treats poverty not as misfortune but as a condition produced by systems that the church has too often blessed. Selina Stone argues that Christian ethics in the North Atlantic has been shaped by colonial assumptions that continue to distort its account of justice, and that decolonising the discipline requires attending to voices that the tradition has marginalised. These two frameworks do not disagree about the reality of sin. They disagree about where sin is most visible and which institutions bear the heaviest burden of repentance.

A student applying these frameworks to mass incarceration will notice a productive tension. Christian Realism might stress the legitimate role of the state in restraining harm, while insisting that no penal system is innocent of the will to power. Liberation Theology might stress the ways that incarceration patterns reflect racial and economic hierarchies that predate any individual offence. Comparing the two is not an exercise in choosing a winner; it is an exercise in seeing what each framework illuminates and what each obscures.

For students searching for a sample Christian ethics essay or a free HTH-330 benchmark paper example, the temptation is to treat the comparison section as a summary. The rubric rewards the opposite. A strong comparison section names the theological hinge on which the two frameworks diverge. In the case of Realism and Liberation Theology, that hinge is eschatology. Realism expects justice to remain approximate until the eschaton, which makes it cautious about utopian programmes. Liberation Theology reads the exodus and the resurrection as warrants for present-day liberation, which makes it impatient with caution. Neither reading is incoherent. The essay’s job is to show why the difference matters for the proposal you defend.

What the rubric actually rewards in the comparison section

Most students lose marks in the comparison section because they describe two frameworks side by side without asking what makes them different at the level of first principles. The better move is to identify one theological locus, such as anthropology, ecclesiology, or eschatology, and show how each framework’s position on that locus generates its practical prescriptions. A comparison organised around a single locus reads as analysis; a comparison organised around a list of similarities and differences reads as description. This is the distinction the rubric is built to detect.

Why the proposed response section trips up otherwise strong essays

A common pattern in student submissions is a proposal that could have been written without either framework. The rubric asks for a proposal that is derived from the analysis, not merely consistent with it. Test your proposal by asking whether a reader could predict it from your comparison section alone. If the answer is no, the proposal is attached to the essay rather than generated by it. The strongest proposals also name a realistic institutional actor, a congregation, a denominational body, a faith-based nonprofit, rather than gesturing at “the church” in the abstract. Specificity is not decoration; it is evidence that the ethical reasoning has reached the level of practice.

6. References

Stone, S. (2024). Can Christian ethics be saved? Colonialism, racial justice and the task of decolonising Christian theology. Studies in Christian Ethics, 37(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/09539468231213557

Hiebert, D. (2023). The recurring Christian debate about social justice: A critical theoretical overview. Sociology and Christianity. https://sociologyandchristianity.org

Woodworth, W. (2023). Economics, politics, and liberation theology: Bottom-up religion in solidarity with the poor. American Journal of Multidisciplinary Research & Development, 5(10).

Gautier, D. (2023). Die Ambivalenz des Realismus: Reinhold Niebuhrs theologische Ethik in rassismuskritischer Perspektive. Lexington Books.

Rabie-Boshoff, A. C. (2022). Justice of peace: Imago Dei and ecotheology. HTS Theological Studies, 78(2). https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i2.7793

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Mass Incarceration and Restorative Justice: A Christian Ethical Analysis

Course: HTH-330: Christian Ethics
Institution: Grand Canyon University
Assessment: Benchmark Written Essay
Word count: Approximately 1,350 words, excluding title page and references

Issue Framing

Mass incarceration describes a penal order in which imprisonment becomes a routine response to social disorder, poverty, addiction, and racialized policing rather than a limited measure reserved for serious harm. The ethical problem lies in the scale and distribution of punishment. At midyear 2024, local jails held 657,500 people, and 69 percent of them were unconvicted and awaiting court action, which means that pretrial detention had become a normal feature of the system rather than an exceptional safeguard (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2025). A society may disagree about sentencing policy, policing budgets, or bail reform; it faces a deeper moral question when confinement systematically falls on particular communities and when punishment precedes conviction.

The parties affected extend beyond incarcerated people. Victims of crime require acknowledgment, safety, and repair. Families lose income, caregiving, and stability when a parent or child enters custody. Employers, neighbours, schools, and congregations also absorb the consequences of disrupted relationships. Competing goods therefore stand in tension: public safety and accountability for harm on one side; human dignity, due process, family integrity, and the possibility of restoration on the other. An ethical account must hold these goods together rather than treat safety and mercy as opponents.

Racial disparity sharpens the moral concern. Black people were jailed at a rate of 566 per 100,000 residents in 2024, four times the rate for white people, although they represented 38 percent of the jail population rather than a proportional share of the general population (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2026). Such figures do not prove that every individual sentence is unjust. They do suggest that the system’s cumulative effects cannot be explained by individual choices alone. Mass incarceration therefore raises questions about structural sin, the use of state power, and the church’s obligation to victims, offenders, and communities alike.

Framework One

Christian Realism, associated with Reinhold Niebuhr, begins with a sober account of human sin. People seek security, status, and power; institutions amplify those impulses because collective power can outrun moral restraint. Niebuhr’s realism does not deny the demand of love. It argues that love cannot be imposed directly on political life without ignoring the persistence of self-interest, coercion, and conflict. Recent scholarship likewise presents Christian realism as a tradition that treats avarice and power-seeking as recurring features of social life, not temporary failures that better administration can erase (Boulton, 2018).

Applied to mass incarceration, Christian Realism affirms that the state has a legitimate responsibility to restrain violence and protect vulnerable people. Victims deserve protection, and some offenders must face consequences that prevent further harm. The framework resists sentimental claims that forgiveness alone can replace public order. At the same time, it warns that prisons are not morally neutral instruments. A penal institution can become an expression of the very pride and domination Christian Realism identifies as endemic to political authority.

This double judgement produces a cautious ethic. Christian Realism would support measures that reduce unnecessary detention, limit punitive excess, and preserve accountability, but it would resist abolitionist claims that assume conflict and harm can be managed without coercive institutions. Its central question is practical: which forms of restraint are necessary, and which have become self-serving exercises of power? A realistic response therefore distinguishes between punishment that protects the community and punishment that satisfies public anger, racial fear, or bureaucratic convenience.

Framework Two

Liberation theology starts from a different location: the experience of communities crushed by poverty, violence, and exclusion. It reads Scripture from the standpoint of those whom political and economic systems treat as disposable. Gutiérrez (2018) frames liberation theology as reflection on Christian faith in light of the suffering and hope of oppressed peoples, linking spiritual salvation to concrete liberation from unjust conditions. The framework therefore treats poverty, racial hierarchy, and incarceration not as isolated misfortunes but as signs of social arrangements that require transformation.

In relation to mass incarceration, liberation theology asks who benefits from a system that removes poor and racialized people from their communities. It observes that jails and prisons often manage problems produced by unemployment, housing instability, untreated addiction, and under-resourced schools. Aguilar Ramírez and de Beer (2020) argue that liberationist practical theology responds to collective woundedness in urban contexts by connecting theological reflection to the material conditions that shape people’s lives. Incarceration, on this account, is not merely a failure of individual character; it is part of a wider pattern of social abandonment.

The framework also gives particular weight to solidarity. Christians are called to stand with prisoners, victims, and families rather than to speak about them from a safe distance. Liberation theology would therefore question a punitive culture that treats offenders as permanent outsiders. It would also question religious language that offers comfort without confronting the institutions that produce suffering. Its moral demand is not simply kinder punishment but a community in which the poor, the accused, the victimised, and the formerly incarcerated participate in shaping a more just social order.

Critical Comparison

Christian Realism and liberation theology converge in their refusal to treat crime as a purely private matter. Both recognise that sin has social dimensions. Both reject a punitive culture that confuses vengeance with justice. Both also insist that the church cannot limit its concern to spiritual comfort while ignoring material harm. Their shared anthropology, marked by fallenness and the need for grace, prevents either framework from imagining that better laws alone will produce a fully just society.

Their divergence concerns the location and meaning of sin. Christian Realism locates sin in the universal human temptation to dominate, including among reformers and liberation movements. It therefore expects justice to remain approximate and institutional power to require restraint. Liberation theology locates sin more visibly in structures that protect the powerful and burden the poor. It reads the Exodus, the prophets, and the ministry of Jesus as a call to interrupt those structures now, rather than waiting for a distant eschatological resolution.

The theological hinge is eschatology joined to ecclesiology. For Christian Realism, the church lives between the cross and the final judgement; its political task is to restrain evil without pretending that history can be perfected. For liberation theology, the resurrection announces that God’s future breaks into the present through solidarity with the oppressed; the church becomes a sign of that future when it practises justice among those the world excludes. Stone (2024) argues that Christian ethics must also examine colonial and racial assumptions that have shaped whose suffering the tradition recognises. That critique strengthens liberation theology’s claim that incarceration cannot be assessed apart from racial history.

The practical difference follows from these commitments. Christian Realism is likely to support incremental decarceration, improved oversight, and restorative practices that preserve public order. Liberation theology is more likely to support community investment, abolition of unnecessary detention, and restorative processes that return power to affected communities. Neither position is naive. Realism risks accepting injustice as permanent; liberation theology risks underestimating the enduring reality of coercion and harm. A faithful ethic must learn from both warnings.

Proposed Response

A local congregation should establish a restorative justice and reentry partnership with a county jail, public defender’s office, victim-services organisation, and local employers. The programme would offer trained volunteer facilitators for victim-offender dialogue where both parties consent, mentoring for people awaiting trial, financial assistance for bail in low-risk cases, and employment support after release. Ross and Muro (2020) find that prison-based restorative justice can foster transformation beyond reduced reoffending by addressing relationships, responsibility, and community participation. Scholl (2024) similarly describes restorative justice as a humanistic approach that attends to the needs of victims, offenders, and communities rather than treating punishment as the sole response to harm.

The proposal follows liberation theology because it begins with people most damaged by the system and seeks to restore relationships rather than merely manage offenders. It also incorporates a realist safeguard: participation remains voluntary, trained professionals oversee serious cases, and the congregation does not replace courts, victim advocates, or public safety institutions. The church acts as a neighbour and advocate, not as an amateur substitute for due process.

The strongest Christian Realist objection is that such a programme may underestimate power and self-interest. Victims may feel pressured toward reconciliation; offenders may perform remorse to gain leniency; institutions may use restorative language to reduce costs without changing coercive practices. The objection deserves a direct answer. The congregation should adopt clear consent procedures, separate victim advocacy from offender mentoring, measure outcomes over several years, and refuse to describe the programme as a replacement for accountability. Restorative justice becomes ethically credible only when it protects the vulnerable while challenging the punitive habit of treating certain people as beyond restoration.

References

Aguilar Ramírez, J. D., & de Beer, S. (2020). A practical theology of liberation: Mimetic theory, liberation theology and practical theology. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 76(2), Article a6165. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v76i2.6165

Boulton, M. (2018). Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism, a theology of avarice. Constellations, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.29173/cons29344

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2025). Jails report series: 2024 preliminary data release. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jails-report-series-2024-preliminary-data-release/web-report

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2026). Jail inmates in 2024: Statistical tables. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2024-statistical-tables/web-report

Gutiérrez, G. (2018). Liberation theology. In W. T. Cavanaugh & P. Scott (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to political theology (2nd ed., Chapter 20). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119133759.ch20

Ross, K., & Muro, D. (2020). Possibilities of prison-based restorative justice: Transformation beyond recidivism. Contemporary Justice Review, 23(3), 291–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2020.1783258

Scholl, M. B. (2024). Restorative justice: A humanistic paradigm for addressing the needs of victims, offenders, and communities. The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 63(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/johc.12204

Stone, S. (2024). Can Christian ethics be saved? Colonialism, racial justice and the task of decolonising Christian theology. Studies in Christian Ethics, 37(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/09539468231213557