The foundation is gone.
The Bible was never a simple moral code. It is not a timeless code of law, but a polyphonic archive of religious experiences, historical struggles, cultural influences, and moral contradictions. This is precisely where its strength - and its limitation - lie.
Ecclesia Nova II asks whether the Bible, revelation, natural law, and the magisterium can still serve as the ultimate authorities for moral justification today. The volume examines the normative foundations of church moral theology through its most challenging test cases: violence in the name of God, slavery, gender hierarchy, apocalyptic worldviews, and the church's control over the body, guilt, and sexuality.
The result is a turning point: Where biblical texts legitimize violence, condone slavery, subordinate women, or shame people through sacred regimes of guilt, one can no longer simply say, "God wills it so." Moral validity arises not from religious authority, but from public justifiability, human dignity, justice, freedom, protection from violence, and real responsibility.
Artificial intelligence reinforces this finding. It does not replace theology or ethics, but it makes texts comparable, reveals contradictions, and allows gaps in reasoning to be examined. In the age of AI, church morality can no longer be protected by sacred assertions. It must demonstrate that it holds up to scrutiny.
This volume is not a rejection of religion. It is a rejection of unchecked ultimate moral authority. A corrected Bible remains a testimony, an archive, a language, and an inspiration. But Holy Scripture no longer reigns unchallenged - and not just since the advent of AI.
Following this loss, the real question arises: How can theology move forward if God was never the guarantor of the morality that people have attributed to him?