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Edwards likewise acknowledges this sense of
rightness and well-being. If one believes that the world is well and beautifully made, he argues, then ethical action does not aim, first and foremost,
to transform the world fundamentally. Rather, we consent to God's ordering of the world. We might call this an ethic of consent. "True virtue most
essentially consists," he explains, "in benevolence to being in general" (Edwards 1991, 3). This doesn't mean that Christians adopt a fatalistic acceptance of whatever happens to occur. It means, instead, that virtue begins
with recognition of the underlying goodness of the whole and aims to
bring parts of that whole back into reconciliation with that goodness.
Christians sometimes become so busy trying to transform the world and
claim it for Christ that we forget that God's declaration in Genesis that "it
is good" means that the world is a hospitable place for us. It means that it
has already been claimed by Christ who, as the Word of God, formed the
creation and is still reforming it.
    For the nurse this ethic of consent functions at many levels. It means
that, as Margaret Mohrmann points out, the human body is reliable and
can be trusted. The body needs restoration at times and even occasionally
extreme interventions such as surgery. At the same time, however, we
should not treat its most basic functions as if they were pathological or
fundamentally flawed. Bodies work, much of the time, the way they are
supposed to work, and health care should work with them. An overemphasis on the power of science and new technologies can lead us to believe that
we can improve on nature in a number of ways, from advocating caesarean
sections even when a pregnancy is progressing normally to putting small
children on diets because their bodies are chubby. As we know in retrospect, these are problematic interventions, generated by misunderstand ings of the nature of a healthy body. But they also represent a failure of
trust in the goodness of our bodies, in the goodness of creation, and ultimately in the goodness of its Creator (Mohrmann 1995, i6).

    The ethic of consent also means that, insofar as human institutions
participate in the goodness of creation, Christian nurses need not
assume that they will be in conflict
with the institutions in which they
work, even though those institutions may not be explicitly Christian. All creatures experience, at
some level, this sense of rightness
and well-being. There is no one, in
other words, who utterly lacks a
"sense of the divine," and because
of this we should expect that
Christians will find large areas of
common interest with those of
other faith traditions (and even with those who hold to no faith at all!).
Given that these common interests are part of our created nature, we
should also expect them to be evident in our organizational structures.
When institutions are structured to promote physical and psychological
health, when they operate in ways that protect the well-being and dignity
of the clients who use their facilities, then the Christian nurse can participate in them and affirm their goals. These institutions can surely embody
our sinfulness (think, for example, of how racism and sexism take on institutional lives of their own), but they also manifest the fundamental goodness of creation.
    The gratitude, enjoyment, rightness, and well-being that are rooted in
the first part of the nurse's double consciousness mean that we are called
to respond to those who evoke gratitude and enjoyment as those who belong to God. Gustafson characterizes the task of theological ethics as one
of seeking to "relate to all things in a manner appropriate to their relations
to God" (Gustafson 1981, 158). If our lives are to be lived for the glory of
God, are to be fitted to the divine purposes, then we must relate to those
around us in ways that acknowledge their role as mediators of the divine.
Our basic posture toward God,