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October 4 - October 30, 2019
Christian Ethics, alias Moral Theology, as an intellectual discipline: distinct from moral thinking on the one hand and from moral teaching on the other, it offers to each of them an ordered reflection on their assumptions and procedures in the light of the Christian gospel.
there can be no framing this “today” — it remains no more than a pleasing philosophical abstraction — unless the “you,” “I,” or “we” in question have come to know ourselves as agents summoned by God to answer him in action, and in that knowledge have addressed the question of what we are to do as the supremely important question.
The “today” we face presupposes our agency and presupposes the world with its time. Ethics, in helping us face it, must point us to the knowledge of self and world that is actually given us, a knowledge through which the Spirit of God leads us to the action and life that are offered to us.
For Ethics is not itself practical reasoning or moral instruction, but a reflection upon both.
The essential note of an evangelical ethics will be missing if the freedom of the Gospel is not understood as life in the Spirit.
Life does not stop and enter a new register of restfulness with each practical achievement.
If an Ethics consists solely of reflective observations on the practice of moral thinking and teaching, it will lead into the stagnant marshes of nihilism. A “moral science” that begins and ends in an observer’s account will be a salt that has lost its savor, reducing practical thinking to a process. As P. T. Forsyth remarked, “a process has nothing moral in it.”3
The trouble lies with a moral science that offers observations on the terrain in place of a strategy. An observational science can do nothing to help us evaluate our ends;
Of itself Ethics knows nothing of an end of history, but it can point to a moral teaching that does.
an Ethics will speak of God’s action. It will speak of the groanings of creation and of the firstfruits in whom these groanings reach articulacy, but it will speak of them as moments in the purpose and work of God. Its discipline will be theological — not disregarding the contributions of philosophical analysis and phenomenological interpretation, but stepping beyond them to reach decisions which philosophy quite properly holds back from, decisions authorized and required by the Spirit who searches the deep things of God. In the second place we must add that it will speak of our human life and
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Ethics must speak, though reflectively, to each today, as each today is a fresh today, not a repetition of yesterday.
This means that Ethics has neither the first nor the last word in Theology. Those words belong to a doctrine that speaks of God’s purposes, acts, and ultimate ends. But because God’s purposes are alive and active, there is place for a word in between first and last words, a word that speaks reflectively on the Spirit’s aid to our present weakness,
Ethics, though reflective, is still a practical discipline, not a theoretical or speculative one.
No theologian should accept that a truth about God is a function of its utility, and yet truths are useful to creatures such as we, who need truth in order to live by it.
Ethics can claim no primacy in theology, then, but neither should it be willing to grant one, however much it may accept that it can speak only after Doctrine has spoken. The two branches of theology are mutually complementary: Doctrine completes Ethics by speaking of an end of God’s works; Ethics completes Doctrine by offering it an understanding of itself as a practice of praise. Yet the two still proceed in a certain independence. If the truths they attend to are the same, the rational order in which they place them is different. Ethics, watching reflectively over practical reason, orders
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The giving of life comes first not in the logic of divine being but in the order of divine works. The Spirit will preside over our loves and our hopes, our knowing, our enduring, and our final glorification, but it is from the giving of our life that all subsequent life must flow.
But death is the enemy of all our purposes, and the Spirit’s power in raising the dead is of a piece with our moral recovery, the restoration of imperiled or decayed agency. Ezekiel’s famous vision of the dry bones of a battlefield reconstituted by the Spirit into a mighty army is meant precisely as a description of moral renewal
Some who have been emancipated busy themselves thereafter oppressing others as they were once oppressed, as though freedom were no more than an exchange of roles. Some attempt to recover and re-live the pathos of emancipation over and over again, as though a step beyond it would be a step back into the old oppression. Emancipation is only the negative moment of freedom; it should open the way to fulfillment in self-government. Freedom is a way of living that builds on the event of emancipation, preserving its gains and realizing its promise.
It is the mark of true freedom that it can see the moral law from a new vantage-point as a witness to God’s purpose to order and bless the life of the human race. What previously looked like disconnected arbitrary norms come together to form a coherent “law of Christ,” the love of neighbor as self.
We may say that life in the Spirit is nothing less than a condition of moral maturity, in which the elements of moral experience — norms, good, demands of other people — are integrated into a competent discernment of God’s will, founded in an understanding of the order and destiny of the world.
Life in the Spirit is the life of a post-resurrection mankind, taken into the friendship of God, admitted to divine direction and guidance.
Self-naming is the excess of the fullness of divine being, the moment at which it affirms itself in giving itself.
Ethics begins with calling on God, the first human act. But that call is not the first event; God’s call to us to call on him precedes it, and only at his summons does our agency come to consciousness.
“Our Father” is the source of our being. We may take or leave the suggestion that the use of the intimate form “Abba” in prayer was an innovation on Jesus’ part.10 It scarcely matters, since the underlying Christological point is clear:11 his address to God as Father corresponded to his understanding of himself, and in summoning disciples to call God “Father,” he invited them to enter the position before God which he claimed for himself.
If in calling on the name we assert our agency as grounded on the gift of the name, in praying for it to be hallowed we pray for effective encounter with the Holy in all our living and acting. It is a prayer for the grace to live life as God has given us to live it, as a member of his family.
To know ourselves as agents is to know that we may win our souls or lose them; our lives shall at the last have been well lived or wasted.
Humanity may turn in either of two directions: it may remain self-enclosed within its own immanence, or it may be lifted up to share the life of God.
We may speak of life by the flesh in a more general or a more specific sense. Generally, first of all, it is coextensive with the category of sin. Sin is a form of evil, and evil, according to the theological tradition, has no being, but only failure of being.
Limited responsibility is still responsibility, and the more responsible as it takes responsibility for its limits:
The dogmatician’s sin is “original,” i.e., located in the origins of our agency, and since sin is where human beings necessarily start from, it is also “radical,” i.e., bound up with our membership of the human race — not, to be sure, in its creation and its destiny, but in its historical actuality.
Moral Theology, always speaking in second place and after the dogmatic theologian has finished, views sin not as a presupposition but as an open possibility. Sin lies ahead of us as well as behind us, not as a necessity but as a danger.
In proposing to speak of sin against faith, sin against love, and sin against hope, we simply follow the order implied in the trajectory of moral reason as attending to self, world, and time. Let us give each of the three a provisional name: we shall speak of the sins of doubt, of folly, and of anxiety.
Sin is always “against,” since it is constituted as refusal of some aspect of good reality,
Our sins do indeed evince contempt of God, but we are not capable of shaking our fist at God and defying him outright. We are capable only of forgetting him, and of forgetting what he has made and what he has done.
No treatise by Aquinas or Calvin can tell us what challenges confront us, no grand theory of all conceivable temptations can be formed.
All sin is against the self, since we cannot refuse God’s world in loveless folly, or God’s time in impatient anxiety, without self-harm, but there is a sin that harms the self not consequentially but primarily, when we deny what God is calling us to be.
There is a failure which consists essentially in refusing responsible agency, a failure to think morally, a passive-reactive immanence that is deaf to the call of God to act and live for him.
What is it, then, that we “doubt,” when we fail to ask in faith? That God exists, or that he rewards those who seek him (cf. Heb. 11:6)? Quite possibly, yet more fundamentally we doubt the selves God holds out to us and the God who offers us ourselves. As such, doubt is the radical sin, the sin that undermines agency at its root.
The condition God has set upon the agency he gives is that it should be exercised; one who fears to exercise it is called “base servant!” (Luke 19:22). We are mistaken if we limit this to a simple lack of confidence; it may very well be lazy over-confidence, which sees no need to put itself out by exertion.
True self-love responds to a summons addressed to self; bad self-love clings to a self that is self-conceived.
Doubt is a predatory relation to the world; its inner resources are over-leveraged and its power over-extended when it comes to any course of action involving obscurity or public rejection.
Shame is commonly distinguished, correctly enough, from fully reflective moral self-awareness; it is a feeling, not a cognition, and is largely instinctive. It can be inflamed by trivial occasions and unresponsive to great ones. Its reactions in any instance must be questioned, and may often be dismissed when we are told by someone we can trust, “That’s nothing to be ashamed of!” Shame is a bewildered attention to the self, astonished by the inner contradiction of failed agency. Where, it asks, is this boasted agency of mine? But its concern is with the appearance; it cannot submit a failure
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Shame is not a recovery of agency, merely a symptom of its loss, and can even stand in the way of recovery if its painfulness so dominates the practical horizon that any further view is blocked. If renewal is to be given us, we must look for it beyond shame. That was the highly personal discovery of Martin Luther, which so unsettled the medieval synthesis of penitence and restoration. A step that goes beyond shame will not flow from self-contempt, but only from the intervention of God to remake our lives, and that intervention is not proportioned to shame in recognition of some would-be
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Only in believing can we seriously say of ourselves, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things that we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us.”28 Not a report of events, but a self-acknowledgment, a valid form, we might say, of the notorious Cogito ergo sum. In that acknowledgment, drawn from us by the living presence of the God against whom we have sinned, there is a new discovery of the self.
Faith, as Christians have spoken of it, is a response to the summons of God, at once action and reaction, response and initiative, cognition and intention. It is, as we have put it, the root of action.1 To unpack that phrase, two observations suggest themselves: first, faith is already an act, the first act, and not merely the presupposition of an act; second, faith confers meaning on subsequent acts which spring from it, and they in turn give concrete expression to faith.
Thomas Aquinas defines faith as an “imperfect” cognition — imperfect, in that it needs to be carried through in hope and love if it is to come to rest in its object.
Faith is the moral center of the life, around which other acts cohere and find their larger justification.
Faith is the categorical act, the source of a life’s activity, and precisely as such may be known from the acts that spring from it.
Faith’s initiative springs from a prior initiative. The phrase “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26) is not correctly rendered as “obedience to the faith” (KJV), nor as “obedience that comes from faith” (NIV), nor even as “faith and obedience” (NEB, REB). It is precisely the act of faith itself, which is already obedience to the voice of God. There is something at stake in this grammatical nicety: the summons of God, to live and act before him, is not first a universal message of good news and then a particular command for each individual to obey. It is from the start a command as well as a
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To be true is precisely to be set before a horizon of responsibility stretching before and behind every consciousness we have of one another.
