The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety

The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety

by Timothy F. Sedgwick
The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety

The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety

by Timothy F. Sedgwick

eBook

$13.49  $17.99 Save 25% Current price is $13.49, Original price is $17.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

What makes someone a Christian?
 
The way of life we call Christian is lived in relationships to others. Christian faith, understood as practical piety, calls for a life opened to the world at large, concerned for the “stranger” as well as for the neighbor.
 
This exploration of morality by Timothy Sedgwick emphasizes that the Christian life is grounded in the experience and worship of God. His work develops Christian ethics as “sacramental ethics”—an ethic that has at its center a deepening encounter with God.
 
Written in an accessible style, this book provides teachers, pastors, counselors, and general readers with an ideal introduction to Christian ethics. It renews the topic by showing that faithful moral living is achieved through the daily practices of grace and godliness. First exploring the foundations of Christian ethics as seen by both Catholics and Protestants, and then developing a constructive view of morality as a way of life, Sedgwick shows that effective piety is built on spiritual disciplines that deepen our experience of God: prayer, worship, self examination, simplicity, and acts of hospitality.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781596272040
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Publication date: 11/01/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 176
Sales rank: 546,950
File size: 790 KB

About the Author

Timothy F. Sedgwick has served as professor of Christian ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary for seventeen years and taught earlier at Seabury Western Theological Seminary. He is the author of Sacramental Ethics and The Making of Ministry, and the coauthor of Preaching What We Practice. He has also written more than forty professional articles and essays. He earned a PhD from Vanderbilt University and has served the Episcopal Church on committees, councils, and boards. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1 Describing the Christian Life (from pages 1-24)

WHAT NEEDS to be done? What do I want to do? Who should I call? Who do I want to call? Our daily lives are given in the responses we make to such questions. We are most often aware of our responses in times of change. Change raises the question, "What is most important to us?" "What do we truly love and desire?"

My students often accuse me of asking "cosmic questions." The cosmic questions, however, are simply asking what is the pattern in the answers we give to the ordinary questions of our daily lives. How often I have heard such questions as these from my two daughters during their teenage years: What should I do today? What should I wear? Do I want to be by myself or go out with friends? Should I buy some new pants? Should I stay up and study some more or go to sleep now and study in the morning? What courses should I take? What am I going to do this summer? Our responses to such questions are much like sentences in the unfolding of a larger story. One sentence leads to the next. As we look back we discern a drama marked by different scenes, characters, and conflicts.

Deep guidance for the moral life cannot be gained by narrowly focusing on the crises of our daily lives. In asking what I should do this day, I can be helped by writing down a list of possibilities and then identifying what I like and dislike about each item. In focusing only on the decisions, however, I cannot understand what values and loves are most important to my life. Deep guidance can come only from an understanding of the stories that express the drama I see myself living. These range from my family stories to the stories given in the different cultures in which I live. In turn, I seek some story that both makes sense of my life's stories and expresses a larger meaning and purpose to which I can give myself. What makes understanding Christian faith and the moral life difficult are the different stories of Christian faith and life that have been offered.

Often I find our situation like living in a city where I encounter fragments of stories but do not know how these fit together. For example, in joining in Christian worship I sing songs that celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. These evoke another world, holy and full of mystery, given in silence and prayer. But making sense of prayer and this ancient language of sacrifice and blessing is something that involves deciphering. I hear in a sermon that I am baptized into a new life, and I feel something new in this community of worship. But I cannot make sense of what that means when I hear the radical demands in the gospel to sell everything and to come follow in Jesus' way. I sense something of the Christian story as a way of life, but I don't know how it fits with the other worlds of meaning and value in which I live —providing for children, making a living, caring for myself, giving to the community, being with others, and being with myself. Understanding the Christian moral life is then first of all a matter of understanding the story of Christian faith as making sense of our life in the world. The challenge of developing such an account is what I will call the problem of piety.

The word "piety" is often understood as devoutness, as religiousness, often with a pejorative sense of being narrow and judgmental. This is suggested by the phrase, "she is certainly a pious person." The word piety, however, has a far broader meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, piety originally referred to persons who habitually acted with "reverence and obedience to God" and "faithfulness in the duties owed to parents and relatives [and] superiors." The Anglican Jeremy Taylor described piety as a way of life more fully in his 1650 book on The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living. He structures the book itself in terms of sobriety, justice, and religion. Sobriety means "our deportment in our personal and private capacities, the fair treating of our bodies and spirits." Justice is a matter of "our duty to all relations to our neighbours." Religion refers to "the offices and direct religion and intercourse with God." Altogether, sobriety, justice, and religion formed a way of life Taylor described as Christian piety. Such piety, he said, was a matter of a life formed in order to "stand before God, acting and speaking, and thinking in His presence."

This understanding of piety as a way of life is what I mean by piety. I will often refer to such piety as practical piety in order to emphasize the practices that are central to piety. The question of an adequate account of the Christian life is then, "What is the character of Christian practical piety given the different pieties that we may encounter?" This challenge may be posed in terms of what I will call modern, postmodern, and traditional pieties.

Changing Understandings

I grew up for the most part in the sprawling suburbs of Chicago following World War II. My world was formed by the promises of education, science, and technology. Polio could be prevented. I went for the series of vaccinations and never again heard speak the fear that I might catch polio by swimming in the public pool. In 1957 the Soviets sent Sputnik into orbit, and the United States entered the space race. Altogether, I was part of a generation educated to conquer new frontiers.

I assumed that life was about successfully meeting challenges and solving problems. The meaning and end of life for me were given in seeking to form a world in which the basic needs of all people would be met, where everyone had an equal opportunity to share in the challenges and the chance to form a better life. This was what writers in Christian ethics spoke of as fellowship, or, to use their patriarchal language, "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." My hope was a form of idealism. I conceived an ideal state of affairs and envisioned life as moving towards that ideal. Christian faith gave expression to the ideals of love and justice. It held the promise that people could change, that there was a grace in acceptance and forgiveness. The church for me was that community of grace; it invited me to participate in a larger purpose that gave dignity and value to life.

My idealism was broken by the failure of the United States in the 1960s and '70s to stop the war in Vietnam and to address the sources of poverty and racial oppression in American society. Martin Luther King's "Poverty March" on Washington, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the demonstration and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the killing of student protesters at Kent State University following the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia: these made impossible the conviction that society would realize an ideal.

My own experience allowed me to hear other voices, from the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust to political refugees to those suffering a slow death from terminal illness. The voice is constantly that of Kurt in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness saying, "The horror, the horror." If there was any purpose that gave meaning to life, I came to believe that it had to be given in the very midst of human suffering and failure. This was for me most powerfully articulated by particular peoples: for example, African-Americans speaking of the "black experience," of spirituals and blues that celebrated life in the midst of violence and oppression. Above all, these voices have meant for me that if there was any meaning that could redeem life, it would have to be simply there, given, the ground and basis for what I did, a matter of grace. Instead of images of a new Jerusalem, of the coming of the kingdom of God, my prayers have become more focused by Job and by Jesus' suffering and death.

The change in my sense of life's meaning is more than my coming of age. Instead, my personal experiences reflect broader changes in the understandings of society and culture. The sense of value and meaning given in achieving a new and better society is what has been central to what is called a modern vision of things. Modern in this sense refers to what is called the legacy of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the developments of science and technology gave confidence that through reason, human ingenuity, and sheer effort, nature could be tamed and the world could be perfected so that all people could live together peaceably. In contrast, my sense of the broken and fragmentary character of life has been called a postmodern vision. Postmodern means after the modern, after the collapse of confidence in reason and progress. Both of these, modern and postmodern, stand in contrast to what may be called a traditional vision.

The traditional understanding of Christian faith and life was reflected in my grandparents. I think especially of my great-grandmother, who was born in 1882 in the newly settled land of southeastern Minnesota. Of all her grandchildren I was among the more inquisitive, always asking her to tell me what it was like before electricity and automobiles. She spoke matter-of-factly of changes and challenges. Homesteading, the final uprising of the Sioux, the move to the city, industrialization, economic depression, the World Wars, and before she died not only jet airplanes but landing on the moon — these were the background to her history. But what appears most basic from her earliest experience was the sense of need for order, discipline, and hard work. Each person was to do his or her duty at home and at work, in the community, and for society. Authority was taken for granted. Christian faith for her made sense of this ordered life in terms of the personal virtues of trust, honesty, industry, and integrity. These virtues were sustained by a sense of the divine as ordering and judging but also as merciful and forgiving. To say God was loving was to say that there was forgiveness for the failure to live up to the divine order.

This traditional piety did not create a narrow sense of the miserable sinner, but was rather a sober assessment of our lives. Sunday worship began with the confession of sin or, when Holy Eucharist was celebrated, with the reading of the Ten Commandments or at least a summary of the law and then the confession of sin. The centrality of the law in worship expressed a clear sense of order and, in turn, a sense of sin, of personal failing to live up to the demands of the law. In a world lacking basic security, people depended on mutual cooperation. Failure, for example, to keep one's word, to offer help as promised, could threaten the livelihood and even physical life of another person or of the community as a whole. The consequences of sin on the common life were visibly imagined, if not directly seen, and for this reason moral failure evoked sorrow and repentance —not narrowly a turning from evil deeds but more broadly a turning from a narrow self-concern. Repentance called forth God's mercy to uphold all people in a holy and righteous life, to grow continually in love and service. In and through Jesus Christ, God's mercy and blessing were assured. This traditional life of faith was not marked narrowly by duty. Instead, for the ordering of life and the means of grace that made it possible, there was a deep sense of gratitude that continued to turn individual lives outward beyond themselves. Duty and obligation were but the other side of love and care, which connected the individual to the larger human community.

These three pieties — traditional, modern, and postmodern — focus on different aspects of Christian faith and life and need not be seen as opposed to each other, as if one were right and another were wrong. The older, traditional piety of my grandmother focuses on a world defined by personal duties, so much so that from our own cultural vantage point they tend to be perceived as moralistic or rigid, focused excessively on individual relations and virtues. Christian faith arises in the experience of judgment regarding our failures. Such judgment, however, is not at its heart moralistic and individualistic. Rather, the judgment is a judgment of failure to participate in a larger order of things necessary for individuals to be a people. God's forgiveness is then an act that restores participation in that order. This is a justification by grace that, in turn, frees a person from self-absorbed individualism.

The modern piety of my young adulthood focused on the future. This emphasis arose in part because traditional piety seemed to have lost sight of the future and instead focused on duty, judgment, and mercy. To look at the future, though, was to see that reconciliation was a new creation, a community of love and justice. The larger sense of reconciliation — as corporate and incarnate, as becoming a people in this world —was restored. The human problem, however, was sometimes too narrowly thought of as human failure to live in God's kingdom, without attention to the actual dynamics that form human life together. The presence of God as a matter of judgment and a gift of grace was too easily lost from view.

Postmodern piety has turned attention back to the present. Born of the experience of God as the experience of sheer grace in the midst of suffering, the sense of the giftedness of life was restored. In turn, the human response to God was brought back into view as a matter of vulnerability and openness, of dependence and trust, of thanksgiving and compassion. The dynamics of turning to God, of conversion, were illumined. This focus on God's epiphany or manifestation in the midst of the breaking apart of life, however, can lose itself in the present. Apart from the roles, relations, and practices that lead to and from the encounter with God, the postmodern focus on experience can become individualistic and pluralistic, fragmentary and relativistic.

While these three pieties may share a common set of convictions, each of these pieties is distinct in its emphasis, because one is reacting to another. Traditional pieties, with their emphasis on duties and obligations, can lose touch with the larger ends of forming communities of love and justice. Modern pieties thus focus on ends and ideals but in doing so tend to de-emphasize duties and obligations. In turn, the idealism of such modern pieties may evoke a traditional reaction or else a postmodern turn back to the experience of grace in the life lived.

This description of three pieties is by no means an adequate account of the pieties that have formed different generations. It is not my intention to depict pieties simply as traditional, modern, and postmodern. My more limited purpose is to suggest the differences and tensions between different generations and different communities. If Christian ethics is to offer a broader understanding of Christian faith and life, the challenge of Christian ethics is to offer an account of Christian faith as a way of life, in spite of the differences among Christians. As a matter of faith, this means a Christian ethic must answer the question, "What is good, right, and holy?" As a matter of a way of life, a Christian ethic must answer a second and third question: "How do we come to know and how do we participate in this life?" Different pieties initially appear to give different answers to these questions. A Christian ethic must find some common answer.

A Life Given in Worship

At the most obvious level, what the different Christian pieties share in common is that each is founded or grounded in Jesus. As the word "Christ" or "Messiah" originally meant, for Christians Jesus is the one who brings in the kingdom of God, the one who brings reconciliation and redemption. As such, Jesus is the divine messenger and agent who brings his followers, his disciples, into a new life. However, understandings of Jesus are as different as the pieties themselves. To those in darkness Christ is the light. To the guilty Christ brings forgiveness. To those in bondage Christ gives freedom. To those divided Christ is the reconciler. To those oppressed Christ liberates. To the broken Christ brings peace. Jesus enlightens, forgives, gives freedom, brings justice. Regardless of the image, Jesus is the Christ because he effects new life. At the same time, however, as the different images suggest, this new life has been described in different ways. The four gospels themselves reflect such differences. Again, the challenge in developing an account of the Christian moral life is to describe the shape and central features of a life that Christians share in common.

The Ten Commandments offer an initial point of reference for seeing what is central to the Christian moral life. The Ten Commandments may serve as such a reference because they have been a central text for all Christians. They have provided the basic framework for Roman Catholic ethics — what Roman Catholics themselves call moral theology. In Protestant churches they have been equally important. In his catechisms, for example, Luther exhorted Christians to read the Ten Commandments daily. In Anglican churches the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed were displayed at the front of the church. For Anglicans, the Eucharist itself began with a reading of the entire Ten Commandments or the summary of the law.

The Ten Commandments indicate the first major feature of the Christian moral life. Moral commands are grounded religiously. As the summary of the law says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:30-31; Luke 10:27)

The Hebrew people understood and shared this understanding of the nature and purpose of law. Central to Judaism is Torah, a Hebrew word used to designate the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, what for Christians is the Old Testament. Central to Judaism is giving thanks and delight in the Torah, that is, in the law. But the word law is misleading, at least to the extent that it narrowly focuses on acts as some means to an end. Instead, Torah more broadly means a way of life detailed in law. This way of life itself arises from the law as people seek to deepen their relationship with God.

At the heart of the Torah is the story of the Exodus and the giving of the commandments to Moses as he leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the land of Canaan in order to form a new people. Exodus is preceded by Genesis, the telling of creation and the beginnings of the Hebrew people as wandering nomads, heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the other three books of the Torah (Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Exodus story is extended. At the heart of this story are the commandments and codes governing worship, daily rituals, and moral and civic matters. These laws, however, are inseparable from the larger story of the Hebrews' relationship with God. The Ten Commandments are preceded by God simply declaring, "I am the Lord your God." Relationship is given. And this relationship is the basis for life: "I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Deut. 5:6). The commands express how to acknowledge and honor this relationship.

The first of the Ten Commandments, "You shall have no other gods but me," designates that there is a power and purpose that gives life. In this sense there can only be one god. The worship of other gods separates us from what alone gives life. For the Israelites other gods were most often nature gods, local or otherwise, that were believed to have power to insure fertility, prosperity, and security. For us, these gods are less likely to be personalized but named impersonally as sex, money, and power.

The second, third, and fourth commandments detail what it is to abide in relationship with God. We are not to "make any graven images and worship them." We are not to "take the name of God in vain." And we are to "keep holy the Sabbath." The last six commandments specify what is correspondingly demanded in our relationships one to another. In this sense, the first four commandments are religious commands, and the last six commandments are moral commands. We are to honor our father and mother; murder no one; be faithful in marriage; and neither steal nor lie. These five commandments specify what is to be done in order for persons to be in communion with others by acknowledging and respecting them as persons. The Ten Commandments conclude with the command, "You shall not covet." This last command is distinct in being directed to the heart rather than against a particular act. The command is that we not seek to secure ourselves, either in immediate pleasures or in power over others. Life instead is given in a covenant in which we honor and care for others.

Christian communities inevitably move from these general commands to more particular prescriptions. As commands move to specific judgments about what should be done, they reflect particular understandings from the culture and in this sense are relative to the culture. To command persons "to honor mother and father" is to express the ends of respect and care. To command sons, however, to take on their father's profession unless released by the father's permission is relative to a particular social and familial arrangement. To command persons to "do no murder" is to express the absolute value of all people. To command persons either to remove or not to remove a dying person from life support systems, such as a respirator, is a particular judgment on the nature of the human life we value.

What is most important in understanding Christian faith and life, however, is not the development of specific moral demands and the attempt to resolve moral questions; rather, the moral law must be placed in the larger context of our relationship with God —the focus of the first four of the Ten Commandments. The fourth commandment is itself the hinge on which turns the development of the life of faith. The life of faith develops because in the worship of God relationship with God is established and deepened.

As God rested on the seventh day of creation, the Israelites are commanded to rest and not to work on the last day of the week, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. This includes remembering and celebrating the history of their relationship with God in the reading of Torah. In rest and worship they are reminded of and brought to experience the blessing of life, which is not something they achieve but something created before them and given as the gift of life itself. As for our Jewish forebears, so for Christians, Sabbath celebrates that life is given in God. The symbolism, though, is different. For Christians, the celebration of the risen Lord ends Sabbath observances in a strict sense of rest on the seventh day of the week. Instead, Sunday celebrates the fact that life is given each day in the act of offering one's life to God in thanksgiving. This is the life revealed in Jesus' life and teaching, fulfilled in the Last Supper, in his passion and death, and confirmed in the resurrection. Sunday is thus the day of resurrection, the beginning of new life, "the eighth day," the first day of new life celebrated as the first day of the week. This symbolism, centered on Sunday as the first day of the week, is largely unknown in contemporary Western culture but is reflected in the format of most calendars that begin the week with Sunday and not with Monday.

For both Jew and Christian the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath is a declaration of what is central to a holy life. In this fourth commandment the first three commandments are fulfilled: God is honored as all of life is placed in relationship to God. The life that is reconciled and redeemed is grounded in the nature of things and is not a matter of moral achievement. For this reason keeping the Sabbath is a matter of worship, again not as law but as the acknowledgment, enjoyment, and deepening of God's presence in our lives. In turn, worship is the hinge that connects the first three commandments — to love God —to the last six commandments about loving the neighbor.

The Ten Commandments themselves, however, do not constitute a Christian ethic. They state the basic claim of Christian faith and the moral life, that the Christian life is a moral life grounded religiously, given in worship. The last six commandments detail basic, moral obligations between persons. They do not, though, offer an account of how we come to know and do what is good and right. In turn, the first four commandments prohibit idolatry and call for keeping the Sabbath holy. But these commands do not indicate what is the nature of true worship and, more broadly, what is the nature of the relationship with God given in worship or how this grounds and enables the moral life. In short, the Ten Commandments command the love of God and the love of neighbor but do not develop the nature of these loves or how the two are related. The Christian tradition may be understood as the attempt to answer these questions.

For the first thousand years in the life of the church, understandings of the Ten Commandments were offered mainly through sermons, which were in large part biblical commentaries. Alongside preaching, other writings offered accounts of particular aspects of the Christian life. For example, in the fourth century Augustine wrote about the nature of love, about the nature of the good and the nature of evil as idolatry, about freedom and the knowledge of God, and about practical matters such as marriage, political obligation, and the use of force. Together, the broad-ranging explorations of Augustine contain the elements of a systematic account of the Christian life. In Western Christianity these elements were later developed in different ways by Roman Catholics and Protestants. A comparison of these two strains of Christian ethics, Roman Catholic and Protestant, provides the opportunity to identify what are common claims central to understanding Christian faith and the moral life.

Roman Catholic and Protestant Perspectives

In the thirteenth century all Catholics were required to make a confession of sin to a priest at least once a year. The confession of sin soon became a weekly obligation. The priest as confessor was responsible to declare God's forgiveness of sin and to offer pastoral support in the amendment and renewal of life. In order to provide moral judgment regarding sin and pastoral guidance in light of sin, the Roman Catholic Church developed moral theologies. Judgments and counsel often became mechanical, in part from the sheer number of confessions heard each week. The purpose of the confession, however, was to enable persons to name those actions and attitudes that separated them from God, from their neighbor, and from themselves. To name sin was to identify what was contrary to a person's deepest desire and true identity. The naming of sin was, therefore, pastoral, to bring people back into relationship with God and with their neighbor. Where there was sorrow for sin there was forgiveness, the release from guilt, and the reestablishment of the bonds that give life wholeness. As priest, the confessor thus declared to the penitent absolution, the forgiveness of sins. Again, while confessions often devolved into mechanical judgments of sin and absolution, the deeper purpose was reconciliation.

In order to offer direction to confessors, moral theologies developed an understanding of moral responsibility and sinful acts. Often written as a separate volume called general moral theology, the first focus of moral theology was on what has been called "moral agency." The concern was how persons come to know and do the good, how mind and will are perfected or corrupted in the actions that form their lives. A second volume of moral theology then focused on what a person should do. Often called special moral theology, this volume addressed specific cases and sought to offer practical moral judgments in order to determine sinful acts.

The general Roman Catholic account of the Christian moral life began with a description of the purpose or end of human life as being in relationship to God. In the end the person was to "see God." Called the beatific vision, this visual image drew together experience and purpose. The end of life was to live in the presence of God. Such a presence was to share in the mind of God. That is to say, to be in the presence of God is to be drawn into God's purpose or work. In terms of content, this end is called "blessedness." Happiness is not a matter of individual pleasure but a matter of sharing in what is ultimately good and purposeful. Persons can rest in this relationship because nothing is wanting. They are content and at peace, filled with a sense of glory, joy, praise, and thankfulness.

Following a discussion of the end of life, general moral theologies describe the human person in terms of virtues and vices. Virtues and vices are moral terms for describing the perfection or corruption of human powers and capacities. In matters of value, as in all matters of life, we become what we do. As such, virtues are good moral habits. Vices are bad moral habits. As developed in the ancient Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, the basic human virtues are called temperance, courage, practical wisdom, and justice. These virtues were called cardinal virtues, from the Latin cardo, meaning "hinge," because they were understood as pivotal to human fulfillment.

Perfecting of the body is a matter of temperance, of forming bodily pleasure in right proportion so that one seeks neither excessive consumption nor excessive denial. A healthy person eats and enjoys eating. He or she is neither anorexic nor obese. The perfection of the will was a matter of the development of courage or, from the Latin translation of the Greek word for courage, also called fortitude. A person of courage is steadfast, able to act in the face of danger without becoming foolish or reckless. With fortitude a nurse is able to serve those with highly contagious diseases, taking appropriate caution, masking and gloving. Perfection of mind is a matter of practical wisdom or, from the Latin translation of the Greek, prudence. Prudence is knowing when to do what, gained through practical experience. A farmer with prudence knows when to plant and when to wait until the ground can be plowed.

As this suggests, temperance, fortitude, and prudence complement one another. For example, the young lack the experience necessary to be wise and therefore are more often foolish and intemperate. In turn, a hangover from partying into the morning hours provides knowledge more vivid than admonitions to drink in moderation. The moral life in this sense involves a harmony, a balancing of activities in order to create wholeness to life. Justice is then the last of the cardinal virtues: to give each what is appropriately due. As such, justice is a political virtue focusing on what is needed to form a community of people. Again, these excellences were understood as habits. By doing what was good, a person came to experience the good in his or her heart. Once known, the good was done naturally, almost spontaneously.

At the heart of virtue is knowledge of the good. Roman Catholic moral theology understood that such knowledge was not given simply in "growing up," or in other terms, given naturally. Instead, to know the good ultimately was a matter of the experience of God. The experience of God, in turn, formed the self. Again, the powers or capacities of the self were perfected. This ultimate—or what was called super-natural perfection—comes from God. The specific virtues were, therefore, called the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love.

Faith, as a virtue, refers both to the knowledge of God and to the act of knowing God. The experience of God was a matter of both knowledge of God and trust in God. Hope refers to the will. Instead of anxiety and despair, cynicism or bitterness, the experience of God instills hope as an openness to the future and an expectation of new opportunities and joys. Finally, love as a theological virtue refers to the experience of God as a matter of being loved. As with faith and hope, love does not simply develop from a life lived. Instead, love first comes to the Christian. As Christians have expressed this, God first loves us.

These three theological virtues are integrally related. There is no knowledge of God except knowledge born in relationship to God. Faith arises from the experience of being loved; hence faith is a matter of love. In turn, love is not simply a feeling but is a relationship to what is ultimately good. Love is grounded in what is trustworthy. Love is a matter of faith. Hope also is grounded in faith and love, just as there is no faith and love apart from hope. Together, faith, hope, and love give expression to the experience of God as acting upon us and changing us. As such they are virtues. They perfect the human power and capacity to act. Because they first arise from the experience of God as acting upon us, they are called supernatural virtues. They do not arise from making sense of life in general or from human effort and achievement. They are not in this sense ideals to be achieved. Instead, they are gifts from God. They are not matters of human work but matters of divine grace. As such, they come from the concrete experience of God that forms Christians in relationship to God. Central to this formation is worship and specifically the Eucharist.

Protestant thinkers shared Roman Catholic understandings that the moral life was given in the grace of God. They also emphasized the centrality of worship. What they rejected was what they judged as a narrow focus on human action. While Roman Catholic accounts of Christian faith and the moral life began with an emphasis on grace, the focus of moral theology emphasized the criteria by which to assess the goodness of human action and make judgments regarding specific cases. Protestants saw in this focus—even more so in this practice than in the written texts themselves—an undue emphasis on individual guilt and on the religious acts that should be undertaken as a remedy to sin. As Martin Luther concluded from his experience as a Roman Catholic monk, this focus on sinful acts and religious duties led to a preoccupation with oneself instead of leading to the new world of grace revealed in Jesus Christ.

The problem Protestants confronted was the opposite of that confronted by Roman Catholics. Roman Catholic moral theology developed in order to provide understanding and guidance for confessors. The problem was in naming sins and determining what to do in order to live more fully in relationship with God. The problem for Protestants was hearing the gospel. If the good news of the gospel could be heard, then there would be faith, hope, and love. The moral life would follow.

In order to hear the gospel, Protestant thinkers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected the Roman Catholic framework of moral theology. The shape of the moral life was still expressed by the Ten Commandments. But what was most important was accepting that we are accepted and brought into relationship to God, apart from our own effort and work. In the language of Paul, the law is good, but a person is not justified by the law. The law details acts that should and should not be done. To live by the law, according to Paul, is to focus on our acts as means to an end, for example, to avoid punishment or loss or to gain favor or some other end. I tell the truth about what I am selling because if I don't and am caught I will be unable to do business. I tell the truth because it is good for business; it is more profitable. In contrast, to live by faith is to see the law as expressing the shape of the relations that are good.

The motivation to act morally comes not from the law but from the relationship that gives rise to the law in the first place. I tell the truth because I am bound to other persons; I care about them and would not want to deceive them. In this sense, law expresses and deepens the relationship that is already given. The law is like a kiss or an embrace. The kiss and the embrace express and deepen the love that is already present. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth expressed this understanding of law by saying "law is the form of the gospel." Faith as knowledge and relationship with God is the basis of the moral life. Faith fills the heart with the love and desire to abide in and deepen the relationship with God. In this sense the Christian moral life is a matter of grace. The heart of Christian faith and life is justification by grace through faith.

Again, Protestant thinkers shared with Roman Catholics the understanding that Christian faith was a matter of radical grace, a transformation of heart and mind in terms of personal knowledge of God which resulted in new dispositions. Instead of the language of virtue as habits of perfection, however, Protestants were more likely to speak of this new life in terms of the fruit of the Holy Spirit—as joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). The life itself was always a matter of freedom and love. The new life was freely done. Works flowed freely from the change effected by God's grace. These works were works of love, so much so that Luther could emphasize that faith is nothing but "faith active in love" (Gal. 5:6).

This Protestant understanding of human life and of divine grace is more narrowly theological than Roman Catholic understandings. Instead of focusing on the power and capacities of the human self, the focus of Christian ethics is on relationship with God. This is illustrated by the understanding of the Ten Commandments. For Protestants the primary purpose of the Ten Commandments and law in general was twofold: to describe the shape of the Christian life and to convict us of our inability to live that life on our own. For this reason, in The Large Catechism Luther implores all Christians to read and meditate on the Ten Commandments every day along with the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. The good designated in the Ten Commandments is never fully realized. The more that the Christian studies the law the more he or she realizes that what good there is comes from God. Only by the grace of God is given the love of God and neighbor.

For Protestants what is most important for the Christian moral life is preaching and teaching of law and gospel. Roman Catholic accounts of growth in faith and love were, at best, misplaced because they focused attention on what to do—the law—rather than on what has been done—the gospel. Despite these differences, Roman Catholic and Protestant understandings of the moral life share common convictions expressed in the Ten Commandments. As stated in the first commandment against idolatry, there is one God who is the power and meaning of all of life. To use more theological language, God is the creator and redeemer of all of life. This is what is meant in saying, "I believe in one God." The world and specifically the relationships that form our lives are of one piece. The goods of life are related, and express a unity and purpose beyond themselves. They are not randomly related. Christian faith is thus a moral life. All things are related and ordered in relationship to God. More specifically, love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. This requires the worship of God, the acknowledgment of God, and the "resting" in God. This is the point of the fourth commandment: to keep holy the Sabbath.

Monotheism is the central common conviction shared by Christians. This conviction is tied to two others. The problem of human life is human sinfulness, not defined narrowly as a matter of wrong acts, but as idolatry. Understood in the context of worship, idolatry is a matter of misplaced love. Christian faith is not first of all a matter of right belief but of right relationship. In this sense, Christians share the conviction that faith is covenantal, given in a relationship with God. This covenant, moreover, is understood as a matter of grace. Grace is a matter of being loved by God, of being forgiven, of being embraced and invited into a new life. Monotheism, sin as idolatry, faith as covenantal—these are three basic beliefs Christians share in common.

Two more specific convictions Christians also share in common. Christians are Christian because they have come into the covenant with God through Jesus Christ. Jesus is, in this sense, the revelation of God. In other words, as Christians experience Jesus, Jesus is the redeemer. The knowledge of Jesus is given in scripture and worship, what Christians refer to as Word and sacrament. In scripture the story of Jesus is told as the story of God's relationship to us. In worship that relationship is acknowledged and deepened.

These common convictions about Christian faith and the moral life have not always been apparent given the polemical relationship between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. From the sixteenth century onward, Roman Catholics and Protestants each sought to establish themselves as the religion of the individual nations of Europe and then with colonial expansion as the religion of new lands and peoples throughout the world. In this context, Roman Catholics and Protestants defined themselves over and against each other. This led to dogmatic understandings that hardened differences in terms of basic beliefs rather than fostering common understandings of Christian faith as a way of life given in response to God.

Faith came to be defined for Protestants in terms of justification by faith. Correspondingly, the absolute sovereignty of God was emphasized, so much so that predestination and double predestination were central beliefs for many Calvinists. In God's absolute power and wisdom, God knew from the beginning of time who was saved and who was damned. These beliefs were reinforced as they were conceived as the alternative to Roman Catholic "works" righteousness, in which God was reduced to a good that humans acquired. For Roman Catholics, such Protestant understandings of faith reflected an individualism centered in a subjective experience of faith. The truths of faith were denied, especially the Roman Catholic beliefs about the church and its authority. Among these defining beliefs of Roman Catholicism was the belief in the pope as head of the church, a belief that eventually was defined in terms of papal infallibility in teaching doctrine essential to faith. For Protestants, these beliefs were idolatrous in that they substituted belief in the church and the pope for faith in God.

The competition between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism fed polemics and hardened understandings of faith as a matter of mutually exclusive beliefs. Points of common identity were lost from view. Alternative frameworks that placed their different beliefs in some larger context were largely inconceivable. All of this changed only recently. While several events mark this change, none is greater than the Roman Catholic Vatican II Council that met from 1962 to 1965. Under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, this Council produced a broad range of documents that no longer defined Christian faith as Roman Catholic over and against Protestantism. Instead began the exploration of what is the faith that is shared among "all people of good will."

The present age is ecumenical. Beyond polemics Roman Catholics and Protestants have sought to understand what experiences have given rise to their differences. This has led to an explosion of historical studies examining, for example, scripture, the church, worship and liturgy, theology, and ethics. Thicker descriptions have been offered of the life of faith communities. Beliefs have been contextualized, placed in the broader context of these faith communities. Understandings of Christian faith and life have then been enlarged by the inclusion of different communities within Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—for example, communities of women beginning in the early church and continuing through contemporary feminist and womanist movements. Increasingly, other voices representing other communities of faith have also become part of this exploration of the nature of faith. For example, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and the Anabaptists have become important conversation partners, as well as contemporary voices ranging from new evangelical and charismatic communities to those based on liberation theologies.

From each of these communities of faith come theologies that seek to offer a richly detailed description of Christian faith and the moral life. The particularity of these theologies offers the promise of an account that will do more than identify common convictions of faith. A thick description holds the promise of providing a fuller understanding of the specific features of Christian faith as a way of life. The challenge and difficulty in developing such an account is in discerning and describing these features in such a way that they represent more than ritual notes or an ethnographic description of a particular people. Instead, if such an account is to reflect the broader claims of Christian faith, it must place a particular community and tradition in the larger context of human life in general as lived in the presence of God.

This introduction to the Christian moral life is broadly Christian and particularly Anglican. In this chapter I have sought to identify the central claims regarding the nature of Christian faith and the moral life as reflected in the Ten Commandments and in the central claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the next chapter I will turn from defining beliefs about the nature of Christian faith and life to a more detailed description of this life as lived, given my experience and understanding of faith as formed by the Anglican tradition. These first two chapters provide something of a bifocal vision in order to offer in the remaining chapters a thicker, more detailed account of Christian faith as a way of life grounded in the worship of God.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Describing the Christian Life
  2. Changing Understandings
    A Life Given in Worship
    Roman Catholic and Protestant Perspectives

  3. An Anglican Perspective
  4. Faith as a Way of Life
    The Theological Tradition
    Theology and Ethics

  5. Incarnate Love
  6. The Transformation of Sexuality
    Idolatry and Moralism
    The Covenant of Hospitality

  7. Love and Justice
  8. The Transformation of Poverty
    The Nature of Justice
    Law and Gospel

  9. The Practices of Faith
  10. Disciplines of Mind and Body
    Worship and the Disciplines of Faith
    Hospitality and Forgiveness

  11. The Call of God
  12. The Nature of Calling
    The Faith of Piety
    Ethics and the Christian Life

Appendix

Theology as Grounded in Piety
Narrative Theology and Practice
Understandings of God

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A book to enjoy and savour…as gentle and reverent depiction of Anglican moral theology and practice it is splendid.”
—Robin Gill, Universityof Kent at Canterbury, The Anglican Theological Review

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews