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Behaving in Public

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

Concern for integrity has been one of the abiding preoccupations of Christian ethics since World War II. It has also been one of its chief signs of vigor. In the 1950s many Roman Catholic moral theologians reacted against their Neo-Scholastic heritage, with its legalistic focus on obligation and its philosophical emphasis on the law of nature. Instead, they sought out a more genuinely evangelical, salvific vision of moral life—a vision that eventually found official expression in the Second Vatican Council's 1965 injunction that moral theology should take its cue from Scripture. Shortly after that, in Protestant circles Paul Ramsey inveighed against Joseph Fletcher's reduction of Christian ethics to a utilitarian concept of love, invoking instead the biblical concept of deontic covenant-faithfulness. Then, in the middle of the following decade, Stanley Hauerwas began his lifelong reaction against the preoccupation of ethics with the abstract analysis of quandaries, to the neglect of the right formation of the self in the light of a larger and specifically theological worldview. Hauerwas's reaction acquired the dimensions of a trend when it was reinforced in the 1980s and 1990s by a revival of Anglo-Saxon (and especially British) interest in the moral theology of Karl Barth, whose insistence on the integration of ethics into Christian dogmatics is unrivaled in its stringency.

Much of the rising concern to secure the Christian character of Christian ethics has been provoked and sustained by the postwar challenges posed to traditional norms in the West by liberal thinking on sexual and political matters, and by utilitarian thinking on medical ones. Because such thinking rapidly achieved the status of common sense, Christians have been pressed to develop an ethical language with which to express their doubts and their alternatives; and this has led them to revisit the theological roots and premodern sources of Christian ethics in search of critical distance and leverage. Oliver O'Donovan's magisterial construal of the history of biblical and medieval political thought is a prime example of this.

To talk about a concern for the integrity of Christian ethics, however, is to speak too vaguely. The concern is for theological integrity, for it is the theological dimension of Christian ethics that sets it most obviously apart from liberal and utilitarian common sense. Liberal and utilitarian ethics in their culturally dominant forms are studiously nonreligious, often assertively antireligious. Accordingly, a Christian ethic that would respond to them with something more than an echo must understand its own theological sources and how those sources bear on moral life.

And yet, even to speak of theological integrity does not quite capture the nature of the recent abiding concern of Christian ethics. There are different readings of how theology should bear on ethics. For example, some moral theologians appeal largely to the doctrine of creation to ground an affirmation of given moral reality or order — that is, an ethic of "natural law." Others make much play of the creaturely nature and fallen condition of human beings in order to ground a "realistic" ethic in which the virtue of prudence looms large. Still others invoke Jesus to ground a norm of self-sacrificial love. All of these can claim to integrate ethics into theology, but none of them meets the relevant concern. This is best described as a concern, not just for theological integrity, but for theological narrative integrity. The theological doctrines of Creation and the Fall are the easiest to correlate with secularist thinking: even unbelievers sometimes recognize the claims of a given moral reality, concede the limits of human control, or acknowledge the disturbing propensity of human beings toward wicked behavior. Likewise, an ethical reading of the significance of Jesus in terms of his teaching and exemplifying a certain kind of love is necessary: one does not need to be a believer to admit the claims of love, even in the form of self-sacrifice, and to see it manifested extraordinarily in Jesus of Nazareth. These are the easy parts. More difficult to reconcile with secularist thinking are those elements of the story that the Christian Bible and Christian orthodoxy tell about the world, which assert the saving power of God in it. These include a reading of Jesus not just as a moral teacher and exemplar but also as God incarnate, as well as the eschatological hope that God will save and fulfill the world at the end of history. Therefore, the concern for theological integrity that has animated so much Christian ethics in recent decades is a concern that ethics be governed by the whole story, including those christological and eschatological parts of it that attest the salvific presence of God in history and in its conclusion. The concern for integrity is certainly a concern that ethics be integrated into theology, but it is more than just that. It is also a concern that the theology into which ethics is integrated comprises a salvation narrative that is complete, and that it is therefore one in which faith in the saving activity of God in history is not sheepishly downplayed.

This element of the concern for the integrity of Christian ethics, then, represents an orthodox reaction against a liberal apologetic strategy that has long sought to appease religion's cultured despisers by sacrificing — or at least equivocating over — traditional Christian soteriology. Hauerwas's criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr provides us with a case in point. His complaint is that Niebuhr, overimpressed by the claims of "modern science" to have banished supernatural activity from a clockwork universe governed by mechanical laws, lost his theological nerve and dissolved theology into anthropology. Those expressions that have the form of statements about God's action in history are in fact "myths" expressive of eternal truths about human being and existence. Miracles understood as the violation of the laws of natural causation are no longer credible, Niebuhr tells us, and so we cannot "believe in the virgin birth, and we have difficulty with the physical resurrection of Christ." Instead, he says, we should regard the Resurrection as a symbol by which "the Christian faith hopes for an eternity which transfigures, but does not annul, the temporal process." Over against this Bultmannian reinterpretation, Hauerwas asserts an orthodox soteriology, which, in cleaving to a physical resurrection, not only expresses hope for transfiguration but puts the ground back under its feet. It also generates an ethic inspired by such hope to raise its eyes beyond Niebuhrian, sin-chastened prudence.

The dual concern that ethics be integrated with theology, and that this theology maintain its orthodox integrity, I thoroughly applaud. While the existentialist anthropologies of Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr have long gripped me, I have always been puzzled by their soteriological equivocation. It redounds to Niebuhr's credit that he persisted in clinging to hope for the transfiguration of the temporal world; but quite how he could do this, having mythologized the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I just do not see. A metaphorical resurrection is really not of much help to beings whose death is no metaphor. Still, today we have advantages that theologians working in the first seven decades of the twentieth century lacked. Nowadays, with the dissemination of post-Newtonian science and the resurgence of metaphysics and theism, talk about God and his extraordinary activity in the world of time and space is much easier to justify.

The concern for theological integrity plumbs yet further depths. Beyond the integration of Christian ethics into theology, and beyond the identification of that theology as structured by the whole biblical narrative, and thus including an orthodox, historical soteriology and eschatology—beyond that, Hauerwas contends for something yet more specific. One of his constant complaints against "natural law" ethics, be they Roman Catholic or Niebuhrian, is that their methodology has the result "that theological convictions about Jesus are not directly relevant to concrete ethical analysis." When Hauerwas says "Jesus," however, he does not mean just any Christology. Ethics whose practical norms are directly shaped by the doctrine of the Incarnation, for example, as in Anglican Christian socialism, would not satisfy him. "Incarnation," he writes, "is not an adequate summary of the story" (p. 57). It is too abstract, too little historical and particular. The same applies even to the principle of neighbor-love (p. 60). Instead, Hauerwas argues that to encapsulate the story of Jesus in a manner sufficiently historical, we have to specify neighbor-love in the light of the cross and speak, with ascending precision, in terms of service, peacemaking, humility, vulnerability, renunciation, dispossession, forgiving enemies, and nonviolence (pp. 76, 80, 81, 85, 87ff.).

Now, of course, a Christian ethic must allow the moral significance of Jesus to shape it directly—but only at the appropriate points. It seems to me, for example, that whereas Jesus' teaching and example has something explicit to say about how we should react when we suffer injustice—namely, with forgiveness—it does not bear so directly on how we should react when we suffer cancer. I also agree on the need to capture the moral significance of Jesus in terms that do justice to the historical particularity of his story and that are exegetically responsible. I have argued elsewhere that we should be less slapdash than Barth is in his lectures on the command of God the reconciler, where he tells us that Jesus was in favor of "human rights, human freedom, and human peace" and that he was against political absolutism, materialism, rigid ideologies, and disordered powers such as pleasure—not to mention technology, fashion, sport, and transportation. I agree, too, that part of the normative import of Jesus' story is the refusal of violence. Where I disagree with Hauerwas is in reading this refusal as implying an absolute rule, always and everywhere applicable. Yes, Jesus refused the violence that issues from nationalist idolatry; and yes, he enjoined the forgiveness of enemies. Not all violence is inspired by idolatrous nationalism, however, and forgiveness-as-compassion is compatible with the use of violent force (as I have argued elsewhere).

One final aspect of the concern for the integrity of Christian ethics remains to be mentioned, namely, that ethical reflection find practical expression, particularly in the corporate life of the Christian church. Christianity is not just another system of belief, Hauerwas tells us, and Christian ethics is not just an intellectual discipline, but "a form of reflection in service to a community." Surely this has to be true of any moral theological reflection that takes its own content at all seriously.

The concern that ethics be integrated with theology, that this theology maintain its biblical and orthodox integrity, that it therefore include a historical soteriology and eschatology as well as an anthropology, that the definitive story of Jesus be allowed a direct bearing on appropriate conduct, that this story be read so as to do justice to its historical particularity, and that ethical reflection be ordered toward shaping the life of the church—all of this is perfectly proper. If Christians believe, as they should, that there is a God, that he is a distinct reality and not just an anthropological symbol, that he wears the face of Jesus of Nazareth, that he suffered judicial murder while looking with compassion upon his murderers, that his is the power that raised the crucified Jesus bodily from the dead, and that hence there is eschatological hope for a perishing world—if Christians believe all this, then they should take care to work out their ethics in terms of their creed. They, along with everyone else, must construe the truth according to their best lights; and they must bear witness to it. Of course, they might be mistaken in what they see and assert. But if they are not mistaken, and if they fail to tell what they see, then they have failed in love for their neighbors and robbed them of the opportunity to apprehend a real benefit. Christians should tell it as they see it.

The question of how best to tell it, however—the question of how to communicate effectively what one believes to be true—is another, distinct question. The art of successful persuasion might advise Christians against telling the whole truth at once or at first. It might advise against referring to theological premises before they have made efforts to explain what they mean and why those premises matter. It might advise an oblique approach, avoiding the use of theological clichés that incline listeners to yawn rather than startle them into reflection. Such rhetorical tactics need not be a symptom of lack of nerve. On the contrary, they can be an expression of sensitivity to the otherness of others and of a readiness to place oneself in their shoes, in order to discern how best to walk them into one's own vision of things. Sequence matters: an assertion that makes no sense at the beginning of an argumentative journey can make good sense at the end. Rhetorical canniness need not be a sign of evasion. It can be an expression of love—both for the neighbor and for the truth that one would have the neighbor see.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Behaving in Public by Nigel Biggar Copyright © 2011 by Nigel Biggar. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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