For the Life of the World : Appreciation and Critique

There are many things in For the Life of the World (FLOW) that deserve mention, gratitude, and praise from a Protestant theological ethicist, many things that the Protestant churches might learn, emulate, and modify in light of their own commitments about salvation, sacrament, and union with God. I will mention three.

First, FLOW does not cut up the Christian life into parts, with belief over here, worship over there, and action in the world following somewhere in the rear. By accenting faith that justifies, sin that corrupts every action, and salvation that cannot be merited—not by right worship, not by obedience to the law—Protestants have been tempted to cut things up in precisely this way. If faith alone is what matters, then the principal task of theology is to identify the right beliefs, spell out their warrants, and put them in right order. The principal work of the church is to proclaim right belief and protect believers from falsehoods. With that done we can then make explicit the consequences of those commitments, their material implications. We can determine what they require of us in terms of worship and action, activities that bear witness to what we believe. (A whole theological curriculum follows from this way of carving things up, one that prioritizes theology's epistemological inquiries and that makes practical theology and ethics somewhat secondary.)

No doubt, it is crucially important to identify the content of the faith we confess and make explicit what we are required to do and say given that confession. Of course, understanding what a life of Christian discipleship requires quite often follows from a prior grasp of the teachings of Christ, above all “his indignation at injustice” and “his love for the oppressed,” teachings which “confirm, while making even more urgent, the largest and most universal moral demands made by the Law and the Prophets of Israel” (6). ² FLOW understands this crucial point. We find it at work throughout the document. But FLOW also refuses to think this order of operations—clarify belief, then specify action—comes first or excludes other orders. Instead, it contends that our actions follow from our loves and that quite often our loves exceed the reach of our clarified beliefs. They can regard persons we barely understand and objects that remain mysterious.

For human beings, made in the image and likeness of a God who is Love, this is necessarily so. Bearing this image, participating in this Love, we are made for communion with God in Christ and called into loving communion with our neighbors and the whole creation (2). This love puts us in motion. It elicits our prayers. It generates our actions. Its content is made explicit in “the first and great commandment of the Law” to love God, neighbor, and self (2). And yet because it has its origin and ground in the “immensity and particularity of God's love for each of us, and for all of creation,” it “surpasses human understanding.” “Imparted to us with an absolute generosity,” we do not always grasp where it will lead us or what obedience to its law will require (3). Quite often the best we can do is reproduce that generosity—extending that love to our neighbors, trusting its promise of future communion, and only then asking what this love requires us to believe about the Christian life, about God and neighbor and moral demand.

Love first, only then specify belief. I don't want to make too much of this order of operations, but I do want to suggest that the Protestant churches (and certainly Protestant ethicists!) would benefit from emulating what we find in FLOW; namely, its willingness to regard the Christian life as a whole, with faith's belief requiring certain actions, and love's actions entailing certain beliefs. Why does this matter? Well, consider, for example, the disregard for human rights that has become increasingly common in recent Protestant ethics. The argument goes like this: When we say that every human being has a right to certain life-goods—FLOW mentions human dignity, general liberty, social stability, immunity from dominating and degrading relationships, free universal health care, a living wage, among others (61–67)—we are saying, in effect, that this entitlement gives us standing in each and every social or political relationship we find ourselves in. We are now rights-bearers, and it is precisely this standing, this social status, that all others are required to recognize, that entitles us to certain kinds of treatment, and that authorizes us to lay claim to that treatment when we are denied it.

But there is a problem with making the recognition of subjective rights an important aspect of a Christian life, at least according to the critics. ³ By accenting the rights that each of us has, it offers a picture of the human person that is too individualistic, too atomizing. With its accent on negative liberty, on freedom from constraint by law or norm, it discounts the social sources of our identity, the various social bonds and mutual obligations that are ordinary features of our created, embodied life. So too, by authorizing persons to lay claim to certain life goods, this accent on subjective rights is too self-regarding, too willing to accept a picture of human life that is agonistic, that pits one person or group against another, whereby some extract what's theirs by right and others succumb to power. What's more, by requiring the recognition of the subjective rights that all human beings are thought to have, this portrait of the Christian life ignores the Apostle Paul's warning against conformity to the world, to its violence and hypocrisy. Why? Because, say the critics, the language of subjective rights is largely a modern affair. It accompanied the emergence of nation-states and capitalist markets, and appeal to those rights has provided moral cover for their impulse to violence, their disregard for local custom and settled norm. Finally, there is the problem of grounding human rights, of identifying what accounts for them. Since this problem has stymied moral philosophers, why should we think that there are such rights—or so the critics conclude? ⁴

These are important criticisms. Christians who adopt the language of human rights will have to address them. FLOW does not take up this task, but its “love first” order of operations does offer a motive for doing so. We have been made in the image and likeness of a God who is Love, made for loving communion with the Holy Trinity, and called to share in that communion with our neighbors. The teachings of Jesus tell us much about how our neighbors are to be loved, but much remains uncertain. Neighbors in need confront us—oppressed by governments and customs, enslaved by employers, fathers, and other masters, degraded by sickness and poverty, subject to arbitrary policing, denied asylum as migrants and refugees, and so on. We are called to respond with love, but what does love require?

In reply, FLOW commends the language of human rights. Our neighbors are loved as their rights are acknowledged, their basic dignity recognized, and their immunity from degrading treatment and arbitrary power guaranteed. They are loved when we concede their authority to seek the treatment they deserve, not by flattery or begging, but by making a claim to what is theirs by right. “When seeking to promote justice and peace among peoples and nations, and when seeking to defend the weak against the powerful, the oppressed against their oppressors, and the indigent against those who seek to exploit them,” the language of human rights is “indispensable” (61–62). No doubt, this recommendation needs to be hedged in by qualifications. The language of human rights does not identify all that love requires (61). It is not a language “adequate to all that God intends for his creatures” (12). Nor should we confuse the negative liberty that it seeks to protect with true human freedom, the freedom that only God's grace can offer, the freedom “to be joined to that for which one's nature was originally framed, and for which, in the depths of one's soul, one ceaselessly longs (62). Still, FLOW does not back away from love's inference. If we are to love as God commands, not in general, but in these modern times, in our circumstances, then we must confess that our neighbors have a small collection of basic rights and inviolable immunities that must be recognized, protected, and defended.

Second, the Christian life of “service through prayer and action” (1) that FLOW articulates and defends includes positions on issues of the day that are rarely brought together, rarely united in a single moral and political stance. It mixes together prophetic witness and progressive (often radical) social criticism with traditional piety and conservative (if this is the right word) views on various topics. The Protestant churches should take note.

The reason for this unusual mixing is simple enough to make out: the positions taken are all deliverances of a prior theological vision of human beings created in God's image and likeness and made for loving communion with “the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (2). It is by virtue of this communion that we are called to loving communion with every neighbor and all of creation. From this basic commitment, from the reality of this gracious love, FLOW builds a case for a social ethos that unites tradition and critique.

We live in polarized times. Our lives, reading lists, and conversation partners are increasingly sorted and segregated. We take refuge among the like-minded. We reside in cultural and political bubbles. We revel in groupthink. Our church communities are caught up in these dynamics. We worship within cloistered postcodes. Too often, our social witness floats free of the self-emptying demands of the Gospel and conforms instead to the homogenizing forces of the market and the idolatrous demands of the nation-state.

For the most part, FLOW refuses to march in conformity to these times. Instead, it commends a Christian life that is “fundamentally doxological” in its praise of God for every blessing and “essentially Eucharistic” in its willingness to suffer material loss for the sake of communion with God and neighbor. Concretely this means that it denounces racial injustice (11), sex trafficking and wage slavery (36), the logic of consumerism (17–18), and all forms of environmental degradation, especially those that disproportionately effect the poor and the racially and economically marginalized (41). It supports flexible immigration laws and permeable borders; the free flow of labor and the freedom to organize (37). It endorses public policies that provide for a robust social safety net (38), one that includes equal and free access to decent medical care, an honest wage, and freedom from hunger (40). It denounces “regressive policies of taxation,” “insufficient regulation of fair wages” (35), and “unscrupulous and rapacious creditors” and “credit institutions” (39). It chastises governments that spend too much on the military and too little on the poor (38). It contends that Christians must live in “radical solidarity” (33) with the “dispossessed and desperate” (32). Throughout, it prophesies deliverance from institutions and practices that dominate and marginalize some while benefiting others.

No one would call this a traditional or conservative moral and political vision. Yet, FLOW is relatively conservative on marriage and gender norms, on abortion (20–25), and on suicide and euthanasia (31). Here, I simply want to spotlight the unusual mixing of traditional piety and radical social criticism and to recommend this possibility to the Protestant churches. The mainline churches have too often been willing to qualify, sometimes sacrifice, traditional piety for the sake of radical critique. FLOW suggests a different approach, one that will likely yield an unusual collection of moral and political positions, one that crosses boundaries on our culture war landscape (liberal, conservative, progressive). Regardless of what one thinks of the moral and political positions FLOW defends, its approach deserves emulation.

Third, and related, FLOW understands that taking a stand for something, bearing witness to it, testifying to its truth, beauty, or sacred value, typically requires standing against other things. Sometimes this is done with action, with bodies in motion that stand against other bodies. Sometimes this is done with words offered as deeds, as criticism of truth denied, beauty sullied, or sacred value desecrated.

Bearing witness/standing for—standing against/offering criticism. These are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of a Christian life. Christian claims and commitments, Christian rituals and practices, Christian norms and ideals have always required both aspects, and yet holding both together has never been easy. Across Christian history, the temptation has always been to resolve the difficulty by taking one stance and refusing the other. In some times and places, Christians have stood for and in support of a dominant cultural and political order. They have offered their claims and commitments as justifications for that order, their prayers and sacrifices as civic rites that index membership and identity. In other times and places, they have stood wholly against the dominant order, which they regard as corrupt, idolatrous, unholy. They have led lives set apart. This has enabled them bear witness to a different order, to Christ's coming Kingdom, to its mercy and justice, but it has also made it difficult for them to find common cause with those beyond the walls of the church.

For the most part, Protestants in America have been tempted by the first option, and only recently by the second. ⁵ FLOW encourages all Christians to refuse both. No doubt, “the Church remains in some sense always an alien presence within any human order, and recognizes God's judgment falls upon all human political power in some measure” (9). Certainly, “it is absolutely forbidden for Christians to make an idol of cultural, ethnic, or national identity.” There can be no such thing as a “Christian nation,” no tolerance for “belligerent forms of nationalism and blasphemous philosophies of race” (11). Even so, “Christians may and often must participate in the political life of the societies in which they live, but must do so always in service to the justice and mercy of God's Kingdom” (9). Nor should they regard “all forms of human government as equivalent.” All fall short of the Kingdom of God, but some are better than others, and surely “it would be irrational and uncharitable of Christians not to feel a genuine gratitude for the special democratic genius of the modern age” (10). Still, even democratic regimes offer enticements to avoid. In the heat of democratic debate, we can be tempted to slander, revile, and demonize (12). So too, in a liberal democratic order, we can be tempted to retreat to the private sphere and endorse the ideologies that sustain it—“pure individualism, free market absolutism, and a spiritually corrosive consumerism” (14).

Even so, FLOW does not recommend retreat behind the walls of the church, where Christians only stand against, never with or for the liberal, democratic order. While the church and its worship “constitute the true Christian polity,” an “icon of God's Kingdom” that critiques all temporal political regimes (8), nothing prevents the church from “direct and robust cooperation with the political and civil authorities and organs of the state in advancing the common good and pursuing works of charity.” Indeed, according to FLOW, it is precisely their example, their steadfast commitment to the common good, that Christians can offer their fellow citizens in this age of democratic decay, for that commitment is “the true essence of a democratic political order” (14).

There is much more that could be said in praise of FLOW for its wisdom and in gratitude for its example, for what it can teach the Protestant churches about serving God in these times. But for now, these three remarks will have to do. What more needs to be said? Just this: The appeal to moral tragedy that FLOW makes in its discussion of the intentional use of violence should not be endorsed. As I said, this appeal has tempted Christians in the modern era, and Protestant Christians, certainly Protestant theological ethicists, have too often succumbed.

The consequences for Christian witness have been entirely unwelcome, or so I will suggest. And note, I can only make suggestions. The topics in basic ethical theory that need to be addressed in order to bring the idea of moral tragedy into focus are too many and vexing to be handled here. My aims are more modest: to spell out what this idea amounts to, to consider why it has been so attractive to contemporary Christians as they consider resorting to violence in defense of those threatened with violence, and to say why we should resist the idea nevertheless.

By a moral tragedy, I do not refer to one of the many horrific things done and endured by human beings in this vale of tears east of Eden. I am not using the term as the newspapers do (“Tragedy struck this evening as a fire swept through a house at the corner of Walnut and Pine”). Rather, I refer to a circumstance of choice in which it is thought that some greater good cannot be secured—topple a tyrant, resist a genocidal thug, liberate the enslaved, protect the innocent from impending slaughter, and so on—without resorting to an injustice. The resort might be justified. It might be required by the circumstances, by the need to secure the greater good. Yet neither justification nor necessity diminish the injustice done or the moral sacrifice in the doing. Tragically, in these circumstances, one must do what is wrong in order to bring about the good.

Whether there are in fact such circumstances, regardless of what some might think, is a matter of dispute among ethical theorists. Cards on the table: I doubt that there are. Defending this doubt would require a long and twisting detour through some of the densest theoretical thickets. For Christians in the modern period, however, the thought that there can be circumstances of this kind, has two advantages. First, it enables them to regard Matthew 5—its command to love enemies and its proscription against resisting evil—as a critique of all violence, and to hold that critique together with Luke 4, with a call to discipleship that requires releasing captives and setting free the oppressed. It enables FLOW to condemn the resort to violence without prohibiting that resort absolutely. “The Orthodox Church cannot, naturally, approve of violence, either as an end in itself or even as a means for achieving some other end” (44). It “unequivocally” condemns violence of any kind (45). At the same time, it

By restricting justified violence to those tragic circumstances in which important goods cannot be had or horrific evils avoided without forsaking the right and seeking forgiveness, the church can have it both ways. It can endorse a prima facie duty to respond to injustice nonviolently, while simultaneously conceding that the demands of neighbor love may require us to set aside duty, at least temporarily. In circumstances of grave necessity, it can allow actions that cannot be condoned but must be done in order to prevent a great and grave injustice. It can insist that, in circumstances like these, we find ourselves bound by the demands of neighbor love to do what we know to be wrong.

There is a second advantage that this view of tragic violence affords contemporary Christians. It enables them to live comfortably in a social and political ethos that is modern, liberal, and democratic. For the sake of argument, let's say that this ethos has two aspects: liberty regarded as freedom from constraint built on the recognition that there are many things that human beings might value, a plurality of goods that we might love, desire, and possibly revere; and restraint on that liberty built on the recognition that some goods are more important or basic than others, and that some actions necessarily make it impossible to secure one or more of these basic goods.

In the first aspect of this ethos, liberty from constraint is the upshot of the plurality of human goods and cares, human loves and lives. All of us should be free to organize our affairs as we please, in pursuit of the goods that matter to us. ⁶ All of us have a small collection of basic rights that protect our pursuit of some of the most important goods. ⁷ In the second aspect, a collection of duties is the upshot of this liberty. All of us have a small collection of duties that prohibit us from acting in ways that violate these rights, that prevent the unfettered pursuit of these important goods. My point is that Christians who share this ethos, regardless of their other commitments, will find the tragic view of justified violence familiar, easy to endorse. Let me explain.

Begin with the first aspect, with its key feature, value pluralism. There are many good things that we can love, desire, and possibly revere, and each kind of thing is fundamentally different from every other kind. Each is good, no doubt, and yet each instantiates a unique kind of goodness. This means that circumstances can arise in which the things we value will conflict, where one good cannot be had without forsaking the other. Consider an ordinary example: the competing goods of office and home. A parent might value time with their children, but they might also care about their job. Every hour spent at home leaves less time for the satisfactions of work, and vice versa. We tend to resolve these conflicts by ranking one value over the other, by accepting trade-offs and making sacrifices. All of this is familiar, and that's the point! For those of us who abide in a liberal, democratic ethos, this is the life we lead, with its accent on the diversity of goods, the freedom to choose, and the need to sacrifice some goods for the sake of others. This life, this ethos, prepares Christians to regard the resort to violence as a tragic necessity.

There is the good instantiated in a life lived nonviolently and in accord with the demands of a widely shared interpretation of Jesus's words in Matthew 5. There is the good that comes as a neighbor is rescued from a grave injustice. Since it is quite often the case that this latter good cannot be had without resorting to violence, perhaps even deadly violence, Christians in these circumstances will be faced with a familiar dilemma. They will have to rank competing goods, accept certain trade-offs, and make certain sacrifices. If they choose violence, their resort will be tragic, and not simply because they will trade one important good for another, but (crucially) because they will find themselves compelled do an injustice.

Here the second aspect of the liberal and democratic political order comes into play. If violence of any kind must be unequivocally condemned (45), then a life free of violence must be a great good that is protected by a settled right that all of us have, the right to lead a life free of violent treatment. Paired with this right, there must be an equivalent obligation, equally settled and shared: the duty to treat others nonviolently. But this means that every resort to violence, even violence used to protect the innocent from tyranny and oppression, does an injustice. It violates a right. It forsakes an obligation. The violation might be justified by its apparent necessity, by the greater good it helps secure, but it can never be just. The right now violated remains in force. The obligation now forsaken continues to bind. The fallout is tragic, a lamentable but unavoidable injustice.

I said that Christians of all kinds should resist the temptation to endorse this account of tragic violence. I am now in a position to explain why. If the church insists that the resort to violence is always wrong but sometimes justified, if it must acknowledge the “inescapably tragic reality” of making that resort in order protect a greater good or avoid a horrific evil (46), then it has adopted a moral stance that is incompatible with the biblical prohibition against doing injustice (Exod 20), a prohibition that remains in force even after the promulgation of the New Law of Grace (Matt 5:17–20) and that cannot be set aside for the sake of some good that may come (Rom 3:8). More than that, this moral stance may tempt the church to accept the weakening of other prohibitions, to regard other grave wrongs as justified by the goods they may help secure in dire circumstances. Reasons for resisting this temptation will be hard to muster once the tragic view of violence has been endorsed. ⁸

As I noted, the tragic view of violence has advantages that Christians may have trouble forsaking, but perhaps reasons can be found. At the very least, those reasons would have to include: a different interpretation of Matthew 5, one that identifies a prohibition against revenge, not against every resort to violence; a theological defense of the Bible's absolute prohibition against injustice, one that accents human obedience to divine law as a response to God's promise of redemption; an account of the unintended harms that will at times accrue as that prohibition is honored, one that identifies norms of responsibility and excuse; an account of subjective rights and duties that grounds them in valuable roles and relationships, not in the goods they help secure; and a different understanding of the relationship between Christian commitment and liberal democracy.

This is a lot to ask, but the effort is worth making; FLOW offers us an example to follow. As I noted above, it endorses a Christian social ethos that is compatible with a moral and political order that is liberal and democratic, while simultaneously warning us against certain dangers and temptations, against an uncritical conformity to the ethos of the age.

I have identified the dangers and temptations that come with the logic of tragic violence. I have said that one such temptation is the comfort of conformity, of conforming to a liberal order that is willing to regard our basic duties as merely prima facie, our basic rights as subject to necessity's violations. The benefits of this conformity are obvious. Giving them up will be difficult. Locating good reasons to do so (points 1–5) is one difficulty. Taking a stand against our own age, against its willingness to abandon the right for the sake of the good, is another.

In a different time, the Apostle Paul called the church at Rome to resist the comforts of conformity and to rely on God's grace for the strength to answer that call. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). If we regard ourselves as addressed by this call and as recipients of this grace—as surely, we must—then we can take up these difficult tasks with faith's confidence.