Christian Public Reasoning in the United Kingdom: Apologetic,Casuistical,and Rhetorically Discriminate

The British story of Christian ethics since the 1960s is one of steady and, recently, vigorous growth. In 1948 the part-time lectureship that Ronald Preston took up at the University of Manchester was one of only two posts in the field in the whole of England—the other being Oxford’s Regius Chair of Moral and Pastoral Theology. By 1970 two further permanent professorships had appeared—the F. D. Maurice Chair of Moral and Social Theology at King’s College London, and the Samuel Fergusson Chair of Social and Pastoral Theology at Manchester. Now, by my unscientific accounting and excluding positions in religion and politics, there are at least eleven university posts held by Christian ethicists in England, with a further six in Scotland. Additional signs of vitality are the founding of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics in 1983; the launch of the associated journal, Studies in Christian Ethics, in 1988; the fact that whereas that journal began with only one issue annually, it now publishes four; and the appearance in 1977 of the Linacre Centre for Bioethics in London (now the Anscombe Centre in Oxford), in 2007 the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics in Cambridge, and in 2008 the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life in Oxford.

Institutionally, therefore, the discipline of Christian ethics in this country has grown strikingly stronger in the course of my lifetime (which, in case you’re wondering, began in 1955). It has also become markedly more theological, and its theology more conservatively Protestant. In the 1960s and 1970s Christian ethics was often represented by philosophers who championed metaphysics against fashionable logical positivism—I think here of Peter Baelz and Basil Mitchell. Or else it found expression in the thought of Anglo-Catholic churchmen like Gordon Dunstan, who used to begin his undergraduate courses with Aristotle and Aquinas, and who is famously reported to have commented on one student’s essay, ‘Best not to begin with the Bible’! ¹

While this more philosophical approach to the discipline did have its merits—as I shall make clear shortly—its lack of immersion in biblical and theological traditions weakened its capacity to achieve critical distance from prevailing intellectual currents. I think here of Faith in the City, the 1985 report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, and Changing Britain, the 1987 publication of the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility. ² Each of these dealt with pressing social problems in Britain—Faith in the City with urban deprivation, Changing Britain with cultural and moral pluralism. Neither of them did so, however, with moral concepts that had drunk at all deeply from the historic wells of Christian moral theology. The result was that their moral analysis and criticism were too mesmerised by current, liberal-left common sense. As I wrote in the wake of Faith in the City’s publication:

If we may take Faith in the City as symptomatic (and it is certainly not wholly eccentric), then we can say of social ethics in the Church of England today what has recently been asserted of her current conception of her political role: that she has yet to take seriously the intellectual task of developing a fundamentally theological understanding of it. ³

Likewise, on Changing Britain I commented that it permitted the church only ‘to proclaim more loudly the good that the world already knows; but not the good that comes to the world as news’. ⁴

Twenty-five years later Christian ethics in Britain is much better educated in Christian ethical traditions, and its moral intelligence much more fully informed by the full range of theological premises. In part this is due to the remarkable surge of British interest in the thought of Karl Barth during the 1980s, accentuated, if not generated, by the centenary of his birth in 1986. But it is also due to the eastward spreading of Stanley Hauerwas’s influence across the Atlantic, and to Oliver O’Donovan’s thorough mining of Christian biblical and historical traditions for the construction of a moral theology of political life. Without doubt, all of this has served to make Christian ethics more theologically coherent and more self-consciously Christian.

Nevertheless, there have been losses. Finding itself in financial straits around the turn of the millennium, the Church of England abolished its Board for Social Responsibility (henceforth ‘BSR’), and with it disappeared the post-war tradition of interdisciplinary working parties that convened theologians, philosophers, social scientists, civil servants, and relevant practitioners, and which produced some substantial reports of enduring value—for example, On Dying Well, which was first published in 1975 and then again in revised form in 2000. ⁵

Another loss has been a greater separation between moral philosophy and Christian ethics. To my knowledge, there are very few, if any, trained philosophers who regularly attend the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, and there is almost no overlap of its membership with that of the Society for Applied Philosophy.

A third loss is that Christian ethics now seems to be largely confined to the academy, whether in the form of a university department or a theological college. Although Britain in 2011 probably has more professional Christian ethicists than it has ever had, I am not aware that anyone of my own generation has established a profile as a regular contributor to public discussion in the national media. If there is a contemporary Christian counterpart to A. C. Grayling, it would be Richard Harries, but Richard is primarily a clergyman and is within sight of his ninth decade.

In the light of all this, what do I think should be the future direction of Christian public reasoning? The first thing to say is that I think that there will be a future, and that its opportunities appear to be greater than they have been for a generation. My perception is that secularist confidence in the project of de-Christianising public institutions and constructing a studiously non-religious public ethic is no longer what it was in the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural climate, which was spellbound for a generation by the secularisation thesis and its wilful faith in the inevitable withering of religion in the modern world, is now much more uncertain, more self-critically reflective, and accordingly more open to reasonable religious contributions. One symptom of this is Jürgen Habermas’s remarkable confession, originally in a 2002 interview with Le Monde, that religious traditions ‘have the distinction of a superior capacity for articulating our moral sensibility’, ⁶ and that secular society cannot afford to sever itself from these ‘important resources of meaning’. ⁷ Another symptom is Timothy Garton Ash’s brave admission that young Muslim critics of liberal mores are saying things that card-carrying secularist liberals need to heed. ⁸

Further, the debate about the proper place of religious expression in the public places of a liberal society—which has been running for over a quarter of a century, mainly in the USA, and mainly with reference to the ‘political liberalism’ of John Rawls—appears to have issued in a consensus. This comprises the views that public discourse should be ‘secular’ in the Augustinian sense of ad hoc negotiation between plural parties, and not in the ‘secularist’ sense of being religion-free; and that public discourse should be ‘liberal’ in the sense of comprising generous (if robust) reasoning together, rather than a flaccid, indifferent toleration of difference. This seems to be the consensus that has emerged out of the academic debate among political theorists, although it has yet to inform public consciousness—judging, at least, by the pages of the Guardian.

So: the first thing to say is that the opportunities for Christian reasoning about ethical matters in public seem much greater than they have been for some time.

The second thing to say about the future of Christian public reasoning is this. I think that Christian ethics needs to re-engage with contemporary moral philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. It needs to do this, at least for the sake of toughening up its own logical rigour. But it also needs to collaborate with Christian or theistic moral philosophers, in order to rebut the casual dismissal of religious ethics by influential atheist moral philosophers. I have not yet conducted a comprehensive survey, but my impression is that these dismissals are typically so simplistic as to amount to caricature. Christian ethics is summed up—sometimes in a handful of paragraphs—in terms of divine command authoritarianism and morally squalid bribery by the prospect of heavenly reward, and then brushed aside. Now why is this? Why do eminent moral philosophers not pay Christian ethics more respect? Is it that Christian ethics doesn’t deserve it? Obviously I do not think so. Christian ethicists may, in the end, be misguided, but we are not on the whole stupid. So is it because some moral philosophers are possessed by an unshakeable Dawkinseque prejudice? That may be. After all, it is not as if there are not available, for example, philosophically formidable articulations of divine command ethics, which may not attract universal assent but certainly do not deserve smug dismissal. (I’m thinking in particular of Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods. ⁹ ) Nevertheless, I do think that part of the problem lies with Christian ethicists who, influenced by Barth, have eschewed philosophical apologetics in favour of displaying the explanatory power and beauty of the Christian narrative. I do not object to such display—far from it; but I do object to the eschewal. And given that moral philosophers are dismissing religious ethics in books written for a popular readership and in current affairs journals, this issue is now a public matter, and it requires a public response. So, I think that Christian ethics needs to re-engage with its moral philosophical critics.

The third thing to say about the future direction of Christian public reasoning about moral matters is that Christian ethicists need to read less Hume, Hegel, and Habermas and more history. Christian ethics in universities tends to hover at a safe level of abstraction above ground. (And judging by the Society for Applied Philosophy and its journal, so does moral philosophy.) In thinking about ethics contemporary Christian ethics tends to refer to classic texts of theology or philosophy, rather than to concrete moral situations or cases. Perhaps this is because it feels the need to display its scholarly credentials. If so, it should relax. But perhaps it is because it supposes that cases merely supply the matter to which ready-made moral concepts can be applied, and that all the intellectual heavy lifting is done at the abstract level. If that is the case, then Christian ethics is mistaken: moral concepts are not merely applied to cases; they are also informed and reformed by them in important ways. Concepts and cases are involved in a hermeneutical dialectic. What is more, moral concepts that have not been formed in negotiation with sometimes messy, intractable, and inconvenient cases are unlikely to embody the practical wisdom that human beings in general, and doctors, soldiers, and civil servants in particular, urgently need. And if the ultimate raison d’être of Christian ethics is not to shape the lives and inform the judgements of actual human beings, then what on earth is it?

But where is the Christian ethicist to find the cases with which to test and refine her moral concepts? Well, she can find current ones in the newspapers, of course, but she can also find a wealth of past ones in history books. Let me give an example. Suppose a Christian ethicist is thinking about the ethics of the use of violent force in terms of the doctrine of just war. Our ethicist will know that one of the standard features of a justified decision to go to war is that there is a reasonable prospect of success. Suppose that, one evening, our ethicist lays down his copy of Augustine or Vitoria or Walzer and takes up Barrie Pitt’s history of the battle of El Alamein. He comes to page 396, where he reads of a briefing conference held in the middle of the battle, in which Major General Freyberg communicates General Montgomery’s orders to Brigadier Currie, commander of the 9^th Armoured Brigade:

[T]he task for 9^th Armoured Brigade—to advance past the infantry objective, break through the enemy defences and immediately beyond the Rahman Track and then hold open the gap against enemy counter-attacks until the heavy brigades of the 1^st Armoured Division had gone through—was so obviously one of difficulty and danger that when Currie’s time came to make comment, he rather diffidently suggested that by the end of the day his brigade might well have suffered 50 per cent casualties. To this Freyberg had replied with studied nonchalance, ‘Perhaps more than that. The Army Commander [Montgomery] says that he is prepared to accept a hundred per cent’. ¹⁰

This account of a particular moment in North Africa in October 1942 reminds our ethicist of other reading he has done in military history, and it gives birth to the thought that one of the conditions of military success is a commander’s possession of a certain kind of callousness—not toward the enemy, or toward civilians, but toward his own troops. A successful commander has to be willing to order soldiers, who may be close personal friends, to fight to the death. In order to do this, he has to be able to distance himself from the human consequences of his decision, to callous himself against them. History, then, teaches that a certain kind of callousness is a condition of military success. Just-war doctrine requires that military success be possible. The logic of just-war doctrine, therefore, appears to make callousness a necessary military virtue. But can callousness be a Christian virtue? Our ethicist reflects on his conversation the previous evening with a surgeon, and on his own experience of heading a university department in the wake of severe cuts in funding, and he realises that all sorts of social roles require well-intentioned human beings to make decisions and perform acts that will foreseeably hurt others; and that in order to make and do them, they have to grow thick skin—they have to callous themselves. Thus, observing that callousness need not involve a culpable lack of care or a failure to love, our ethicist finds himself brought to the novel conclusion that it can be a Christian virtue. Had he not picked up a history book, however, this would never have occurred to him. So: less Hegel, more history—if Christian ethics is to make itself plausible to policy-makers and practitioners.

(Whispering loudly off-stage at this point, let me add that the discipline of engaging with concrete cases ought to come naturally to those professional Christian ethicists who carry pastoral responsibility within a church—and in the UK, most, I think, do. My own chair of moral and pastoral theology explicitly associates ethical reflection with pastoral engagement—as does the Samuel Ferguson Chair of Social and Pastoral Theology at the University of Manchester. I regard such an association, not at all as a compromise of academic integrity, but as an intellectual asset.)

My fourth and final point about the future of Christian public reasoning is that it should do more of what the McDonald Centre of Theology, Ethics and Public Life at Oxford has, inadvertently, begun to do—namely, revive the model of ethical dialogue exemplified by the working parties of the Church of England’s BSR. As I mentioned earlier, these working parties transcended both disciplinary boundaries and the divide between the academy and public policy circles. The reasons why Christian ethics should revive this model are two. The first is to enable academic Christian ethicists to learn from others how best to understand the actual matter about which they would form moral judgements—be that matter scientific, technical, human, social or political; and then, second, to inject Christian analyses and judgements, made wise by such practical education, into the bloodstream of public discourse.

By ‘revival’ I do not mean simple resurrection. I also mean a measure of transformation. In the future, the moral theologians who participate in such interdisciplinary conversations should be clearer in their method and rhetoric than were their BSR predecessors. They should have a clear sense of who it is that they are addressing and to what purpose, and they should adjust their rhetoric accordingly. If they are simply seeking to sort out a moral problem of concern to a secular (that is, plural) public, then it may well be that they need not draw explicit attention to the role of theological considerations in producing their moral judgement. Still, in the course of addressing a common moral problem, moral theologians could—and probably should—also want to commend their theological convictions by pointing out how these serve to sustain a cogent or widely attractive moral position. However, if the main point of the exercise is to demonstrate the theological integrity or bona fides of a moral view to a specifically Christian audience, then it would be absolutely necessary to lay out as thoroughly as possible its theo-logic, and to invoke authoritative biblical and other texts in its support. Different purposes suit different audiences and require different rhetorics. ¹¹ The coherence and cogency of the deliberations of the old BSR working parties sometimes suffered from trying to face two ways at once—both toward the General Synod of the Church of England and toward Parliament. In their resurrected form, they need to face one way at a time.