Studying Christian Ethics: The Birth of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics and the Context Out of Which It Grew

In the middle of 1982, the Church of England’s Advisory Council for the Church’s Ministry (ACCM), in association with the Church’s Board for Social Responsibility, organised a residential meeting for those teaching Christian Ethics in theological colleges and courses. The consultation was presided over by the then Dean of Durham, the Very Revd Peter Baelz, and the venue was the then headquarters of the Royal School of Church Music, Addington Palace, near Croydon in Surrey, an erstwhile residence of Archbishops of Canterbury. Included amongst our number were novices at the art of teaching ethics and moral theology, together with established scholars such as Professor Ronald Preston and Peter Baelz himself. Towards the end of the conference it became clear how little support there was for those teaching in this area of study. Stephen Platten ventured the opinion that it would be constructive if there were to be established a professional association for those responsible for teaching ethics. With characteristic irony, the Dean of Durham responded: ‘I’ve heard on the grapevine that you are to become a residentiary canon at Portsmouth Cathedral. Knowing such places I am aware that canons residentiary have far too much time on their hands. Why don’t you do something about it?’ Ever one for a challenge Stephen Platten took action alongside Dr William Jacob, then secretary of ACCM’s Committee for Theological Education, who had formerly taught ethics at Salisbury and Wells Theological College. That was effectively the ‘moment of conception’ of the Society.

It was, then, at its outset an Anglican initiative. Indeed in recent correspondence, Peter Harvey, a Roman Catholic, a founder-member and a continuing supporter of the society, wrote:

The ecumenical aspect could have been better handled by involving other churches from the beginning. Instead individuals were invited to join, so that Roman Catholic moralists, for instance, never ‘owned’ the society. I was the first Roman Catholic committee member, but was too much a maverick to persuade other Catholic colleagues to join in any numbers, still less to become regular attenders. ¹

Peter himself taught ethics for a time at the Queens College, Birmingham, and was already a member of the Roman Catholic Association of Teachers of Moral Theology. ² He is perceptive in his reflection here in as much the Society found its origins in issues facing moral theologians within the Church of England. For that reason the context within Anglicanism out of which it grew is an essential element in understanding the way in which the Society was born. So, a brief glance back over the history of the Church of England and its engagement with moral theology may assist in seeing how the situation in the twentieth century evolved and how at different points there was the need to take fresh initiatives in the teaching of Christian ethics and moral theology. Let us glance back, first, to the birth of the Church of England, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

* * *

One reflection sometimes made about the Church of England and about Anglicanism more widely relates to theological method. The Roman Catholic tradition is rooted in a deductive approach which is manifested most obviously in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. ³ This same methodology was followed, after the Council of Trent, in moral theology. A clear matrix, which traced its origins to Thomas Aquinas, set the scene for the publication of a series of ‘manuals of moral theology’. These manuals worked from the deductive principles governing moral theology to provide sophisticated casuistical guides for confessors in supporting the consciences of the faithful. In contrast, theologians within the Church of England worked instead on inductive principles. The historical exigencies out of which the Church of England was born meant that such an approach was virtually a requirement. The Church of England had not been established on a deductive basis from a priori theological principles. Instead historical circumstances led to the emergence of ecclesia anglicana independent of the jurisdiction of Rome and shaped by complex and variant forces within the wider pattern of the European Reformation. Contemporary scholarship has set this within a new framework. ⁴ So, recent ‘revisionist’ history makes clear Thomas Cranmer’s intention that the Church of England should be Protestant. Nonetheless, the complex political history of England in the sixteenth century (and the following centuries) still led to emergence of a tradition which could validly be described as ‘catholic but reformed’. How might one offer an apologetic as the foundation for an appropriate theological method deriving from this new understanding of Ecclesia Anglicana?

The key figure here was Richard Hooker (1553–1600). Hooker’s The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ⁵ is now often seen as something of a blueprint or foundational document for what is referred to as Anglican Theology; such a concept is itself fraught with complexity. ⁶ It may be safer to speak of Anglican theologies. Furthermore, Hooker’s magnum opus was itself written out of very specific circumstances. ⁷ Essential for this paper is that in the first book of his Laws, Hooker sets out a method which derives from an understanding of different forms of ‘law’. This would be crucial both for him and other later Anglican writers in the Caroline period as they began to establish an understanding of the ‘moral law’ within the wider context of moral theology. Instead of an approach rooted in the principle of sola scriptura, there is a divinely ordered law which accompanies this. Hooker further sets out a series of different kinds of law, and here there are some clear parallels with Thomas Aquinas. ⁸

His method and his basic presuppositions, then, offer both a theoretical and pragmatic base to which theologians within the Church of England would return in different ways over the next four hundred years. This engagement of the practical and theoretical turned out to be one of the key issues facing the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics when it was established in 1983, but that is to jump ahead rather too swiftly. Some further historical background may help prepare the way for understanding how the Society emerged and how, both positively and negatively, Anglicanism (as it later became) was formative in the process of the Society’s foundation. It was during the seventeenth century, the so-called Caroline age, that a number of Anglican divines developed a new form of moral theology with its own casuistical method, resonant with Hooker’s Laws.

Henry McAdoo’s study of this period points to these resonances and indeed to the continuity within the western tradition, marked by the Caroline approach. He notes:

Our Caroline forbears read and used Aquinas and Calvin and studied the spiritual descendants of both, but refused to forget that they were Anglicans, ⁹ claiming that by their Protestant reforms they had saved and restored the true and primitive Catholic faith. Robert Sanderson’s favourite reading was the Secunda secundae, as indeed is apparent from his works, but he never lost his bearings. Bishop Pearson, who has been described as a ‘schoolman with the scholarship of the Renaissance’, acknowledged a deep respect for Aquinas which has left a permanent impression on his work. ¹⁰

McAdoo continues in this vein and later picks up the theme again as he relates the tradition to its earlier surfacing in Hooker:

Hooker wholeheartedly follows Aquinas in that he holds the natural law to be man’s complete apprehension of the eternal law and he regards natural law as being to a certain extent mediated by human law—an idea quite foreign to the Fathers for whom the notion of a relative law of nature was the answer to the problem arising out of the manifest disparity between the pure law of nature and civil society as it existed. ¹¹

Elsewhere McAdoo points to what one might describe as the ‘ecumenical roots’ of Anglican moral theology such that the initiative taken in the foundation of this Society was an authentic development within an existing tradition. ¹² Alongside this McAdoo notes:

Caroline theology was moreover popular, in that it was meant for the people and (usually not for the professional theologian) and this is true in a specific way of writings on conscience and casuistry. ¹³

Again this presages one of the key issues with which the Society wrestled in its early days: it is essential for practitioners and theologians regularly to engage. The Carolines were determined to hold together moral, doctrinal and ascetic theology. Returning again to Hooker, McAdoo notes:

It is not the least important of Hooker’s contributions to the study of moral theology that he refused any concept of the science save that which views it as concerned ultimately with man’s salvation and participation in the Beatific Vision…but it is likewise true that the loss of any coherent teaching on the Vision of God was largely responsible for the almost total eclipse of anything that could safely be termed a moral theology in the eighteenth century Church of England, and for the ultimate substitution of ethics (regarded as self-sufficing and as an end in itself) for a theological view of human conduct. ¹⁴

Writing just three years later, Thomas Wood makes a similar point. ¹⁵ He also quotes William Ames as saying that this was a subject ‘worthy to be followed with all care by all men’. ¹⁶ Wood too notes the integration of moral and ascetic theology. ¹⁷ Even this, however, was too narrow on its own:

…our casuists did not stop short at the cultivation of personal holiness; they sought also to educate society in the way of justice. We were all born into a human family. We earn our living in some trade or profession. We join voluntary organisations. We are members of the Church. We are citizens of the State. And our membership within these social groups confers upon us certain rights and imposes certain obligations. ¹⁸

From a Roman Catholic point of view, Kevin Kelly drew others to the attention of this Caroline inheritance, a generation ago. ¹⁹

So many of the issues identified in that discussion have been central to the life and deliberations of this Society since its inception. The interplay between theologians and practitioners, the integration of theological reflection and so the relation of ethics and moral theology to doctrine, the relationship of individual and social ethics—all have been grist to the mill over the past thirty years. In picking up these key issues, the Society has been breaking new ground, and some further background will make this clearer.

* * *

McAdoo noted the later paucity of moral theology within the Anglican tradition and an increasingly arid dependence upon the manuals in the Roman Catholic tradition in the following two centuries. Both these traditions alongside Dissent in England did, however, practically engage with moral issues. Wilberforce, Clarkson and others within the Church of England were pioneers in the movement for the abolition of slavery. Manning’s famous intervention in the Dock Strike of 1889 and Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 are examples of a continuing and renewed focus on social ethical issues by Roman Catholics. Dissent engaged with a variety of social issues in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless it was not until early in the twentieth century that a real renewal became clear, first within Anglicanism. The Caroline tradition was rediscovered perhaps supremely in the work of Kenneth Kirk, most notably in his Bampton Lectures of 1928, The Vision of God, ²⁰ and also of Lindsay Dewar ²¹ and Robert Mortimer. ²² Roman Catholic moral theology continued to be taught largely within the tradition of the manuals until the 1960s. With the advent of the Second Vatican Council a new world opened up, ²³ with the rediscovery of the importance of scripture and with a renewed interest in philosophy; so moral theologians now looked to a wider tradition—aesthetic, historical and literary—rather than just the manuals.

This development remained slow, however, and the Anglican experience offers a good case study. The extraordinary situation which pertained in the Church of England is described succinctly by Canon Sydney Evans, then Dean of King’s College London, in the foreword to the 1974 ACCM publication, Teaching Christian Ethics, which had been preceded by another handbook some ten years earlier. He wrote:

This aid to the study of Christian Ethics has come into existence through the revision of a syllabus followed by ordinands training for the ministry of the Church of England. Astonishingly as it may seem, the study of Christian Ethics was dropped from the syllabus of the General Ordination Examination in 1959, but the continuing protests of people like Professor Preston led to its reintroduction in 1964. ²⁴

It does seem astonishing that ordinands (i.e. those being prepared for ordination) could follow a syllabus which somehow implied (by virtue of silence on the subject) that the Christian faith had no ethical imperatives or even covenantal responses. The 1964 reintroduction of ethics into the syllabus was marked by the publication by the Council for the Church’s Ministry (CACTM), the predecessor body to ACCM, of A Handbook for Teachers of Christian Ethics in Theological Colleges. ²⁵ Helen Oppenheimer, the second president of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, then a junior Anglican teacher of Christian ethics (her own words!), used this handbook which had been written by George Woods, then Professor of Theology at King’s College, London, and the ever ebullient (again Oppenheimer’s words) David Jenkins, then Fellow of Queen’s College Oxford. ²⁶ In his introduction John Trillo, the Bishop of Bedford, writing on behalf of CACTM, noted:

The Committee (Ordination Candidates Committee of CACTM) however regard this handbook as no more than a preliminary contribution towards the task of discovering a satisfactory syllabus and a method for teaching this subject. ²⁷

As Trillo noted, this handbook was not to be the end of the story. Helen Oppenheimer has described her own experience during this interim period of teaching at Cuddesdon Theological College, near Oxford, once a week from 1964 to 1969 and also at Wycliffe Hall, in Oxford, where she gave the same lectures, which included seminars on ‘moral cases’. Oppenheimer notes:

…my slogan was that Christian ethics must be neither stiff nor woolly. I strongly advised them not to depend on a textbook but to read plenty of different books. However, if they had to choose only one, they might do best with Kirk’s The Vision of God… The structure of the lectures was mainly shaped by David Jenkins’ chapter on ‘Ethics and the Christian tradition’ in the preliminary Handbook. There was less about the teaching of Christ than one might expect, as biblical experts were taking care of New Testament ethics. What particularly emerged was a quite strong emphasis on natural law, not as rules and regulations but as the way of life conducive to human flourishing. ²⁸

Oppenheimer has been an essential contributor to the Church of England’s developing doctrine of marriage; she was a member of the working parties which produced the report Putting Asunder ²⁹ in 1966 (a key contributory document to the Divorce Reform Act of 1967) and the report Marriage, Divorce and the Church (1971) ³⁰ for which she wrote a seminal essay.

Teaching Christian Ethics was a key element in the process which began to make possible the professional teaching of Christian ethics and moral theology in the Church of England. Eventually it helped prompt the need for some sort of professional body to support those teaching the subject. The genesis of the book has a curiously eccentric feel about it, even for a Church of England initiative. A further quotation from Sydney Evans’s introduction to the book sets the scene:

Mention must be made of the generosity of Lord Elphinstone, the Reverend the Honourable Andrew Elphinstone and the Dulverton Trustees which made possible a week of residence and hard work in the delightful setting of Glenmazeran in Inverness-shire in June 1972, thereby enabling the group to sketch out the sections of the book. ³¹

Other members of the working party have also made reference to both the setting but also to the productiveness of the meeting. Helen Oppenheimer comments:

The little conference in Scotland which produced Teaching Christian Ethics was one of the most enjoyable I have attended. One might say that it consisted of plain thinking and high living, with particularly agreeable colleagues for the one, and salmon and venison for the other. It was May and early spring, and we used to work in the mornings and evenings and walk up the glen in the afternoons. I have a vivid memory of Gordon Dunstan, thinking it was time for evensong, enquiring ‘Do you worship God in this place?’ ³²

Richard Harries, then teaching ethics at Wells Theological College, and subsequently Dean of King’s College London and Bishop of Oxford, has also reflected upon the unusual but productive nature of the meeting. Sydney Evans was the prime mover and Richard notes:

He persuaded Andrew Elphinstone to let us have the use of the family shooting lodge in Glenmazaran in Inverness. This was a brilliant move as it meant we were locked up miles from anywhere, unable to accept other engagements at the same time!… I felt very privileged to be part of the very small group of people who seemed to know anything about Christian Ethics at that time… Gordon Dunstan brooded authoritatively over the proceedings, saying little in the discussion but something magisterial at the end of each session! ³³

In one sense this is all very Anglican. The working party included those already mentioned, alongside Ronald Preston, Samuel Ferguson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology and Manchester University; Keith Ward, then Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at King’s College, London and subsequently Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; Margaret Kane (a theological consultant on industrial and social affairs in north-east England) with Ronald Copping from the staff of ACCM, and subsequently Canon Librarian of Durham Cathedral as its secretary. ³⁴ Gordon Dunstan was, by then, Professor of Social and Moral Theology at King’s College, London and something of a doyen in the world of Christian ethical thought within the Church of England. The publication of this book set the scene for the rebirth of the study of ethics and moral theology in Church of England theological colleges and courses. It was not a textbook but provided the syllabus for a new examination in Christian Ethics for the General Ordination Examination. It was a systematic analysis of the tools and raw materials which were the necessary background for those who would newly teach the subject. There were excellent bibliographies in each chapter and an exhaustive list of key texts at the end. There was, of course, continuing thinking amongst all the churches about moral theology and Christian ethics at the time, although it was fairly inchoate. Roman Catholic moral theology was just beginning to emerge from a four-hundred-year cocoon.

This was the environment into which this particular author was parachuted in August 1978. It was a matter of parachuting since there was no induction course for teachers in theological colleges and courses, and certainly no scholarly community of Christian moralists from which wisdom might be drawn. For Anglicans, the expectation was that one might learn as one went along. Helen Oppenheimer herself notes:

For most of the time I was only about one step ahead of my pupils. The cliché that I learnt as much from them as they did from me was entirely true. I was reading the books myself and putting them in the picture, which must have been more use than hastening through the earlier stages to reach the problems which were on the top of my mind. (For instance, Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches was a corrective to my preference for domestic ethics. Liberation theology had not yet impinged on me.) ³⁵

Further to aggravate the situation was the fact that often one had to teach other subjects too: I taught some New Testament and some philosophical doctrine; the association of ethics with both these subjects is positive, but the assumption that each tutor should be a polymath was less so. There was also no tradition of building up a continuing professional community of teachers in Christian ethics and moral theology or any other subject in the Church of England. Often people would teach for five or six years and then move on to some quite different area of ministry. This was the experience of some of the members of the two working parties already mentioned. It was this general background that stimulated our intervention at the conference/training session in mid-1982 at Addington. I myself was already an example of the ‘short-termism’ prevalent in the teaching of moral theology at the time; after slightly less than five years I would be moving on to a new post. The establishment of the Addington conference itself acknowledged the need for a more professional approach to teaching Christian ethics within the Church of England.

Professor Ronald Preston had complained regularly about this. He worried too about the sheer lack of empirical knowledge amongst Anglican ethicists when deliberating on moral issues. His academic background in economics made him unique amongst professors of Christian ethics. Preston was encouraged by the initiative to set up a society, but he remained sceptical: ‘Only when professionals in the university see their attendance at the annual conference as essential, shall we know it has succeeded and defined its role’, he said. By that criterion, the Society may be said to have fulfilled Preston’s requirement. He himself had been the key Anglican figure to build bridges with the Roman Catholic Association of Teachers of Moral Theology (ATMT). He had attended their meetings almost since their inception in 1968. That date indicates that Roman Catholicism too was only just rediscovering a lively and exploratory moral theological tradition. ³⁶ The Vatican Council had not long finished and those teaching morals at seminaries saw how crucial it was to take a ‘professional’ stance on teaching in their own area. It could no longer be seen as a ‘sub-set’ of canon law, nor did they see themselves as mouthpieces for the magisterium. It was to be a few years yet before the nihil obstat and the imprimatur would disappear from the frontispiece of Roman Catholic theological publications. The liveliness and seriousness of ATMT made it all the more obvious to non-Roman Catholics how important a professional body would be. It is also a further cause for regret that the original initiative for founding the SSCE was not conceived as ecumenical from the start. From the first conference onward the committee was undoubtedly ecumenical, but the initial rally call to establish the society was not. In the light of this, following the Addington meeting, how did the society begin its work?

* * *

Following Peter Baelz’s challenge, which Peter Harvey describes as seeming ‘in part an attempt to re-launch the subject in the Anglican theological colleges’, ³⁷ Bill Jacob and Stephen Platten (then still Chaplain and Tutor in Ethics at Lincoln Theological College) determined to take things forward. The first extant piece of correspondence (on Lincoln Theological College notepaper) is a letter to a wide audience. The second paragraph begins:

We are beginning by circulating college and course tutors, university teachers, and others involved in this area in the life of the church. If you would be interested in participating in such a venture, would you please indicate your willingness by replying to Stephen Platten at the address above. ³⁸

The names at the foot of the letter are Bill Jacob, Margaret Jeffery (then on the staff of the General Synod Board for Social Responsibility), Stephen Platten and Keith Ward (then F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at King’s College, London). Although these four were all firmly Anglican, the letter included a footnote:

We are extremely anxious that the proposed society should be as broadly based as possible ecumenically, and we very much hope that you will take part in this enterprise from the beginning. ³⁹

This letter had been preceded by a meeting in London to plan the initiative and this meeting is referred to in a letter from Platten to Jacob dated 7 October 1982 ⁴⁰ pointing forward to further consultation in Lincoln in November, presumably to plan the wider mailing noted above.

Of the replies to the general letter still extant, there are a scattering from other churches. Trevor Rowe, then General Secretary of the Methodist Church’s Division of Ministries, sent a list of tutors in their colleges at that time. Michael Taylor, from the Northern Baptist College, wrote drawing attention to the newly formed Association of Centres of Adult Theological Education and offered to publicise the initiative there. Kenneth Wilson from the Methodist, Westminster College, offered enthusiastic support and was an important contributor in the early years of the society. Michael Dunford, the Secretary for Ministerial Training of the United Reformed Church, sent in a list of tutors at the URC colleges in Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. Father Gerry Magill, then teaching at the Roman Catholic seminary at Drygrange, replied agreeing to publicise the new venture at the next meeting of the Association of Teachers of Moral Theology. In response to the publicity for the first annual conference in 1983 there were also enthusiastic replies from Raphael Gallagher at the Roman Catholic Marianella Institute in Dublin, from Kevin Kelly one of the leading Roman Catholic writers on moral theology, and from Martin Cressey, then Principal of the United Reformed, Westminster College, Cambridge. So, from the beginning, there was enthusiastic ecumenical response.

What sort of reaction was provoked among practitioners and teachers? Certainly in reply to that first circular letter, there was considerable interest from those engaged with moral issues across the Anglican dioceses. Letters from Social Responsibility Officers were received from Carlisle, Chelmsford, Exeter, Edinburgh, Hereford, Leicester, Llandaff, London, Newcastle, Portsmouth, St Albans, Wakefield and Worcester. Indeed, Geoffrey Smith, the Newcastle Diocesan Social Responsibility Officer, was a key contributor and spokesman for the practitioners in the early years of the Society’s existence. He was always direct in his expression of the divisions between practitioners and academies. In his first reply he writes:

I am also quite clear that there is a little or no connection between the work that I do as a Social Responsibility Advisor and concerns that I try to share with parish clergy in our Diocese, and some of the learning and thinking that goes on in the name of theological education. ⁴¹

Of the surviving letters, in reply to the circular about the establishment of the Society, there was a healthy flurry of correspondence from theological colleges and courses. Teachers at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, Chichester Theological College, Edinburgh Theological College (then Stephen Pattison), Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Cranmer Hall, Durham all responded. Amongst the courses, there were letters from teachers at the Canterbury School of Ministry, the Gloucester Diocesan Course, the Northern Ordination Course (NOC) and from John White, a canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, who had previously taught ethics at NOC; he expressed some hesitation:

Thank you for your communication about a Society for the study of Christian ethics which I am happy to support and encourage. My only anxiety in these days of Christian back-woodsmanship is that it should become a Society supporting a traditionalist position. Therefore, I am a little anxious to call it a Society for the Study of Christian Ethics which is an adjective generally speaking I prefer to abstain from using. So my only constructive comment to begin with is—what about a different title, giving some initial scope for a broader based clientele—if not immediately then in due season. ⁴²

His concern here is not entirely clear. Partly it seems to be a desire to avoid the society becoming a purely Christian association, but it may be that he was concerned also about embracing practitioners. In the event, his new work meant that he did not have the opportunity to engage in the work of this new venture.

Alongside this there were responses from Professor Duncan Forrester in Edinburgh and also Thomas Wood at the University of Wales, Lampeter expressing interest. Forrester made some useful observations in his reply:

I hope that the new society will be coordinated in some way with the existing Association of Teachers of Moral Theology. This body not only includes most of the Roman Catholic moral theology teachers but departments such as mine, St Andrews and Manchester are also represented. It would not be good in a field such as this to have two competing organisations. It would also, I think, be desirable if the Society could consider its relationship to the Society for the Study of Theology. Professor Whyte of St Andrews and I are regular attenders at that Society and it has, from time to time, given attention to Christian ethics. ⁴³

Barrie Paskins from the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London replied showing interest as did Oliver O’Donovan, then Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. Other academics who responded included David Atkinson then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Charles Brock at Mansfield College, Oxford; Stephen Clark at the University of Glasgow; David Jenkins, then at the University of Leeds; Andrew Linzey from the University of Essex; Alastair Campell at the University of Edinburgh and Alan Suggate at Durham who would become the Society’s first secretary.

Finally, there were one or two individual responses. Geoffrey Wynne, then Senior Chaplain at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, expressed an interest and noted some of the ethical seminars which he was convening. These included a seminar with the Deputy Chief Constable of the West Midlands on moral dilemmas in the management of the police force. ⁴⁴ Interestingly, Peter Harvey refers to an early contribution to one of the Society’s conferences by a senior police officer who argued that ‘policing was an art’. ⁴⁵ Both the Bishop of Southwark, Ronald Bowlby ⁴⁶ and the Bishop of Kingston, Keith Sutton ⁴⁷ (later Bishop of Lichfield) responded; Ronald Bowlby was an active member for most of the first decade of the Society’s history. John Habgood, then Bishop of Durham, sent his encouraging good wishes, as did John Austin Baker, then Bishop of Salisbury ⁴⁸ who was recovering from a deluge of correspondence about his part in preparing the Church of England report on nuclear weapons, The Church and the Bomb. ⁴⁹ There were also expressions of interest from Basil Moss, then Provost of Birmingham and Charles Elliott, the Director of Christian Aid. The late Alan Duce, then chaplain at Lincoln Prison, a doyen amongst prison chaplains and editor of their scholarly periodical, was a key supporter from the start. He remained a key contributor for the first decade.

All this correspondence points to certain continuing issues in the early life of the Society. These include its relationship/complementarity with other associations, the tension between practitioners and the academy and a real determination to manifest the new venture’s truly ecumenical nature. All these re-surfaced in the Society’s first conference at Wycliffe Hall from 16-18 September 1983. Wycliffe Hall was chosen for its ease of access and for its location in one of the two ancient English universities where there was a strong commitment to theological teaching. Tribute should be paid particularly to the college domestic bursar at the time, the late Elizabeth Harris, who helped make Wycliffe such a welcoming and attractive venue. There was debate about the conference location, but ultimately Wycliffe Hall became the regular venue and remains so. At the beginning Elizabeth was a key figure in persuading the Society to site itself there.

Considerable energy was expended in getting good publicity for the first conference and Peter Baelz, then Chairman of ACCM’s Committee for Theological Education, was persuaded to write to all colleges and courses encouraging ethics teachers to attend. At the same time publicity was directed to diocesan social responsibility departments and similar bodies in other churches. The theme chosen for the inaugural conference was ‘The Authority of the Bible in Christian Ethics’ with the invitation going out under the joint signatures of Bill Jacob and Stephen Platten. The four keynote speakers were Helen Oppenheimer, Christopher Evans (retired Professor of New Testament, King’s College, London), Ronald Clements (then a lecturer in Old Testament in the Divinity Faculty in Cambridge) and Brendan Soane (then teaching at Allen Hall Roman Catholic seminary, in London). From the beginning, the policy of having a formal response to each paper was established and there was then group work with the speakers and respondents moving around between the various groups. The speaker ‘line-up’ was consciously ecumenical, with a Baptist and a Roman Catholic academic and an ordained and a lay Anglican. As with best practice at most conferences, an evaluation sheet was prepared, in order to learn from this first meeting. The conference included a business session and a committee was elected from that gathering. Indeed, at the business meeting, a sheet was circulated asking some key questions:

Do people wish to form a society? Do you want more than an Annual Conference? viz. a regional organisation. Is the conference format timing and location right? How can we exchange bibliographies, encourage post-graduate students, publicise the Society more ecumenically, assist new teachers in this area? Do we need another periodical or could this be linked in some way with Crucible or Modern Churchman?

The conference attracted 58 participants of whom about 44 were teachers; 14 represented social responsibility departments; there were 10 Roman Catholic participants including some of the leading moralists from that church and a sprinkling of free church people. These included Margaret Perry from the Quaker Social Responsibility committee who was elected to the committee at the first conference. Both morning and night prayers were part of the programme as was a space for eucharistic worship. A significant amount of time was left for people to interact informally. All in all it was an encouraging start, but the committee was under no illusion that there was much work to be done and much consolidation before it became clear whether the Society was both viable and necessary. The committee met again for a morning on 10 November at Church House, Westminster, both to review progress and to plan the second conference. By the time of this meeting there were 104 people on the mailing list.

The second conference was planned for September 1984 at Wycliffe under an overall theme of Ethics and Human Flourishing. The numbers attending were slightly lower at just under 50. There were some innovations. Perhaps the key shift forward was the invitation to a speaker from outside the United Kingdom. Professor James Gustafson from the University of Chicago talked about ‘Patterns of Interdependence and Limits of Human Flourishing’. We were fortunate to attract a grant from the British Academy to cover the cost of Professor Gustafson’s journey and such grants became a regular support to the work of the society from then on. The other keynote speakers were Father Fergus Kerr OP and Dr John Atherton; Professor Duncan Forrester, Mrs Janet Scott and Dr David Cook were the respondents. Another new initiative arising out of this second conference was the production of an Annual Ethics Bibliography. This was taken forward by Professor Tony Dyson of the University of Manchester. Writing to members of the Society he noted:

I have concluded that such a scheme is feasible. For the first year at least the Bibliography would be in the simplest possible form, namely an alphabetical listing of books and articles in Christian Ethics published in the year just past. ⁵⁰

Dyson then details the process by which the bibliography would be produced. ⁵¹ The tension between practitioners and teachers continued and was indeed manifested within the committee itself. At the first Annual General Meeting of the Society during the 1984 conference the provisional steering committee was elected en bloc to form the committee of the Society for the coming year. The members were Tony Dyson, Peter Harvey, Bill Jacob, Margaret Perry, Geoffrey Smith (the Newcastle Diocesan Social Responsibility Advisor), Brendan Soane and Alan Suggate. Alan Suggate agreed to act as the first secretary; Peter Baelz was elected as the first President. A draft constitution was presented and, following amendments, was approved. Perhaps most crucial to note are the objectives of the Society, since they pick up some of the key issues about focus and aims. They are:

to encourage and further the study of Christian ethics in its practical and theoretical aspects.

to strengthen the teaching and learning of ethics as an academic discipline.

to encourage serious ethical thinking and discussion in the life of the churches.

To foster the exercise of Christian social responsibility.

To hold a Conference and at least one General Meeting of the Society in each calendar year. ⁵²

Within the bounds of the constitution, then, were held some of the key foci and tensions of the first two years of the Society’s existence. These issues were not to disappear. However, the Society now had a strong committee which represented a variety of viewpoints and which was determined to embrace the different concerns expressed about both membership and focus. At the November meeting of the committee in London the theme for the 1985 conference was agreed as Power and Authority. Alan Suggate agreed to work up the theme and return to the committee with firm plans. On 18 December 1984, Stephen Platten responded to Suggate’s draft on one specific issue.

My only concern about the outline as you have detailed it so far is that it tends very much in the direction of social ethics and with an emphasis on experience and the human sciences as primary. I am very concerned that we should keep within the group the majority of Roman Catholic moral theologians, since it is within that church that much serious work had been done over the last fifteen to twenty years. ⁵³

Platten’s concern echoes some of the themes which were an important focus in the history of Anglican moral theology as developed during the Caroline period. Moral theological themes needed to stand alongside social ethics. In the programme for the September 1985 conference there was a blend. General Sir Hugh Beach responded to a paper by Dr Robin Attfield on ‘The Ethics of Power’; Dr Richard Higginson responded to Dr Daphne Hampson’s paper on ‘Power and Gender’, and the Revd Dr Kenneth Boyd gave a paper on ‘Priorities in the Allocation of Resources in Health Care’. Applications for membership that year indicated a healthy broadening of the base with new Roman Catholic members. 1985 also marked the first contribution of Professor Robert McLaren from California State University. Bob McLaren became the key link with the American Society for Christian Ethics. Later McLaren would contribute a keynote paper on ‘Familial Roots of Moral Discernment and Behaviour’ at the Annual Conference in 1995, but early on his desire was to encourage exchanges between American and British academics within the discipline. There is a lively correspondence from this time onwards which attempts to find ways of accomplishing this mutual support. Duncan Forrester in Edinburgh was particularly supportive of this initiative and there was correspondence also from the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Hull, Kent and Nottingham and also from theological colleges in Lincoln, Nottingham, Oxford and Cambridge.

The 1986 conference focused on Christian Ethics and the Law. The papers were by Roger Ruston OP, ‘Should Law be Natural?’; Basil Mitchell (Nolloth Professor in the University of Oxford), ‘Should Law be Christian?’; Dr Simon Holdaway (Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield), ‘Should Law be Fair?’ The bonus this year was the first appearance of Stanley Hauerwas at an SSCE conference speaking on ‘Christian Existence Today: Church, World and Living in-Between’. Hauerwas’s contribution was controversial, as ever, and sparked off a lively and at some points intemperate debate. It was marred by the paper being a book chapter which was about twice as long as the time available and delivered at a lightning and almost incomprehensible pace!

At the business meeting during the 1986 conference a draft questionnaire was circulated on the future direction of the Society. Some familiar topics appeared on the questionnaire which was amended and distributed to all members. Questions included: ‘To whom should the Society appeal? What should the format of the annual conference be? Should there be sub-themes within each conference?’ There was a fairly high percentage response to the questionnaire and the general direction already taken by the Society was confirmed in the returned papers. The evidence suggested that the appeal should continue to a wide cross-section of people including practitioners and teachers; Michael Atkinson from the Church of England’s Board of Social Responsibility again pleaded for a mixed approach to the Society’s work, not focusing purely on academics. Undoubtedly there has been a gradual shift towards a more focused academic base. The format for the annual conference was largely confirmed. The committee for the following year remained the same, apart from the resignation of Tony Dyson and Brendan Soane: Brendan had moved to the Beda College in Rome during that year.

It was also at this time that the seeds for the establishment of this journal were planted. Geoffrey Green from the publishers T&T Clark attended the conference and, in a letter in response to the discussions about a periodical, ventured the opinion that now was not the time for a fully blown journal. Instead a fairly low-key collection of the conference papers might be published and the cost would be included in a small (£3) increase in the subscription; ⁵⁴ Tony Dyson also added his voice to the hesitations about publishing a full journal at this stage. ⁵⁵ By the following January, however, thinking had moved on and Geoffrey Green was proposing a journal in paperback of some 160 pages. It would still be limited to the conference papers and the publishers would pre-sell 100 copies to the society at a reduced cost of £5.00 per copy with the normal selling price at £7.50. ⁵⁶ This was the agreed way forward and, in July 1987, Richard Franklin (then ethics lecturer at Chichester Theological College) agreed to act as the first editor and was in correspondence with Father David Williamson, the moral theology lecturer at Allen Hall. Franklin edited the journal from 1988 to 1991, first of all publishing only the proceedings of the Society. In his final editorial year, however, he moved the journal on to two issues per year giving the opportunity to commission further papers or to publish papers occasionally offered by others. Oliver O’Donovan generously agreed to act as Reviews Editor and helped establish the journal with its own life. In marvellously understated style, O’Donovan asked in a circular letter if members might assist in getting books sent for review:

When members of the Society achieve the doubtful distinction of authorship, I would be grateful if they would specifically request their publisher to send a review copy of their book to Studies in Christian Ethics. ⁵⁷

Franklin resigned as editor in 1991 believing that he had been away from the academy for too long and without the environment of support needed to edit such a journal. ⁵⁸ The stable and established life of this journal marked a significant landmark in the work of the Society and the two are still in a rich sense symbiotic. The journal reminds people of the existence of the Society and the Society remains a staple provider of material for the journal. The number of issues published per year increased to three in 2005 (when Susan Parsons became editor) and again to four per annum in 2009; the journal now is read throughout the Anglophone world both in hard copy, but most commonly online. ⁵⁹

The late 1980s marked further progress in establishing the international nature of the Society. The 1987 conference focused on Ecumenism and Ethics and included contributions from Professors Richard McCormick and John Howard Yoder from the USA, and Professor Dietrich Ritschl from Heidelberg; Oliver O’Donovan offered a paper focusing on ‘Is there Such a Thing as a Single Christian Ethic?’ In 1988, the theme was Professional Ethics and in 1989 Political Ethics. The move to a more varied international list of speakers continued with Philip Wogaman from Washington and Trudy van Asperen from Amsterdam contributing in 1988. In 1990 the theme was Sexual Ethics with papers from Philip Turner of General Theological Seminary in New York and Susan Parsons, the current editor of this journal, on ‘Sexuality and Embodiment’. The 1991 theme was Feminism and Christian Ethics and 1992 looked at Unity and Pluralism in a Changing Europe. It would be tedious to catalogue further conferences. Suffice to say that by the mid-1990s, the Society was firmly established as was its journal. Furthermore new blood was being pumped into both the committee and the editorial management of the journal.

Both Jacob and Platten, who had steered the committee, continued with the Society throughout the 1980s. Platten resigned from the committee in 1989 on his appointment to Lambeth Palace as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary for Ecumenical Affairs; the annual conference invariably clashed with the yearly meeting of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission of which he was now the Anglican Co-Secretary. Bill Jacob stood down at about the same time as he had moved to become Warden of Lincoln Theological College and as his scholarly focus reverted to his main area of study, eighteenth-century church history. The Society owes an enormous debt of gratitude to its secretaries and particularly to the first two, Alan Suggate and Richard Higginson, who helped the Society into a position where it could stand firmly on its own feet. Dave Leal also contributed a very great deal to the firm establishment of the Society within the academy. In a letter in the spring of 1991, Peter Baelz, the Society’s first President, wrote:

Although I have attended the Society’s meetings only sporadically, I am delighted that it so obviously thrives and that its journal goes from strength to strength. ⁶⁰

* * *

This brief journey through the early history of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics began with a reflection on the Anglican moral theological tradition and the vagaries of its development. It did so for two distinct reasons. First of all, there is no doubt that Peter Harvey’s perception of the Society growing out of the Church of England’s need to re-launch the study of Christian ethics is an accurate perception. Certainly that was the aim of the 1982 consultation at Addington Palace. It was at that meeting that the seed of the idea for the Society first began to germinate. The introduction to this paper indicated how the Church of England’s own journey within this discipline had followed an erratic and uncertain pilgrimage. In the mid-twentieth century the focus on teaching this discipline reached a particularly low ebb. We have seen how Vatican II led to a renewal of moral theology within the Roman Catholic Church. Within the reformed tradition there was also a rebirth with the work of Paul Ramsey in the USA, and in Europe with the rebirth of theological ethics in the writings of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and Helmut Thielicke. So, although the distinctively Anglican initiative in sending out the first circular suggesting the establishment of the Society was regrettably narrow, it did nonetheless touch on a much broader stream throughout the churches, building on an emergent revival in the subject.

The other distinct reason for beginning with an Anglican reflection, notably focused in the Caroline period, was to draw attention to the richness of an approach to Christian ethics and moral theology which is integrative in its intention. The work of the Society and its journal over 29 years has pointed to the richness of the Christian moral tradition and the way in which different disciplines overlap and enrich each other, hence Duncan Forrester’s early concern that a new society should not duplicate the contributions of others. Far from doing that, however, the Society has offered a broader vision of Christian theology and its ethical and moral implications. The Caroline fathers saw ascetic, doctrinal and moral theology as part of a broader whole. They also saw individual and social issues as being of equal significance and of being inextricably caught up into the everyday challenges of human society. Practice and scholarship were indivisible for them. This may remain the crucial challenge for the Society as it moves into the second generation of its existence: are practitioners and scholars challenging each other sufficiently and assisting the Christian faith in speaking to a world direly needing the riches of the Christian tradition and engagement with it?