Abstract
In October 2014 Brian Brock and Michael Mawson hosted a conference on ‘The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of Reformation Legacy’ at their university, the University of Aberdeen. They advertised it as addressing three questions: ‘What is the significance of the Reformation and its legacy for Christian ethics? Is there a distinctly Protestant contribution to contemporary ethical debates and discussions? What is this contribution and in what ways should it be pursued today?’ The papers in this collection are by the invited speakers.
I was asked to review this particular book by the reviews editor of this journal because in 2003 I founded an international network, called Catholic Theological Ethicists in the World Church (www.catholicethics.com). We held our first global conference in Padua in 2006, our second global conference in Trento in 2010, and a series of regional conferences on each continent (Manila 2008, Nairobi 2012, Berlin 2013, Kraków 2014, Bangalore 2015, and Bogotá 2016). I edited plenary papers from the two global conferences for publication (respectively by Continuum, 2007, and Orbis, 2010); Linda Hogan and other colleagues have edited related volumes. In July of this year we will hold our third global gathering in Sarajevo, aiming at promoting bridge-building in a world in urgent need. At the end of my review of Brock and Mawson’s ground-breaking book, in light of my own experience in such discourses I will raise a few questions about what directions the organizers and participants might further consider.
At the outset, the collection’s editors provide a via negativa establishing more what the book is not about than what it is: it is ‘not directly concerned with Protestant identity, or with attempting to secure or shore up a Protestant profile’ (p. 2). The focus is rather on the theological contribution of the Protestant Reformation and its legacy. Furthermore, while not concerned with Protestantism per se, the collection is interested in ‘what Protestant claims and commitments look like on the ground’ (p. 2).
To tease the reader further into these investigations, the collection begins with a sermon by Stanley Hauerwas delivered at the University of Aberdeen on the eve of the conference. ‘Citizens of Heaven’ is a self-critical examination of whether the freedom that comes from a righteousness made solely through faith leads to a fairly spiritualized reading of the gospel, one that ignores the way of sanctification that we all need. With his usual directness, Hauerwas warns against a faith that does not require you actually to drag your body to church! Here, like an exegete, he unpacks claims of the Reformer Martin Luther (the implicit father of this collection) regarding faith, righteousness and salvation and, like a preacher, he prompts his hearers to ask whether or not these claims resonate with their experiences, all the time waiting for their ‘Amen!’
Rightly the editors begin the papers proper with Gerald McKenny’s honest, transparent and resourceful essay that starts with the words, ‘The field of Protestant theological ethics is in decline’ (p. 17). Concerned with a complacency in relation to understanding the notion that God acts apart from our action, McKenny wants to find what from the Protestant tradition helps us properly to investigate the role of human agency in the righteous life. Surprisingly (for some), he turns to the unnamed hero of the book, Karl Barth, whose own legacy guides much of the collection’s theological insight. McKenny insists that Barth, ‘stresses that God acts in our place and apart from us not to take anything away from us, but rather to establish us as agents and subjects in our own right’ (p. 21). His account of Barth on human agency, engaging doctrines on election, justification and sanctification, as well as grace and nature, makes the essay a foundational building block for the enterprise that Brock and Mawson propose.
From the honed discipline of McKenny, we turn to the wide-ranging insights of Hans Ulrich that focus on the apocalyptic-messianic grammar of many of the major Protestant preachers who appreciate the in-breaking of God overturning the indeterminacy of the way we understand our lives.
Next Brian Brock follows in McKenny’s footsteps but leads us from Barth back to Luther to find how much he resonates with a Barthian account of ‘responsible human action as a matter of attunement to God’s working’ (p. 66).
Hauerwas takes us to ‘How to Do or Not Do Protestant Ethics’ and his is clearly the most ecumenical and exciting essay in the book. What is exciting about the contribution is how easily (though not facilely) Hauerwas moves among the traditions, seeing what resources are capable of complementing others and thereby building a series of legacies that could serve contemporary theological ethics. There is a graciousness here that is a model for Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox colleagues.
If Barth is the unnamed hero, John Howard Yoder is the target of re-examination and appraisal, a point made in two essays. In the first of these, Paul Martens invokes John Calvin’s treatise on the Anabaptists to ask whether there is an Anabaptist superiority complex with regard to the inherently violent state. This is the most ‘on-the-ground’ essay and uses the case of Yoder’s sexual assaults as a critique of Anabaptist leadership for not turning to the state to intervene: ‘I am specifically asking whether the state—in the form of law enforcement, whether organized locally, regionally or nationally—has a role in matters of Anabaptist church discipline’ (p. 119). As a Catholic-casuist-turned-virtue-ethicist, I resonated with the strong heuristic guidance for church polity that Martens proposes.
Michael Mawson returns to the question of human agency and confronts Yoder’s teaching with Bonhoeffer’s, typically considered the mainstream Reformation theologian most resonant with Yoder. Mawson notes that Bonhoeffer is unambiguous in asserting Christ as the primary agent in the Christian community, a noted difference from Yoder’s own claims.
Two fairly standard concepts in contemporary ethics eventually appear as the volume concludes. Rachel Muers ingeniously raises conscience’s head in the Quaker communities and highlights a pneumatological theology of freedom that permeates the Quaker experience of conscience. It is a theologically refreshing essay that makes any Christian realize the worth of knowing one’s tradition in its depth, rather than as it is simply assumed to be.
Exemplarism is the second concept that appears, in part because of the headway that virtue ethics has made recently in Protestant ethics. Michael Banner raises the role of saints in Reformation theology, particularly their exemplarity.
Finally, in a fairly inventive way Jennifer Herdt brings us back to Barth and this time tries to show how eudaimonism might be compatible with Barthian ethics. With a little Aquinas and Calvin on hand, she delivers well a Barth who can teach us ‘the joy of being addressed and of responding to that address’ (p. 171).
This is an extraordinarily satisfying collection that offers a substantive rebuke to the pervasive agnosticism that frames much of contemporary theological ethics. I do not mean to suggest, as several rightly note in this fine work, that we need to establish an identity politics in which we each adhere to (and defend) a particular church polity to which we belong. Rather, the disappointing agnosticism concerns the failure to acknowledge the theological sources that animate and prompt our own contemporary work. It is as if we have no history and depend on no one else’s legacy but our own. Often there is an immediacy about our claims as if suggesting that the theological anthropology that we implicitly presume or presuppose has never before been expressed or considered. When we acknow-ledge how we are affected by the theological claims of our forbearers and that their claims do make a difference in our lives, a certain epistemic humility becomes evident.
Humility is the virtue in this collection that keeps each author mindful that as theologians working in ethics, we need to let God be God first. So often in ethics, Pelagianism is the unacknowledged vice. But contemporary ethics is accompanied also by another vice: failure to acknowledge our fairly profound shared and received religious presuppositions. This fine book remedies that habit.
The humility in this collection is also apparent in the ecumenical tentativeness of each author’s claims. The assertions are barely that, proffered but not imposed, asking rather than telling the reader and fellow interlocutor: Is this not what the freedom of the Christian means?
Another extraordinary merit of this work is the effectiveness with which the writers communicate their fundamental theological claims. During my stints at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry, the late William Placher would tell me that the reason why Catholicism had such robust arguments was because we had a common language that allowed us grounds for debate. Protestants did not share that language, he argued, and the theological presuppositions that each held were always subject to yet another iteration. There is none of that inability to converse here.
Now let me suggest a few ways that Brock and Mawson could move their agenda ahead. In a manner of speaking these are matters I thought I would have found but did not in such a collection. The first is there was very little ‘on the ground’. In particular in a work on ethics, I was expecting some issues like global warming, immigration, homelessness, truth-telling, gender equity, respect for diversity, and so on. I was expecting something that needed a response, but the question was not posed. Here I was waiting for how would Luther, Calvin, the Anabaptists, Barth, and Bonhoeffer help us in these contemporary ethical matters. When we finally settle what moral agency is for us, what concrete difference does that make in the life of ethical inquiry? Do people work for better, more effective sanctuary, fairness, or inclusivity? I found it odd that the entire enquiry was exclusively conceptual and no attempt to engage so-called ethical issues was made. What will, for instance, the Barthian accommodation of joy, or its consideration of moral agency, bring to the issues of climate change, mass refugee movements, and the tragic banality of contemporary political leadership?
Secondly, though the Holy Spirit made a brief appearance, the church, church polity and church worship did not. Here again, I am not looking for identity issues. Rather, fellow Christians often look to us because of what other church members, leaders, elders, or teachers are claiming. In reading this book, I felt that, though the writers believe that Christians should be in church on Sundays worshipping as a people the living God, I could not see what difference this worship makes to ethics. This issue is related to my first concern about the concrete challenges we ethicists face. Other than the Yoder case and a comment on Cromwell, there was little in the collection about how Christian freedom is prayerfully, tangibly exercised.
Thirdly, much of the influence of Protestantism in this collection focuses on what particular theologians wrote; we need also to see how it was received and lived and how church polities have struggled with it. How do Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians actually as communities of faith think about issues? For instance, dozens of Catholic ethicists internationally have written on the wide array of issues related to HIV/AIDS. We did so because initially episcopal leaders tried to negate the ethical legitimacy of condoms and needle exchange. That political move ignited a response worldwide, and, though we originally entered because of the condom controversy, we ended up writing and reflecting on much broader issues related to the pandemic: access to treatment, gender equity in public health, research protocols, pharmaceutical tariffs, and so on. Perhaps those instances where Lutherans or Presbyterians debate about matters of equity regarding gender or sexual orientation might be illustrative. How do we understand Protestant theological ethicists within their particular polities?
I raise these three questions because the end of ethics is action. That The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist had not yet suggested any concrete instantiations of its impact makes me wait for the second conference.