Abstract
This primer on Christian ethics will be valuable for many readers, in particular those wanting to understand ethics in the more ‘open’ strand of Protestant Christianity. Its authors are both American evangelical university professors: the late Glen Stassen (1936–2014) who wrote the first edition, and David P. Gushee who, partly with Stassen and partly on his own, updated this second edition. Subsequently, Gushee and Codi D. Norred have written an article for this journal in which they have, with commendable honesty, called into serious question many of the book’s central assumptions (‘The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics’, Studies in Christian Ethics 31.1 (2018), pp. 3–16).
The authors of Kingdom Ethics contend that whilst many evangelical Christians maintain a pietistic adherence to the person of Jesus, they nonetheless pay little attention to his actual teaching when they come to consider moral issues. The authors aim to re-medy this by attempting ‘to make the actual moral teaching of Jesus central for Christian ethics’ (p. 18). Drawing on the work of scholars such as N.T. Wright, they depict Jesus as a preacher of the Kingdom, ‘the trailblazer and pioneer of God’s reign’ (p. 443). In his announcement of the Kingdom of God, Jesus brings to fruition prophetic teaching, in particular that of Isaiah, about the primacy of justice, mercy and deliverance. ‘Discipleship’, they write, ‘and therefore the Christian faith—is about doing the words of Jesus’ (p. 443). Thus, as we wait, hope and pray for God to bring in his Kingdom, we are called upon to enact it and start to make it become a reality in our individual lives, and within our communities.
Based on such insights, the authors discuss their methodology for Christian ethics in the first half of the book, eventually yielding a series of twelve ‘Key Method Elements’ (KMEs). These are a slightly uneven collection of points that combine basic guiding principles, for example commitment to the central importance of love and justice, with various deliberative procedures. For example, the final two KMEs focus on the use of a somewhat complicated diagram which puts together boxes based on our ‘Way of Seeing’, ‘Way of Reasoning’, ‘Embodied Context’ and ‘Basic Convictions’. These are connected up with a variety of arrows pointing in all directions between each box, and with a large feedback loop taking us back to the beginning again (p. 173). Beyond providing a possibly valuable structure for undergraduate essays, I was not quite sure how helpful or usable it could be.
In the second half of the book, the KMEs go into action as Stassen and Gushee consider a wide range of ethical questions such as criminal justice, patriarchy, war, marriage, race and the care of creation, primarily considering these in the context of modern America.
The basis of the work is certainly a welcome one: to renew and repristinate Christian ethical thought from the primary source of Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’, and to treat his teaching there not just as a set of impossibly high ideals which can thus be quickly ignored or dismissed, but as an enduringly important programme and guide for Christian living.
We encounter a problem however in the authors’ often-reiterated and somewhat surprising assertion that ‘the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount are… seldom taught, preached, or lived’ (p. 22) and that it is therefore up to the authors themselves to reassert their centrality because everyone else has neglected them (p. 190). For a correction to this, we might look to the Roman Catholic moral theologian Servais Pinckaers O.P. (1925–2008), who reminds us that, far from being sidelined in the Christian moral tradition, Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5–7 has actually been at the forefront of it, as evidenced in the Greek Fathers, St Augustine, the Scholastics, in particular St Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscan theologians of the thirteenth century and, recently, in Pinckaers himself and the many people he has influenced (see S. Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, T & T Clark, 1995, pp. 134–35).
This perhaps alerts us to a key characteristic of Kingdom Ethics: that, as a result of the authors’ theological convictions, it is largely ahistorical and immune to lessons from the wider Christian tradition. Stassen and Gushee write that whilst we may learn from tradition, ‘any equating of the authority of Scripture and of tradition must be rejected on the basis of Jesus’s example’ (p. 53). To give some examples of this somewhat dismissive approach to the tradition: in the area of political ethics, the writings of Justin Martyr in the second century are said to lead simply and quickly to a ‘devilish dualism’ between God’s authority and the authority of this world (p. 90). Surely, however, some further nuance might have been provided, for example, by a discussion of precisely this subject as St Augustine treats it in the City of God. Similarly, when the authors discuss Christian character and the ‘virtues of Kingdom people’ (chapter 2), they might have paid more than cursory attention to the classic exposition of the virtues by St Thomas Aquinas. But no: as Gushee and Norred put it with disarming honesty in their subsequent article, the presumption of Kingdom Ethics is that it is possible ‘to make the leap from first-century Palestine to twentieth-century America’ (‘The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics’, p. 7).
In the hands of Stassen and Gushee, rather as in those of Augustine’s great adversary Pelagius, Jesus himself becomes essentially an inspired and persuasive moral teacher. The Christian believer relates primarily to him as a disciple, following the way of life that he taught—‘doing the words of Jesus’ (p. 443). New Testament reflection on Christ, however, and the subsequent theology that arose from it, depicts a variety of other ways in which to understand Christ—ways which also have decisive relevance for the way we might view the Christian moral life. For example, Jesus is the divine Word through whom all creation came into being, and he is the great high priest who has passed into the holy of holies to atone for the sins of his people. Whilst in Kingdom Ethics, such christological themes remain strangely obscured from view, it is they that primarily make Jesus’ teaching authoritative for Christians: ‘what makes Christ important is God, his Divine Sonship’ (J. Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, Ignatius Press, 2005, p. 42).
The result of this somewhat uni-dimensional Christology seems to be that, despite the authors’ strong assertion of the centrality and uniqueness of Jesus’ proclamation, when it actually comes to considering ethical issues, they eventually come to surprisingly safe and predictable conclusions. For example, in their discussion of end of life issues, the authors condemn active euthanasia which deliberately aims to bring about the death of the patient, but are able to support (what they call) ‘passive euthanasia’ which avoids ‘useless prolonging of the dying process’ (p. 440). While surely a sensible distinction, this is hardly the stunningly fresh Jesus-centred, Kingdom insight that the first part of the book seems to promise. Similarly, after a slightly tortuous survey of different views about sexual ethics: ‘traditionalist’, ‘moderate traditionalist’ (which comes in A and B versions), ‘conflicted’ and ‘revisionist’, the authors arrive at the somewhat unremarkable conclusion that ‘wise people come to recognize that covenantal relationships characterized by love, fidelity, and justice are the path to the wholeness all seek’ (p. 269).
In their later article Gushee and Norred express the fear that, in Kingdom Ethics, the New Testament hope for the reign of God became unhelpfully conflated with the liberal idea of progress. Impressed by Martin Luther King’s often-quoted dictum that ‘the arc of the moral universe … bends towards justice’, Kingdom Ethics encouraged a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed expectation that, aided by the sincere efforts of well-intentioned liberal evangelical Christians, God’s Kingdom is pretty clearly on its way, and could be seen to be so. Subsequently, however, Gushee has been more struck by the voices of those who are less convinced about human progress, such as the liberation theologian Miguel De La Torre with his ‘“theology of hopelessness, where meaning and purpose is given to life in the struggle of implementing justice-based praxis” even without a narrative horizon to give it sense’ (‘The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics’, p. 10, quoting De La Torre, The Politics of Jesús: A Hispanic Political Theology, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, p. 139). Similarly, concerns about long-term and irreversible climate change and the ‘nightmare presidency’ of Donald Trump as President of the United States have brought Gushee and Norred to the view that ‘if Christian eschatological hope is fixed on a happy outcome to human history, it looks like a losing bet’ (ibid., p. 15).
Perhaps the primary lesson for Christian moral reflection of this worthy, if perhaps rather over-laboured book is to call into question attempts to go behind centuries of Christian thought, so as to discover a fresh rendering of Jesus and his message that has been uncontaminated by later accretions of church tradition. The attempt to move directly from Jesus and his disciples, as depicted in the earlier parts of the synoptic gospels, to twenty-first century America certainly neglects the important insights that come to us from generations of earlier Christians. But it also results in a product that, despite the authors’ best intentions to rediscover the roots of Christian ethical teaching, curiously ends up reflecting and promoting some rather standard liberal assumptions.
Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount remains, as it always has been, a primary source for Christian moral reflection which must continually direct, and often correct, the church. The authors rightly draw attention to this, even as they invite serious questions about the way they present not only the modern implications of Jesus’ teaching, but also the nature of the teacher himself.