Back to the Basics: The Resurgence of Moral Formation in American Protestant Ethics

A Brief Glance at the Texts

To begin, Robin Lovin’s An Introduction to Christian Ethics displays all that was good in the previous generation of mainline Protestant ethics. It serves as a generous introduction that surveys how Christians organize their moral reasoning in terms of goals (teleology), duties (deontology), and virtues (areteology). Students of the field will recognize that these have been the defining categories of moral reasoning in the American discourse at least since Protestants and Catholics started meeting together at the Society of Christian Ethics in the 1960s, and we will see that they are carried forward diligently in one way or another in most of the other texts considered below. And, displaying incredible generosity, this text also contains a more personal preface written ‘for the student’ and a postscript ‘for the instructor’.

By the conclusion of the text, it is clear where Lovin has been leading the student: to a renovated, non-sentimental, realistic notion of moral responsibility. This particular virtue of responsibility, properly cultivated, shapes Christians into moral persons able to rightly interpret the actions of God and others upon them and determine when to employ the various moral theories to achieve the right goals or fulfill duties. And, with this conclusion, Lovin artfully synthesizes contributions from H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr and yet pushes them into conversation with the broader Christian story and tradition, including recent challenges to the Niebuhrs offered by Stanley Hauerwas and Emilie Townes among others; with this conclusion, Lovin retains a sense of the social emphases of twentieth-century Protestant ethics while organically integrating the importance of virtue, the late addition to the discourse.

Steve Wilkens’s edited volume Christian Ethics: Four Views essentially takes up the organizing categories presented by Lovin but, performatively, provides quite a different conclusion. Following a lengthy introduction, the text develops a self-referential conversation among expositors of, in turn, virtue ethics, natural law (a species of teleology), divine command theory (as a species of deontology), and prophetic ethics. The writers on these are, respectively, Brad Kallenberg, Claire Brown Peterson, John Hare and Peter Goodwin Heltzel. Literally, Wilkens attempts to create a genuine conversation among them by inserting responses to each chapter by the others in a way that affirms differences while delegitimizing impermeable boundaries. The individual contributions are somewhat asymmetrical in style, but each stands as a solid introduction to the respective form of moral reasoning.

The destabilizing element within this volume is the place or role of the final section devoted to ‘prophetic ethics’, a Spirit-led movement that ‘discerns and partners with the Holy Spirit’s movement in our world, transforming lives and communities, witnessing to Christ and the kingdom, and holding out hope for the restoration of God’s good creation’ (Goodwin Heltzel, in Wilkens, p. 165). ¹ Unlike Lovin’s text that attempts to illuminate the complementary roles that deontology, teleology and virtue play in the performance of responsibility, this text apparently sidesteps the notion of a plurality of moral approaches in favor of unresolved competition. This result may accidentally be due to the absence of a concluding synthesizing chapter, but I suspect it is primarily due to Wilkens’s resistance to the natural inclinations of the contributors themselves. For example, Wilkens describes natural law, virtue ethics and divine command theory as ‘systems’ while identifying prophetic ethics as something ‘unlike the other three’ and yet necessary to the book because it represents an ethical perspective that ‘clearly does not fit within the other three models’ (p. 4). Yet, in their own responses, the other three contributors imply a different, more compatible conclusion: Kallenberg—‘prophetic ethics is parasitic on at least some virtue-inculcating practices’ (p. 200); Peterson—‘requirements of a just society often cannot be discussed apart from questions about the essential natures of specific human activities and, more broadly, human nature and human flourishing’ (p. 204); Hare—‘the basic structure of [Goodwin Heltzel’s] account is generated by the three divine commands reported in Micah 6:8’ (p. 210, emphasis original). In the end, this text could conclude, much like Lovin does, that Christians really operate with a kind of moral pluralism with respect to modes of reasoning, yet both the rhetorical shape of the text and the posture of the final essay on prophetic ethics suggest that what we have here is a version of the sleight of hand in H. R. Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture—the first types are ‘ethical systems’ that ‘remain viable’ but the real answer is located in the final chapter: Christian ethics really is or ought to be prophetic ethics.

Each of the remaining texts engages the above methodological categories in one way or another but straightforwardly prioritizes one as the gateway to the heart of Christian ethics. Latching on to the priority of virtue—both cardinal and infused virtues—in moral reasoning, Victor Lee Austin’s Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed and Daniel Westberg’s Renewing Moral Theology reflect their author’s Anglican or Episcopal theological orientations deeply. Austin’s incredibly accessible text begins by asking the basic questions: Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Do we have free will? Is morality subjective, etc. Ostensibly, this volume is not designed to function as a textbook on Christian ethics. Yet, by Austin’s own confession, ‘this book will invite [the reader] to consider some of the basic questions of ethics, including the question of what difference it makes to speak of Christian ethics’ (pp. 1–2). And, if its reception in my REL 3390 Christian Ethics class is any indication, this is an excellent introduction to Christian ethics that is pitched just right (or perhaps my students are classic examples of ‘the Perplexed’).

After developing a nuanced account of virtue through attention to human flourishing, Austin’s lean and basic argument culminates with an exposition of love as the unifying end of the virtues, a conclusion that is then explicated through attention to friendship and persons with disabilities. In attempting to address ‘no particular moral question’ (p. 4)—which, incidentally, is an overstatement, since at least the relationship of disability to human flourishing is allotted its own chapter—Austin provides a rich, theologically-rooted foundation for all that it means to live a truly human existence.

Throughout, Austin’s text is deeply Thomistic, especially in its articulation of charity as friendship with God. And, as such, it unabashedly reflects the deep dependence on Catholic sources and interlocutors that has developed in the last half century. That said, Westberg almost seems to ‘out-Catholic’ him with a position that is as post-Vatican II as one might imagine in Protestant circles. Westberg begins with a Thomistic foundation that grounds a moral theology ‘based on truth, reality and the grace of God—one that is psychologically and philosophically rich, and both instructive and suggestive for contemporary Christian people’ (p. 25). What distinguishes this vision as ‘renewing’ are emphases on the following: a biblical basis, a sound moral psychology, the proper place of the law in ethics, ² and spirituality (pp. 25–26). Of course, these elements are not absent from Aquinas’s theology, but Westberg suggests that they are frequently not incorporated into his ethics, and doing so makes a difference.

Westberg’s text is written for seminarians and it is constructed as an account of ethics self-consciously grounded in shared theological convictions. Part I of the text develops these convictions; Part II develops an interconnected account of the virtues on the basis of these convictions in a way that shapes the Christian in conformity with Christ. And, in a rhetorical and perhaps substantive difference from Austin, Westberg concludes with hope and not love. Despite all that they share in common, the substantive difference between the two texts might be their respective assessments of a realized eschatology—Austin has an account in which friendship with God is necessarily present for the ethical life of true friendship with one’s neighbor; Westberg has a more realist vision in which hope directs the Christian to the new heaven and the new earth and in which justice and not love might necessarily play the leading role amidst the inequality and violence of this world.

Westberg invites evangelicals into his moral theology with the hope that they find themselves in familiar territory much of the time. While I, too, hope that might be the case, it is much more likely that evangelicals will find Kent A. Van Til’s The Moral Disciple and Patrick Nullens and Ronald T. Michener’s The Matrix of Christian Ethics: Integrating Philosophy and Moral Theology in a Postmodern Context much more familiar. Both of these texts prioritize divine command ethics, especially as revealed in Scripture, in a way that exhibits what might loosely be called an evangelical theological vision. Van Til’s text follows the logic of introducing: (a) the moral agent (including sin and virtue); (b) moral norms (including natural law and others that are clarified by divine command); and (c) consequences or ultimate outcomes. Virtues play a significant role in this vision, but they are instrumentalized to ultimate ends. And speaking of ultimate ends, any teleology that is present in Van Til’s vision is not derived from natural law but from the Bible—it is the kingdom of God. Further, this is the only text that dares to motivate with multiple ends in that it concludes not merely with the carrot of love, the beatific vision, or union with God but also with the stick of God’s intention to judge sin and evil in the final judgment: ‘in other words, our thoughts, words, and deeds in this life have everlasting consequences’ (p. 149).

Nullens and Michener’s text is also self-consciously aimed at an evangelical audience, yet its ideal audience is much more familiar with British and continental philosophical and theological sources than any of the texts previously addressed (e.g. Thomas Kuhn, Helmut Thielicke, John Caputo, Bertrand Russell, Oliver O’Donovan, John Paul II, Francis Fukuyama, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Simon Critchley—along with other, Belgian sources—all appear already in the Introduction). In taking aim at the ‘postmodern context’, this text both complexifies and simplifies its task; it presents a diverse and somewhat heterogenous account of what constitutes the contemporary ‘matrix’ within which Christian ethics is performed. As expected, the usual categories of consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology are here in one form or another, as are principles, phenomenology, personalism, anthropology, the Bible, and the Trinity. The chapters roughly move from the standard ‘ethical’ categories to the theological with personalism as the bridge: personalism is ‘the discipline of understanding people in their natural and historical settings and understanding how people transcend their natural conditions by reflecting a higher world of values’ (p. 132). With this in mind, the text builds towards the concluding description of a six-step ‘method’ for thinking through ethical challenges that enables the Christian to ‘navigate through the turbulent sea of an ethical dilemma’ (p. 226):

In the end, and contrary to the complementary vision provided by Lovin, they step back to a kind of ethical hierarchicalism with the love of God and neighbor at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the remainder of it seemingly left as a collection of moral antinomies (this feels not entirely unlike the conclusion of Wilkens’s volume). For this reason, this text seems to be permeated with a sense of Niebuhrian tragedy that betrays the hopeful personalist conclusion: ‘we must ultimately tie our ethics to a renewed image of God in the human person, within the context of the community of Christ. This is truly where all ethical hope lies’ (p. 244). And, like Westberg, we have a conclusion that lies in hope beyond the ambiguities of contemporary life.

Finally, Harry J. Huebner’s An Introduction to Christian Ethics: History, Movements, People loops back to the twentieth-century intellectual furniture familiar to Lovin but with an ecclesial and Anabaptist-inflected vision of what it means to be truly human. This is the ungainly giant in the group of texts, topping out at approximately 650 pages. In short, this is a selective resource book of sorts that might function as a history of ethics in the Christian tradition. It begins with Greek backgrounds, then moves to the biblical narrative and then on down the line until we arrive in the world engaged by Nullens and Michener, post-Enlightenment ethics. The book then circles back around to tell the story of Christian ethics through its encounter with philosophy (where we find short discussions of virtue, deontology, teleology, etc.), sociology, psychology and theology (and while theology permeates the entire text, this section attends particularly to the themes of theological method, Christology, ecclesiology and eschatology). Finally, it tells the story of the last centuries of Christian ethics through biography, beginning with Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth and ending with James McClendon and Stanley Hauerwas.

A conversation recounted by Huebner within the text is helpful for contextualizing what seems to be a telegraphed outcome of the volume:

A fellow ethics teacher looked at the table of contents of this book and said it was easy to see where it was all going since it concluded with a section on peace theologians. My response was that I was less interested in convincing university students to adopt a peace position, for that is easy. If anything, I wanted to convince them that Christian ethics is impossible without the church, and that is difficult (p. 634).

Huebner may be right in this last claim, because the other texts that most obviously assume the presence of the church make almost no mention of how Christian ethics is contextualized ecclesially—‘church’ does not even appear in Westberg’s index, and the method suggested by Nullens and Michener would include reference to the church merely on an accidental or ad hoc basis. For Huebner, the body of Christ exists as a witness to Christ and the love that Christ embodied unto death. It is participation in this body that allows him to end with hope, a hope that is held against the evidence of the real world, a hope already displayed in the life of the church, the body of Christ that actively participates in God’s redeeming the world.

Structural Trends and Emerging Trajectories

Having all-too-quickly summarized the texts above individually, it is important to step back and reflect on some of the trends present in these works collectively. Specifically, I will attend to structural building blocks within the texts, the authors themselves, and the state of the discourse.

In terms of apparatus,

In the context of a history of textbooks oriented toward or around case studies or competing positions—to which the ‘Four Views’ volume gives at least a formal nod—the texts of this generation are refreshingly coherent and deeply theological in an organic sense. And they are deeply personal. Essentially, these texts eschew ‘applied’ ends and seek to concentrate on personal formation, on the historical and doctrinal resources for the cultivation of discipleship, virtues or theological excellences. In service of an understanding of the truly human, the theological virtues of faith, hope and love are the means and literal ends of the majority of these texts. As I see it, what these texts reveal is the dialectical reaction to so much of the politically-engaged Protestant ethics of the last century. It is a pendulum swing of sorts, and the following description helps to illuminate just how far the pendulum has swung.

With the exceptions of Lovin, Huebner, and perhaps Goodwin Heltzel in Wilkens, this generation of introductory texts has essentially left behind the American giants of the twentieth century. Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Martin Luther King Jr., James Cone, Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, and even Stanley Hauerwas are barely represented in these texts, even though Hauerwas was perhaps the most influential ethicist in bringing virtue and the priority of theological concerns into the Protestant conversation several decades ago. And, in the same breath, I should say that the central focus on the political ramifications of Christology that permeated the ethics of the list just mentioned has also shifted. The methodological comforts of traditioned modes of reasoning remain. Yet, gone are the visceral post-Vietnam debates about war and peace, as are the pressing bioethical questions that eventually dominated the late twentieth-century debates; the civil rights discourse and the dramatic rise in political theology since 2000 has generally not yet been registered in the discourse; the perspectivalism and social critiques nurtured in feminist and womanist ethics are frequently glossed over in an attempt to reestablish the properly basic truly human; and the global context of crippling inequality and poverty, ecological destruction and rampant human rights abuses appear to stand beyond the purview of the primary concerns of the field.

Of course, an introductory text cannot do everything, and no doubt the characterization I have just sketched is unfair to the extent that it expects these texts to be something other than they claim to be. And, as I hope to have indicated above, these are very good texts in their own way. Yet, with all the sympathy in the world, I have begun to wonder whether the general identity of the authors of the texts—that is, white males writing for a North American audience—is also tied to the general tenor and trajectory of this generation of texts. To be clear, this is not to say that what is contained in these texts is necessarily problematic; it is to suggest that the field that emerges through these texts is profoundly truncated, and truncated with respect to all the areas that are frequently the concerns of more marginalized voices.

In Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (perhaps also an introductory ethics textbook of sorts?), Miguel De La Torre notes:

The proclivity of the dominant culture to deliberate ethics by pursuing the abstract good usually concludes with ethics being (de)liberated. Praxis leading toward a more just social order was a first casualty of abstract ethical thought. Even though such abstract deliberations may be sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed, they still fall short by failing to alleviate the root causes of disenfranchisement and dispossession. ⁴

De La Torre’s observation will inevitably admit exceptions, but given the collection of introductory textbooks engaged above, he is much closer to the truth than many in the field may want to admit.

Conclusion

One of the muted themes that occasionally emerges in the texts summarized above in different ways is that of the community of Christ. As I look at the introductory texts to the field in the North American context and with a good sense of the kinds of specialized texts that await students who stay in the field, I wonder whether it might be time for us to reconsider how we might conceive of these sorts of enterprises from the bottom up as community-based projects.

What I mean is this: do we really think introductory texts in Christian ethics ought to be single-authored? Have we become so habituated to the expectations of the academy that we implicitly betray our most basic conviction as the body of Christ in our construal of what it means to be truly human? Perhaps it is time to imagine introductory textbooks in ethics to be the synthetic product of a team of scholars performatively constituted by the diversity of the community of Christ to which the reader is called (and by this I do not simply mean a collection of disparate essays)? The Wilkens volume goes some way in this direction, though it self-consciously refuses any sort of synthesis or internal coherence. Of course, this sort of project would also consume vast amounts of time and it would garner virtually no academic rewards. But, might such a project make it possible to integrate the best that the current generation of texts has to offer within the community that is only virtually present? I suspect that until we begin to think about our field in this sort of way, whatever versions of the truly human we propose will look very much like the humans that we think we ought to be (and by we, I mean I).