…But the Faith That Justifies is Never Alone

We shall not learn how to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters. Nevertheless, such talk may teach us better than anything else what it is for a soul to be lost or saved, and so teach us to care about it for ourselves and others.

- Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 224

Scripture, Authority, and Faith

An an Evangelical Christian, one of the things I just love to say, is that I take the Bible seriously. One of our great-grandaddy’s, John Stott, once said that this is the hallmark of Evangelical Christianity – the disposition to believe whatever the Bible can be accurately shown to teach, and to allow it to shape your life.

However, this statement has its limits. It is clearly polemical, implying that all other Christians don’t take the Bible seriously. It is also not that illuminating. ‘What exactly would it be to take the Bible seriously?’ you might genuinely ask. Here is one of the more thought-provoking treatments of this question that attempts to fill out the notion.

If we need to say more about the Scriptures than that they are authorized, perhaps we may follow John Webster in speaking of their ‘sanctification’ for their work. That means simply that God has set them apart. As he  has set apart a particular member of the that race for the salvation of the world, so he has set apart particular  writers to bear a definite and decisive  testimony to what he has done. It was, of course, a human testimony they had to bear, a work performed in human ways by human servants. In a thousand ways, the texts that lie between the covers of our Bibles show that they are the product of painstaking and creative human labor and reception. But we must be careful what we make of that word ‘human’. If we glide from speaking of their humanity into implying some kind of inadequacy in them, as though their being human were a shameful secret we have laid bare, a deficiency we are now in a position to patch up, then it is we, not they, that must stand  charged with ignorance and superstition. The humanity of the Scriptures does not entitle us to patronize them. Just as we speak of the sinlessness of the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and some Christians speak of the immaculate human conception of the Virgin Mary, so we may speak quite appropriately of a perfection of Holy Scripture. Its perfection is sui generis, a fitness for its own assigned task. The perfection of the Psalms does not consist in their being the most perfectly metrical verses or containing the most perfect poetic imagery. The perfection of the letters of Paul does not consist in their being the highest examples of epistolary elegance. Neither does the perfection of the historical books consist in their being the most unambiguous records or the  most discerning evaluation of sources.

The only perfection that counts is this: that God truly attests himself and his deeds through this poetry, these letters, this history. The faith required of the reader of Holy Scripture  is obedience to the testimony that God bears within them, and that is one and the same as the faith that  leads to salvation.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis (2008), p. 55-56

Oliver O’Donovan: In Praise of Relativism?

The New Testament can and should exercise authority over our moral thought at both general and specific levels. Yet there remains a work of moral judgment that is properly relative to agents and situations, and this is what shapes the priorities that prevail in given periods. That is why it is more difficult for us to sympathize with the moral attitudes of earlier Christian generations than it is to share their doctrinal convictions; for with our contemporaries we share a common world with its urgent questions and moral challenges. The logic of human historicity is that living in a given age means having a distinct set of practical questions to answer, neither wholly unlike those faced in other generations nor mere repetitions of them…If we ask why there should be historical differences, the answer is simple: the priorities we hold are the result of shared judgments about the demands of the age in which we live and act.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p. 45

Christians are often scared of the word ‘relativism’. Christians are also sometimes ashamed of the proverbial skeletons in their historical closet – Christians from bygone eras who did, what seems to our lights, awful and irrational things. This quote from Oliver O’Donovan throws light on both these attitudes. He surprisingly seems to suggest that there is a sense in which Christians are relativist, and he seems to caution against referring unproblematically to Christian history to shed light on contemporary questions.

Thoughts?

Ethics: Description or Judgment?

“Ethics” is not the name of a descriptive science, like “chemistry” or “sociology”. There is no slice of reality in which it specializes. Ethics is the explication of the logic of practical reason that directs our conduct, individual and collective. It terminates not in a descriptive judgment about how the world lies, or a slice of the world, but in a practical judgment on how we shall conduct ourselves.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), pp. 37-38.

This remark from O’Donovan cuts straight to the heart of a latent fogginess in my own thinking. Is ethics primarily a task of description or of judgment? That is, when we make ethical claims – when we say that ‘hate is wrong’ and ‘generosity is good’ – are we first and foremost recommending a certain course of action, or are we describing the way the world is? As a Christian, I often think it is the later: there are objective moral realities and God has given us insight into them through the gospel of Jesus Christ. So when we make moral claims we are describing the world truthfully as we know it be thanks to God’s revelation, and we are also, indirectly, describing what God is like.

O’Donovan clearly recommends the other option, that ethics ought to be a task of judgment, but for me this raises a host of other questions, not least, is this judgment then independent of any descriptive account we give of the world – a descriptive story which can either include reference to God or not? 

What do you think?

Norms In Evangelical Reasoning

When really serious issues are at stake and talk of doctrines ‘upon which the church stands or falls’ begins to rumble like thunder, urging the search for resolution can seem like an invitation to capitulate, to concede essential points before beginning. It can seem as though Scripture is deemed to be inconclusive and ambiguous, so that either side is free to concede the possible right of the other’s interpretation. It can seem as though what is needed is an indefinite irresolution about everything important, in which there is no need for, and no possibility of, a decisive closure.

But that is all a trick of the light…

None of this is implied in the search for agreement. The only thing I concede in committing myself to such a process is that if I could discuss the matter through with an opponent sincerely committed to the church’s authorities, Scripture chief among them, the Holy Spirit would open up perspectives that are not immediately apparent, and that patient and scrupulous pursuit of these could lead at least to giving the problem a different shape – a shape I presume will be compatible with, though not precisely identical to, the views my opponent now holds, even if I cannot yet see how. I do not have to think I may be mistaken about the cardinal points of which I am convinced. The only thing I have to think – and this, surely, is not difficult on such a subject! – is that there are things still to be learned by one who is determined to be taught by Scripture how to read the age in which we live.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p.32-33

Evangelical Christians believe that one thing which marks them out as distinctive from all other approaches to the Christian faith and tradition is their stance towards Scripture. That is, how they approach the Bible as an authority. This hallmark is not without its problems: Other sincere Christians from different traditions are likely to take offense at evangelicals latching onto this since it implies that other traditions don’t really take the bible seriously; it is also prone to misunderstanding, with the pithy sentence ‘taking the Bible seriously’ being reconstructed as ‘believing every word in the Bible is true, end of conversation’ which soon leads to the caricature ‘science is dumb and let’s legislate Old Testament morality’.

The above remarks from Oliver O’Donovan give a helpful elucidation of what evangelicals are trying to get at when they say that they take the Bible seriously.  O’Donovan’s quote rewards close reading. To those outside of the evangelical tradition, hopefully it should water-down some stereotypes. To evangelicals it should serve as a reminder and perhaps a call to repentance.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this quote.

Aquinas the Pragmatist?

It is worth pausing to make comparison with a similar moral antinomy, much discussed in the Scholastic period: Is it right to obey a mistaken conscience? On the one hand, obeying one’s conscious is, apparently by definition, something it is always right to do. On the other hand, a mistaken conscience is, again by definition, a conscience that instructs you to do the wrong thing. So doing what a mistaken conscience tells you is to do right and wrong at the same time. There is a lesson to be learned from the deft way Aquinas, confronting this paradox of “perplexity”, thrusts it aside. “One can withdraw from the error”, he tells us (Summa Theologiae II. 1.19 ad 3). Commentators have expressed bewilderment at this, for it is, of course, not an answer to the question, but an evasion. It does not tell us what to do when our conscience is mistaken; it tells us  not to have a mistaken conscience. Is Aquinas merely saying, “If that was where I wanted to go, I wouldn’t start from here” – always a bad answer to practical questions, since “here” is where all practical questions start from? No: he means that there is something that the framing of the question has left out of account; the alternative is wrongly posed. It beguiles us into imagining a helpless innocent pathetically trapped between the devil of dutiful wrongdoing and the deep blue sea of guilt-ridden right-doing. Moral reality is simply not like that.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p.31

In this passage, profound Christian ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan points out a little lesson in philosophy, which I always thought was given voice by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Pragmatists like John Dewey and William James. O’Donovan surprisingly points out that the same move can be seen in the work of the medieval theologian Aquinas (ca. 1225-1275). Perhaps proof that there is, after all, nothing new under the sun.

The lesson is: rejecting the question. A philosophical stance towards questions, or a least a philosophical stance informed by Wittgenstein, Pragmatism (and Aquinas!) holds that not every question is a good question. Questions can be loaded and so naturally push you towards one answer; questions can set up false dichotomy’s and distinctions and so obscure other relevant options or ideas; questions can be motivated not by the neutral task of pure inquiry but by mysterious and complex psychological and political reasons.

The difference between O’Donovan’s point as sourced via Aquinas, and this idea of scrutinizing questions (and indeed the very act of asking questions), is that Christians believe that there is an objective, concrete reality which can be obscured and manipulated by bad questions. O’Donovan concludes, ‘Moral reality is simply not like that’, a phrase Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists wouldn’t want to be caught saying. However I think this moral (and probably metaphysical) realism provides a greater incentive to reject bad questions, since they genuinely can hide features of an independent reality, they genuinely can fail to latch onto the way things are.

Wittgenstein was interested in what about the human psychology motivates people to ask philosophical questions, Pragmatists were worried about how allegedly neutral questions could be political and ethical questions in a Groucho Marx disguise. O’Donovan and Aquinas are concerned that certain questions simply fail to carve out reality at the joints, to capture the richness and complexity of reality.

Ethics With a Telescope

The distinction between flesh and spirit in not dualistic but eschatological. Paul’s contrast between flesh and spirit is not between matter and mind but between the old, fallen humanity of Adam and the new humanity of Christ. ‘Flesh’ refers to the fallen humanity; ‘spirit’ to the redeemed, eschatological humanity which has already taken shape in Christ and begins, through the Spirit, to take place in those who are being conformed to his image, when and as God pleases.

– Colin Gunton, Act and Being (2002), p. 114

This brief remark from Colin Gunton crystallizes a point which is of great importance in Christian ethics, and which ultimately sets it apart from other ethical systems. Ethics is often discussed in the New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul, in deceptively simple terms of choosing between actions of the ‘flesh’ and actions of the ‘spirit’ (e.g. Romans 8, Galatians 5). What this means is not that there are earthy, physical, sweaty, dirty and all-too-human actions on the one hand and lofty, heavenly, blissful, pure and divine actions on the other, and that therefore ethics is somehow a matter of trying to be less human and more like God.

Rather, what it means is that ethics needs to tell a story. Christian ethical systems, Christian ethical decisions, Christian ethical reasoning and Christian ethical prescriptions need to tell a story about God, Jesus, humanity and – crucially – the future. It needs to tell a story about two different ages, a story about the difference between the past and the future. It needs to tell the story of what human life was meant to be like, and what, because of God’s acting in Jesus, it will one day be like. This is the context in which these terms ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ find their meaning, and to rip them out of this serves only to obscure things.

Christian ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan is helpful in continuing this thought, arguing that this dichotomy brings a simplicity to ethics, and can be utilized as a decision procedure. He writes:

The final question is whether this life, this act, this character, belong to the renewed and transformed world which God is bringing into being…In the light of that question, the issues of morality which are as complex and diverse as the created world which gives rise to them are reduced to a stark and awesome simplicity. We can speak of the simple choice for or against God’s new creation, the simple alternative of a broad way and a narrow way, the straightforward either-or opposition of sin and virtue.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 259-260

Against Individualism in Ethics

And so Saint Paul continues, ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging symbol. I may have gifts of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.’ (1 Corinthians 13.1-2, NEB). In reading these familiar words we must be alert to the context of discussion in which they are situated: the greatest achievements which Paul thinks meaningless without love are gifts of the Spirit, vocations, particular callings to which one is summoned individually, which will distinguish this man’s service from his neighbor’s and will mark his history out as a unique and personal history. It is not that Paul deprecates the individual and personally distinctive; it is not that he suspects all striking manifestations of it a secret hypocrisy.

His point is simply that a life considered solely as the fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working-out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’, so the variety of forms of life are unified within a common form of life according to God’s order, the life of love.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 222

Individualism is a pretty attractive idea. We tend to admire people who manage to achieve some sort of individualism against the odds. We admire people who think for themselves, who refuse to be defined by the society or tradition they are a part of. Rogue figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust (or Elizabeth Bennet) insist on not fitting into any predefined role society may have had for them, and of not letting any group, institution or one perspective tell them who they really are, or tell them what they ought to aspire to. As Samuel Coleridge once said, heroes invent the terms and categories by which their life will be judged.

This leads to the question – what is the opposite of individualism? If the Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who leaves and slams the door is a heroic individual, what would we say of the Nora that stayed?

The quote above from O’Donovan suggests that the opposite of individualism need not be ‘conservatism’, ‘submissiveness’, ‘resignation’ or ‘ordinariness’. He suggests that the opposite of individualism is seeing your life not as the subjective expression of a unique take on life, but as the subjective expression of something universal. If individualism is the subjective expression of the particular, the contingent, the unique, the self-constructed then it’s opposite is the subjective expression of the universal, the fixed, the necessary, the received. Construing things this way shows that it is not the moment of subjective ethical expression which is under threat, but the source of this expression.

O’Donovan argues that all Christian ethics needs to be an expression of love. Christians are free to perform ethical action and engage in ethical reasoning and to still call what they are doing Christian so long as it seeks to be an expression of love, particularly the kind of love that God displayed on the cross. The person who speaks in tongues of angels, does so from love. The person who prophesies, does so from love. The person who lives in faith, does so from love. The Christian who buys only Fair Trade chocolate, does so from love. The Christian who befriends someone who is utterly different to them, does so from love. The Christian who takes a position on abortion, war, torture or sexual ethics, does so from love.

This quote from O’Donovan draws attention to an important and unique characteristic of Christian ethics. Christians hold that the ethical life has a certain shape – the life of love. Amongst all the complexity and subjectivity of contemporary life Christians hold that ethical living is living which is built on and shaped by a particular non-negotiable – love. Henry David Thoreau once said that living well, living ethically, is a matter of ‘dwelling as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ Christianity replies, there is only one channel. Life which aspires to fulfill a personal destiny is vacant abstraction, and morally speaking is neither here nor there. Life which attempts to embody something universal, is good.

To many, this idea of subjectively expressing something universal is much more attractive than subjectively expressing something of your own making. Which idea are you more attracted to as the task of ethical living?

How to Use the Bible in Christian Ethics

We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of the order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it will lead to evasions of the ‘plain’ sense of the Bible’s teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian theological construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible’s silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 200

Christians are convinced that they ought to hold to moral convictions and that these convictions ought to be rooted in Scripture, which we take to be the word of God. However, given this pair of seemingly simple and compatible convictions, there is much confusion about how exactly the Bible should be deployed in ethics and ethical conversation. I think there are two main confusions.

First, Christians are not too sure what to do with ethical prescriptions that seem context bound, out of date, and to the periphery of activities ethics should be focused on – examples of Israel’s food and ceremonial laws, and Paul’s instructions to slave owners spring to mind.

Second, we’re sometimes not sure how strongly to hold moral convictions which the Bible doesn’t speak to. At various times, in various Christian traditions, Christians have held strong moral convictions about issues as diverse as birth control, economic distributive justice, abortion, stem-cell research, the necessity of war, the necssity of pacifism, loving and monogamous homosexual relationships, euthanasia, pornography, racism, democracy and the Harry Potter books. What all these issues have in common is a lack of any cut-and-dry correspondence to a moral prescription of the Bible – a ‘Do not…’ or an ’Always..’ or a ’Blessed is he who…’

The above remarks from O’Donovan suggest a Christian stance towards the Bible which can address these two confusions. It holds that all that the Bible has to say about ethics is not contained in sentences that begin with ‘Do not…’ or ‘Always…’ or ‘Blessed is he who…’. It holds that the Bible points to a coherent plan, a consistent order, a ‘comprehensive moral viewpoint’ which is far deeper and richer than a couple of prescriptions lumped together in a heap. Through it’s story about God and Israel, and about the death and resurrection of God in Jesus, and it’s proclamation of the Good News for all creation, O’Donovan suggests there is a presentation of a certain ethical orientation. An orientation which is more like a precise, beautiful and big house, then like a pile of bricks.

To the Christian who thinks ethics is a matter of dropping proof-texts, O’Donovan says the Christian ethical viewpoint is far more compelling, fluid and complex then you might think, but warns that if you take this approach seriously you may feel the comfort of knee-jerk conservatism and ‘plain’ intuition fading around you.

To those who, often in reaction to a Christianity of this first bent, refrain from making strong Christian moral claims about some of the complexities of modern life listed above, instead invoking the silence of the Bible as a divine ‘Go no further’, O’Donovan dares them to glimpse the full architectural sketch of the Bible and reconsider whether there aren’t many important issues which can be spoken to coherently and sensibly from Scripture.

What do you think of this approach to (Christian) ethics? What could this ‘sketch’ be? Do you think this is what most people think when they think of religious or Christian ethics?