I always enjoy reading Ephraim Radner’s thoughts, and always learn from him. He is a cherished mentor. That said, I do wish to voice an objection that pertains not just to his most recent volley against same-sex marriage, but to the whole project, shared by many, of keeping alive the sexuality debates and cultivating a self-identity as a defender of orthodoxy on that question.
My objection is that I think such a project does not serve the Church as well it may seem to conservative Christians because it causes Christians to focus on the wrong questions. The approach to doing ethics that Ephraim pursues is, in my opinion, not the most fruitful.
As Sam Wells said in his dissertation, commenting on this discovery by Stanley Hauerwas:
When ethics is understood as the adjudication of tricky cases of conscience by balancing moral principles, the practice is implicitly socially conservative – since it assumes there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the status quo, only with its anomalies. In contrast, the Christian community lives within a tradition based on a story which in many respects contradicts the assumptions of the contemporary social status quo. How then does the community faithfully live out its story?
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Ephraim implicitly wants Christians to engage on the level of acts consequentialism. That is precisely the ethical approach of his opponents, whom he characterizes as Christian leaders who have departed from the received wisdom. That is the ethical approach of such leaders because that is how Niebuhr taught the Church to defend the desiderata of its culture. Yet acts consequentialism is both strategic and theological error. The error implies confusion about the task of Christian ethics. Our task is not to defend tradition or a particular ethical conclusion with regard to a proposed act. Rather, our task (channeling Wells again) is “to describe the world in which Christians perceive themselves to live and act, and to help the Christian community form practices consistent with life in such a world.”
The problem is NOT that folks are making wrong choices with respect to homosexuality. The problem is NOT that folks are irrationally preferring one set of facts over the ones Ephraim wants to defend as though both sets of facts occupy the same world. The problem for the Church is not one of choice but of vision: due to the astigmatism of sin, folks actually perceive entirely different worlds. Folks on the opposing side of Ephraim’s proposed acts consequentialism choose rationally, but choose on the basis of a differently perceived world. And so the problem in our ethics cannot be reduced simply to claims that people are disobedient or rebellious or irrationally want to conform to cultural waywardness. The problem is that too often we do not see the world as it really is. As Wells has shown, our task as ecclesial ethicists is not to argue for different choices, but for different worlds.
Our strategy ought not be to engage in continuous battle over whether homoeroticism is rightly defended or condemned or in other questions about right acts, but rather to call the Church to the practices through which virtue is formed, wherein we learn to take the right things for granted. The material cause of right actions is a virtuous community, and so our most fruitful approach in ethics is to focus persistently on the formation of that virtuous community, resisting the temptation to respond at the level of acts consequentialism.
And therefore our energies ought to be devoted to the recovery of vision, not to debating on the level of acts consequentialism. We can trust folks to make right choices if they see the world rightly.
How do we collaborate with the Spirit’s sustenance of our ecclesial vision? By devoting ourselves to cultivation of the soil in which such vision is formed. And that soil just is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ – a relationship in which we discover ourselves to be addressed and acted upon by Christ and justified in our belief that the only right response is to follow. A personal relationship means that Christ can be no longer our object of study from a safe distance; there is a personal knowing such that his history becomes our history, and our actions are seen as extensions of our relationship with him. Such personal relationships are forged only through repetitive contact with him. And so we most collaborate with the Spirit by fostering such repetitive contact: our energies are rightly devoted to soil cultivation techniques such as the recovery of our Scriptural literacy, the classical spiritual disciplines (updated for our times as need be), the three-fold rule, and sacramental practices such as holy matrimony and reconciliation. If we focus on fostering personal relationships with Christ, the virtue we seek will happen. The Spirit will make it so.
Arguing about the rightness of same-sex marriage distracts us from our theological task, and is the least fruitful way to cultivate the virtue of Christian community. If, in spite of this caution, we must engage the presenting question, the level of discourse ought not be on the level of acts consequentialism (which, in the current discourse presupposes a universality of ethics that is itself dubious), but on descriptions and celebrations of real marriages that are rational responses to the experience of grace. Rather than attacking same-sex unions, we ought to be describing and calling folks to a fidelity in their vows that signifies the covenant of grace, and showing how the Spirit uses such exemplars of fidelity to form the community of Christ such that we are sustained in our mission to the world. The important questions about marriage are not about procreation or questions of natural law but about how the Spirit uses faithful marriages sacramentally to unveil the New Jerusalem, correcting our vision so that we see the world the way it really is.
Craig, If I read you correctly, you are arguing that consequentialism (i.e. utilitarianism?) is a wrong ethical approach, and that a virtue ethical theory is correct. I don’t think, however, that a virtue ethical theory is devoid of consideration of ends. In the Aristotelian/MacIntyrean world a social order is an organic whole towards which all of the parts are ordered. To use Aristotle’s biological example (which is consonant with St Paul’s doctrine of the Body), an organism is made up of heterogenous parts that, when working together, cause vegetative growth and locomotion. This is what the social organism is as… Read more »
Craig has pointed I think to the main thing, that our way forward is by “devoting ourselves to cultivation of the soil in which such vision is formed. And that soil just is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ – a relationship in which we discover ourselves to be addressed and acted upon by Christ and justified in our belief that the only right response is to follow.” Every act of obedience to follow Jesus because another means by which we are formed into the image of Jesus. This is where the bulk of our labor must go. This is… Read more »
Insofar as one’s goal is to argue for ‘different worlds’, then one’s task is utopian. The happy place is no place. There is only the here and now. An ecclesial ethics that will not start from this recognition is an ecclesial ethics that I do not want anything to do with. But if ecclesial ethicists are really content with such far out and dreamy arguments, I suppose that they will respond by telling me to ‘take a chill pill, man’.
I agree, Ben. Without engaging the consequences of actions, our ethics become disengaged. Deuteronomy is a good example of clearly articulated consequences of good and evil action.
Ben, were you to immerse yourself in the field, you would quickly discover that your description is exactly the opposite of that which characterizes ecclesial ethicists. They are famously suspicious of universalist arguments, especially of the utopian kind. In context, Wells’ comment has in view Yoder’s ‘politics of Jesus’ which is construed as an alternative politics to that of the world. So the argument actually goes in the direction you seem to desire: against utopian fantasy and toward an insistence on an incarnated ethics of great particularity – namely, that of Jesus. So the task of theology is to point… Read more »
The great difference between ecclesial ethics and evangelical ethics is that the latter is easy to understand and thus easy to apply. This is not to say that it is always applied well! But in terms of daily life, a mode of thought which can be used to make sense of difficult issues is far preferable to a system that one must have a doctorate degree to understand. Yes, some issues are difficult and require specialist training and specialist vocabularies. I am hardly opposed to such training, but it must ultimately be grounded in a way of life that the… Read more »
“Evangelical ethics” is not a category in any contemporary schema with which I am familiar. It sounds like you are referring to the Ramist approach advocated by the Cambridge Calvinists of the 1590s and enshrined in American evangelicalism by the Puritans: the practice of mining general principles from Scripture and applying them to particular situations, which is a deeply problematic approach that Hooker refuted so well I need not repeat the arguments here. My experience of you suggests that you have a much more nuanced view than this. But perhaps you mean something else. With regard to ecclesial ethics, it… Read more »
Jeff: two points. First, I did not speak of ‘wrong’ but of ‘fruitfulness.’ Your argument about arguing about the rules makes sense within a language game, but the problem to which Hauerwas and Wells were responding (and which led Hauerwas to criticize MacIntyre’s eventually), is the fact of pluralism. Your argument presupposes a universalist ethics in which we can assume that we are all in the same language game, but ecclesial ethicists – drawing upon Lindbeck (who also influenced Ephraim btw) – reject that premise for a variety of reasons. So, of course, we have to discuss ends at time,… Read more »
Craig, I appreciate your post and you know that I resonate with your ‘cultivating the soil’ approach. But it does seem that, at the end of the day, we are still going to have to discuss such difficult moral situations, rather than only work towards cultivating proper theological vision. I’ll admit that the phrase I disagree with the most is: ‘We can trust folks to make right choices if they see the world rightly’. While I might wish to affirm a statement optimistically, I just don’t think it’s true. It takes a lot more to make the right choice than… Read more »
Can’t argue with you, Zach, only clarify. My comment about ‘trusting folks’ sounds to me now as overly optimistic, too. That said, I know that what I had in view was Calvin’s notion of sin as blindness, and so seeing rightly as the cure of the cause of sin. But you’re certainly right to correct me there. Thanks. With regard to your claim about acts consequentialism, there is a distinction between the question of whether we ever have to deal with consequences and duties and the most fruitful way of nurturing a community of virtue. My use of the term… Read more »
I appreciate the discussion here. I would like to stress, however, that it really isn’t possible to separate out the character- and vision-forming aspect of Christian life from particular acts of judgment, decision, and witness. The latter are part of the former and vice versa. In the present case of same-sex marriage, the larger civil culture has decided to embrace the concept and practice of same-sex “marriage”, and to affirm its presuppositions (whatever they are). Not only does this contradict the Christian “vision” of the world, in my view, it does so quite concretely by violating the rights and dignity… Read more »
Thanks, Ephraim. To be clear, I’ve argued about method of ethical discourse and not argued that one should be silent, and I’ve argued about fruitfulness in so doing in our pluralistic era. You know the arguments against universalist ethics that the ecclesial ethicists have made, of course, so I won’t rehearse them here. But you know just as well that the ecclesial ethical method does not at all urge retreat from the political sphere. Hauerwas famously takes on violence and Wells takes on racism. And surely you’ve read their Christian Ethics, to which your colleague Joseph Mangina contributes, and so… Read more »
Thanks for the clarification, Craig. But on that basis, I guess I still don’t understand your concerns. We are perhaps talking past each other here. We seem to be quite in agreement that the issue is how same-sex marriage does or does not express or fit into the way Christians view God and God’s world in Christ. Baptism, Eucharist, eschatology and the rest are all related to this and to the character of the Scriptural word’s enunciated revelation of God… within which marriage finds its meaning. Perhaps where we differ is that I do not think categories like “fidelity” and… Read more »
Ephraim, With regard to my concern that we focus on the things that most contribute to the production of a virtuous community rather than on the sexuality debates, it is clear that we disagree on what is at stake in that particular question. I wonder if we disagree on that because I think the question has to do with how we encounter the real presence of Christ in a sacramental practice such as that of holy matrimony, and you (may) see the question as one of obedience? In such a case, we might calculate the stakes differently. With that in… Read more »
I wrote my reply late at night, and it occurs to me that more clarification of my line of questioning may be needed. The context is this: If one maintains a eudaimonistic view such as we find in Thomas, and also the view that our beatitude and telos is to participate in God’s rationality fully through scientia, then one’s focus in on virtue, and questions such as the presenting one are questions framed in terms of whether or not they constitute such participation in God’s rationality. Sin is spoken of in terms of blindness and salvation in terms of a… Read more »
This is helpful, Craig. But I think you are putting me — and the topic at hand — in a box that doesn’t exist. There is no dualistic opposition between virtue and obedience (obedience is freuqnetly understood as a virtue itself!), participation and discipleship/following and so on. They are part of a single and coherent reality that the loving human creature embodies in her or his relationship to God. Splitting them apart is a mistake, and frankly, the Augustine/Scotus vs. Thomas argument is, I suspect, historically flawed. (That’s another argument I don’t want to get into — but most Scotus… Read more »
To be clear, Ephraim, no box here: I asked you to locate yourself on a spectrum so that I can understand better why you are justified in your claims about the gravity of the threat to the church in the sexuality debates. Surely you are right that we must be careful in speaking of Scotus, and I’d add that the same is true of Thomas. So that we avoid offense to historians of both, surely we can speak of recognizable Thomas and Scotus moments where we refer not necessarily to their own claims but to shifts in habits of thought… Read more »
I can’t speak on Scotus as I have not read him. However, I wonder if it might be helpful to slightly alter the terms of description from great men (Aquinas and Scotus) to broader theological traditions (intellectualism/rationalism and voluntarism)? From my own readings on point, it seems that the issue between voluntarism and rationalism is, broadly speaking, one of will vs. reason – or, better, love vs. knowledge. The emphasis upon obedience within voluntarism does not strike me as being devoid of a range of affective interests and concerns, including but not limited to the of love God and union… Read more »
Your suggestion works for us Ben, but we’d need to specify the Thomist form of rationalism in which there is an innate capacity for intellection of transcendentals, euadomonism, etc, rather the Kantian or other forms. Virtue is not obedience. In brief it is an affective and cognitive disposition. It assumes that ethical judgements are phronetic and so aesthetic. Character is the goal, but these dispositions generate a wide range of responses that constitute participation in God’s rationality and therefore constitute obedience. Not so with the other end of the spectrum, ethical question are not aesthetic, phronetic questions, but more like… Read more »
First, can you explain what you mean by ‘aesthetic’? It isn’t clear.
Second, I am against ethics being a primarily academic discipline upon which action in the real world is predicated. In such a case, ethics – or, rather, the ethicist’s will (ironically, given the present discussion) – becomes a hindrance to right living. Piety does not need a PhD. Morality does not need a PhD. These may benefit from such training, but such training is not strictly necessary.
Aesthetics is the anglicization of a German word from the 18th c that is often associated with Kant. The word is retroactively projected onto both Plato and Aristotle in contemporary presentations of their thought, for both dealt with the subject matter. In particular, one see aesthetics in Aristotle’s Poetics. The key point is the distinction between things created for production and things created for themselves. The knowledge needed to create things for production (poïesis) is the knowledge of techne’, whereas the knowledge needed to create things that are themselves good involve phronesis (prudential judgment). This distinction is adopted by Aquinas… Read more »
Craig,
Wonderful post. From the peanut gallery, I think you’re own to something. And though I appreciate Radner’s push back on your general point, I suspect you’re right to call attention to the spectrum of views happening between Thomist and Scotist moments. This spectrum needs to be brought to the surface.
Many thanks!
Robb
I’d say you’ve introduced a false binary.
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