John C. McDowell

Knowing where to begin in the field of Christian ethics is not an easy business. One could, for example, ask the obvious question ‘What is theological ethics, and how do we proceed in doing them?’ But identifying the appropriate process of answering these itself recognises that the response given, to a great extent, depends upon considering just who is doing the answering. This, of course, does not necessarily lead to one’s folding beneath the weight of a supreme sense of subjectivity and relativity. It is merely to recognise that our answers to these questions, as with our answers to a plenitude of other questions, reflects who we are: our perceptions, character, etc. The answers will in some sense, therefore, reflect the subjectivity of the respondent: since her perceptions and cogitations are precisely her way of seeing things.

But, lest one should imagine that this is to lend weight to an almost seemingly imperialistic sense of epistemic subjectivity, one needs to note the rather banal, but nevertheless all too often overlooked, point that precisely who we are and how we perceive things is moulded through our interactions with living traditions of people whose input to our cognitive and moral development helps to determine the people that we are. And those traditions often have long memories (but, more darkly, also frequently corrupted memories). Hence theological ethics cannot escape, without denying a fundamental facet of the way in which thought and action is shaped, its origins and genealogy, memories of thinkers and figures from the (both remote and nearer) past who have served to fashion the various traditions from which we receive our being. (Thinkers such as Jesus himself, Paul, Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, etc., spring readily to mind here as the great formative minds on the various branches of the Christian tradition.)

What is more, this thought-formation receives further input from self-styled secular and non-Christian theorists: for example, figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, have had a profound impact, in one way or another, on aspects of public and Christian thinking and acting. This fact, of course, raises without explicitly answering the specifically normative question of how the relationship between consciously theological ethics and that of explicitly non-Christian sources is to be conceived. If Christian ethics, then, is broadly defined (and not everyone would concur with this description) as reflection on the nature of one’s being a creature before God and other human beings, what is the nature of its ‘border’, if there is such a thing at all, with other forms of reflection on the nature and character of human agency?

As we have already seen, there has been a generally overwhelming assumption that has shaped Christian practice and reflection about ethics in modernity: that something called ‘ethics’ exists prior to or independent of ‘doctrine’ and theology. The ethical theory of 5 thinkers within this broad type of approach to the subject have already been discussed (viz., Plato, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Ayer). Their broad approach creates (if their arguments be considered valid) insurmountable problems for any discipline of theological ethics if that discipline lay claim to any form of distinctiveness.

Broadly speaking, these various thinkers’ reflections on this issue privilege ‘secular’ ethics to the point of utterly undermining any distinct contribution from a theological perspective. After all, either it is the case that secularity dissolves theology (as with Kant), or theology as thinking within the ‘sacred’ space is secluded from the ‘profane’ spaces of culture, i.e., privatised. Of course, whereas Kant felt that his practical reason was creating breathing space for religious faith, in practice, his ethics propel religious ethics out of the equation. Ayer entertained no such illusions concerning the place of theological ethics (or, indeed, any forms of ethical rationality and ‘objectivity’ since he undermined all forms of ethical deliberation’s cognitive status) in secular society. The point is that for him, and the Vienna circle that provided the his main well of inspiration, that true ways of thinking are distinguished from religious ways of thinking – the latter are considered to be emotive and mythological expressions [This approach is further encapsulated in Braithwaite’s analysis of the nature of ethical judgments]. Trutz Rendtorff summarises the consequences:

One would expect a different analysis by theologians, since they are (by name at least) engaged in the very discipline that these philosophers have relegated or subsumed under reason’s proceedings. With some theologians this is true, but with others the above method of approaching ethics often underlies their own contribution, to a certain extent.

It must be noted that the following typology is by no means complete, and does not intend to fully delve into the complexities of the contents of all theologically inspired ethical theories. Rather, it must serve only as a guide to the range of possible responses given to the methodological question of the relationship between secular and theological ethics. It is a selected cross-section of various possible strategies. In so doing, of course, the nature and content of these forms of theological ethics will be discussed.

Each of these strategies also variously provide different approaches to the questions of

1) Sources for ethics: from whence do (or rather, ought) our ethics arise? E.g., scripture, traditions, reason, ‘commonplace’ ways of thinking and acting, reason, conscience, natural law, direct revelations, etc.

2) Absolutism and relativism in ethics: certain versions of the divine command theory of ethics postulate that ethical principles are absolute laws which are to be universally accepted, interpreted, and applied by all peoples in all times and places (hence the requirement that a ‘good life’ comes only from hearing the divine command ...). Other forms of Christian ethics do more justice to themes of ethical relativity. Questions of the tragic dimension of ethical reflection and decision making can here come into play (i.e., that knowing the ethical ‘good’ is a complex business that can lead us into problematic interchanges between our creaturehood and that of others; or because our interpretations of the ‘good’ can present instances of ethical conflict in a tragically messy world).

A similar set of responses may be discovered on the objective-subjective question: some would argue that ethics is reflection on a given, an absolute set of commands/rules that objectively exist prior to, and independent of, the human agent; others argue that ethics discusses guidelines (rather than absolute rules) which help shape the agent in her concrete decision-making; still others argue that ethics is a self-generated and determined enterprise, wholly existent because of one’s situation of living in a world with other people and objects.

Questions of assessing the appropriateness of any of these ethical types is also difficult to do. It has been frequently assumed that a certain neutrality could be entertained in ethical debate; i.e., that all parties could and should shed their own presuppositions in order to enter onto shared/common territory, observe the various arguments and nature of the ethics under consideration, and thereafter unanimously decide on the appropriately warranted position which could then be adopted.

However, although there are exceptions, contemporary thinkers generally admit that the processes of one’s being ethically grounded, ethical debate, and possible paradigm-shifts are much more complex and messy, as much informed by sociological and psychological considerations as by theoretically theological and philosophical ones [Exceptions to this are, e.g., Richard Swinburne’s apologetic strategy; certain arguments for the ‘provability’ of the resurrection; etc.].

We are born into, shaped by, and continue to inhabit worlds of discourse and language. Our own position on ethics shares, therefore, many general characteristics with that world and the shared network of beliefs. Consequently, although our belief structure is to a certain extent malleable and expandable through further experience and reflection, we tend to see things through the tainted lenses that we inevitably wear as particular people, living in specific times and places [This thought often comes as a shock to some people who presume the purity and eternal validity of their own thoughts. To make the claim that I have done is to apparently reduce this secure absoluteness to a dangerous relativity, and such is only one short step away from a full blown nihilism. If we see things in our own way then how can we be sure that our way of seeing is true? However, surely the very fact that theologians have spoken of sin as a disrupting influence on the cognition as well as the will is appropriate here. Moreover, Christian tradition has understood the role of the creeds as a hermeneutical one - as ways of better reading the scriptures. John Calvin, for instance, spoke of the proper spectacles to wear when attempting to interpret scripture].

If this is so, it is the case that persuading others of the legitimacy of one’s own position is not a matter of leaving one’s own territory completely (since that cannot be done - one cannot unlearn the things that one knows, or unbecome the people that our experiences and knowledge have made). Rather, although there are imaginative leaps in the debating process in order to attempt to understand and critique another standpoint, the debate will be more ad hoc and pragmatic, and also consequently more tentative and hopeful. Therefore, in taking a critical position on any particular ethical strategy one needs to recognise what one is actually doing, and where one is coming from. That does not, however, necessarily undermine the need for, and validity of the critique. It merely places in a more honest perspective one’s own criticisms and appropriations, remembering that the process of ethical debate is an endless one - one that is appropriate to a vision of life that admits human fragility, since, as Paul writes, "now we see through a glass darkly" in this period of eschatological between-times (coming from the eschatological event of a particular resurrection to the eschatological consummation of the general resurrection) [To accord ethical debate this tentative, probing and processive character is already to question versions of theology that seek to close off debate in a style akin to eschatological consummation and completion - i.e., that the Truth is a given and can thereby be fully experienced, known and lived. Does this eschatology make sense of the NT and the present situation of suffering experience, or does it fall into a parallel trap to that into which the Corinthians fell?].

Under consideration is not some minor point of ecclesiastical dogma, or some purely academic nit-picking piece of logic. On the contrary, at issue is the very character of Christian existence and agency, particularly understood to be problematic in a post-Christian society. The primary question, therefore, that Christian ethics has to discuss is how its ethical imagination and practice is determined by its theological horizon, and what the nature and content of that horizon is.

What is required is a way to moderately and fluidly typologise ethical strategies, provide a theological account of the human who acts, and resist detailed description of ways of acting before God as a graced creature. It is this, I have elsewhere argued, that characterises the ethics of Karl Barth.