Читать книгу The Christian Moral Life - Timothy F. Sedgwick - Страница 11

In the thirteenth century all Catholics were required to make a confession of sin to a priest at least once a year. The confession of sin soon became a weekly obligation. The priest as confessor was responsible to declare God’s forgiveness of sin and to offer pastoral support in the amendment and renewal of life.¹⁴ In order to provide moral judgment regarding sin and pastoral guidance in light of sin, the Roman Catholic Church developed moral theologies. Judgments and counsel often became mechanical, in part from the sheer number of confessions heard each week. The purpose of the confession, however, was to enable persons to name those actions and attitudes that separated them from God, from their neighbor, and from themselves. To name sin was to identify what was contrary to a person’s deepest desire and true identity. The naming of sin was, therefore, pastoral, to bring people back into relationship with God and with their neighbor. Where there was sorrow for sin there was forgiveness, the release from guilt, and the reestablishment of the bonds that give life wholeness. As priest, the confessor thus declared to the penitent absolution, the forgiveness of sins. Again, while confessions often devolved into mechanical judgments of sin and absolution, the deeper purpose was reconciliation.

In order to offer direction to confessors, moral theologies developed an understanding of moral responsibility and sinful acts. Often written as a separate volume called general moral theology, the first focus of moral theology was on what has been called “moral agency.” The concern was how persons come to know and do the good, how mind and will are perfected or corrupted in the actions that form their lives. A second volume of moral theology then focused on what a person should do. Often called special moral theology, this volume addressed specific cases and sought to offer practical moral judgments in order to determine sinful acts.¹⁵

The general Roman Catholic account of the Christian moral life began with a description of the purpose or end of human life as being in relationship to God. In the end the person was to “see God.” Called the beatific vision, this visual image drew together experience and purpose. The end of life was to live in the presence of God. Such a presence was to share in the mind of God. That is to say, to be in the presence of God is to be drawn into God’s purpose or work. In terms of content, this end is called “blessedness.” Happiness is not a matter of individual pleasure but a matter of sharing in what is ultimately good and purposeful. Persons can rest in this relationship because nothing is wanting. They are content and at peace, filled with a sense of glory, joy, praise, and thankfulness.

Following a discussion of the end of life, general moral theologies describe the human person in terms of virtues and vices. Virtues and vices are moral terms for describing the perfection or corruption of human powers and capacities. In matters of value, as in all matters of life, we become what we do. As such, virtues are good moral habits. Vices are bad moral habits. As developed in the ancient Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, the basic human virtues are called temperance, courage, practical wisdom, and justice. These virtues were called cardinal virtues, from the Latin cardo, meaning “hinge,” because they were understood as pivotal to human fulfillment.

Perfecting of the body is a matter of temperance, of forming bodily pleasure in right proportion so that one seeks neither excessive consumption nor excessive denial. A healthy person eats and enjoys eating. He or she is neither anorexic nor obese. The perfection of the will was a matter of the development of courage or, from the Latin translation of the Greek word for courage, also called fortitude. A person of courage is steadfast, able to act in the face of danger without becoming foolish or reckless. With fortitude a nurse is able to serve those with highly contagious diseases, taking appropriate caution, masking and gloving. Perfection of mind is a matter of practical wisdom or, from the Latin translation of the Greek, prudence. Prudence is knowing when to do what, gained through practical experience. A farmer with prudence knows when to plant and when to wait until the ground can be plowed.

As this suggests, temperance, fortitude, and prudence complement one another. For example, the young lack the experience necessary to be wise and therefore are more often foolish and intemperate. In turn, a hangover from partying into the morning hours provides knowledge more vivid than admonitions to drink in moderation. The moral life in this sense involves a harmony, a balancing of activities in order to create wholeness to life. Justice is then the last of the cardinal virtues: to give each what is appropriately due. As such, justice is a political virtue focusing on what is needed to form a community of people. Again, these excellences were understood as habits. By doing what was good, a person came to experience the good in his or her heart. Once known, the good was done naturally, almost spontaneously.

At the heart of virtue is knowledge of the good. Roman Catholic moral theology understood that such knowledge was not given simply in “growing up,” or in other terms, given naturally. Instead, to know the good ultimately was a matter of the experience of God. The experience of God, in turn, formed the self. Again, the powers or capacities of the self were perfected. This ultimate — or what was called supernatural perfection — comes from God. The specific virtues were, therefore, called the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love.

Faith, as a virtue, refers both to the knowledge of God and to the act of knowing God. The experience of God was a matter of both knowledge of God and trust in God. Hope refers to the will. Instead of anxiety and despair, cynicism or bitterness, the experience of God instills hope as an openness to the future and an expectation of new opportunities and joys. Finally, love as a theological virtue refers to the experience of God as a matter of being loved. As with faith and hope, love does not simply develop from a life lived. Instead, love first comes to the Christian. As Christians have expressed this, God first loves us.

These three theological virtues are integrally related. There is no knowledge of God except knowledge born in relationship to God. Faith arises from the experience of being loved; hence faith is a matter of love. In turn, love is not simply a feeling but is a relationship to what is ultimately good. Love is grounded in what is trustworthy. Love is a matter of faith. Hope also is grounded in faith and love, just as there is no faith and love apart from hope. Together, faith, hope, and love give expression to the experience of God as acting upon us and changing us. As such they are virtues. They perfect the human power and capacity to act. Because they first arise from the experience of God as acting upon us, they are called supernatural virtues. They do not arise from making sense of life in general or from human effort and achievement. They are not in this sense ideals to be achieved. Instead, they are gifts from God. They are not matters of human work but matters of divine grace. As such, they come from the concrete experience of God that forms Christians in relationship to God. Central to this formation is worship and specifically the Eucharist.

Protestant thinkers shared Roman Catholic understandings that the moral life was given in the grace of God. They also emphasized the centrality of worship. What they rejected was what they judged as a narrow focus on human action. While Roman Catholic accounts of Christian faith and the moral life began with an emphasis on grace, the focus of moral theology emphasized the criteria by which to assess the goodness of human action and make judgments regarding specific cases. Protestants saw in this focus — even more so in this practice than in the written texts themselves — an undue emphasis on individual guilt and on the religious acts that should be undertaken as a remedy to sin. As Martin Luther concluded from his experience as a Roman Catholic monk, this focus on sinful acts and religious duties led to a preoccupation with oneself instead of leading to the new world of grace revealed in Jesus Christ.

The problem Protestants confronted was the opposite of that confronted by Roman Catholics. Roman Catholic moral theology developed in order to provide understanding and guidance for confessors. The problem was in naming sins and determining what to do in order to live more fully in relationship with God. The problem for Protestants was hearing the gospel. If the good news of the gospel could be heard, then there would be faith, hope, and love. The moral life would follow.

In order to hear the gospel, Protestant thinkers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected the Roman Catholic framework of moral theology. The shape of the moral life was still expressed by the Ten Commandments. But what was most important was accepting that we are accepted and brought into relationship to God, apart from our own effort and work.¹⁶ In the language of Paul, the law is good, but a person is not justified by the law. The law details acts that should and should not be done. To live by the law, according to Paul, is to focus on our acts as means to an end, for example, to avoid punishment or loss or to gain favor or some other end. I tell the truth about what I am selling because if I don’t and am caught I will be unable to do business. I tell the truth because it is good for business; it is more profitable. In contrast, to live by faith is to see the law as expressing the shape of the relations that are good.

The motivation to act morally comes not from the law but from the relationship that gives rise to the law in the first place. I tell the truth because I am bound to other persons; I care about them and would not want to deceive them. In this sense, law expresses and deepens the relationship that is already given. The law is like a kiss or an embrace. The kiss and the embrace express and deepen the love that is already present. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth expressed this understanding of law by saying “law is the form of the gospel.”¹⁷ Faith as knowledge and relationship with God is the basis of the moral life. Faith fills the heart with the love and desire to abide in and deepen the relationship with God. In this sense the Christian moral life is a matter of grace. The heart of Christian faith and life is justification by grace through faith.

Again, Protestant thinkers shared with Roman Catholics the understanding that Christian faith was a matter of radical grace, a transformation of heart and mind in terms of personal knowledge of God which resulted in new dispositions. Instead of the language of virtue as habits of perfection, however, Protestants were more likely to speak of this new life in terms of the fruit of the Holy Spirit — as joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). The life itself was always a matter of freedom and love. The new life was freely done. Works flowed freely from the change effected by God’s grace. These works were works of love, so much so that Luther could emphasize that faith is nothing but “faith active in love” (Gal. 5:6).¹⁸

This Protestant understanding of human life and of divine grace is more narrowly theological than Roman Catholic understandings. Instead of focusing on the power and capacities of the human self, the focus of Christian ethics is on relationship with God. This is illustrated by the understanding of the Ten Commandments. For Protestants the primary purpose of the Ten Commandments and law in general was twofold: to describe the shape of the Christian life and to convict us of our inability to live that life on our own. For this reason, in The Large Catechism Luther implores all Christians to read and meditate on the Ten Commandments every day along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.¹⁹ The good designated in the Ten Commandments is never fully realized. The more that the Christian studies the law the more he or she realizes that what good there is comes from God. Only by the grace of God is given the love of God and neighbor.

For Protestants what is most important for the Christian moral life is preaching and teaching of law and gospel. Roman Catholic accounts of growth in faith and love were, at best, misplaced because they focused attention on what to do — the law — rather than on what has been done — the gospel. Despite these differences, Roman Catholic and Protestant understandings of the moral life share common convictions expressed in the Ten Commandments. As stated in the first commandment against idolatry, there is one God who is the power and meaning of all of life. To use more theological language, God is the creator and redeemer of all of life. This is what is meant in saying, “I believe in one God.” The world and specifically the relationships that form our lives are of one piece. The goods of life are related, and express a unity and purpose beyond themselves. They are not randomly related. Christian faith is thus a moral life. All things are related and ordered in relationship to God. More specifically, love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. This requires the worship of God, the acknowledgment of God, and the “resting” in God. This is the point of the fourth commandment: to keep holy the Sabbath.

Monotheism is the central common conviction shared by Christians. This conviction is tied to two others. The problem of human life is human sinfulness, not defined narrowly as a matter of wrong acts, but as idolatry. Understood in the context of worship, idolatry is a matter of misplaced love. Christian faith is not first of all a matter of right belief but of right relationship. In this sense, Christians share the conviction that faith is covenantal, given in a relationship with God. This covenant, moreover, is understood as a matter of grace. Grace is a matter of being loved by God, of being forgiven, of being embraced and invited into a new life. Monotheism, sin as idolatry, faith as covenantal — these are three basic beliefs Christians share in common.

Two more specific convictions Christians also share in common. Christians are Christian because they have come into the covenant with God through Jesus Christ. Jesus is, in this sense, the revelation of God. In other words, as Christians experience Jesus, Jesus is the redeemer. The knowledge of Jesus is given in scripture and worship, what Christians refer to as Word and sacrament. In scripture the story of Jesus is told as the story of God’s relationship to us. In worship that relationship is acknowledged and deepened.

These common convictions about Christian faith and the moral life have not always been apparent given the polemical relationship between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. From the sixteenth century onward, Roman Catholics and Protestants each sought to establish themselves as the religion of the individual nations of Europe and then with colonial expansion as the religion of new lands and peoples throughout the world. In this context, Roman Catholics and Protestants defined themselves over and against each other. This led to dogmatic understandings that hardened differences in terms of basic beliefs rather than fostering common understandings of Christian faith as a way of life given in response to God.

Faith came to be defined for Protestants in terms of justification by faith. Correspondingly, the absolute sovereignty of God was emphasized, so much so that predestination and double predestination were central beliefs for many Calvinists. In God’s absolute power and wisdom, God knew from the beginning of time who was saved and who was damned. These beliefs were reinforced as they were conceived as the alternative to Roman Catholic “works” righteousness, in which God was reduced to a good that humans acquired. For Roman Catholics, such Protestant understandings of faith reflected an individualism centered in a subjective experience of faith. The truths of faith were denied, especially the Roman Catholic beliefs about the church and its authority. Among these defining beliefs of Roman Catholicism was the belief in the pope as head of the church, a belief that eventually was defined in terms of papal infallibility in teaching doctrine essential to faith. For Protestants, these beliefs were idolatrous in that they substituted belief in the church and the pope for faith in God.

The competition between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism fed polemics and hardened understandings of faith as a matter of mutually exclusive beliefs. Points of common identity were lost from view. Alternative frameworks that placed their different beliefs in some larger context were largely inconceivable. All of this changed only recently. While several events mark this change, none is greater than the Roman Catholic Vatican II Council that met from 1962 to 1965. Under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, this Council produced a broad range of documents that no longer defined Christian faith as Roman Catholic over and against Protestantism. Instead began the exploration of what is the faith that is shared among “all people of good will.”²⁰

The present age is ecumenical. Beyond polemics Roman Catholics and Protestants have sought to understand what experiences have given rise to their differences. This has led to an explosion of historical studies examining, for example, scripture, the church, worship and liturgy, theology, and ethics.²¹ Thicker descriptions have been offered of the life of faith communities. Beliefs have been contextualized, placed in the broader context of these faith communities. Understandings of Christian faith and life have then been enlarged by the inclusion of different communities within Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — for example, communities of women beginning in the early church and continuing through contemporary feminist and womanist movements.²² Increasingly, other voices representing other communities of faith have also become part of this exploration of the nature of faith. For example, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and the Anabaptists have become important conversation partners, as well as contemporary voices ranging from new evangelical and charismatic communities to those based on liberation theologies.²³

From each of these communities of faith come theologies that seek to offer a richly detailed description of Christian faith and the moral life. The particularity of these theologies offers the promise of an account that will do more than identify common convictions of faith. A thick description holds the promise of providing a fuller understanding of the specific features of Christian faith as a way of life. The challenge and difficulty in developing such an account is in discerning and describing these features in such a way that they represent more than ritual notes or an ethnographic description of a particular people. Instead, if such an account is to reflect the broader claims of Christian faith, it must place a particular community and tradition in the larger context of human life in general as lived in the presence of God.

This introduction to the Christian moral life is broadly Christian and particularly Anglican. In this chapter I have sought to identify the central claims regarding the nature of Christian faith and the moral life as reflected in the Ten Commandments and in the central claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the next chapter I will turn from defining beliefs about the nature of Christian faith and life to a more detailed description of this life as lived, given my experience and understanding of faith as formed by the Anglican tradition. These first two chapters provide something of a bifocal vision in order to offer in the remaining chapters a thicker, more detailed account of Christian faith as a way of life grounded in the worship of God.

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1. The narrative understanding of ethics as a matter of setting, character, and plot has its origins in Aristotle’s Poetics. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 143. This has been the center of many contemporary understandings of the relationship of Christian faith and ethics. See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Central to this development has been the work of Alasdair Maclntyre, especially After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) in which he argues that all ethics depend on a way of life grounded in a set of practices and understood in terms of a life story. Among the best accounts of the foundations that inform this work is William Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990). For a discussion of these foundations, see the Appendix.

2. This is the argument central to H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

3. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 11, p. 804.

4. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, 2 vols., ed. E G. Stanwood (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), vol. 1, p. 29.

5. Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. 1, p. 3.

6. The following sketches of pieties are intended to reflect different types of responses. These types (traditional, modern, and postmodern) point to the transformation in worldviews and understandings from what might be called pre-enlightenment to modern to postmodern. For an account of the changes informing these sketches and, more broadly, the argument of this book in general, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990); and Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue.

7. Riggins Earl, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self and Community in the Slave Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis, 1993).

8. This is a variation of the three questions by which James M. Gustafson has defined the discipline of theological ethics: What is the nature of the good? What is the nature of moral agency? And, what are the criteria for moral judgment? See James M. Gustafson, “Christian Ethics,” The Westminster Dictionaryof Christian Ethics, James F. Childress and John Macquarrie, eds. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), pp. 87-90. Also see James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), esp. pp. 139-44.

9. For a historical and scriptural account of the development and meaning of the Ten Commandments see Walter J. Harrelson, The Ten Commandments and Human Rights (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). For a contemporary discussion in light of contemporary Christian ethics see Paul Lehmann, The Decalogue and a Human Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

10. Here the purpose of law is understood in terms of love — love of God and love of neighbor as these two are integrally related. But, as indicated below in this chapter, the nature of love of God and neighbor is not clear. Love of God is not even mentioned in the Old Testament; in the New Testament, outside of the summary of the law, it is mentioned only one other time (Luke 11:42). As one line of thought this book is the development of such an understanding of divine and human love. For a summary of the reasons for the lack of such an account, and in turn a constructive account to which I am in basic agreement and with which this account coheres, see Edward C. Vacek, Love, Divine and Human: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994), pp. 131-33.

11. Irving Singer, The Nature of hove. Vol. 1: Plato to Luther, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 233-67.

12. See Kathryn Greene-McCreight, “Restless Until We Rest in God,” Ex Auditu 11 (1995): 29-41. For recent discussion of the origins and meaning of the Christian Sabbath see D. A. Carson, ed., From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).

13. See James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) for an account of the similarities and differences between the two.

14. Charles Curran, “The Sacrament of Penance Today,” in Contemporary Problems in Moral Theology (Notre Dame: Fides, 1970), pp. 1-96.

15. For an example of a traditional moral theology, see Thomas Slater, A Manual of Moral Theology for English-Speaking Countries, 3rd ed. (New York: Benziger, 1908).

16. See, e.g., Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians,” Luther’s Works, vols. 26-27, trans. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1963, 1964).

17. Karl Barth, “Gospel and Law,” Community, State and Church, trans. Will Herberg (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), pp. 71-100.

18. Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” Luther’s Works, vol. 31, trans. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), p. 365.

19. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, tr. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), p. 5.

20. See Documents of Vatican II, trans. Walter M. Abbott (New York: American Press, 1966), p. 3.

21. See Lisa Sowie Cahill and James F. Childress, eds., Christian Ethics: Problems and Prospects (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1996), especially pp. 3-182.

22. See, e.g., Charles E. Curran, Margaret A. Farley, and Richard A. McCormick, eds., Feminist Ethics and the Catholic Moral Tradition. Moral Theology 9 (New York: Paulist, 1996).

23. For an introduction to contemporary voices in theology, see Roger Badham, ed., Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1998).