Philip Turner
Moral Theology: Dodo or Phoenix?
Session I
Preface
The following six addresses were written in response to requests from the Diocese of West Texas and the Anglican Communion Institute for an introduction to the moral problems now facing the Episcopal Church. There are six lectures, but there could have been ten or twenty. Even with a more extended treatment, there would have been more to say. What I have tried to do is simply develop an outline of the moral challenge that lies before the Episcopal Church. An outline can do no more than suggest the work that needs completion. The outline provided in these addresses seeks to present no more than an indication of what a finished work entails.
The addresses begin with an attempt to describe the present crisis in Christian Ethics and Moral Theology. As the sub-title suggests, both disciplines may in fact be extinct. Consequently, any attempt to resurrect either or both requires a return to the foundations of Christian moral thought and practice. One way to accomplish this return is to ask what the proper focus of these disciplines in fact is. There are three possibilities. Either the focus is the sanctification of the individual believer, the reform of the social order, or the common life of the church. These are the options presented by the history of Christian moral thought. Accordingly, the second lecture provides an example of each possibility. Its purpose is to help the reader identify his or her particular starting point. Once, however, a starting point is identified, one must still ask if the particular focus one gives to moral reflection in fact receives biblical support. Thus, the purpose of the third lecture is to establish the focus given to Christian Ethics and Moral Theology in the Holy Scriptures.
The unexpected result of this inquiry (for Episcopalians) is that the focus given to moral reflection in the bible is neither individual sanctification nor social reform, but the common life of the church. If, however, the common life of the church is indeed the proper focus for Christian moral reflection, one still must ask how this common life is related to that of the larger society within which Christians happen to live. That is, one must ask both about the moral practices that distinguish the common life of the church and one must enquire more specifically about the way in which Christians participate in the larger social life of which they also are a part.
I offer these reflections in hope that they might help my fellow Episcopalians to engage more constructively in our present debates and struggles than now seems common. Even if only to a small degree they help people understand the theological and moral crisis in which the Episcopal Church now finds itself, and even if they assist only a small step toward its resolution, I will consider the effort worthwhile.
Philip Turner
Belfast ME
April 3, 2005
I
Moral Theology in Crisis
A.
I began teaching ethics some 30 years ago; and since that time I have felt as though I were living in a war zone. None of the churches in this country have managed to escape the divisive and debilitating moral arguments that have raged and continue to rage in each and every denomination; and none of these battles have raged more fearfully than in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians now stand in the midst of a church struggle whose intensity is exceeded only by the one concerning slavery that took place in the 19th Century. I am unable to predict how the struggle over sexual ethics now taking place in our church and within the Anglican Communion as a whole will turn out, but there is a strong possibility that both our church and the communion of which we are a part will divide.
The battle over sexual ethics is unquestionably the most bitter to have arisen in my 30 years as a professor of Christian ethics, but it is certainly not the only one. When I returned from a ten-year stint as a missionary of our church in Africa, there was in progress a heated debate over the ethics of our involvement in the nuclear arms race and the war in Vietnam. These struggles were preceded by a conflict over the civil rights of African Americans, and they were succeeded by contentious legal and political conflicts over a woman’s right to chose and a person’s right to die. Mixed in with this “moral stew” have been a number of other moral issues—artificial insemination by anonymous donor, stem cell research, and human cloning to mention but a few. And now we are faced with yet another war, the morality of which many find questionable and many others entirely noble, if not heroic. To this conflict I must add another that, though less intense, is of equal importance; namely, a more muted debate over the way in which the wealth of this country should be developed, divided, and perhaps even shared beyond its own boarders.
Given this history, it is not surprising that I receive a number of requests to speak on one or another moral issue or, more generally, Christian Ethics and Moral Theology. My problem is that I do not know how to meet the expectations of those who issue the invitations or those who are invited to listen and perhaps find some way through our current moral impasse. I become increasingly convinced that both as churches and as a nation, we have lost the ability to engage in serious moral and political discourse. The course of our past election serves only to confirm me in that opinion. If the pollsters are right (and I have very reason to believe that they are) most people had, well before the election, made up their minds without having their opinion tested by rigorous public debate. Consequently, both of our dominant parties continue to eschew serious debate, and in their place launch attack Ads designed to deflect attention from any serious engagement with the issues that confront our nation.
What the newspapers and the television news tell us about our past election campaign can be transferred directly to the interior life of our churches. Our congregations are filled with people who have made up their minds and (generally speaking) recognized the futility of discussing their views with people who do not already share them. They are filled also with people who have no desire to hear their priest tell them what, as Christians, they ought to think, say, and do in respect to the issues I have mentioned. These matters are considered matters for private conscience. Neither priest nor church has the right to claim moral obedience to belief and practice that lie outside private determination. Furthermore (since private conscience is sovereign), if I find that your conscience does not agree with mine, I may well assume that the disagreement between us signals either ignorance on your part or (worse) some terrible moral failure. At best, I might admonish myself to be tolerant of people whose opinions I find either wrong headed, or troubling, or both.
So what are we as clergy to do about ethics and moral theology? We are bound by solemn vow to teach and protect the faith and to admonish the wayward. Nevertheless, we know full well that, if we become overly definite in either pulpit or coffee hour in respect to any of these issues, we risk the loss of members and open division within our congregations. In some instances, we may even face the loss of our jobs. We know also that when we are interviewed for a job, our views on one or more of these issues may well determine the outcome. We know, in short, that the exercise of our vocation is now tied to the views we hold on these matters.
In circumstances such as these, when searching for a job, the prudent thing to do is to look for a congregation that shares one’s own views, or, when one sees that opinion is divided, to suggest sympathy for both points of view and in so doing present oneself as a moderate. The first of the possibilities places both priest and congregation in an activist role. The second breeds programs designed to promote mutual understanding between people who have more or less agreed to disagree. In the first case, priest and parish actively engage themselves in struggle. In the second, they find opportunities to share both experience and view point in controlled circumstances that disadvantage rigorous defense of one’s position or serious challenge to that of one’s opponent. In the first instance, moral investigation is short circuited by action; and in the second, it is drowned out by direct appeals to experience that cannot be questioned. So in the first instance moral reflection is precluded by an immediate and unreflective demand to act, and in the second by the requirement to sympathize.
In neither case is there any real space for Christian Ethics or Moral Theology. Thus, the question implied in the title of these addresses is a real one. Are Christian Ethics and Moral Theology in fact like the Dodo, extinct species that have been replaced by committed and direct action on the one hand or values clarification and sympathy on the other? Or is there any hope that they might rise like the Phoenix from the ashes of the church’s common life?
B
I very much hope that Christian Ethics and Moral Theology may prove closer to the Phoenix than the Dodo, but I am in no way sanguine about this possibility. It may well prove to be the case that the individualism of our age is such that beliefs, virtues, and practices common to all people who call themselves Christians have now fragmented beyond recovery. It may well prove to be the case that rather amorphous appeals “to be loving” are the best we can muster. It may well prove that Christian clergy can no longer proclaim and defend a common morality. All these things may prove to be the case, but if they are we will most certainly, over time, bid farewell to any group that can meaningfully be called the people of God, or the ecclesia, or the body of Christ.
There is, in short, some urgency in considering our moral circumstances as Christians. The primary reason for this consideration lies, however, in none of the particular battles I have mentioned. Neither does it lie in the particular difficulties these struggles pose for clergy and their congregations. The urgency lies in the fact that these battles mark the location where Christian believers confront a culture that once supported Christian belief and practice but in significant ways no longer does. The urgency lies in the fact that the moral issues of our time mark the place where Christ confronts the social system that both forms and deforms us as moral agents; and demands a Christian form of life that, in many ways and on various occasions, gives witness to something different.
The previous point requires an explanation for it underlies all that follows. The way in which Christians address (or do not address) the moral issues of which I speak will not only determine whether Christian Ethics emerges from the ashes like the Phoenix or become extinct like the Dodo. It may determine as well whether or not the churches manage to remain faithful to their calling or become, like Israel and Judah, objects of God’s displeasure and judgment. Our response will, I believe, determine whether our churches are strengthened for divine service or sent into a form of cultural exile that is analogous to the deportations undergone by both the Northern and Southern kingdoms.
How so? Every first year student of theology studies the great heresies that so divided (and weakened) the early church. Those heresies were many and varied, but one theme ties them together; namely, the view so common in the Hellenistic period that this world in some way exists as but a pale shadow of a heavenly one. The world as we know it is not a good (though fallen) creation in need of redemption. Rather it is in some way a shadow realm of darkness that is to be escaped. Pagan ethics and pagan belief provided a way both to manage successfully an uncertain and shadowy existence, and to escape it to a realm of light and inner peace. The Gnostics and Stoics were not the only people who held these beliefs. So also did the Docetists and the Arians. In many forms and guises, some clearly Pagan and some inadequately Christian, the early Christians confronted an alien worldview that beckoned with more force than we now easily can imagine.
So also do we, but the alien worldview Christians in our age face appears first of all in the form of a moral point of view rather than a metaphysical one. This worldview lies at the base of each of the issues I have mentioned and beckons with a force every bit as strong as did the world-denying stance of the Gnostics, Stoics, Docetists, and Arians. In a word, though we claim to be part of a pluralistic culture, in fact the moral and metaphysical beliefs we hold are remarkably uniform. Unlike standard Christian prayer and hymnody, ours is not an age that looks forward to a resurrected and transfigured world that awaits us at the end of this one. The kingdom for which we long does not lie in the hands of God whom we await. Rather, it lies in a future we ourselves create. Further, the present we inhabit is not bounded and ordered by a moral law to which we are subject. Rather it is one in which individual persons with a panoply of rights struggle to become “selves” with a rich personal history and a good deal of private satisfaction. We do not think of ourselves as “souls and bodies” with an eternal destiny that, as St Paul believed, is entered only through a refiners fire. We think of ourselves as unique “individuals” who are “persons” with rights and “selves” with a personal history that is ours alone.
When all is said and done, the standard ethic of people like us is both individualistic and utilitarian. “Individuals”, who are first of all “persons” with rights, seek to become “selves” with a rich and rewarding personal history. In pursuit of this goal, we are to seek the greatest possible individual happiness as long as in doing so we inflict no unacceptable harm on others.
I can illustrate this somewhat abstract point by reference to some of the moral issues with which we are most familiar. These issues provide the moral content of the pastoral offices of the church, and so also the moral territory most frequently inhabited by priests and pastors. I speak of marriage, birth, and death. At each of these points, fearsome battles rage within the churches—battles that divide and weaken us at a time that demands of us both unity and strength.
When people come to seek the blessing of the church on their marriage, how do they think of what they are about to undertake? If my experience is any indication of the common view of our culture, most understand their undertaking as a private contract entered into by autonomous individuals for the purpose of continued happiness with a person with whom they are “in love.” Since the purpose of the contract is the provision of continued happiness and love, the general view is that the contract can be voided by divorce if either or both of these seem absent from or insufficiently present within the relationship. Thus, within a society composed of contracting individuals “incompatibility” becomes the chief ground for divorce. In short, marriage is a relation entered and terminated by autonomous “individuals” who are “persons” with rights seeking to become satisfied “selves.” Marriage, along with employment, possessions, leisure activity, and friends becomes a major source of personal satisfaction, and personal satisfaction is the individual’s chief goal in life.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. Surely there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy or to have love last. A loveless marriage is no one’s idea of heaven. Nevertheless, it’s hard to escape the fact that this view of marriage is markedly different from that contained in the Christian rites of marriage that have appeared over the ages. In these rites, marriage is presented not as a private contract entered for personal reasons; but as an “estate” or “order” that people freely enter, though the nature of the estate is not determined by that choice. The estate of marriage, according to this view, has its own “goods” or “purposes,” and these “goods” and “purposes are not dependent upon individual choice. The goods of marriage map a pre-existing moral territory that gives content to what marriage is in the eyes of God. Further, because marriage is an order that one enters rather than a personal goal one is free to choose, marriage can be thought of as a vocation not open to everyone.
What then are the “goods” and “purposes” that for Christians have defined marriage as a vocation? They are traditionally “permanence” “fidelity,” “unity,” “children,” the constraint of lust, and the growth of charity. Over time, these goods have appeared in various forms and with various emphases, but despite variations in form and emphasis, they stand in rather marked contrast to the contemporary American view of marriage. According to this latter view, marriage is not an institution that serves a variety of pre-determined goods, but one that serves to promote the private satisfaction of individual persons seeking personal well being.
That this latter idea of marriage now controls the contemporary “mind set” is well illustrated by the second area of moral concern I mentioned above; namely, birth. I am sure that it has escaped no one that according to the view of marriage that has dominated Christian conscience from the beginning, the birth of children is not a purely voluntary aspect of marriage. Of course, no one assumed that every couple would be able to have a child. Age and health were always understood to be mitigating aspects of this good. Further, despite Roman Catholic objections to the contrary, the birth of children need not on this view be potentially connected to every occasion of sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, Christians have never assumed until recently that the birth of children is, from a moral point of view, simply a matter of choice. However, once marriage is made subordinate to the personal search for happiness, the birth of children becomes a good subordinate to that end. It indeed becomes a matter of individual choice, and this choice is determined by the definition of happiness parties to the contract bring to their relationship.
I need hardly mention also, that once the birth of a child becomes subordinate to the personal happiness of parents, the sort of child one has (or does not have) becomes also a matter subordinate to that happiness. Thus, a pregnant mother and prospective father are faced with an ever-growing battery of tests to determine all manner of things about the child to be born. Further, because of the litigious nature of our society, parents are put under enormous pressure to have these tests and to abort any child showing imperfections. It is also the case that if a couple want a child and have difficulty conceiving, there are any number of procedures available so that they might have the child of their dreams, and so not miss one of the benefits for which they have contracted. Soon, very soon, these procedures will open the possibility for “designer children” just as now they offer the possibility, among others, for a woman (or surrogate) to carry a child who is biologically related neither to mother, father, or surrogate.
I in no way wish to suggest that all these developments are bad. Some are both wonderful and morally good. Nevertheless, I have said enough to indicate that the birth of a child for many has ceased to be a good of marriage, and has become instead a project related to the personal fulfillment and happiness of autonomous moral agents. Child bearing and child-raising increasingly appear as projects subordinate to the self-fulfillment of “individuals” who are “persons” with a right to a child whose birth and nurture contribute to the well-being of a fully developed “self.”
A similar point of view appears if one looks in even a cursory manner at the debate that now rages over euthanasia. In current thinking, life is not a gift entrusted by a good and loving God, but a possession to be managed like any other possession. The end of life is not an event to be “suffered,” or “undergone.” It is not a point at which our creaturely character becomes apparent—a point at which we become dependent upon others in a way analogous to the way in which a child is dependent. It is not a point at which we entrust our life to God and to those near and dear to us. It rather becomes the last point at which we, as autonomous individuals, manage our lives so as to minimize our deficits and maximize our assets. So, we do not suffer death, we make it come on our own terms.
C
I hope I have said enough to indicate why I believe that, as the early church was almost compromised by its engagement with pagan culture, so we stand in danger of being compromised by another, post-modern and quite secular one. The point at which the engagement between Christ and culture takes place in our time is a moral point of view that privileges autonomous individuals. It does so by removing people from a moral universe that has boundaries and demands that are not of human choosing and placing them in a moral free market wherein personal satisfaction is to be sought through the free pursuit of self-chosen goods.
Once more, I do not wish to be misunderstood. Just as Christianity was enriched by its borrowings from the Hellenistic world, so we have all been enriched by the discovery of the “individual” who is a “person” with rights and a “self” with a unique personal history. This view of moral agency is a gift of the Enlightenment, and it is indeed a gift. I have no desire to sink moral agents into a communal tyranny in which who they are in themselves is of no importance. Boris Pasternak, through his character Dr. Zivago, rightly and mercifully, cried out against such collectivism. Nevertheless, Christians cannot accept this moral point of view until the “individual” who is a “person” on the way to becoming a “self” is located in a larger moral and spiritual universe—one that limits what rightly may be pursued as, at the same time, it marks out a communal destiny in which each person has a place of dignity and honor.
D.
The question that haunts me is how this relocation of moral agents, of “individuals” who are “persons” and “selves,” is to take place? This, I have come to believe, is the question with which our time presents us. It is at this point that Christians, that is to say Christians in the West, confront history and stand before God as either faithful or unfaithful servants. During the dreadful days of Stalinism, the poet Czeslaw. Milosz, called upon his readers to confront the bloody history of their time openly and honestly. He warned as well that two great temptations stood in the way of what he considered a fundamental moral duty. The first, and most common temptation, he said, is simply to go along—to fit in—and justify one’s action be saying one faces the ineluctable force of history. The second temptation is to stand outside one’s time, and adopt the view that one can stand above the surrounding mess. We might call the first strategy that of the “conformist” and the second that of the “aesthete.”
I cannot help noticing that these temptations are precisely those that face the clergy of our church. Since the General Convention last met I have watched clergy I know well change their views in a ways that remind me of the techniques of camouflage found among nature’s most remarkable creatures. I have noticed others who seek to position themselves outside the fray by asserting that there are more important things to which attention must be given. There are indeed issues of greater consequence than our argument over sexual ethics, and there are good reasons to change one’s mind. I wish to deny neither of these statements. Nevertheless, as I have argued, the issues that divide us cloak a deeper matter; namely, the way in which we understand ourselves both as Christians and as moral agents. Simply to go with the flow or to stand on the bank and watch one’s time flow by may best be understood as analogous to the attempt on the part of Adam and Eve to hide themselves from God.
Neither the strategy of the “conformist” nor that of the “aesthete” can be considered a Godly response to our particular history. The question, of course, is what must we do to confront our time and circumstance in a Godly manner? We are confronted for the first time in centuries with a point of view that controls the moral thinking of our society, but that cannot be taken into Christian conscience in its present form without betraying faithful Christian belief and practice. Such a circumstance presents Episcopalians with an issue of extraordinary difficulty. We have built our identity (and so sought to distinguish ourselves from other denominations) by seeking to espouse what we take to be the forces of enlightenment within our culture. What shall we do when these very forces, whatever their strengths may be, in fact either distort or overwhelm faithful Christian belief and practice?
In these addresses, I hope to take a step toward finding an answer to this question. I hope that I can suggest those conditions that lead to a Phoenix like rising of Christian Ethics and Moral theology from the ashes that now comprise the moral and spiritual state of our church. An enterprise of this magnitude requires that we take nothing for granted. We cannot assume that we can continue in our present mode; as if all we had to do is rearrange the furniture we now have. That means I cannot rehash for you a basic course in Christian ethics as now taught in one or another of our seminaries. I cannot take us through one or another contentious issue, and politely present the options as if it really doesn’t matter for which one opts as long as one is tolerant toward one’s opponent. It means also that I cannot return us to “those exciting days of yesteryear” when all one had to do was rehearse what Bishop Kirk had to say about the distinction between Christian Ethics and Moral Theology. In times like ours, one must begin again.
This is what I propose to do. Begin again! I know that in doing so I will disappoint many who would like me either to confirm a view that they now hold or help them sort out some moral perplexity often presented in the course of providing pastoral care. In the course of the remarks that follow one or both of these things may happen. I really do not know. What I do know is that my purpose is to do neither of these things. Rather, it is to return to the beginnings and ask afresh how Christian Ethics (or if you prefer Moral Theology) might be reconstituted so as to be of help in a time when Christian faith and practice stand in danger of being swallowed by an imitation—a culture that claims the name Christian but, in vary significant ways, no longer is. Accordingly, I propose first of all to ask and seek to answer a basic question. How might we rightly understand the focus, basis, goal, and character of Christian Ethics?
