The Christian Moral Life. Timothy F. Sedgwick
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community of faith.
In this sense The Christian Moral Life seeks to offer a moral theology, grounded, however, in a renewed sense of the worshipping community. The understanding of the worshipping community in relationship to the world can no longer be taken-for-granted, as it was in the writing of traditional moral theologies when Christianity was established, what we call Christendom. Instead, the community of worship offers an alternative world, a sign of who we are meant to be, revealed in Scripture and known in the life of the community of faith as marked by its worship. So Edward Schillebeeckx’s sacramental principle: as Christ is the sacrament of God to the world, the church is the sacrament of Christ.1
The traditional elements of moral theology are then addressed in The Christian Moral Life within this larger context. There is an account of cardinal and theological virtues. These are grounded in an account of the encounter with God as a matter of hospitality to the stranger. Moral principles are developed as expressing the ends of action. And traditional questions are addressed, for example, the relationship between the love of God and neighbor, the first and the second table of the Ten Commandments, law and gospel, and love and justice. And this leads to the practices of piety, the nature of vocation, and the mission of God.
As I look back to my initial explorations of these matters in Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life (Fortress, 1987) and ahead to Preaching What We Practice: Proclamation and Moral Discernment (Morehouse, 2007), with David Schlafer, I see how much my own work has explored what has been central to the great Anglican moral theologian Kenneth Kirk, from Some Principles of Moral Theology (Longmans, Green, 1920) and Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (Longmans, Green, 1927) to The Vision of God (Longmans, Green, 1928). The difference has been in casting the character of a Christian ethic in a post-Christendom world grounded in liturgical and sacramental theology. Here again, in Anglicanism this grounding in the worshipping community is prefaced by the first book to introduce the liturgical renewal movement in the English world, A.G. Hebert’s Liturgy and Society (Faber and Faber, 1935). The Christian Moral Life has this twentieth-century lineage. I hope that it may prompt its continued engagement and development.
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1 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Sacrament of the Encounter with God, tr. Paul Barrett (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).
Introduction
I have been fortunate to share in the worship of a variety of Christian churches. The power of those experiences has confirmed that the presence of God given in worship is inseparable from the call into the covenant of hospitality that is our daily life. I recall worship with a variety of Christian communities: with an Anabaptist community of Brethren during Holy Week where I shared with them foot washing and an agape meal; with an African-American congregation in the preaching and singing which drew out the congregation together in praise and in petitions for the world; with a Roman Catholic community of Benedictine monks in singing the daily offices as they have since the fourth century; with Quakers in the quiet stillness in their meeting; with Presbyterians in Sunday worship with prayers offered in response to scripture and the sermon; with Eastern Orthodox in their divine liturgy with incense rising, intoned prayers, and blessings; with an ecumenical group in reading scripture and offering prayer together; and with my seminary community in daily worship.
When I think about what is central to all such worship, I remember a Sunday Eucharist in China following the opening of China after the cultural revolution. The service was ecumenical in a reopened church without windows. I could not understand the Chinese, but the shape of the Eucharist drew me into the participation we call worship. That evening at dinner I sat next to an 83-year-old minister, a Chinese man who was formerly a Seventh Day Adventist. We talked about the changes sweeping China and we talked about the church. I asked him how his own faith and understanding of the church had changed since the Chinese Revolution in 1949. He said simply, “We were wrong before. We thought more of our churches than of faith. Our effort was to preserve the church. Now we share one church because we know that we are the church only if we serve all people.”
Nothing could express more clearly to me the nature of Christian faith. My Anglican roots have enabled me to see this vision of faith. But it is only in my own encounter and the consequent welcome and embrace of strangers — of their embrace of me and of my embrace of them — that I have known this life. From this comes an ecumenical spirit. The church is not the end of faith. Instead, the end of the church is God’s calling, to enable the voice of God that it may be heard calling all people into a covenant of hospitality.
As I was concluding this book I reread H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry1 and was aware of how much my own work, beginning with my doctoral dissertation on H. Richard Niebuhr, has been a working out of questions he pursued. Through now 20 years of seminary teaching my concern has been on the experience of God and on the mediation and deepening of faith as a matter of response to that experience. The questions that have haunted me are, “How is God present in our lives?” and “How does the church enable our relationship to God, especially in the radically pluralistic, secular world we call postmodern?” These are questions central to Niebuhr’s work, especially as he saw institutional churches as the bearers of Christian faith but also assimilated into the prevailing culture.
The church, of course, is not one thing but highly varied and, as monastics and Protestant reformers both saw, always in need of being reformed. Niebuhr, for example, asked, at one point, does the church need to go “Back to Benedict?”2 In one sense, I am convinced that it does. Only through spiritual disciplines of reading scripture, prayer, and acts of hospitality will persons form a way of life in which the Christian story makes sense and the experience of God is deepened. Such a renewal of Christian life is the larger purpose of this book. The more particular purpose is the development of a Christian ethic that would have at its center the deepening of the encounter with God. In this way, this book is the development of Christian ethics as “sacramental ethics.”3
In this book I have worked in two steps. In the first two chapters I have sought to offer an introduction to Christian ethics in general and Anglican understandings in particular. Central understandings of Christian faith and life have been identified. In the subsequent chapters I have sought to move from historical understandings to a contemporary account of the Christian moral life, at least as I am able to as a “cradle born” Episcopalian who has had some opportunity to know others in and outside of Anglican churches.
Both parts of this introduction focus on the fact that this way of life we call Christian is a life lived in our relationship to the world about us: to those near at hand, neighbors, with whom we share daily life, and to those who are “other” than ourselves, strangers. As suggested in understanding Christian faith as a practical piety, Christian faith is a life lived in which a person is opened to the world-at-hand, drawn out and connected to a world beyond oneself. This is a life of turning, of conversion, from life given and defined by particular and often individualistic desires for fulfillment to a new life given as a member of a people who live life in the embrace of others. Finally, as both parts of this book emphasize, the Christian life is grounded in the experience and worship of God. Worship is central to the life of Christian faith in the sense that worship is the celebration and deepening of the experience of God in our lives.
This account of the Christian life has developed through a variety of conversations. These conversations have been centered in the church, specifically in seminary and parish. I am thankful for 19 years at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and St. Luke’s Parish in Evanston, Illinois. Conversations from classroom (especially a class called “The Christian Life”) to parish hall have been the birthplace of this book. I am also thankful for the opportunity to continue these conversations and complete this writing at my new home at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.
This book, though, would not have been possible apart from the extended church and especially invitations to