The Christian Moral Life. Timothy F. Sedgwick
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state of affairs and envisioned life as moving towards that ideal. Christian faith gave expression to the ideals of love and justice. It held the promise that people could change, that there was a grace in acceptance and forgiveness. The church for me was that community of grace; it invited me to participate in a larger purpose that gave dignity and value to life.
My idealism was broken by the failure of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s to stop the war in Vietnam and to address the sources of poverty and racial oppression in American society. Martin Luther King’s “Poverty March” on Washington, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the demonstration and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the killing of student protesters at Kent State University following the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia: these made impossible the conviction that society would realize an ideal.
My own experience allowed me to hear other voices, from the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust to political refugees to those suffering a slow death from terminal illness. The voice is constantly that of Kurt in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness saying, “The horror, the horror.” If there was any purpose that gave meaning to life, I came to believe that it had to be given in the very midst of human suffering and failure. This was for me most powerfully articulated by particular peoples: for example, African-Americans speaking of the “black experience,” of spirituals and blues that celebrated life in the midst of violence and oppression.7 Above all, these voices have meant for me that if there was any meaning that could redeem life, it would have to be simply there, given, the ground and basis for what I did, a matter of grace. Instead of images of a new Jerusalem, of the coming of the kingdom of God, my prayers have become more focused by Job and by Jesus’ suffering and death.
The change in my sense of life’s meaning is more than my coming of age. Instead, my personal experiences reflect broader changes in the understandings of society and culture. The sense of value and meaning given in achieving a new and better society is what has been central to what is called a modern vision of things. Modern in this sense refers to what is called the legacy of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the developments of science and technology gave confidence that through reason, human ingenuity, and sheer effort, nature could be tamed and the world could be perfected so that all people could live together peaceably. In contrast, my sense of the broken and fragmentary character of life has been called a postmodern vision. Postmodern means after the modern, after the collapse of confidence in reason and progress. Both of these, modern and postmodern, stand in contrast to what may be called a traditional vision.
The traditional understanding of Christian faith and life was reflected in my grandparents. I think especially of my great-grandmother, who was born in 1882 in the newly settled land of southeastern Minnesota. Of all her grandchildren I was among the more inquisitive, always asking her to tell me what it was like before electricity and automobiles. She spoke matter-of-factly of changes and challenges. Homesteading, the final uprising of the Sioux, the move to the city, industrialization, economic depression, the World Wars, and before she died not only jet airplanes but landing on the moon — these were the background to her history. But what appears most basic from her earliest experience was the sense of need for order, discipline, and hard work. Each person was to do his or her duty at home and at work, in the community, and for society. Authority was taken for granted. Christian faith for her made sense of this ordered life in terms of the personal virtues of trust, honesty, industry, and integrity. These virtues were sustained by a sense of the divine as ordering and judging but also as merciful and forgiving. To say God was loving was to say that there was forgiveness for the failure to live up to the divine order.
This traditional piety did not create a narrow sense of the miserable sinner, but was rather a sober assessment of our lives. Sunday worship began with the confession of sin or, when Holy Eucharist was celebrated, with the reading of the Ten Commandments or at least a summary of the law and then the confession of sin. The centrality of the law in worship expressed a clear sense of order and, in turn, a sense of sin, of personal failing to live up to the demands of the law. In a world lacking basic security, people depended on mutual cooperation. Failure, for example, to keep one’s word, to offer help as promised, could threaten the livelihood and even physical life of another person or of the community as a whole. The consequences of sin on the common life were visibly imagined, if not directly seen, and for this reason moral failure evoked sorrow and repentance — not narrowly a turning from evil deeds but more broadly a turning from a narrow self-concern. Repentance called forth God’s mercy to uphold all people in a holy and righteous life, to grow continually in love and service. In and through Jesus Christ, God’s mercy and blessing were assured. This traditional life of faith was not marked narrowly by duty. Instead, for the ordering of life and the means of grace that made it possible, there was a deep sense of gratitude that continued to turn individual lives outward beyond themselves. Duty and obligation were but the other side of love and care, which connected the individual to the larger human community.
These three pieties — traditional, modern, and postmodern — focus on different aspects of Christian faith and life and need not be seen as opposed to each other, as if one were right and another were wrong. The older, traditional piety of my grandmother focuses on a world defined by personal duties, so much so that from our own cultural vantage point they tend to be perceived as moralistic or rigid, focused excessively on individual relations and virtues. Christian faith arises in the experience of judgment regarding our failures. Such judgment, however, is not at its heart moralistic and individualistic. Rather, the judgment is a judgment of failure to participate in a larger order of things necessary for individuals to be a people. God’s forgiveness is then an act that restores participation in that order. This is a justification by grace that, in turn, frees a person from self-absorbed individualism.
The modern piety of my young adulthood focused on the future. This emphasis arose in part because traditional piety seemed to have lost sight of the future and instead focused on duty, judgment, and mercy. To look at the future, though, was to see that reconciliation was a new creation, a community of love and justice. The larger sense of reconciliation — as corporate and incarnate, as becoming a people in this world — was restored. The human problem, however, was sometimes too narrowly thought of as human failure to live in God’s kingdom, without attention to the actual dynamics that form human life together. The presence of God as a matter of judgment and a gift of grace was too easily lost from view.
Postmodern piety has turned attention back to the present. Born of the experience of God as the experience of sheer grace in the midst of suffering, the sense of the giftedness of life was restored. In turn, the human response to God was brought back into view as a matter of vulnerability and openness, of dependence and trust, of thanksgiving and compassion. The dynamics of turning to God, of conversion, were illumined. This focus on God’s epiphany or manifestation in the midst of the breaking apart of life, however, can lose itself in the present. Apart from the roles, relations, and practices that lead to and from the encounter with God, the postmodern focus on experience can become individualistic and pluralistic, fragmentary and relativistic.
While these three pieties may share a common set of convictions, each of these pieties is distinct in its emphasis, because one is reacting to another. Traditional pieties, with their emphasis on duties and obligations, can lose touch with the larger ends of forming communities of love and justice. Modern pieties thus focus on ends and ideals but in doing so tend to de-emphasize duties and obligations. In turn, the idealism of such modern pieties may evoke a traditional reaction or else a postmodern turn back to the experience of grace in the life lived.
This description of three pieties is by no means an adequate account of the pieties that have formed different generations. It is not my intention to depict pieties simply as traditional, modern, and postmodern. My more limited purpose is to suggest the differences and tensions between different generations and different communities. If Christian ethics is to offer a broader understanding of Christian faith and life, the challenge of Christian ethics is to offer an account of Christian faith as a way of life, in spite of the differences among Christians. As a matter of faith, this means a Christian ethic must answer the question, “What is good, right, and holy?” As a matter of a way of life, a Christian ethic must answer a second and third question: “How do we come to know