The Christian Moral Life. Timothy F. Sedgwick
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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.: