Amazing Rando
February 6th 2006, 12:27 PM
Here's an essay I wrote a few weeks ago for my Christian Ethics class- we'd read some of the works of moral theologians John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Alisdair MacIntyre and were asked to summarize and evaluate their positive contributions to contemporary studies of biblical ethics as well as to note any areas of deficiency we detected. Comments are welcome on anything I wrote as well as clarifications on anything about Yoder, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre's distinctive approach to theological ethics.
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Rob Arner 1-30-06
Christian Ethics
Christian theological ethics according to Yoder, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre
Since the Enlightenment, it can no longer be taken for granted that Christian ethicists will draw upon Scripture for their foundational moral principles. The role of the Bible in answering the age-old question, “What ought I to do?” has been subsumed by appeals to reason, pragmatism, consequentialism, and expediency, even by thinkers who lay claim to the name of “Christian.” While this disengagement with Scripture in considering difficult ethical issues (such as the questions of warfare, abortion, and homosexuality) has been done in the name of wider appeal outside the bounds of the Church and an attempt to discern a “universal ethic,” it has been done at the cost of faithfulness to our Creator. The ethical uncertainty of this age, as witnessed by the spread of moral relativism (whether articulated explicitly or maintained intrinsically) even within the Church herself, is a consequence of the Church’s failure to ground her thoughts and actions firmly in the revelation of God through Jesus Christ.
The three thinkers we have been studying this semester, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntyre, have concentrated their efforts on recapturing a moral vision that is fundamentally faithful to the Bible and to Christ. Their approaches to this daunting task are varied, but each contributes a distinctive element to the conversation that is of particular value in realizing the telos of the Christian life and the true modus vivendi for faithful living. This essay will highlight some of the central concerns of these three thinkers and take stock of how their insights might be incorporated into a life of faithful Christian discipleship.
John Howard Yoder’s seminal work, The Politics of Jesus, challenged many of the prevailing assumptions and conclusions in the field of Christian ethics, and continues to be influential even now, over thirty years after its publication. Yoder’s primary thesis is that Jesus must be central for Christian ethics. At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be a terribly controversial proposition- after all, one would naturally assume that Christian ethics would be centered on the person and teaching of Christ. But this has not been the case in many contemporary Christian ethical endeavors. The opening chapter of The Politics of Jesus points to six classic rationalizations that attempt to undercut, diminish, or reject altogether the significance of the teaching and example of Jesus for the question of social ethics. These rationalizations come from many different sources and in many varieties. Among the ones Yoder mentions are the “interim ethic” hypothesis of the historical-critical school, and the “spiritualization” of Jesus made popular by modern Protestantism. We might well add to this list of rationalizations the “counsels of perfection” theory made popular by medieval Catholicism, and the bogus distinction many Christians attempt to make between “public” and “private” morality that seeks to make Jesus normative for “private” interpersonal relationships but utterly irrelevant in the so-called “public” area of social ethics.
Against these excuses for ignoring the example of Jesus, Yoder asserts that what the New Testament unambiguously teaches is an “ethic of imitation.” He asks powerfully, “What becomes of the meaning of incarnation if Jesus is not normatively human?” This approach to theological ethics is grounded in the valid assumption that the Savior came not just to die a sacrificial death, but to live a sinless, exemplary life and to teach the true values and socio-political orientation of God’s kingdom. Yoder’s approach is implicitly Christocentric- far more so than the “mainstream ethic” which he derides, and the latter half of his book is spent demonstrating that this is precisely the approach taken by the apostolic writings in the remainder of the New Testament.
Another important insight Yoder offers to the Christian pursuing theological ethics is the importance of the New Testament insistence of the distinction between the Church and the world. In his essay, “The Otherness of the Church,” Yoder laments that since the days of Constantine, the Church and the world have been, in many respects, merged. “World,” Yoder notes, “signifies in this connection not creation or nature or the universe, but rather the fallen form of the same, no longer conformed to the creative intent.” The world is the realm of the fallen exousia, the “powers” that seduce and co-opt God’s people for their sinister purposes. It is “structured unbelief, rebellion taking with it a fragment of what should have been the Order of the Kingdom.” Yoder argues that when the Church seeks to dominate the culture or the nation through the fallen institutions of human governance, as well as through coercion, force, and violence, the basic principles of the gospel have been compromised.
Stanley Hauerwas, who studied under Yoder and whose conclusions bear striking similarities to Yoder’s own, is another important contemporary voice in the field of Christian ethics. As summed up by R.R. Reno, Hauerwas’ three primary emphases are character, church, and Constantinianism. In his emphasis on character, Hauerwas draws from the Aristotelian stress on virtue as a defining characteristic of the community of believers. The good news of the gospel for Hauerwas is not some disembodied, “spiritual” blessing, but rather about concrete changes that are possible in one’s life as a result of trusting in the Christ and belonging to his people. Our fundamental character is changed, reoriented away from the dominion of darkness and brought into the kingdom of the light of Christ. A shift in character is a defining aspect of conversion, and is the basis for the real and lasting change that occurs in our lives.
Such character, according to Hauerwas, is can only be nurtured in the context of a community of faith. When the church, as that community, embodies the character to which Christ calls us, we live out the vocation for which we were created. Christian ethics, as such, cannot be done outside the boundaries of the believing community. The Church is the community for which Jesus lived, taught, and died, and it is to this same Church that he entrusted the task of being ambassadors for the Kingdom. In his essay, “On Keeping Theological Ethics Theological,” Hauerwas argues forcefully that ethics cannot be divorced from the life of the Church. We must not aspire to attain some “universal ethic” to which all people, believer and non-believer alike, can assent, because doing so implicitly means compromising our faithfulness to the Lord. For the Christian, ethics must remain within the bounds of the story of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, or moral reasoning will lose all meaning. In short, we must not divorce our morality from the life of faith, or as Hauerwas puts it:
As American society becomes increasingly secular, Christian ethicists come to think that, if they wish to remain political actors, they must translate their convictions into a theological idiom. But once such a translation is accomplished, why is the theological idiom needed at all?
After cataloguing the post-Enlightenment journey of Christian thinkers in removing the theological underpinnings from their formulations of ethical principles, Hauerwas offers a potent challenge to those Christians who would formulate moral norms apart from the lived realities of the community of faith.
In his last major emphasis as catalogued by Reno, Hauerwas is most clearly echoing the thought of Yoder. He is merciless in his rhetoric against “Constantinianism,” the state of affairs brought about when Constantine and his successors dangerously blurred the line between Church and world. As did Yoder before him, Hauerwas argues that after Constantine, the Church fell into captivity to a worldly lust for power and a desire for social significance. The significance of this observation can be seen in the Church of contemporary America, which still operates under a somewhat-more-than-vestigial assumption of Constantinianism. When the Church joins forces with the prevailing social, economic, and political establishments and powers, her sense of distinctiveness is lost and she becomes simply another option amidst the sea of individualistic philosophies and institutions that permeate our modern American society. This in turn makes distinctively Christian beliefs and practices invisible and increases the popular sense of the Church’s irrelevance.
In contrast to thinking of the Church’s “politics” in terms of where she falls on the standard Liberal vs. Conservative spectrum, one extremely important facet of Hauerwas and Yoder’s work has been a reemphasis on the Church as “a political alternative for every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those who have been formed by the story of Christ.” The Church stands apart, as a witness to and a “beachhead” in the inbreaking Kingdom of God. She is neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” Republican nor Democrat. Instead, the Church embodies the “politics of Jesus,” to quote the title of Yoder’s distinctive magnum opus. The Church’s values are not the world’s values, and when we align ourselves with worldly allies for the sake of political expediency or in the name of wielding more influence in contemporary society, we betray the gospel and the very principles which make us distinctively “Christian.” It’s often quite difficult to tell the difference between a Constantinianized Christian and a virtuous pagan, so the integrity and uniqueness of the Christian voice depend on keeping “the world” out of our Church.
This emphasis on a lived “community of character” in Hauerwas’ writing leads to one difficulty that must be overcome in his understanding of the use of Scripture by the believing community. For Hauerwas, because Scripture is not read properly outside the context of the Church, the emphasis of the Church’s witness should be on being the Church, not on teaching about the Church. Scripture must be read by the believing community for the benefit of the believing community, not for the sake of telling everyone else how to live. Hauerwas even goes as far as to write in his typically provocative fashion,
Most American Christians assume they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important for the church than to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to every child when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked… Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.
The goal of this strategy is, of course, not to produce biblically illiterate Christians, but to cultivate the community of character by living the story and being the story. Only then can the believing community read and interpret the Bible correctly and authentically. This subjugation of the place of Scripture however leads to an interesting problem- at what point in the living of the story is Scripture introduced? How is the Church to know how to embody the story when she is, for the most part, ignorant of what that story is? It is at this point that a student schooled in Hauerwas’s (who is admittedly no exegete of Scripture) brilliant theological example would profit from Yoder’s careful exegesis as done in The Politics of Jesus and elsewhere.
The third voice in the field of Christian theological ethics we have studied so far, Alasdair MacIntyre, offers a crucial insight centered on the end, or telos, to which the Christian life, and the life of the Church, lead. Like Hauerwas, MacIntyre notes that Christian narrative must be the fundamental structure out of which to make sense of the Church’s place in the world. His distinctive ethical emphasis, however, is on fulfilling the end for which we were created. Heavily dependent on Aristotle, MacIntyre notes that the success or failure of a thing’s existence depends on the extent to which it fulfills its telos. The telos is determined by the thing’s essential function. Thus for a watch, the function of a watch is to tell time. The watch’s success or failure is to be judged by the extent to which it fulfills its telos of time-telling. A broken watch is thus a teleological failure, because it cannot perform its essential function.
In terms of humans, whom MacIntyre follows Aristotle in naming teleological beings, the choice of a right action is made by determining which action best enables us to fulfill the end for which we were created. If the telos for which human beings were created is (for example) to enter into a loving relationship with our God, then questions of morality are settled by establishing which actions best facilitate our relationship with God. One deficiency of MacIntyre’s approach is that he does not give an account of what exactly the telos of the human life is. He notes that it is determined by tradition, by the narrative of the Christian story in this case, but Christians have disagreed vehemently over what purpose human beings were created to fulfill. Thus as different streams of the Christian tradition answer the essential teleological question in widely divergent ways, the ethical choices they make will be as different as the answers they give.
In sum, one of the key contributions all three thinkers offer is their insistence that ethics not be divorced from theology. It is our Christian convictions which provide the basis for our moral choices, not vice versa. For Yoder, this comes in the form of an “ethic of imitation,” in patterning our lives after the example and teaching of Christ, the Suffering Servant. In Hauerwas’ distinctive approach, moral principles are primarily ecclesiological, in that they grow directly out of the living out the unfolding story of God’s actions in the world by the body of believers. MacIntyre’s teleological approach tells us that right actions are those which best fulfill God’s purpose for the creation of the world. All three thinkers contribute positively to the contemporary ethical debates by insisting that Christian morality is for, well… Christians of course!
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Rob Arner 1-30-06
Christian Ethics
Christian theological ethics according to Yoder, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre
Since the Enlightenment, it can no longer be taken for granted that Christian ethicists will draw upon Scripture for their foundational moral principles. The role of the Bible in answering the age-old question, “What ought I to do?” has been subsumed by appeals to reason, pragmatism, consequentialism, and expediency, even by thinkers who lay claim to the name of “Christian.” While this disengagement with Scripture in considering difficult ethical issues (such as the questions of warfare, abortion, and homosexuality) has been done in the name of wider appeal outside the bounds of the Church and an attempt to discern a “universal ethic,” it has been done at the cost of faithfulness to our Creator. The ethical uncertainty of this age, as witnessed by the spread of moral relativism (whether articulated explicitly or maintained intrinsically) even within the Church herself, is a consequence of the Church’s failure to ground her thoughts and actions firmly in the revelation of God through Jesus Christ.
The three thinkers we have been studying this semester, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntyre, have concentrated their efforts on recapturing a moral vision that is fundamentally faithful to the Bible and to Christ. Their approaches to this daunting task are varied, but each contributes a distinctive element to the conversation that is of particular value in realizing the telos of the Christian life and the true modus vivendi for faithful living. This essay will highlight some of the central concerns of these three thinkers and take stock of how their insights might be incorporated into a life of faithful Christian discipleship.
John Howard Yoder’s seminal work, The Politics of Jesus, challenged many of the prevailing assumptions and conclusions in the field of Christian ethics, and continues to be influential even now, over thirty years after its publication. Yoder’s primary thesis is that Jesus must be central for Christian ethics. At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be a terribly controversial proposition- after all, one would naturally assume that Christian ethics would be centered on the person and teaching of Christ. But this has not been the case in many contemporary Christian ethical endeavors. The opening chapter of The Politics of Jesus points to six classic rationalizations that attempt to undercut, diminish, or reject altogether the significance of the teaching and example of Jesus for the question of social ethics. These rationalizations come from many different sources and in many varieties. Among the ones Yoder mentions are the “interim ethic” hypothesis of the historical-critical school, and the “spiritualization” of Jesus made popular by modern Protestantism. We might well add to this list of rationalizations the “counsels of perfection” theory made popular by medieval Catholicism, and the bogus distinction many Christians attempt to make between “public” and “private” morality that seeks to make Jesus normative for “private” interpersonal relationships but utterly irrelevant in the so-called “public” area of social ethics.
Against these excuses for ignoring the example of Jesus, Yoder asserts that what the New Testament unambiguously teaches is an “ethic of imitation.” He asks powerfully, “What becomes of the meaning of incarnation if Jesus is not normatively human?” This approach to theological ethics is grounded in the valid assumption that the Savior came not just to die a sacrificial death, but to live a sinless, exemplary life and to teach the true values and socio-political orientation of God’s kingdom. Yoder’s approach is implicitly Christocentric- far more so than the “mainstream ethic” which he derides, and the latter half of his book is spent demonstrating that this is precisely the approach taken by the apostolic writings in the remainder of the New Testament.
Another important insight Yoder offers to the Christian pursuing theological ethics is the importance of the New Testament insistence of the distinction between the Church and the world. In his essay, “The Otherness of the Church,” Yoder laments that since the days of Constantine, the Church and the world have been, in many respects, merged. “World,” Yoder notes, “signifies in this connection not creation or nature or the universe, but rather the fallen form of the same, no longer conformed to the creative intent.” The world is the realm of the fallen exousia, the “powers” that seduce and co-opt God’s people for their sinister purposes. It is “structured unbelief, rebellion taking with it a fragment of what should have been the Order of the Kingdom.” Yoder argues that when the Church seeks to dominate the culture or the nation through the fallen institutions of human governance, as well as through coercion, force, and violence, the basic principles of the gospel have been compromised.
Stanley Hauerwas, who studied under Yoder and whose conclusions bear striking similarities to Yoder’s own, is another important contemporary voice in the field of Christian ethics. As summed up by R.R. Reno, Hauerwas’ three primary emphases are character, church, and Constantinianism. In his emphasis on character, Hauerwas draws from the Aristotelian stress on virtue as a defining characteristic of the community of believers. The good news of the gospel for Hauerwas is not some disembodied, “spiritual” blessing, but rather about concrete changes that are possible in one’s life as a result of trusting in the Christ and belonging to his people. Our fundamental character is changed, reoriented away from the dominion of darkness and brought into the kingdom of the light of Christ. A shift in character is a defining aspect of conversion, and is the basis for the real and lasting change that occurs in our lives.
Such character, according to Hauerwas, is can only be nurtured in the context of a community of faith. When the church, as that community, embodies the character to which Christ calls us, we live out the vocation for which we were created. Christian ethics, as such, cannot be done outside the boundaries of the believing community. The Church is the community for which Jesus lived, taught, and died, and it is to this same Church that he entrusted the task of being ambassadors for the Kingdom. In his essay, “On Keeping Theological Ethics Theological,” Hauerwas argues forcefully that ethics cannot be divorced from the life of the Church. We must not aspire to attain some “universal ethic” to which all people, believer and non-believer alike, can assent, because doing so implicitly means compromising our faithfulness to the Lord. For the Christian, ethics must remain within the bounds of the story of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, or moral reasoning will lose all meaning. In short, we must not divorce our morality from the life of faith, or as Hauerwas puts it:
As American society becomes increasingly secular, Christian ethicists come to think that, if they wish to remain political actors, they must translate their convictions into a theological idiom. But once such a translation is accomplished, why is the theological idiom needed at all?
After cataloguing the post-Enlightenment journey of Christian thinkers in removing the theological underpinnings from their formulations of ethical principles, Hauerwas offers a potent challenge to those Christians who would formulate moral norms apart from the lived realities of the community of faith.
In his last major emphasis as catalogued by Reno, Hauerwas is most clearly echoing the thought of Yoder. He is merciless in his rhetoric against “Constantinianism,” the state of affairs brought about when Constantine and his successors dangerously blurred the line between Church and world. As did Yoder before him, Hauerwas argues that after Constantine, the Church fell into captivity to a worldly lust for power and a desire for social significance. The significance of this observation can be seen in the Church of contemporary America, which still operates under a somewhat-more-than-vestigial assumption of Constantinianism. When the Church joins forces with the prevailing social, economic, and political establishments and powers, her sense of distinctiveness is lost and she becomes simply another option amidst the sea of individualistic philosophies and institutions that permeate our modern American society. This in turn makes distinctively Christian beliefs and practices invisible and increases the popular sense of the Church’s irrelevance.
In contrast to thinking of the Church’s “politics” in terms of where she falls on the standard Liberal vs. Conservative spectrum, one extremely important facet of Hauerwas and Yoder’s work has been a reemphasis on the Church as “a political alternative for every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those who have been formed by the story of Christ.” The Church stands apart, as a witness to and a “beachhead” in the inbreaking Kingdom of God. She is neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” Republican nor Democrat. Instead, the Church embodies the “politics of Jesus,” to quote the title of Yoder’s distinctive magnum opus. The Church’s values are not the world’s values, and when we align ourselves with worldly allies for the sake of political expediency or in the name of wielding more influence in contemporary society, we betray the gospel and the very principles which make us distinctively “Christian.” It’s often quite difficult to tell the difference between a Constantinianized Christian and a virtuous pagan, so the integrity and uniqueness of the Christian voice depend on keeping “the world” out of our Church.
This emphasis on a lived “community of character” in Hauerwas’ writing leads to one difficulty that must be overcome in his understanding of the use of Scripture by the believing community. For Hauerwas, because Scripture is not read properly outside the context of the Church, the emphasis of the Church’s witness should be on being the Church, not on teaching about the Church. Scripture must be read by the believing community for the benefit of the believing community, not for the sake of telling everyone else how to live. Hauerwas even goes as far as to write in his typically provocative fashion,
Most American Christians assume they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important for the church than to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to every child when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked… Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.
The goal of this strategy is, of course, not to produce biblically illiterate Christians, but to cultivate the community of character by living the story and being the story. Only then can the believing community read and interpret the Bible correctly and authentically. This subjugation of the place of Scripture however leads to an interesting problem- at what point in the living of the story is Scripture introduced? How is the Church to know how to embody the story when she is, for the most part, ignorant of what that story is? It is at this point that a student schooled in Hauerwas’s (who is admittedly no exegete of Scripture) brilliant theological example would profit from Yoder’s careful exegesis as done in The Politics of Jesus and elsewhere.
The third voice in the field of Christian theological ethics we have studied so far, Alasdair MacIntyre, offers a crucial insight centered on the end, or telos, to which the Christian life, and the life of the Church, lead. Like Hauerwas, MacIntyre notes that Christian narrative must be the fundamental structure out of which to make sense of the Church’s place in the world. His distinctive ethical emphasis, however, is on fulfilling the end for which we were created. Heavily dependent on Aristotle, MacIntyre notes that the success or failure of a thing’s existence depends on the extent to which it fulfills its telos. The telos is determined by the thing’s essential function. Thus for a watch, the function of a watch is to tell time. The watch’s success or failure is to be judged by the extent to which it fulfills its telos of time-telling. A broken watch is thus a teleological failure, because it cannot perform its essential function.
In terms of humans, whom MacIntyre follows Aristotle in naming teleological beings, the choice of a right action is made by determining which action best enables us to fulfill the end for which we were created. If the telos for which human beings were created is (for example) to enter into a loving relationship with our God, then questions of morality are settled by establishing which actions best facilitate our relationship with God. One deficiency of MacIntyre’s approach is that he does not give an account of what exactly the telos of the human life is. He notes that it is determined by tradition, by the narrative of the Christian story in this case, but Christians have disagreed vehemently over what purpose human beings were created to fulfill. Thus as different streams of the Christian tradition answer the essential teleological question in widely divergent ways, the ethical choices they make will be as different as the answers they give.
In sum, one of the key contributions all three thinkers offer is their insistence that ethics not be divorced from theology. It is our Christian convictions which provide the basis for our moral choices, not vice versa. For Yoder, this comes in the form of an “ethic of imitation,” in patterning our lives after the example and teaching of Christ, the Suffering Servant. In Hauerwas’ distinctive approach, moral principles are primarily ecclesiological, in that they grow directly out of the living out the unfolding story of God’s actions in the world by the body of believers. MacIntyre’s teleological approach tells us that right actions are those which best fulfill God’s purpose for the creation of the world. All three thinkers contribute positively to the contemporary ethical debates by insisting that Christian morality is for, well… Christians of course!
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