How we teach and how we learn are central to Christian moral formation. As matters of the three “... more How we teach and how we learn are central to Christian moral formation. As matters of the three “E’s”—ethics, ecclesiology, and ecumenism—this lecture untangles the history of moral teaching in the church and asks whether differences in moral teaching should be church-dividing. Tim Sedgwick is a Collegeville Institute Resident Scholar, and professor of Christian Ethics and former academic dean at Virginia Theological Seminary. He is also an Episcopal delegate to the current Anglican Roman Catholic Theological Consultation USA which is addressing matters of ethics and ecclesiology
La conception de la foi chretienne, de sa mission, de sa structure et de son autorite par une Egl... more La conception de la foi chretienne, de sa mission, de sa structure et de son autorite par une Eglise est donnee a travers sa maniere de comprendre l'autre. Au sujet de l'anglicanisme, R. Hooker et K. Kirk proposent deux exposes distincts de l'Eglise et de la foi chretienne. Pour les deux hommes, le veritable defi consiste a former un peuple chretien. Pour Hooker, le probleme consiste a ne pas se diviser sur des pratiques religieuse catholiques ou protestantes. Pour Kirk, il s'agit de ne pas reduire la foi a une experience individuelle. Ces deux hommes elargissent le sens de l'identite chretienne en general et de l'anglicanisme en particulier
This volume seeks to identify sources from religious faith that inform bioethics and, more specif... more This volume seeks to identify sources from religious faith that inform bioethics and, more specifically, an ethic of health care. In other words, this volume is a collection of essays on theological foundations for bioethics and health care. These waters have been widely explored. Most often religious faith has been understood in terms of the claims it makes about the meaning and value of human life. Conclusions are then drawn in response to moral issues such as abortion, patient-physician relationships, informed consent, experimentation, death and dying, and the form and distribution of health care services.
Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 1997
IN THIS TIGHTLY ARGUED MONOGRAPH Schweiker offers an account of the central questions an ethic mu... more IN THIS TIGHTLY ARGUED MONOGRAPH Schweiker offers an account of the central questions an ethic must address and answers them in a theologically grounded ethic. This is among the best philosophically sophisticated, theological ethics to be developed in response to the questions and challenges of modernity. This is not a systematic theological ethic but an argument that other scholars must engage as they develop their own arguments.
From the beginning of the ecumenical movement, it has been said that "service unites, doctri... more From the beginning of the ecumenical movement, it has been said that "service unites, doctrine divides." Now it is apparent that matters of moral judgment are a major source of division within churches and between churches. This is nowhere more so than in matters of human sexuality and particularly in judgments over homosexuality and same-sex relations. Making sense of the conflict over ethics in the church has been limited in focusing primarily on questions of right moral teaching and on moral formation that will form persons in such an ethic. (1) Common ground has been found in the challenges that churches confront in forming such teaching, especially in terms of the cultural captivity of the churches and, hence, the relationship of local churches to the universal Church. Largely, however, in matters of moral teaching, churches have addressed differences in the same way that differences in doctrinal understandings had initially been addressed. Right belief or purity of d...
The contributors to this book of timely essays have come to believe that the ability of the Episc... more The contributors to this book of timely essays have come to believe that the ability of the Episcopal Church to offer moral guidance is in jeopardy. This diverse group of moral theologians addresses the issues of human sexuality, birth technologies, abortion, the justice of the economic order, and the use of military force. Although their outlooks are different, they all share a common understanding of the discipline of Christian ethics.
Deepening the Christian identity celebrated in worship Tim Sedgwick s Sacramental Ethics was a gr... more Deepening the Christian identity celebrated in worship Tim Sedgwick s Sacramental Ethics was a groundbreaking book that awaked us to the significance of religious practices for the moral like. We are, therefore, indebted to Augsburg Fortress for their willingness to make this work available for a new generation who has much to learn from this book. Stanley Hauerwas Duke Divinity School This remarkable little book remains a classic, a wise and concrete reflection on the life of faith as a real way of life, grounded in the communal encounter with the grace of God in public worship. Look here to see again what word and sacrament have to do with daily life. Read here to think again how the paschal movement of Christ from death to life can pull us along, converting us to the care and embrace of the world. Gordon W. Lathrop Charles A. Schieren Professor of Liturgy Emeritus Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia Timothy Sedgwick is the most imaginative and provocative moralist now w...
En partant de l'observation de la perspective d'un nouveau systeme de developpement des m... more En partant de l'observation de la perspective d'un nouveau systeme de developpement des ministeres, l'A. s'interroge : comment dans les vingt cinq dernieres annees en est-on arrive au renouveau de l'Eglise et des ministeres ? En consequence, qu'est-ce-que cela dit sur ce qui est capital dans cette vision de «ministere total» ? Il tente de repondre a ces questions en donnant l'exemple de l'experience en Alaska du developpement des ministeres, avec le point de vue de Roland Allen dans des livres publies entre 1912 et 1930 et exploite seulement dans les annees 60. Ce point de vue s'est ensuite approfondi avec le renouveau liturgique, et l'experience de «ministere total» dans le Nevada dans les annees 70.
The Central Question of Christian Faith When Christians struggle with deciding what to do, their ... more The Central Question of Christian Faith When Christians struggle with deciding what to do, their first question should be, "How is God acting upon us?" Christians should ask this question because faith in God makes the claim that God is at the center of our lives, as the power and goodness that creates, governs, and redeems us. This claim, in turn, demands that we should act in all our actions so as to respond to God's action upon us. The dual question of "What is God's action upon us?" and "What should be our response?" is a question that begins in Scripture, running through it from Genesis to Revelation, from the story of Adam and Eve to the question confronting the new Christian churches in persecution. And this is the question that continues to challenge Christians. Augustine writes The City of God in the midst of the fall of Rome and wrestles with how God has acted and so with how we should live as citizens of two cities, the human city and the city of God. From Augustine through Benedictines and Franciscans to Ana-baptist Menno Simons, in Thomas Aquinas and in Protestant reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Richard Hooker, to contemporary Christian realists and pacifists, the dual question of Gods action and our response stands at the heart of Christian ethics. In the second half of the twentieth century, H. Richard Niebuhr focused more than two generations of students and Protestant ethics in general-most notably in Christ and Culture (1951) and The Responsible Self (1963)-on the importance of beginning with the question of God's action and then, and only then, turning to the moral question of what should be done. This meant beginning in prayer, what Niebuhr once referred to as "the grace of doing nothing."1 In prayer Christians seek to stand in the presence of God. Beyond thanksgivings and petitions, prayer is a matter of silence. "For God alone my soul in silence waits" (Psalm 62:1). Especially in times of turmoil, we tend to react out of our preconceived notion of things and so cannot hear what is going on. As Rowan Williams reflects in his meditations on our response to terrorism in Writing in the Dust: After September 11, "Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void . . . [and not] bind God to our own purposes."2 In silence we may listen rather than see, feel rather than react to the events that threaten us. In silence we may hear the word of God. Our prayers as Christians express our Trinitarian understanding of God. God acts upon us as creator, governor (sustainer, ruler, and judge), and redeemer. These are not three separate actions but are inseparable. The love that creates is the love that sustains, judges, and redeems. It may be that we know or recognize love most clearly when we are forgiven for what we have done and are simply accepted by someone else. But such love does not stand alone. The love given in forgiveness is the love for which we were born, while the fullness of that love cannot be conceived apart from love's negative image in the failures of our life together. Silence and prayer open our soul to this God so that prayer is not a frenetic praying for some kind of victory-whether that be success in bearing arms or in the pacifist renunciation of lethal force altogether. Rather, out of silence Christians pray in repentance for the failures that have led down the path towards war. They pray out of compassion for those who suffer and with hope born of faith that God will be present-that whatever judgment may come, there will be grace in that judgment. Christian prayer does nothing and yet transforms everything. In prayer Christians are converted into grace. Whatever comes, we pray in the declarative words of the Lord's Prayer, "God, your will be done." It is the action of the world upon us-literally our suffering of both limitations and possibilities, of failures and blessings, of the terrible and the beautiful-that leads to prayer. …
A Secular Age. By Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 20... more A Secular Age. By Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. ? + 874 pp. $43.50 (cloth). Much expanded in scope and detail from his 1999 Gilford Lectures, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age provides the means of conceiving how religion and specifically Christian faith are at once captive to the present age even while they shape and determine our outlook. Moreover, A Secular Age provides a means of making sense of religious sentiments and movements without which we are captive to naive enthusiasms or critical cynicism. Taylor recommends reading the book "as a set of interlocking essays, which shed light on each otiier, and offer a relevance for each other" (p. ix). The chapters move from (1) an interpretation of the nature of secularization and die contemporary world of Western Europe and North America, to (2) an intellectual history detailing the shift from (using Max Weber's term) an enchanted world to disenchantment given an immanent worldview and the possibility of unbelief, to (3) an account of religion and religious faith today, to (4) a philosophical and religious interpretation of what this all means and suggestions for possible futures. This makes A Secular Age a "big book," the culmination of Taylor's work as a philosopher. Taylor's argument is historical: meanings arise from history and are "true" as they make sense of the present and possible futures in terms ofthat history. Only with an historical understanding of religious belief and its transformations is it possible to understand what is assumed in the rejection of religious beliefs and so what are the alternative meanings and possibilities born or embedded in history. Taylor begins by recounting three meanings of "secular": (1) separation of religion from other spheres of life; (2) the decline of religious beliefs and practices; and (3) the change of conditions such that God becomes a question and no longer axiomatic. The first two accounts of secularization describe the changes in Western culture marked by the collapse of Christendom and what is spoken of now as life in a post-Christian world. These first two accounts of secularization are "subtraction stories" in which past beliefs are lost to "enlightened" views of the world, as when religious belief is viewed as replaced by scientific understandings of the world. Such accounts (as most recently expressed by the new atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) are reductionist in that their critique and rejection of religious beliefs fail to comprehend the nature of religious meaning and how these meanings are themselves transformed and assumed in their secular claims (see note 27, p. 835). The pleasure of reading Taylor's account of secularization is the context for the understanding he provides for the religious and philosophical views of others. He reaches back into what has been called the pre-Axial Age, in which human agency is embedded in the social order which is embedded in the cosmos which incorporates the divine (p. 152), and also reaches forward to the breakdown of this sacred hierarchy (what he calls "the great disembedding"), where natural causality, human agency, and questions of the human good or human fulfillment are questioned and addressed. Relying on and making sense of primary sources in philosophy and theology, Taylors argument enables one to see differently. And for religious thinkers and practitioners, this enables a critical perspective on current movements in a secular age. The windows which Taylor opens are given through two pairs of "ideal typical types": the enchanted world and the porous self; and the disenchanted world and the buffered self. As ideal types, they draw together common features that focus attention on assumptions that make sense of larger changes, in this case differences in views of God, die world, society and history, and the human person. In the enchanted world of the pre-Axial Age, the world is sacralized and drenched with powers - spirits, demons, cosmic forces - that break in upon the self, that must be directly encountered, engaged, placated, honored; hence the importance of holy things and holy places, sacred mysteries and sacramental rites, prayers and incantations. …
Essential readings for what? For Christian ethics this is a question of what is needed in order t... more Essential readings for what? For Christian ethics this is a question of what is needed in order to understand the Christian moral life. This requires studies of Christian faith, the human person, and culture and society. These studies must draw from a range of disciplines. Here are ten such readings, each of which introduces the reader to a broad range of literature essential to Christian ethics. 1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989) The result of a life teaching the history of philosophy and more broadly Western thought, Taylor tells the story that untangles the strands that have formed us and the way in which we now see ourselves as having an interior sense of self that seeks fulfillment in the world about us. 2. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994) Since her highly praised book, The Fragility of Good: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986), the prolific scholar Martha Nussbaum has written broadly across the fields of classics, philosophy, literature, and law. The Therapy of Desire is of special importance to persons in ethics as it addresses how our understanding of the good is shaped by our experience of the good. She shows that ever since the Greeks, ethics has been grounded in ascetics (practices of formation). 3. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1988) Peter Brown always tells a good story. Here he tells the story of sexual renunciation in Christian late antiquity, not so much as a denial of the body but as forming the self, of freedom, of the shaping of desiring, and of knowing God and what is good. 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) This contemporary classic makes clear that our post-Enlightenment sense of ourselves has a history: this is the history of the autonomous (and narcissistic) self that denies the importance of traditions and the practices that form the self. 5. F. D. Maurice, Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) Essential reading in Christian ethics requires not only accounts of the self in terms of how we know and do good, but Christian accounts of how we come to faith and what difference that makes in our lives. As an Anglican, the nineteenth-century F. D. Maurice offers the most comprehensive account of how in faith we are formed in history, socially and sacramentally. This book offers an outstanding collection of his writings, beginning with The Kingdom of Christ (1838/1842). …
I. The sexual revolution may be variously described. At the least it reflects changes in understa... more I. The sexual revolution may be variously described. At the least it reflects changes in understandings and assessments of the nature and purposes of human sexual relations and, in turn, understandings of gender roles and of the family or household in relationship to society-at-large. These changes are identified with the second half of the twentieth century, though the challenge to the received tradition has sources in the development of industrial and post-industrial society as that is marked by increasing economic wealth and mobility, both physical and social. In other words, the challenge to the received tradition is tied to the breakdown of traditional society with defined social roles as shaped by the need for the maintenance, and even survival, of societies. (1) For Christians and for Western societies, the focus of discussion and debate within particular ecclesial traditions has most often been on sexual norms. The received tradition has held as normative that sexual relations should be consummated in marriage between husband and wife, who have committed themselves to forming a life together, "until death do us part," marked by sexual exclusivity and, God willing, the blessing of children. As John Witte has described it, in the development of these norms, the understanding of marriage has varied from contract to covenant with different views on the relationship between mutual commitment and the nature (or ontological identity) of marriage. (2) The understanding or relationship between the ends of marriage was also viewed differently, most notably between Roman Catholic emphasis on the integral unity between the procreative (as openness to having children) and the unitive (as an expression of love) and Lutheran and subsequently Anglican, Reformed, and other Protestant views in which that integral unity was broken, such that sexual relations were an appropriate expression of love apart from the possibility of procreation. (3) In the twentieth century, the first challenge to the received tradition was posed by contraception. For Roman Catholics contraception broke the unity between the procreative and unitive ends of marriage. For all, contraception could turn the focus in sexual relations to pleasure and individual fulfillment, thus encouraging fornication and divorce. (4) These concerns may be expressed in the consequent change of the grounds for divorce, a change from cause (such as adultery) to broader notions of failure to fulfill one another (a failed marriage and no-fault divorce). Such changes liberalizing norms and practices were seen as tied to a romantic vision of marriage as companionate. (5) In short, the concern was that the traditional understanding of marriage as a "remedy against sin" would be lost from view. Further, if sexual relations are not fundamentally tied to procreation but are expressions and sacraments of love, then sexual relations need not be heterosexual. (6) Such a view was supported, moreover, by the broader social movement of gay liberation and the testimonies of gay people; the study of homosexuality socially, historically, and physiologically; and the declassification of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder resulting from arrested development. (7) In the stormy debates on ethics and human sexuality, Roman Catholic arguments have focused on the assumptions in that Church's teachings on sexuality, specifically on claims about the nature of sexuality grounded in claims about natural law. What does it mean to claim that something, such as contraception or homosexual relationships, is against nature? In what sense does the reading of nature reflect a particular time, place, and interests? Assuming normative teachings were caught in their own history--for example, the Neo-platonic dualism and patriarchal character of early Christian thought--what is normative? (8) In Protestant churches the debate over sexual ethics focused predominantly on scripture. …
A distinctive strand of Anglican thought addressing Christian faith and Christian life may be des... more A distinctive strand of Anglican thought addressing Christian faith and Christian life may be described as the exemplary tradition, represented by Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Traherne, Joseph Butler, F. D. Maurice, and Kenneth Kirk. This virtue tradition within Anglicanism seeks to bring persons more fully into relationship with God as a matter of practices that shape fundamental intentions. This strand is informed by contemporary ethical theory while offering claims and raising questions beyond what theory provides in order to form a unified account of the Christian moral life. This constructive archeology of tradition is what is needed in order to insure theory and the lived traditions of Christian faith inform one another. "Christianity is all for practice," says seventeenth-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor.1 Similarly, in The Ruh and Exercises of Holy Living, he speaks of Christianity as a matter of piety - piety in the traditional sense of the word, not overly wrought religious practices but a way of life. Through reading Scripture, prayer, baptism, and eucharist, persons enter and form a community of faith marked in the great commandment given in the Old and New Testaments that summarizes this life as a matter of love of God and love of neighbor. Certainly belief informs practice, but religious knowledge is given in the practice of faith which in turn informs belief. This is expressed in the hturgical principle lex orandi lex credendi: the order of prayer is the order of belief.2 The Anglican thinkers who understand Christian faith as a matter of practical piety constitute a distinct strand of Anglican thought. This strand or tradition within Anglicanism constitutes a virtue ethic. As a virtue ethic, the Christian life is understood in the Aristotelian language of form and matter. An account of Christian faith must identify the end (or form) of the Christian fife in terms of the intentions that form human action. In turn, the matter or content of this life must be described in terms of the actions tied to the ends intended. This account of virtue was, at least since Augustine, developed as a matter of the classical cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice in relationship to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.3 The actions that realize these virtues may be called practices, such as prayer and eucharistie worship, forgiveness, and love of neighbor or what we now describe more specifically as hospitality to the stranger. In this tradition, worship expresses and shapes the character of the Christian life as a matter of the love of God as given in Jesus Christ. As such, the Anglican virtue ethic is an exemplary ethic in which Christ reveals the shape or form of what it is to be human and specifically that fife as given in relationship to God. In this sense, Christ is the archetype, the exemplar, the model of what it is to be human. Christ is the second Adam, human life as redeemed. It may be helpful to place the exemplary tradition within Anglicanism within the larger context of moral traditioning. By moral traditioning I mean the passing down of moral reflections on the Christian life. As different questions are raised within the community of faith, reflections are varied in purpose and style. Often writings serve a variety of purposes, for example, to convert, to understand, to form, to counsel, and to exhort. Such reflections are not "siloed off" from one another but inform each other. A tradition of thought is then only identified retrospectively, looking back at writings and drawing them together in terms of some common features. The development of theories of ethics - since Aristotle's reflections on the good, on virtues, and on principles - has shaped moral reflection and moral theology or ethics as a discipline of study. Sharpness of focus, however, at times obscures broader questions and wisdom within a tradition. In other words, the moral tradition may be construed too narrowly in accord with a theory of ethics as opposed to the range of reflections that constitute a tradition. …
How we teach and how we learn are central to Christian moral formation. As matters of the three “... more How we teach and how we learn are central to Christian moral formation. As matters of the three “E’s”—ethics, ecclesiology, and ecumenism—this lecture untangles the history of moral teaching in the church and asks whether differences in moral teaching should be church-dividing. Tim Sedgwick is a Collegeville Institute Resident Scholar, and professor of Christian Ethics and former academic dean at Virginia Theological Seminary. He is also an Episcopal delegate to the current Anglican Roman Catholic Theological Consultation USA which is addressing matters of ethics and ecclesiology
La conception de la foi chretienne, de sa mission, de sa structure et de son autorite par une Egl... more La conception de la foi chretienne, de sa mission, de sa structure et de son autorite par une Eglise est donnee a travers sa maniere de comprendre l'autre. Au sujet de l'anglicanisme, R. Hooker et K. Kirk proposent deux exposes distincts de l'Eglise et de la foi chretienne. Pour les deux hommes, le veritable defi consiste a former un peuple chretien. Pour Hooker, le probleme consiste a ne pas se diviser sur des pratiques religieuse catholiques ou protestantes. Pour Kirk, il s'agit de ne pas reduire la foi a une experience individuelle. Ces deux hommes elargissent le sens de l'identite chretienne en general et de l'anglicanisme en particulier
This volume seeks to identify sources from religious faith that inform bioethics and, more specif... more This volume seeks to identify sources from religious faith that inform bioethics and, more specifically, an ethic of health care. In other words, this volume is a collection of essays on theological foundations for bioethics and health care. These waters have been widely explored. Most often religious faith has been understood in terms of the claims it makes about the meaning and value of human life. Conclusions are then drawn in response to moral issues such as abortion, patient-physician relationships, informed consent, experimentation, death and dying, and the form and distribution of health care services.
Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 1997
IN THIS TIGHTLY ARGUED MONOGRAPH Schweiker offers an account of the central questions an ethic mu... more IN THIS TIGHTLY ARGUED MONOGRAPH Schweiker offers an account of the central questions an ethic must address and answers them in a theologically grounded ethic. This is among the best philosophically sophisticated, theological ethics to be developed in response to the questions and challenges of modernity. This is not a systematic theological ethic but an argument that other scholars must engage as they develop their own arguments.
From the beginning of the ecumenical movement, it has been said that "service unites, doctri... more From the beginning of the ecumenical movement, it has been said that "service unites, doctrine divides." Now it is apparent that matters of moral judgment are a major source of division within churches and between churches. This is nowhere more so than in matters of human sexuality and particularly in judgments over homosexuality and same-sex relations. Making sense of the conflict over ethics in the church has been limited in focusing primarily on questions of right moral teaching and on moral formation that will form persons in such an ethic. (1) Common ground has been found in the challenges that churches confront in forming such teaching, especially in terms of the cultural captivity of the churches and, hence, the relationship of local churches to the universal Church. Largely, however, in matters of moral teaching, churches have addressed differences in the same way that differences in doctrinal understandings had initially been addressed. Right belief or purity of d...
The contributors to this book of timely essays have come to believe that the ability of the Episc... more The contributors to this book of timely essays have come to believe that the ability of the Episcopal Church to offer moral guidance is in jeopardy. This diverse group of moral theologians addresses the issues of human sexuality, birth technologies, abortion, the justice of the economic order, and the use of military force. Although their outlooks are different, they all share a common understanding of the discipline of Christian ethics.
Deepening the Christian identity celebrated in worship Tim Sedgwick s Sacramental Ethics was a gr... more Deepening the Christian identity celebrated in worship Tim Sedgwick s Sacramental Ethics was a groundbreaking book that awaked us to the significance of religious practices for the moral like. We are, therefore, indebted to Augsburg Fortress for their willingness to make this work available for a new generation who has much to learn from this book. Stanley Hauerwas Duke Divinity School This remarkable little book remains a classic, a wise and concrete reflection on the life of faith as a real way of life, grounded in the communal encounter with the grace of God in public worship. Look here to see again what word and sacrament have to do with daily life. Read here to think again how the paschal movement of Christ from death to life can pull us along, converting us to the care and embrace of the world. Gordon W. Lathrop Charles A. Schieren Professor of Liturgy Emeritus Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia Timothy Sedgwick is the most imaginative and provocative moralist now w...
En partant de l'observation de la perspective d'un nouveau systeme de developpement des m... more En partant de l'observation de la perspective d'un nouveau systeme de developpement des ministeres, l'A. s'interroge : comment dans les vingt cinq dernieres annees en est-on arrive au renouveau de l'Eglise et des ministeres ? En consequence, qu'est-ce-que cela dit sur ce qui est capital dans cette vision de «ministere total» ? Il tente de repondre a ces questions en donnant l'exemple de l'experience en Alaska du developpement des ministeres, avec le point de vue de Roland Allen dans des livres publies entre 1912 et 1930 et exploite seulement dans les annees 60. Ce point de vue s'est ensuite approfondi avec le renouveau liturgique, et l'experience de «ministere total» dans le Nevada dans les annees 70.
The Central Question of Christian Faith When Christians struggle with deciding what to do, their ... more The Central Question of Christian Faith When Christians struggle with deciding what to do, their first question should be, "How is God acting upon us?" Christians should ask this question because faith in God makes the claim that God is at the center of our lives, as the power and goodness that creates, governs, and redeems us. This claim, in turn, demands that we should act in all our actions so as to respond to God's action upon us. The dual question of "What is God's action upon us?" and "What should be our response?" is a question that begins in Scripture, running through it from Genesis to Revelation, from the story of Adam and Eve to the question confronting the new Christian churches in persecution. And this is the question that continues to challenge Christians. Augustine writes The City of God in the midst of the fall of Rome and wrestles with how God has acted and so with how we should live as citizens of two cities, the human city and the city of God. From Augustine through Benedictines and Franciscans to Ana-baptist Menno Simons, in Thomas Aquinas and in Protestant reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Richard Hooker, to contemporary Christian realists and pacifists, the dual question of Gods action and our response stands at the heart of Christian ethics. In the second half of the twentieth century, H. Richard Niebuhr focused more than two generations of students and Protestant ethics in general-most notably in Christ and Culture (1951) and The Responsible Self (1963)-on the importance of beginning with the question of God's action and then, and only then, turning to the moral question of what should be done. This meant beginning in prayer, what Niebuhr once referred to as "the grace of doing nothing."1 In prayer Christians seek to stand in the presence of God. Beyond thanksgivings and petitions, prayer is a matter of silence. "For God alone my soul in silence waits" (Psalm 62:1). Especially in times of turmoil, we tend to react out of our preconceived notion of things and so cannot hear what is going on. As Rowan Williams reflects in his meditations on our response to terrorism in Writing in the Dust: After September 11, "Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void . . . [and not] bind God to our own purposes."2 In silence we may listen rather than see, feel rather than react to the events that threaten us. In silence we may hear the word of God. Our prayers as Christians express our Trinitarian understanding of God. God acts upon us as creator, governor (sustainer, ruler, and judge), and redeemer. These are not three separate actions but are inseparable. The love that creates is the love that sustains, judges, and redeems. It may be that we know or recognize love most clearly when we are forgiven for what we have done and are simply accepted by someone else. But such love does not stand alone. The love given in forgiveness is the love for which we were born, while the fullness of that love cannot be conceived apart from love's negative image in the failures of our life together. Silence and prayer open our soul to this God so that prayer is not a frenetic praying for some kind of victory-whether that be success in bearing arms or in the pacifist renunciation of lethal force altogether. Rather, out of silence Christians pray in repentance for the failures that have led down the path towards war. They pray out of compassion for those who suffer and with hope born of faith that God will be present-that whatever judgment may come, there will be grace in that judgment. Christian prayer does nothing and yet transforms everything. In prayer Christians are converted into grace. Whatever comes, we pray in the declarative words of the Lord's Prayer, "God, your will be done." It is the action of the world upon us-literally our suffering of both limitations and possibilities, of failures and blessings, of the terrible and the beautiful-that leads to prayer. …
A Secular Age. By Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 20... more A Secular Age. By Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. ? + 874 pp. $43.50 (cloth). Much expanded in scope and detail from his 1999 Gilford Lectures, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age provides the means of conceiving how religion and specifically Christian faith are at once captive to the present age even while they shape and determine our outlook. Moreover, A Secular Age provides a means of making sense of religious sentiments and movements without which we are captive to naive enthusiasms or critical cynicism. Taylor recommends reading the book "as a set of interlocking essays, which shed light on each otiier, and offer a relevance for each other" (p. ix). The chapters move from (1) an interpretation of the nature of secularization and die contemporary world of Western Europe and North America, to (2) an intellectual history detailing the shift from (using Max Weber's term) an enchanted world to disenchantment given an immanent worldview and the possibility of unbelief, to (3) an account of religion and religious faith today, to (4) a philosophical and religious interpretation of what this all means and suggestions for possible futures. This makes A Secular Age a "big book," the culmination of Taylor's work as a philosopher. Taylor's argument is historical: meanings arise from history and are "true" as they make sense of the present and possible futures in terms ofthat history. Only with an historical understanding of religious belief and its transformations is it possible to understand what is assumed in the rejection of religious beliefs and so what are the alternative meanings and possibilities born or embedded in history. Taylor begins by recounting three meanings of "secular": (1) separation of religion from other spheres of life; (2) the decline of religious beliefs and practices; and (3) the change of conditions such that God becomes a question and no longer axiomatic. The first two accounts of secularization describe the changes in Western culture marked by the collapse of Christendom and what is spoken of now as life in a post-Christian world. These first two accounts of secularization are "subtraction stories" in which past beliefs are lost to "enlightened" views of the world, as when religious belief is viewed as replaced by scientific understandings of the world. Such accounts (as most recently expressed by the new atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) are reductionist in that their critique and rejection of religious beliefs fail to comprehend the nature of religious meaning and how these meanings are themselves transformed and assumed in their secular claims (see note 27, p. 835). The pleasure of reading Taylor's account of secularization is the context for the understanding he provides for the religious and philosophical views of others. He reaches back into what has been called the pre-Axial Age, in which human agency is embedded in the social order which is embedded in the cosmos which incorporates the divine (p. 152), and also reaches forward to the breakdown of this sacred hierarchy (what he calls "the great disembedding"), where natural causality, human agency, and questions of the human good or human fulfillment are questioned and addressed. Relying on and making sense of primary sources in philosophy and theology, Taylors argument enables one to see differently. And for religious thinkers and practitioners, this enables a critical perspective on current movements in a secular age. The windows which Taylor opens are given through two pairs of "ideal typical types": the enchanted world and the porous self; and the disenchanted world and the buffered self. As ideal types, they draw together common features that focus attention on assumptions that make sense of larger changes, in this case differences in views of God, die world, society and history, and the human person. In the enchanted world of the pre-Axial Age, the world is sacralized and drenched with powers - spirits, demons, cosmic forces - that break in upon the self, that must be directly encountered, engaged, placated, honored; hence the importance of holy things and holy places, sacred mysteries and sacramental rites, prayers and incantations. …
Essential readings for what? For Christian ethics this is a question of what is needed in order t... more Essential readings for what? For Christian ethics this is a question of what is needed in order to understand the Christian moral life. This requires studies of Christian faith, the human person, and culture and society. These studies must draw from a range of disciplines. Here are ten such readings, each of which introduces the reader to a broad range of literature essential to Christian ethics. 1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989) The result of a life teaching the history of philosophy and more broadly Western thought, Taylor tells the story that untangles the strands that have formed us and the way in which we now see ourselves as having an interior sense of self that seeks fulfillment in the world about us. 2. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994) Since her highly praised book, The Fragility of Good: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986), the prolific scholar Martha Nussbaum has written broadly across the fields of classics, philosophy, literature, and law. The Therapy of Desire is of special importance to persons in ethics as it addresses how our understanding of the good is shaped by our experience of the good. She shows that ever since the Greeks, ethics has been grounded in ascetics (practices of formation). 3. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1988) Peter Brown always tells a good story. Here he tells the story of sexual renunciation in Christian late antiquity, not so much as a denial of the body but as forming the self, of freedom, of the shaping of desiring, and of knowing God and what is good. 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) This contemporary classic makes clear that our post-Enlightenment sense of ourselves has a history: this is the history of the autonomous (and narcissistic) self that denies the importance of traditions and the practices that form the self. 5. F. D. Maurice, Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) Essential reading in Christian ethics requires not only accounts of the self in terms of how we know and do good, but Christian accounts of how we come to faith and what difference that makes in our lives. As an Anglican, the nineteenth-century F. D. Maurice offers the most comprehensive account of how in faith we are formed in history, socially and sacramentally. This book offers an outstanding collection of his writings, beginning with The Kingdom of Christ (1838/1842). …
I. The sexual revolution may be variously described. At the least it reflects changes in understa... more I. The sexual revolution may be variously described. At the least it reflects changes in understandings and assessments of the nature and purposes of human sexual relations and, in turn, understandings of gender roles and of the family or household in relationship to society-at-large. These changes are identified with the second half of the twentieth century, though the challenge to the received tradition has sources in the development of industrial and post-industrial society as that is marked by increasing economic wealth and mobility, both physical and social. In other words, the challenge to the received tradition is tied to the breakdown of traditional society with defined social roles as shaped by the need for the maintenance, and even survival, of societies. (1) For Christians and for Western societies, the focus of discussion and debate within particular ecclesial traditions has most often been on sexual norms. The received tradition has held as normative that sexual relations should be consummated in marriage between husband and wife, who have committed themselves to forming a life together, "until death do us part," marked by sexual exclusivity and, God willing, the blessing of children. As John Witte has described it, in the development of these norms, the understanding of marriage has varied from contract to covenant with different views on the relationship between mutual commitment and the nature (or ontological identity) of marriage. (2) The understanding or relationship between the ends of marriage was also viewed differently, most notably between Roman Catholic emphasis on the integral unity between the procreative (as openness to having children) and the unitive (as an expression of love) and Lutheran and subsequently Anglican, Reformed, and other Protestant views in which that integral unity was broken, such that sexual relations were an appropriate expression of love apart from the possibility of procreation. (3) In the twentieth century, the first challenge to the received tradition was posed by contraception. For Roman Catholics contraception broke the unity between the procreative and unitive ends of marriage. For all, contraception could turn the focus in sexual relations to pleasure and individual fulfillment, thus encouraging fornication and divorce. (4) These concerns may be expressed in the consequent change of the grounds for divorce, a change from cause (such as adultery) to broader notions of failure to fulfill one another (a failed marriage and no-fault divorce). Such changes liberalizing norms and practices were seen as tied to a romantic vision of marriage as companionate. (5) In short, the concern was that the traditional understanding of marriage as a "remedy against sin" would be lost from view. Further, if sexual relations are not fundamentally tied to procreation but are expressions and sacraments of love, then sexual relations need not be heterosexual. (6) Such a view was supported, moreover, by the broader social movement of gay liberation and the testimonies of gay people; the study of homosexuality socially, historically, and physiologically; and the declassification of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder resulting from arrested development. (7) In the stormy debates on ethics and human sexuality, Roman Catholic arguments have focused on the assumptions in that Church's teachings on sexuality, specifically on claims about the nature of sexuality grounded in claims about natural law. What does it mean to claim that something, such as contraception or homosexual relationships, is against nature? In what sense does the reading of nature reflect a particular time, place, and interests? Assuming normative teachings were caught in their own history--for example, the Neo-platonic dualism and patriarchal character of early Christian thought--what is normative? (8) In Protestant churches the debate over sexual ethics focused predominantly on scripture. …
A distinctive strand of Anglican thought addressing Christian faith and Christian life may be des... more A distinctive strand of Anglican thought addressing Christian faith and Christian life may be described as the exemplary tradition, represented by Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Traherne, Joseph Butler, F. D. Maurice, and Kenneth Kirk. This virtue tradition within Anglicanism seeks to bring persons more fully into relationship with God as a matter of practices that shape fundamental intentions. This strand is informed by contemporary ethical theory while offering claims and raising questions beyond what theory provides in order to form a unified account of the Christian moral life. This constructive archeology of tradition is what is needed in order to insure theory and the lived traditions of Christian faith inform one another. "Christianity is all for practice," says seventeenth-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor.1 Similarly, in The Ruh and Exercises of Holy Living, he speaks of Christianity as a matter of piety - piety in the traditional sense of the word, not overly wrought religious practices but a way of life. Through reading Scripture, prayer, baptism, and eucharist, persons enter and form a community of faith marked in the great commandment given in the Old and New Testaments that summarizes this life as a matter of love of God and love of neighbor. Certainly belief informs practice, but religious knowledge is given in the practice of faith which in turn informs belief. This is expressed in the hturgical principle lex orandi lex credendi: the order of prayer is the order of belief.2 The Anglican thinkers who understand Christian faith as a matter of practical piety constitute a distinct strand of Anglican thought. This strand or tradition within Anglicanism constitutes a virtue ethic. As a virtue ethic, the Christian life is understood in the Aristotelian language of form and matter. An account of Christian faith must identify the end (or form) of the Christian fife in terms of the intentions that form human action. In turn, the matter or content of this life must be described in terms of the actions tied to the ends intended. This account of virtue was, at least since Augustine, developed as a matter of the classical cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice in relationship to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.3 The actions that realize these virtues may be called practices, such as prayer and eucharistie worship, forgiveness, and love of neighbor or what we now describe more specifically as hospitality to the stranger. In this tradition, worship expresses and shapes the character of the Christian life as a matter of the love of God as given in Jesus Christ. As such, the Anglican virtue ethic is an exemplary ethic in which Christ reveals the shape or form of what it is to be human and specifically that fife as given in relationship to God. In this sense, Christ is the archetype, the exemplar, the model of what it is to be human. Christ is the second Adam, human life as redeemed. It may be helpful to place the exemplary tradition within Anglicanism within the larger context of moral traditioning. By moral traditioning I mean the passing down of moral reflections on the Christian life. As different questions are raised within the community of faith, reflections are varied in purpose and style. Often writings serve a variety of purposes, for example, to convert, to understand, to form, to counsel, and to exhort. Such reflections are not "siloed off" from one another but inform each other. A tradition of thought is then only identified retrospectively, looking back at writings and drawing them together in terms of some common features. The development of theories of ethics - since Aristotle's reflections on the good, on virtues, and on principles - has shaped moral reflection and moral theology or ethics as a discipline of study. Sharpness of focus, however, at times obscures broader questions and wisdom within a tradition. In other words, the moral tradition may be construed too narrowly in accord with a theory of ethics as opposed to the range of reflections that constitute a tradition. …
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