Approaches to Theological Ethics

Sources, Traditions, Visions

Maureen Junker-Kenny

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567682956
• eBook ISBN: 9780567682987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Maureen Junker-Kenny offers a systematic overview of the discipline of theological ethics in the variety of its approaches, which draw upon different philosophical traditions and theological visions in treating its sources. Part One examines the four sources of theological ethics: the Bible, tradition, philosophical accounts of the human, and the individual human sciences. Part Two compares five frameworks in English- and German-speaking theological ethics, based on virtue, worship, natural law, autonomy, and feminist analyses. Part Three compares three types of vision - integralist, praxis-oriented, and discourse-focused -, and Junker-Kenny concludes by situating the investigation of the discipline within contemporary philosophical and theological exchanges on religion in the public sphere. The book provides a framework in which students can locate the specific use of core ethical concepts and argumentations, comparing how each approach relates to the Bible, to historical reason, theological thought, practical self-understandings and interdisciplinary perspectives on ethics in a scientific and technological culture. In an age of globalisation where different cultures, religions, lifestyles and values meet in the workplace, in schools, and in public spaces shaped by religious and cultural traditions, it is necessary to foster the ability to create possibilities and venues for dialogue between different self-understandings. Analysing the variety of approaches to theological ethics helps articulate different visions of what constitutes a fulfilled life, of how the moral vocation of each human being can be supported, and of the role of the Christian faith for ethics.

Part 1

Introduction: The sources of
theological ethics

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1The Bible as a source of theological ethics

2The second source: Tradition as norma normans normata

3The third source: Normative accounts of the human person

4The fourth source: The individual human sciences

 

As a discipline, theological ethics straddles and seeks to integrate four distinct sources, each with their own methods, normative standards and histories of debate: (1) the Bible; (2) tradition; (3) philosophical accounts of the human; and (4) the individual human sciences.¹ Theological ethics is thus a res mixta; it draws on and relates divine revelation and human reason to each other. The first two sources deal with revelation, the latter two with reason in its different forms and capacities to examine human experience. The ways in which these four sources are integrated in order to arrive at ethical judgements and make decisions vary in the five approaches to be examined in Part 2.

Each of these sources comes with its own set of hermeneutical questions and controversies on starting points and premises, alternative frameworks and concepts, and relationships to other sources. This is also the case in philosophical ethics. What gives an additional normative edge to theological ethics is that it understands itself as a response to the prior initiative of God as Creator and Redeemer. God’s self-revelation is the context out of which theological ethics develops alongside systematic theology which reflects on the theoretical implications of faith in God. How this distinctive horizon shapes and modifies the normative expectations to agents is outlined with different accentuations by each approach. The fact that theological ethics arises from a distinctive, positive, historical foundation endows it with a normative task not paralleled in schools of philosophical ethics. The scriptures require a discipline of their own, biblical studies, to investigate the historical origins of this religion in the life and destiny, proclamation and praxis of its founder, the person of Jesus. Naming him Christ means to accept him as the saviour, the ‘anointed one’ expected in the Jewish tradition.

Before beginning to examine the contribution of each of the four sources and their possible integration, the whole analysis needs to be put under a qualification: neither end of the interpretive process is clear-cut. At the contemporary end, what would be necessary to establish cannot be completely delivered: an account of the premises of the era and culture that shape one’s current understanding. Regarding the biblical end, also this pole does not constitute a self-contained message. It offers interpretations of God by reflecting on God’s action in the history of Israel and of Jesus. Thus, for the task at hand an ‘information’ model based on univocity from beginning to end is inadequate. It ignores the interpretive effort needed at both points, which has to be laid out and justified. In his introduction to Reading the Sacred Scriptures, the Irish theologian and theorist of education Fiachra Long points out the difference of the actual hermeneutical task from the impression conveyed by the myth of the messenger god Hermes:

The Greek god, Hermes, who may have been fleet of foot and hugely competent in his essential work of communicating the wishes of Zeus to humankind, is not a very good model to explain the more ambiguous context of human meaning-making, not to mention the more complicated process of reading and re-reading the scriptures. Homer models his idea of message transfer on a linear logic, invoking a general asymmetry between the gods and humankind where the message, originating in a separate domain (Mount Olympus), is then communicated without distortion to a messenger (Hermes), before being translated by means of Hermes’s consummate skill into the mind of a human recipient … In such a case, the translation is doubly certain, untouched by human misunderstanding on two counts, it being perfectly clear in itself and second perfectly translated. The listener, as a result, has no desire to do anything else but to be patently enlightened by the message handed over … To add to our difficulties, our receivers are not only technically imperfect listeners but are often prejudiced and closed to the message communicated because of their own learning … A historical vulnerability seems to be built in to this process of engagement between creator and receiver.²

It was on behalf of the readers of the Bible that Luther defended its immediate accessibility with no need for intervention or explanation by church authorities. Yet the claimed perspicuity of scripture, which is seen as sui ipsius interpres, has to be qualified not for ecclesial, but for theological reasons. The Bible itself witnesses to and already interprets God’s revelation, and is thus not identical with it. It gives meaning to prior events by reading them as actions and responses of God. Its various text forms and books document a history of development in the understanding of God. Also, regarding the readers, the ever-changing situations of reception introduce uncertainty into the process of delivery and rule out a model where the recipients are seen as merely passive. For the practical task of discovering ethical guidelines, this insight implies that submitting the biblical writings to ‘norm-hunting’³ is especially inadequate: this reading strategy is not open to unexpected insights from the biblical text. It has a prior selective agenda and assumes the priority of the current horizon in defining concerns. A hermeneutical mode of enquiry aware of the role of pre-understandings will question the idea of a neutral condition of listening on the human side, uncomplicated by symbolic frameworks and other presuppositions influencing personal and collective attentiveness. To safeguard the normative standing of the Bible, its otherness has to be protected from premature claims, the mediated nature of God’s revelation acknowledged, and the authority of the Bible interpreted on this basis. Collapsing the two, God’s Word, and the human words in which it is expressed, prevents such careful discernment and fails to justify the choice of the guiding perspective which a reader will inevitably make. The task to lay open one’s premises also relates to the two sources of reason: normative accounts of the human and research in the individual human sciences. But it appears with even greater urgency in relation to the renewed efforts of each age to interpret God’s self through the communication contained in scripture. The active role exercised first by the biblical writers and then by the readers calls for a theological framework that allows to put forth revelation in terms of a divine–human encounter, not as a divine communiqué complete in itself, which does not require any effort to be understood. For the latter view, called ‘extrinsicist’, the authority of God’s message depends on discounting any role of the addressees in interpreting God’s revelation. However, just as systematic theology reflects on the questions and capabilities of the human recipients that correspond to God’s self-revelation, the discipline of theological ethics has to explore the human subjectivity that is called to respond to God’s offer. This is spelt out especially in the two sources called ‘the normatively human’ and the ‘human sciences’.

Distinguishing four sources already implies that they are compatible in principle. But their argumentations are on different levels, with separate criteria of normativity; this allows for argued steps of integration into a specific judgement, requiring a process of assessment that keeps the limits of their methods in mind. With these preliminary indications of the independent standing of each source and their inherent boundaries that make precisely defined enquiries possible, the following chapter on the first source opens the dialogue with scholars of the texts and contexts of the Bible.

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¹  The proposal of its ‘quadrilateral’ composition enjoys considerable agreement across denominations in English-speaking theological ethics. Cf., for example, the brief description by Lisa S. Cahill, Between the Sexes (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 4–8, 12–13, with references to its author John Wesley, as well as to James M. Gustafson and Robert J. Daly.

²  Fiachra Long, ‘The Hermeneutic Task’, in Reading the Sacred Scriptures: From Oral Tradition to Written Documents and Their Reception, ed. Fiachra Long and Siobhán Dowling Long (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 2.

³  Tom Deidun, ‘The Bible and Christian Ethics’, in Christian Ethics: An Introduction, ed. Bernard Hoose (London: Cassell, 1998), 22.

1

The Bible as a source of
theological ethics

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Chapter Outline

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1.Scripture as a creation of the church

2.The Bible as the authoritative word of God

3.The New Testament as the earliest testimony to God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus

While Chapters 1 and 2 will analyse the Bible and ‘tradition’ separately, since different questions arise from each for their use for contemporary issues, it needs to be stated at the beginning that both sources are internally related. The only available access to the foundational writings of Christianity is through their history of reception, which includes the process of canon formation completed after new cultural challenges had been encountered. Regarding their ranking, they are distinguished as norma normans non normata, recognizing the Bible as the originating, authoritative document, and as norma normans normata. The normative value of tradition, consisting of the sequence of the understandings created by the efforts to relate the message of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ to new intellectual contexts, is derived from the primary source, the Bible. The achievement of these early theological interpretations is to give direction to the subsequent understandings of the Christian message: the communities and intellectual streams they spoke to, the creeds and Council decisions on debates on how the person and work of Jesus Christ could be expressed most adequately. Summarized as norma normans normata, this body of writings is acknowledged as providing an ongoing normative standard: the theological decisions they contain ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Introduction: The sources of theological ethics
• 1 The Bible as a source of theological ethics
• 2 The second source: Tradition as norma normans normata
• 3 The third source: Normative accounts of the human person
• 4 The fourth source: The individual human sciences
• Part 2 Traditions of theological ethics
• 5 Varieties of virtue ethics
• 6 Christian worship as a foundation of Christian ethics
• 7 Natural law
• 8 Autonomous ethics within a Christian faith perspective
• 9 Feminist theological ethics
• Part 3 Visions
• 10 Theological ethics as integralist, as praxis-oriented or as discourse-focused
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright