Faithful Living

Discipleship, Creed, and Ethics

Michael Leyden

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334058199
• eBook ISBN: 9780334058212
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How can the things we do and say in Church impact our lives and shape the decisions we make on a daily basis? What kind of life is implied for people who believe the things that Christians believe? Faithful Living attempts to think through these questions and considers the formational impact worship can have on Christian ethics, and therefore on the lives of Christian disciples.

1

Ethics by Implication

Introduction

How should Christians live, and what differences might our faith make to the daily round of decisions and actions that make up our lives? These are questions you might hear on the lips of parishioners, thoughtful members of a youth group, enquiring ordinands and students of religion. But the fact that such questions need to be asked betrays a modern phenomenon in which the theological substance of faith – its basic claims about God, the world and everything else – has become separated from the stuff of everyday life, privatized and relegated to Sunday morning devotions and personal spirituality. Knowing how faith and actions relate to one another is no longer obvious. Nor is it much talked about. In a globalized context, theories of tolerance have dealt with religious claims by relativizing them.1 And many Christians have colluded with it, though for different reasons. When Pope Francis criticized the US Presidential hopeful Donald Trump for the shallowness of his Christian faith in the light of revelations about his treatment of women and lies about political collusion, the Pontiff received criticism from other prominent Christians, including Trump’s opponents Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Bush’s interiorization of faith was explicit, and he would not be drawn on the Christian quality of Trump’s behaviour: ‘I honestly believe that’s a relationship you have with your creator.’2 Though the effort to not judge or offend means there may be widespread sympathy for such a sentiment, it masks a deeper (and overriding) commitment to individualism and consumerism. In such a cultural paradigm, faith is not only a personal matter (which it is) but a private matter (which it cannot be). To allow Trump’s inconsistency without question sets a precedent in which what someone claims to believe and how they live need not integrate. Faith gets privatized, and privatized religion separates the intellectual content of faith, i.e. what we believe, from the practical content of faith, i.e. how we live, leading to the kind of anaemic faith that prevents congregations from understanding the practical value of theological commitments.

The questions with which I began this chapter reject this separation in favour of an integrated and holistic account of the Christian life. Integration means treating several distinct parts of something as a whole by linking each part within a wider framework of meaning. An integrated life avoids the fragmentation of human existence into individual moments, beliefs, habits or practices and instead pursues co-inherence as it highest good, choosing to treat the different parts – family, work, hobbies, religion, values, education, culture, sex and gender, and their related decisions and actions – as constituent ingredients of a single identity. What I do, where I am from, what I value, who I love, and what I believe are, among other things, all parts of who I am, or, perhaps more honestly, who I am becoming. A fragmented sense of self is not healthy. It manifests an inward denial of God’s creative intention.

But, integration of parts does not necessarily mean equality of parts. We are not seeking to hold competing aspects in balance. For Christians, the ‘religious’ aspect of life necessarily impacts the whole sense of being and acting, because faith in the triune God has a determinative quality which stems from the worship of Christ as Lord. Such commitment is all encompassing, loving God with the heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12.30; Matt. 22.37; Luke 10.27). With this in mind, we might imagine a Christian aspiring to work as a school teacher or nurse or scientist, but it’s tougher to believe she or he would aspire to dealing illegal narcotics or being a hired assassin since that work does not align with the teachings of Jesus: such jobs are innately destructive and opposed to the abundant life that Christ came to bring (John 10.10). The challenge of an integrated Christian life is in recognizing that it’s not a given, but something we must learn to do as we learn to live in the light of the gospel. It is what we might otherwise call the challenge of discipleship. ‘Discipleship … is a matter of being taught to live … it is about being accountable to Jesus …’3 The challenge is entailed in Jesus’ call to the first disciples, ‘come and follow me’. To follow somebody is not simply to trail behind them and journalistically document their lifestyle choices, or provide an audience for their activities. Following in the Christian sense involves learning from, and growing with, and integrating into, the life of faith that is centred on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of all others. To meet the challenge of discipleship appropriate discernment is needed.

In what follows I reject the notion of separating theology from everyday life by suggesting an approach to discipleship that integrates belief and practice in their more formal guises as doctrine and ethics. It might seem strange to suggest that these two aspects of the faith should need integrating at all, but for many the central beliefs of the Church can feel remote and removed from the concerns of everyday life. One of the tasks of pastoral ministry is to help people connect their relationship with Jesus Christ and their place in his Church with their everyday experiences, decisions and actions. At no point in this book will I try to establish whether Christian beliefs ought to make a difference to the lives Christians lead. Even the most ardent atheist assumes that they will (and can be quick to identify our hypocrisy when they don’t). Rather, I take a more explicatory approach to the topic by presuming that the material and theological substance of Christianity is intellectually, emotionally and spiritually formative, and ought also, therefore, to be ethically formative. Following this instinct means that further resources for discipleship become available.

Such thinking has long been a part of the Christian tradition. Take, for example, that great preacher, Augustine of Hippo, who saw theology as the peculiar and distinguishing foundation of an integrated life: ‘I am speaking now to Christians; if you believe otherwise, hope otherwise, and love otherwise, then you must also live otherwise.’4 The sermon was delivered sometime in the early fifth century,5 somewhere in North Africa (most likely in Augustine’s episcopal city of Hippo Regius, in modern day Algeria) to a gathering of disciples. It is clear from the message that the bishop trusted the congregation really did believe the right things about God, the world and themselves, but he also feared that in the face of the temptations of the orgiastic celebration offered by the New Year feast they would not live as though those beliefs should make a difference. Perhaps they would forget, or maybe they were ill-equipped to ‘join the dots’ between beliefs and actions. On the basis of a short exposition of Christ’s saving work, Augustine called the congregation to aspire to St Paul’s exhortation to ‘walk as children of light’ (Eph. 5.7–8), and thus reject the behaviours associated with pagan ritual, drunkenness and lasciviousness. If they were to think through the Apostle’s question, ‘what accord can there be between the Lord’s temple and idols?’ (2 Cor. 6.14–16), they would see the answer is none at all, since the God of Jesus Christ has no equal and thus cannot be compared with the false gods of the idols. These Christians were to ‘believe in him who is the one and only true God’ and then show that belief, Augustine argued, in concrete decisions that ‘demonstrate faith by … action’.6 Religious belief alone, as if fragmented and detached from other parts of life, is not good enough; the Algerian disciples were called to an integrated life (cf. Jas 2.18–24).

Of course, if we stop to think about it, ethical deliberation works just like that for most people, either implicitly or explicitly. We see it when a person acts contrary to their professed beliefs and we are moved to question their honesty and integrity. Our culture expects transparency in order to connect someone’s actions to their motivating commitments, no matter how peculiar or (un)religious their worldview.7 That said, it is not always easy to make connections and the reality of integration may be complex. To take a prime example, Christian doctrines – which we might think of as the codified form of Christian belief – can feel dry, conceptual and irrelevant because they’re intellectually demanding and sometimes impractical. (Think of the kinds of questions with which we started and the parishioners who might be asking them.) The religious jargon that often accompanies them, as well as the years of debate and argument, means that doctrines seems at some distance from the practicalities of ethics and morality. It’s not that Christians don’t really believe them, as the scene from Hippo Regius reminds us, but that doctrines are not obviously useful in everyday life circumstances.

The twentieth-century theologian Otto Weber pointed out that the historic separation of doctrine and ethics within the Church was not due to poor pastoral ministry or bad bishops, but stemmed from changes wrought at the Enlightenment, during which time often difficult and complicated Christian beliefs failed to be integrated into the prevailing rationalist worldview. This, he argued, led the Church to adopt a specifically ‘non-theological … conception of the “Christian Life” which was independently examinable, describable, and explainable’.8 Why wouldn’t that happen in such a context? After all, Christian beliefs are inherently irrational and weird. Consider the improbable claim to uniqueness associated with the resurrection of Jesus, or the mathematical challenge of the doctrine of the Trinity. In the face of such absurdities, other (related but not identical) ideas like love, forgiveness and equality are much more sensible and acceptable. However, Weber’s cautionary response to this gives us pause for thought: he argued that what gives meaning to the adjective ‘Christian’ as it is applied to doctrine is the same when applied to ‘ethics’: namely, belief that the triune God is at work in the world through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and this is witnessed in Scripture and summed up in the Church’s ecumenical creeds. In other words, Christians cannot easily abandon the Church’s historic doctrines because they are a matter of identity; Christians are those who believe these things (or at least are somehow related to those who believe these things). So, Weber wrote, ‘to make ethics autonomous … would imply that there are special criteria available for ethics. But we cannot find such criteria’.9 Any ethic that desires to be Christian must be rooted in Christianity’s theological substance of which doctrines are the codified theological form: separation and fragmentation is not possible, and ultimately not helpful for the challenges of discipleship.

Thus my concern in this book is for what I think of as an integrated ethics of discipleship which might position itself as an answer to the question: what kinds of lifestyle choices, decisions and actions might be implied for contemporary disciples by the theological substance of the Christian faith?10 As will become clear, I think what is required is a particular approach to Christian moral reasoning that prioritizes practical catecheses and can thus resource Christian discipleship in the local church. It does so by attending to the ethical meaning of doctrinal statements.

Towards a Doctrinally Motivated Ethics

Probably the most common approach to Christian ethics found in introductory textbooks or primers begins with an immediate quandary, problem or ‘hard case’,11 and then help is sought from a recognized canon of theological resources (Scripture, tradition, reason, experience). We might think, for example, of what to do about an unwanted pregnancy. Ethicists here use the resources to assess and evaluate which of a range of possible responses (abortion included) is most appropriate. It might involve deliberation on the sanctity of life in biblical theology, or feminist theology’s recovery of female agency, or ecumenical discussion of the meaning of personhood, or all three. The quandary itself is the impetus for moral reasoning and guides which resources are used. If done well the discussion neatly provides a concrete answer to a concrete question, after which a precedent may be set that can, in turn, shape wider discourse on other related topics.

While the ethics of hard cases is common, it is not easily marshalled to answer our question here, where the presenting problem is not a specific quandary but the more general puzzle of how to live with Christian theological beliefs. Another approach is needed. Michael Banner helps us to see this when he counsels ethical discourse against ‘becoming so besotted with hard cases as to take the view, in effect, that they comprise the scope of its tasks and responsibilities’.12 Common sense tells us he is correct. Ethics has a more wide-ranging responsibility because life involves more than lolloping from quandary to quandary. What is needed is something bigger: a mode of ethical reasoning that captures and locates our momentary problems within a fuller description of human existence, mapping-out the kind of life Christians might lead when they’re not trying to navigate the difficult issues as well as when they are. This means ethical discourse, which is descriptive, explicating human existence in direct relation to the theological substance of the Christian faith. For this, I suggest, it is necessary to reverse the trend found in some textbooks to treat doctrines as secondary resources called to serve the solution to a particular moral quandary and instead to prioritize attentiveness to doctrines as identity-conferring commitments which orientate an integrated Christian life.

Doctrines are the Church’s most deeply held beliefs. They are the products of lengthy reflection on Christian experiences of encounter with God in Jesus Christ, and the subsequent effort to make sense of the nature and identity of this God and ourselves as his creatures. They grow out of careful engagement with Scripture as the divinely appointed witness to God’s work (2 Tim. 3.15–17).13 Scripture’s authority does not consist in the powers of its human authors or interpreters but, as John Webster has argued, because ‘Holy Scripture is the result of divine movement; it is generated not simply by human spontaneity but by the moving power of the Holy Spirit’, and therefore it has a ‘Spirit-bestowed capacity to quicken theology to truthful thought and speech.’14 Scripture is in one sense a human product that results from encounter with God, but in another it is inspired writing. This means that it holds a status more than personal or corporate memoir because of the presence of another vitalizing power – the Spirit. The Church’s doctrines are a construct of the community as it has made sense of its subsequent encounters with God in the light of Scripture.15 Doctrines attempt to summarize and display the gospel by fixing points of reference for our talk about God that are faithful to Scripture and therefore to Jesus Christ. Doctrines are, therefore, derivatively authoritative in proportion to their faithfulness to Scripture’s witness. Doctrines do not replace Scripture because they are contingent upon it, but they do act as shorthand systematic summaries of its content as it has been understood and appropriated by the Church under th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Nicene Creed
• 1 Ethics by Implication
• 2 ‘We Believe in God’: Community and Morality
• 3 ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’: Consuming Our Fellow Creatures
• 4 ‘In One Lord, Jesus Christ’: Political Responsibility
• 5 ‘Conceived of the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary’: Disability and Humanity
• 6 ‘Suffered Death and was Buried …’: Suffering
• 7 ‘On the Third Day he Rose Again’: Hope and Moral Vision
• 8 ‘The Lord and Giver of Life …’: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life
• 9 ‘Communion of Saints, and Forgiveness of Sins’: The Church and Practical Catechesis
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Copyright