Resurrection and Moral Order

An Outline Of Evangelical Ethics

Oliver O'Donovan

• Publisher: Apollos
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780851114330
• eBook ISBN: 9781789740189
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this truly seminal work, the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University illuminates the distinctive nature of Christian ethics with profound thought and massive learning. By grounding Christian ethics in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, he avoids both a revealed ethics that has no contact with the created order and one that is purely naturalistic. For this second edition Professor O'Donovan has added a prologue in which he enters into dialogue with John Finnis, Martin Honecker, Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas. Essential reading for advanced students of theology and ethics and their teachers.

1

The gospel and Christian ethics

The foundations of Christian ethics must be evangelical foundations; or, to put it more simply, Christian ethics must arise from the gospel of Jesus Christ. Otherwise it could not be Christian ethics.

It is, of course, quite possible – for it has often happened and often does happen – that Christian believers may have ethical convictions which do not arise from their faith in Jesus. There can be ethical Christians without there being Christian ethics. It is possible, too, that such believers may actually produce theological arguments for separating their faith from their ethical convictions. Certain forms of belief in natural law or in the opposition of law and gospel make a virtue of denying that ‘Christian ethics’ in the strict sense can exist. Such theories may allow that Christian faith has a bearing on ethics indirectly, in that Christian spirituality promotes a heightened concern for the moral dimension of life and a strengthened ability to cope with it. But the substance of ethical questions, they hold, is not open to special illumination from the gospel; the believer is in no more favoured a position than the unbeliever when it comes to discerning the difference between good and evil. But we must observe what follows from separating faith and morality in this fashion: we become either moralists or antinomians. By ‘moralism’ we mean the holding of moral convictions unevangelically, so that they are no longer part of the Christian good news, and can, therefore, have the effect only of qualifying it, whether as praeparatio evangelica, as a ‘ministry of condemnation’ (as Saint Paul said of the Mosaic law, 2 Cor. 3:9), or as a rule which is supposed to govern an area of life which Christ has not touched or transformed. By ‘antinomianism’ we mean the holding of the Christian faith in a way that expresses disregard, or insufficient regard, for moral questions. Once it is decided that morality is not part of the good news that Christians welcome and proclaim, believers will have to choose between being thoroughly evangelical and ignoring it, and respecting it at the cost of being only half evangelical. A belief in Christian ethics is a belief that certain ethical and moral judgments belong to the gospel itself; a belief, in other words, that the church can be committed to ethics without moderating the tone of its voice as a bearer of glad tidings.

Already in Saint Paul’s letters to Galatia and Rome the twin temptations of antinomianism and moralism are identified as dangers. What Paul observed, however, is that they are simply two sides of one and the same temptation, which he called ‘the flesh’. This highly suggestive association of law and licence, anticipating certain modern psychological observations, sprang from the perception that all alternatives to evangelical ethics, which Paul presents as life in the Holy Spirit, have something fundamental in common. Every way of life not lived by the Spirit of God is lived by ‘the flesh’, by man taking responsibility for himself whether in libertarian or legalistic ways, without the good news that God has taken responsibility for him. Consequently we cannot admit the suggestion that Christian ethics should pick its way between the two poles of law and licence in search of middle ground. Such an approach could end up by being only what it was from the start, an oscillation between two sub-Christian forms of life. A consistent Christianity must take a different path altogether, the path of an integrally evangelical ethics which rejoices the heart and gives light to the eyes because it springs from God’s gift to mankind in Jesus Christ.

We first meet the term ‘flesh’ (sarx) in Galatians in respect of the merely human, which of itself has no power to effect its own justification (2:16), though its life may be the natural context for life lived ‘by faith in the Son of God’ (2:20). But the flesh becomes dangerous when it is conceived as an alternative source of strength to the Spirit (3:3). In the Christian life there must always be maintained a paradoxical tension between the weakness of the flesh and the strength of the gospel which is heard and lived through it (4:13–14). The tendency of the natural to degenerate into the rebellious is illustrated by the story of Ishmael and Isaac: the one who was born ‘naturally’ (kata sarka) and who becomes hostile to the one born of divine promise (4:23), who represents an alternative source of strength, the Spirit (4:29). Up to this point the rivalry is conceived entirely in terms of moral power, of the pretensions of the flesh to justify man through ‘works of the law’. But inevitably an autonomous human power seeks fulfilment in its own self-expression, and so we find the flesh taking occasion not only of law but of freedom to assert itself against the Spirit (5:13). The mutual antipathy of Spirit and flesh (5:17) unites both flesh as ‘desire’ (epithymia) and flesh as ‘law’ (nomos) (5:16,18). Saint Paul will reject at least one reading of Aristotle’s doctrine that ‘sin is multiple’. The unity of the principle of life by the Spirit evokes a kind of shadow-unity among the different modes of rebellion. Whether it appears as law or as licence, the ultimate fact about life according to flesh is that it is a refusal of life in the Spirit. In the last resort legalism is not characterized by its delight in the law, but simply by its taking the merely and exclusively human, the flesh, as the object of its ‘boasting’, rather than the divine work of the cross of Christ (6:13–14).

Resurrection and creation

Yet it is too imprecise to say merely that Christian ethics ‘springs from’ God’s gift in Jesus Christ. What is the logic of this ‘springing’? What is it about God’s gift that carries the promise of ethical illumination with it? We shall argue for the theological proposition that Christian ethics depends upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

We call it a ‘theological proposition’ since it cannot be substantiated directly by quoting from the text of the New Testament. Certainly we might mention Colossians 3:1: ‘If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.’ But then somebody would reply by quoting 2:20: ‘If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe….’ And do we not receive the impression, as we read Colossians 3 and the corresponding passage in Ephesians 4, that it is the ascension as much as the resurrection of Christ that is central to the apostle’s thought? Looking elsewhere we can find other ‘ifs’ that reinforce our commitment to the moral life, for instance in Philippians 2:1. In the ethical instruction of the New Testament there is great freedom in reaching for aspects of the Christian kerygma that will afford us a motive for Christian obedience. The advent of Christ, his death, resurrection and ascension, his sending of the Spirit and his expected return to judge, all these can and do incite believers to ethical seriousness. Even the simple example of Christ can incite us to imitate him (Phil. 2:5, notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of exegetes, theologians and translators to expunge the idea from this verse). We are not attempting to deny the richness of the New Testament’s ethical appeal; but it is the task of theology to uncover the hidden relation of things that gives the appeal force. We are driven to concentrate on the resurrection as our starting-point because it tells us of God’s vindication of his creation, and so of our created life. Just so does 1 Peter, the most consistently theological New Testment treatise on ethics, begin by proclaiming the reality of the new life upon which the very possibility of ethics depends: ‘By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ (1:3).

The meaning of the resurrection, as Saint Paul presents it, is that it is God’s final and decisive word on the life of his creature, Adam. It is, in the first place, God’s reversal of Adam’s choice of sin and death: ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15:22). In the second place, and precisely because it is a reversal of Adam’s decision to die, the resurrection of Christ is a new affirmation of God’s first decision that Adam should live, an affirmation that goes beyond and transforms the initial gift of life: ‘The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit’ (15:45). The work of the Creator who made Adam, who brought into being an order of things in which humanity has a place, is affirmed once and for all by this conclusion. It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause. If the creature consistently acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? It might have been possible before Christ rose from the dead to answer in good faith, Yes. Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call ‘gnostic’, the hope for redemption from creation rather than for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead …’ (15:20). That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued. The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created.

In making the resurrection our starting-point we do not intend to isolate it from the other saving events which the Gospel narrative proclaims, least of all from the death of Christ which preceded it and from the ascension which followed it, both of them bound up with the resurrection in a knot of mutual intelligibility. If, still instructed by Saint Paul, we follow the first strand of thought back from Easter Sunday to Good Friday, we shall find God’s reversal of Adam’s choice already visible in Christ’s representative death, where ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, [God] condemned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). There was pronounced God’s No to life in the flesh, which was the condition of his Yes to life in the Spirit. The ethics of the gospel, too, has its aspect of condemnation, which judges and puts to death all that stands in the way of human life. And if we follow the second strand of thought forward from Easter to Ascension Day, we shall see the transformation of human life made explicit, though not visible, in Christ’s passing beyond the terms and possibilities of existence in history. The ethics of the gospel has also its world-transcending aspect, in which we are to ‘seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God’ (Col. 3:1). Yet these aspects, of abnegation and transcendence in personal ethics, of criticism and revolution in social ethics, are prevented from becoming negative and destructive by the fact that they are interpreted from the centre, the confirmation of the world-order which God has made. Man’s life on earth is important to God; he has given it its order; it matters that it should conform to the order he has given it. Once we have grasped that, we can understand too how this order requires of us both a denial of all that threatens to become disordered and a progress towards a life which goes beyond this order without negating it. But when the gospel is preached without a resurrection (as it was preached by the romantic idealists more or less throughout the nineteenth century), then, of course, the cross and the ascension, collapsed together without their centre, become symbols for a gnostic other-worldliness.

The resurrection carries with it the promise that ‘all shall be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15:22). The raising of Christ is representative, not in the way that a symbol is representative, expressing a reality which has an independent and prior standing, but in the way that a national leader is representative when he brings about for the whole of his people whatever it is, war or peace, that he effects on their behalf. And so this central proclamation directs us back also to the message of the incarnation, by which we learn how, through a unique presence of God to his creation, the whole created order is taken up into the fate of this particular representative man at this particular moment of history, on whose one fate turns the redemption of all. And it directs us forward to the end of history when that particular and representative fate is universalized in the resurrection of mankind from the dead. ‘Each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ’ (15:23). The sign that God has stood by his created order implies that this order, with mankind in its proper place within it, is to be totally restored at the last.

This invites a comment upon a debate which has occupied too much attention, the debate between the so-called ‘ethics of the kingdom’ and the ‘ethics of creation’. This way of posing the alternatives is not acceptable, for the very act of God which ushers in his kingdom is the resurrection of Christ from the dead, the reaffirmation of creation. A kingdom ethics which was set up in opposition to creation could not possibly be interested in the same eschatological kingdom as that which the New Testament proclaims. At its root there would have to be a hidden dualism which interpreted the progress of history to its completion not as a fulfilment, but as a denial of its beginnings. A creation ethics, on the other hand, which was set up in opposition to the kingdom, could not possibly be evangelical ethics, since it would fail to take note of the good news that God had acted to bring all that he had made to its fulfilment. In the resurrection of Christ creation is restored and the kingdom of God dawns. Ethics which starts from this point may sometimes emphasize the newness, sometimes the primitiveness of the order that is there affirmed. But it will not be tempted to overthrow or deny either in the name of the other.

The natural ethic

Since creation, and human nature with it, are reaffirmed in the resurrection, we must firmly reject the idea that Christian ethics is esoteric, opted into by those who so choose, irrelevant to those who do not choose.

It is easy to see how this misconception has gained favour. Western moral thought since the Enlightenment has been predominantly ‘voluntarist’ in its assumptions. That is to say, it has understood morality as the creation of man’s will, by which he imposes order on his life, both individually and socially. Moral reasoning is subservient to the commitment of the will; any ethic, however ‘reasonable’ it may be in terms of practicality or internal consistency, is originally a posit of the will, a choice to which either individual or society has, in free self-determination, committed itself. Moral disagreements, then, may reveal ultimate clashes of commitment which are incapable of resolution. This account of morality has had a strong appeal for those traditions of Christian thought which, on the one hand, oppose a morality of the law apart from faith, and, on the other, give to faith a mainly irrationalist content. Kierkegaard, perhaps, provides the pattern for modern Christian voluntarism, in which neither faith nor morality can rest upon the foundation of reason but must simply be chosen. (Kierkegaard also distinguished very sharply between faith and morality, but that is of less importance for those contemporary Christians who have followed him in assigning to both a voluntarist foundation.) In this modern ‘faith-ethic’ Christian moral obligation becomes a function of the believer’s decision, something that he has opted into. It is esoteric, meaningful only to those who, by a process in which moral awareness has apparently played no part (so much for the summons ‘Repent and believe’!), have placed themselves within the closed circle. Thus all Christian moral duties become analogous to such ecclesiastical house-rules as respect for the clergy or giving to the church, duties which presuppose membership of the church community and lay no claim on those outside it. Even the prohibitions of adultery and murder are, apparently, house-rules of this type; the failure of the non-believer to respect his marriage or his neighbour’s life is nothing extraordinary, since, lacking the faith-commitment of a Christian, he does not have any reason to respect his marriage or his neighbour’s life!

This view is evidently mistaken, if only because so many unbelievers do respect their marriages and their neighbour’s lives, and, more significantly, so many non-Christian cultures require that they should do so. The theological weakness which has led to such a result is a failure to reckon with creation, and so with the reality of a divinely-given order of things in which human nature itself is located. True, man has rejected, despised and flouted this order. Human nature, as Christians believe, is flawed not only in its instances but in its mould, so that to be human itself means that we find this order of things a problem and are rebelliously disposed towards it. And yet this order still stands over against us and makes its claims upon us. When man is least on guard against God he finds his natural ordering reasserting itself and carrying him in directions against which his self-will revolts.

The order of things that God has made is there. It is objective, and mankind has a place within it. Christian ethics, therefore, has an objective reference because it is concerned with man’s life in accordance with this order. The summons to live in it is addressed to all mankind, because the good news that we may live in it is addressed to all mankind. Thus Christian moral judgments in principle address every man. They are not something which the Christian has opted into and which he might as well, quite as sensibly, have opted out of. They are founded on reality as God has given it. In this assertion we can find a point of agreement with the classical ethics of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics which treated ethics as a close correlate of metaphysics. The way the universe is, determines how man ought to behave himself in it. And Christians need have no problem understanding how there can be, in societies and cultures untouched by Christian influence, a recognition of moral principles which are true, simply because they know that such cultures stand within a created order of things and may be expected to demonstrate this fact in many ways.

It has been a characteristic of classical Christian thought to understand ethics in relation to a ‘human nature’. Consider, for example, from the Eastern church this exchange in Maximus Confessor’s Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91:309):- ‘Pyrrhus: What, then? Are virtues natural? Maximus: Certainly they are natural. P: But if they are natural, why are they not present equally in all who share the same nature? M: They are present equally in all who share the same nature. P: But why is there so much moral inequality among us? M: Because we do not all do what is natural. If we all equally did what was natural according to our human origin, there would be evident among us not only the one human nature but one human virtue admitting of no “more” or “less”.’ The Western Christian reader, conditioned to detect the scent of Pelagianism, may be tempted to respond to such talk with Augustine’s retort to Pelagius: ‘Enough of the constitution of human natures! Our concern is with their restoration!’ De sanandis non de instituendis naturis agitur (De natura et gratia 11.12). And it is true that Maximus does nothing to suggest that sin is more than random individual defect, and so is open to a Pelagian interpretation. But that weakness is no reason to ignore the common tradition of both East and West which stresses the reality of a human nature, with its proper virtues and excellences, which is given in creation, a nature which, as Adam’s descendants, we fail to instantiate adequately and which therefore is our judge. Augustine himself spoke constantly about such a nature, and indeed he could hardly otherwise have thought seriously about its restoration. ‘Any and every unrighteous man must be the object of our hatred in respect of his unrighteousness and the object of our love in respect of his humanity; that by reproving the fault in him which rightly earns our hatred, we may liberate that in him which rightly earns our love, that is to say the human nature itself, and set right every fault in it’ (Contra Faustum XIX.24). There is, of course, a difference between speaking in this way of a ‘human nature’ and speaking as we have done of a ‘created order’ within which man takes his place. The one is more centred on man, the other on the universe of created beings. But the dif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue to the second edition
• 1 The gospel and Christian ethics
• Part One: The objective reality
• Part Two: The subjective reality
• Part Three: The form of the moral life
• Bibliography
• Index of biblical references
• Index of authors
• Index of subjects