Finding and Seeking

Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

Oliver O'Donovan

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780802871879
• eBook ISBN: 9781467441896
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This is the second of three volumes in Oliver O'Donovan's masterful "Ethics as Theology" project. In his first volume -- Self, World, and Time -- O'Donovan discusses Christian ethics as an intellectual discipline in relation to the humanities, especially philosophy, theology, and behavioral studies, and in relation to the Christian gospel.In Finding and Seeking O'Donovan traces the logic of moral thought from self-awareness to decision through the virtues of faith, hope, and love. Blending biblical, historico-theological, and contemporary ideas in its comprehensive survey, this second volume continues O'Donovan's splendid study in ethics as theology and adds significantly to his previous theoretical reflection on Christian ethics.

Chapter 1

Spirit and Self

Ethics in the Spirit

“The Spirit comes to our aid in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26). Weak in confidence, weak in understanding, weak in endurance, our sickened agency is restored, our ill-­conceived undertakings are given good effect. What do we mean by weakness? Paul has described it, borrowing a telling image from the Isaianic Apocalypse, as a world that groans and labors in the pangs of childbirth (8:19-22). Striving to produce something but unable to tell what it would produce, it is wholly bent upon painful effort, a world with a historical destiny but no vision of fulfillment. The future is laid upon it as a goal to strive for, but it is opaque and beyond any clear imagination. Within this world there are some who “possess the firstfruits of the Spirit” (8:23), who share in the cosmic groaning of history with a certain self-­awareness, knowing that their own accomplishment is bound up with a point of arrival for the material universe, the “resurrection of the body.”1 But neither the unconscious groaning of the world nor the conscious groaning of the spiritually aware achieves anything. They are formless aspirations towards an object that is neither envisaged nor realized. The salvation they look for is hidden behind the curtain of the future; it has no presence, and they can only wait.

This shortfall in agency cannot be made good from the side of its object. From an abstract future there is no clarity or energy to be drawn, no meaning sufficient to direct or command. The shortfall must be supplied from the side of the subject. And here Paul speaks, remarkably, of a third groaning, one that arises in the being of God himself. God’s Spirit groans for the fulfillment of God’s purpose, and if the Spirit’s groans are “inexpressible,” that does not mean that they are doomed, like ours, to be contentless and ill-­focused. The divine purpose may be incommunicable, but the secret understanding of the future which the Father and the Spirit hold between them comes to our assistance. “We do not know how we are to pray aright”; yet prayer can be effective if it springs from the praying of the Spirit. Our formless aspirations, taken up and woven into God’s purposes, aim at more than we can know.

The Spirit comes to our aid, and active life with its active purposes comes within our reach. Rescuing us from a futile passive-­reactive immanence, the Spirit of God strives and works with and through our practical thinking. But as active life becomes thinkable, so does reflection upon active life. The Spirit comes to our aid in the practice of Ethics, too — not only, that is, in how we think about what we are to do, not only in our mutual communication and instruction as to what we are to do, but in the reflective analysis we bring to bear on them. For Ethics is not itself practical reasoning or moral instruction, but a reflection upon both. Especially the Spirit teaches us to reflect upon the moral instruction of Jesus, illuminating it for each successive attempt to understand, obey, and communicate. It was with well-­justified astonishment, then, that Johannes Fischer complained twenty years ago that the Spirit “plays almost no part in contemporary theological ethics.”2 The essential note of an evangelical ethics will be missing if the freedom of the Gospel is not understood as life in the Spirit. Failure on this point must mean the failure of Theological Ethics as a whole.

There is, to be sure, some reason for hesitation. It might appear that the only effect of reflection on active life is to subvert the logic of action. Reflection and action, it may be thought, are mutually exclusive postures. Action is exertion seeking satisfaction in a point of rest. It seeks that it may find. It has an end-­of-­action set before it to attain. In the foreshortened view of active intelligence the end-­of-­action melts into the end-­of-­history. The whole of future time is divided into time before and time after, the time of exertion and the time of rest: “If I can only get this rose bush to bloom on this plot, the garden will be really pleasant!” Ethics knows how foreshortened that perspective is. It reflects on the place that the goal occupies within the world’s happenings, and foresees many more months and years of further aspiration in the garden after the blooming of the rose bush. Life does not stop and enter a new register of restfulness with each practical achievement. “Find, and you shall seek!” says the reflective ethicist back to the moral thinker. That is not good news for practical reason. It carries the warning of an illusory character in its ends and a futility in its exertions. As soon as we set practical thinking in a framework of reflection, we view the world of action as Qoheleth viewed it, bewildered at the vanity of each and every undertaking.

Yet that view cannot be escaped. Everyone who steps into practical thinking must at some point step out of it, and look back uneasily over the shoulder, wondering whether the project has been an illusion.

If an Ethics consists solely of reflective observations on the practice of moral thinking and teaching, it will lead into the stagnant marshes of nihilism. A “moral science” that begins and ends in an observer’s account will be a salt that has lost its savor, reducing practical thinking to a process. As P. T. Forsyth remarked, “a process has nothing moral in it.”3 There is room enough in Ethics, to be sure, for disciplined observations, generic (as in sociology, economics, or anthropology) or particular (as in history), which can contribute to the forming of a moral imaginary. Taken on their own terms, they are modest and useful scouts, reporting on the terrain. The trouble lies with a moral science that offers observations on the terrain in place of a strategy. An observational science can do nothing to help us evaluate our ends; it can only say that they are similar or dissimilar to the common run of human ends. It can only deflate us with the sad wisdom that action has no real end at all, but returns after every finding to seek some more, at best allowing the illusion of an end. For Kierkegaard the ethicist was trapped on the ground of “resignation,” cultivating self and life assiduously in the absence of ultimately satisfying grounds for doing so.

There is a certain practical coherence about conforming to the common run of humankind and the exigencies of natural existence. We begin most unreflective moral experience with little more than these to go on, and may tolerate an Ethics that speaks of them familiarly, even if it never takes us a step forward. Yet the question “why?” takes us beyond any such Natural Ethics. It is not an unreasonable or sophistic “why?” but a “why?” that asserts itself logically as soon as we achieve a sense of responsibility, as soon, that is, as we acknowledge that there is a reality to which we owe the questioning of social norms and natural exigencies. Since it is not a “why?” of theory but of practical reason, the only answer to which it is open is an end of history. Of itself Ethics knows nothing of an end of history, but it can point to a moral teaching that does. “Seek, and you shall find!” (Matt. 7:7). Like other teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, this word has two aspects, as acknowledged practical wisdom, on the one hand, as eschatological promise on the other. The proclamation of the Kingdom has, it seemed, stepped in to vindicate the cheerful logic of practice against the sad disillusion of ethical observation.

And with that vindication new possibilities arise for reflection. It becomes thinkable that “Find, and you shall seek!” need not deflate “Seek, and you shall find!” The perpetual return to seeking becomes a preliminary mapping of the way to the promise of an ultimate finding. Of itself Ethics has no resources to make such a promise, but it can hear it, and it can proceed on the basis that it has been heard. Such is Ethics undertaken in the Spirit. The Spirit is “warranty” of the promise (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph. 1:14), and under its leading Ethics can think about the perpetual seeking-­and-­finding of moral thinking, about its native ends-­of action and its formal accomplishments, in the light of what is promised over and beyond every intermediate finding and seeking.

Let it be said, first of all, that such an Ethics will speak of God’s action. It will speak of the groanings of creation and of the firstfruits in whom these groanings reach articulacy, but it will speak of them as moments in the purpose and work of God. Its discipline will be theological — not disregarding the contributions of philosophical analysis and phenomenological interpretation, but stepping beyond them to reach decisions which philosophy quite properly holds back from, decisions authorized and required by the Spirit who searches the deep things of God. In the second place we must add that it will speak of our human life and action as it is to be undertaken “today,” in the time that is given us to live. Here there is a delicate but important division of labor between a theological Ethics and a doctrinal theology. Doctrine rests in truth. It has to struggle hard for it, and can never perfect its articulation of it once and for all, but the truth of the matter and nothing else is its term, and to that extent it sets the activities of time in the light of eternity. It speaks of temporal moments in their unique unrepeatability, but since its concern is with what God accomplishes in them, it does not speak to those moments. In telling of God and his work done once for all in history, it tells truths that are good yesterday, today, forever. Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius (not Herod the Great or Nero), but the truth of his death in the reign of Tiberius was no less true in the reigns of Herod and Nero. If we say that he was “crucified before the foundation of the world,” we mean that his crucifixion by Pilate was always God’s purpose for mankind; if we say that he was “crucified again” in the martyrs, we mean that the power of his death under Pilate lived on in his suffering church. All times and places equally are governed by the truth that he suffered under Pontius Pilate. The perennial validity of this proposition belongs to no proposition framing a practical purpose or pursuing a moral deliberation. Deliberation is always a matter of “today, if you will hear his voice.” Ethics must speak, though reflectively, to each today, as each today is a fresh today, not a repetition of yesterday.

This means that Ethics has neither the first nor the last word in Theology. Those words belong to a doctrine that speaks of God’s purposes, acts, and ultimate ends. But because God’s purposes are alive and active, there is place for a word in between first and last words, a word that speaks reflectively on the Spirit’s aid to our present weakness, which discerns the present converse of the Spirit in guiding the human spirit to the service of God’s further ends. We are summoned to be alert and understanding, not passively reactive, and that means thinking what it is we are to do while it is ours to do it.

The point may be expressed crudely by saying that Ethics, though reflective, is still a practical discipline, not a theoretical or speculative one. It is not a branch of dogmatics, distinct in its special themes as the doctrine of the church is distinct from the doctrine of creation. Yet the polarity of “practical” and “speculative” should not seduce us into thinking that truths of dogmatic theology are without interest for practical life. An impatient would-­be-­up-­and-­doing theology may have a hate-­list of doctrines it stigmatizes as “purely speculative” — the Trinitarian doctrines, for example, or the doctrine of God’s electing decree before the foundation of the world. Yet these truths, too, can enrich and enlarge the moral imaginary. No theol...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Spirit and Self
• 2. Faith and Purpose
• 3. Faith and Meaning
• 4. The Good of Man
• 5. Wisdom and Time
• 6. Love and Testimony
• 7. Hope and Anticipation
• 8. Deliberation
• 9. Discernment
• Prospective Postscript
• Index of Subjects and Persons
• Index of Scripture Quotations