T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics

Tobias Winright, Tobias Winright

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567677181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics provides an ecumenical introduction to Christian ethics, its sources, methods, and applications. With contributions by theological ethicists known for their excellence in scholarship and teaching, the essays in this volume offer fresh purchase on, and an agenda for, the discipline of Christian ethics in the 21st century. The essays are organized in three sections, following an introduction that presents the four-font approach and elucidates why it is critically employed through these subsequent sections. The first section explores the sources of Christian ethics, including each of the four fonts: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.
The second section examines fundamental or basic elements of Christian ethics and covers different methods, approaches, and voices in doing Christian ethics, such as natural law, virtue ethics, conscience, responsibility, narrative, worship, and engagement with other religions. The third section addresses current moral issues in politics, medicine, economics, ecology, criminal justice and other related spheres from the perspective of Christian ethics, including war, genetics, neuroethics, end-of-life decisions, marriage, family, work, sexuality, nonhuman animals, migration, aging, policing, incarceration, capital punishment, and more.

PART THREE

Issues, Applications, and Twenty-First-Century Agenda for Christian Ethics

Section A: Politics and Society

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Politics and Political Theology

ELIZABETH PHILLIPS

This chapter finds itself in a section with the title “Christian Ethics and Political Issues.” Like most syllabi and textbooks in Christian ethics, this volume is divided into methodological sections and “issues” sections, with “political” as one type of issue alongside medical/bioethical, sexual, economic, justice, and environmental issues. Nothing is wrong with this way of organizing subjects in Christian ethics, per se, and I have often written and taught within similar frameworks. Done well, it can be clarifying. However, it can also be argued that situating the political as a type of “issue” in ethics is not without its problems—problems that bring into relief some of the differences between the frameworks of Christian ethics and Christian political theology.

Framing of the political as an ethical issue bears the distinct marks of (1) modern academic divisions of disciplines based on the sciences, where theology is the “pure” work of “theory” and politics is one among several areas where “social ethicists” do the work of “application,” and (2) modern decisionistic and quandary-based approaches to ethics in which the horizon for consideration of politics is a set of problems that need solutions. I will take each of these in turn.

POLITICS AS APPLICATION

The volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are neatly divided into three parts. For contemporary learners and practitioners of Christian ethics or systematic theology, the order of these three sections may seem strange. First comes his treatment of theology proper: the Trinity and the doctrine of Creation. Second comes his moral theology. And third is Christology, the church, and the sacraments. Why are the doctrinal or dogmatic topics straddling the moral or ethical topics in this way? This was an intentional assertion by Aquinas that moral theology is not separate from doctrine. As D. Stephen Long has noted, “His discussion of Christian morality in the second part of his Summa Theologiae both depends upon the first part, where he sets forth the doctrines of the Trinity and creation, and requires the third part on Christology, church and sacraments for its completion.”¹ Many scholars of Aquinas have commented upon the irony and inaccuracy of the practice of studying the second part in isolation from the others, as if he wrote the second part for the ethicists and the other two parts for the theologians. Aquinas, obviously, knew no such distinction, and he intentionally positioned his work against the medieval precursors of such distinctions.

Interestingly, even if we do pursue the inevitably detrimental and anachronistic attempts to divide his work into dogmatic and moral theology, if we then further attempt to isolate his political work, we find it stretches across the parts of the Summa.² The political is not a topic or issue isolated to the second part. As with the classical philosophers and the early theologians before him, in the work of Aquinas any consideration of what is good and ultimate will necessarily be infused with considerations of the political. An attempt to isolate the political thought of most patristic authors would be equally detrimental and anachronistic. The political is a thread woven throughout the letters, apologies, sermons, and treatises of early Christianity.

Sharp distinctions between ethics and systematic theology arose in the modern era, and most prominently in Protestant theology. Even the idea of “moral theology” would become associated with Catholicism as opposed to the “Christian ethics” of Protestantism. Protestant ethics would eventually be further divided into theological ethics and social ethics, in which the Bible and Christian tradition remained valid sources for the former but the social sciences became the guide for the latter. By the end of the twentieth century, Protestants (particularly in America) who were studying or teaching Christian approaches to the political were most likely doing so under the heading of “social ethics” and with methods informed substantively by social science. Joining with social science in applying frameworks (and philosophical assumptions) from the modern scientific method, Christian ethics too was divided into its pure or fundamental pursuits (theological ethics) and its applied pursuits (social ethics). The social ethicist’s work was to identify social problems, understand them through social-scientific methods, and offer remedies to them through the application of Christian principals and norms derived from pure theology. Critics of this pure/applied division note how not only subject matter but also source material was wrenched apart in such disciplinary separation; so-called theological ethics has often neglected experience as a source and so-called social ethics has often neglected both scripture and tradition.

Protestants were not entirely alone in drawing such distinctions. From the Council of Trent until the present, there has been an official distinction in Catholicism between dogmatic or fundamental theology and moral theology. However, these were framed in relation to Aristotelian distinctions between intellectual and moral virtues instead of pure and applied scientific methods. The sources of reason, scripture, and tradition were equally important for both discourses, and experience would come to be recognized as a source in more recent versions of both. From the late nineteenth century there also developed a distinct tradition of Catholic Social Teaching (encyclicals as well as other official teaching and conciliar documents and statements), Catholic Social Thought (wider treatment of the issues of social teaching by theologians and lay people), and Catholic Social Tradition (diverse forms of activism, organizing and policy-making related to social teaching). Whereas politics became the purview of the social ethicist in Protestantism, Catholic learners and teachers of Christian approaches to the political might do so under any one of this wide variety of headings, or a combination thereof.

One consequence of these disciplinary and methodological divisions, most prominently in Protestant social ethics, but doubtless too in some forms of moral theology and Catholic Social Thought/Tradition, was that the political largely ceased to be a category for constructive, systematic, or doctrinal work—the kind of work done in pure or fundamental disciplines. Practitioners became far less concerned—if at all—with theologies of the political or politics of the theological and focused instead on political “issues” in ethics and the moral life. Questions of the meaning and nature of human sovereignty and its relation to the sovereignty of God, and questions of the place of the political in creation, for examples, become eclipsed by the pursuit of identifying and addressing social problems.

POLITICS AS PROBLEM

Christian ethicists very rightly should, of course, seek to identify and address social problems. This is not in question. However, a good deal of the game of moral theology has already been given away if the political is always already perceived in terms of problems to be solved. Conceptualizing the political as an issue to be addressed by practitioners of methods of application not only divides social ethics from theology, splitting the four sources of Christian ethics between its pure and applied forms instead of holding them in conversation with one another, but also sets the parameters of the discourse as one of social problems that need moral solutions. These social problems may be correctly identified and meaningfully addressed, and they may be exactly the sorts of problems to which Christian ethicists’ attention should be turned; my argument here is not to question the validity of the social-problem-solving-discourse but to question its sufficiency. Focusing solely on the status quo of readily identifiable problems and seeking to come to decisions about their status and/or remedies can prevent the Christian ethicist from understanding the subject theologically, removing from access crucial theological resourcing for the entirely valid task of addressing problems.

Both the identification of politics as a problematic issue and the agenda of making decisions about the quandaries it poses constrain the moral imagination as well as praxis. One aspect of retrievals of the virtue tradition in recent Christian ethics has been an awareness of the limitations of quandary-based frameworks, which have largely been determined by approaches that assume that there is a clear set of quandaries facing the ethicist, and the task is employing either deontological or consequentialist methods for making these difficult decisions. Advocates of virtue ethics not only critique deontology and consequentialism on their own terms but also note how the employment of the two methods in late modern Christian ethics results in ethical enquiry being overdetermined by the difficult/exceptional instead of the everyday, the quest for the best method of reasoning instead of the best way of life, the focus on doing and not being, and the removal of teleology and other wider questions of meaning and ultimacy from moral reasoning. The possible subjects of enquiry into the political as well as methods, sources, and horizons for political enquiry are limited in all these ways when the political is reduced to quandaries.

The same can be said of any number of topics that are likewise treated as the “issues” (read: problems to be addressed by “applied ethics”). Two examples will illustrate the insufficiency of the issues-and-problems framework. Consider the framing of medical ethics. There is a conventional set of issues that Christian ethicists consider: reproduction, contraception, and abortion; euthanasia, assisted suicide, and end-of-life; medical resources and access; and new medical technologies. The vast majority of the conversation is framed as: here is a professional medical practice; should Christians be for it or against it? And what method will you employ in order to decide? Theological questions about the meaning of health and suffering, life and death, interdependence and the common good, sexuality and procreation are marginalized. Not only should such questions be pursued in their own right, apart from th...