New Dictionary of Christian Ethics & Pastoral Theology

David J. Atkinson, David F. Field, Arthur F. Holmes, Oliver O'Donovan, David J. Atkinson, David F. Field, Arthur F. Holmes, Oliver O'Donovan

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830896189
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

- One of Christianity Today's 1996 Books of the YearEspecially in today's complicated world, moral practice and decision-making raise many hard questions. Dealing with those questions often requires wide-ranging understanding—in areas such as systematic and practical theology, psychology, economics, sociology and philosophy. For the first time, the New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology offers expert information and guidance across this range of disciplines—in a single volume. Besides hundreds of articles on specific issues, the Dictionary includes eighteen major keynote articles which provide a basic introduction to the main themes of Christian ethics and pastoral theology. These articles alone constitute a textbook of Christian ethics, excellently surveying that broad field. Written at a nontechnical and accessible level, this dictionary will be consulted again and again by Christians from all walks of life.

PART ONE

ONE

God

Christian moral theology (see Christian Moral Reasoning†) and pastoral theology (see Practical and Pastoral Theology†) are decisively shaped by Christian convictions about the nature of God. The primary determinant of our understanding of Christian action (moral and pastoral) is properly the gospel of God, proclaimed and embodied in Jesus* Christ. The gospel summons is enacted amongst a community of agents who are shaped by their confession of God’s redemptive gift of himself in the life, death and resurrection* of Jesus and in Jesus’ presence in the Holy Spirit.* Moral theology and pastoral theology reflect on the acts of the gospel community in the light of their divine source and norm.

1. Historical considerations

Classical Christian theology accords with the opening definition, in that it generally does not treat moral or pastoral questions in isolation from its exposition of the doctrinal substance of Christianity. Such questions receive only relatively independent coverage in works of ethical exhortation (often in a catechetical context), in treatments of disputed questions (such as the propriety of Christian attendance at the Greek games or of military service by Christians), and in controversial writings against pagans or heretics in which ethical polemic often figures large. Similarly, scholastic theology treats ethical and practical issues as an integral part of its Summae or Sentences (though commentaries on Aristotle’s* Ethics flourished in the scholastic period). The magisterial Reformers continue this integration of doctrine and morals, as in John Calvin’s* account of Christian action in the course of his exposition of the sanctifying work of Christ and the Spirit. Seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism operates somewhat differently: the wider scope of the biblical account of God’s dealings with humanity tends to fall away in favour of a formalized understanding of divine revelation as doctrinal or moral propositions, from which recommendations about human action are deduced by a casuistical* method largely derived from Aristotelian logic (enjoying renewed popularity in the European Protestant academies). Thus the Basel theologian Wollebius (1586-1629), in Book II of his Compendium Theologiae Christianae (tr. in W. Beardslee, ed., Reformed Dogmatics, Oxford and New York, 1965), outlines moral and pastoral theology by expounding the Decalogue* (construed as ‘precepts’) in such a way that God comes to be understood as ‘the heavenly legislator’ (II.xi.1). This goes along with an understanding of pastoral practice as extended application of principles for Christian conduct, derived by logical deduction from the biblical text. Whilst this method was often a form for articulating much biblical and practical wisdom – notably in English divines such as Richard Baxter* or John Owen (1616-83) – its formalism threatened to reduce the trinitarian and Christological dimensions of Christian teaching about God to an abstract dogmatic scheme.

It is arguable that this construal of the connection between God and human action as one between precept and obedience prepared the way for the contention of Immanuel Kant* that good moral action can never take its law from outside itself (from, e.g., divine commands) since the moral self is essentially autonomous. For Kant, language about divine law, grace, etc., corrupts our sense of ourselves as moral agents whose freedom from external determination is essential to the attribution of responsibility. Kant’s immensely subtle critique of divine ‘heteronomy’ has largely shaped discussion and critique of Christian moral theology in the modern era. This can be seen in persistent criticism of the politically and psychologically alienating potential of the notion of obedience* to God’s will, as articulated in the protest atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx,* Friedrich Nietzsche* and Sigmund Freud.* In a somewhat different vein, mid-20th-century analytical ethicists argued forcefully for the independence of morals from theological commitments (see the representative collection in Ian Ramsey, ed., Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, London, 1966). In pastoral theology, a parallel development in the present century can be seen in preference (especially in N. American Protestantism) for social scientific rather than theological analysis of the pastoral situation, and for clinical and therapeutic models of pastoral care (see Pastoral Care, Counselling and Psychotherapy†), often relegating the theological content of pastoral action to posterior ‘theological reflection’.

Some more recent writing in moral and pastoral theology, however, shows considerable interest in the reintegration of these disciplines with Christian doctrine, crucially with the Christian doctrine of God. A major model here is provided by the work of Karl Barth,* whose monumental Church Dogmatics constitutes the most significant attempt since the Reformation to make ethics an essential component of the exposition of the Christian doctrine. The dogmatic basis for this attempt is Barth’s understanding of covenant,* in which God elects from all eternity to be God with humanity in a relation of reciprocal agency, the action of divine grace* evoking the corresponding human work of gratitude. Extending Barth (and sometimes in criticism of his apparently inadequate moral psychology), some propose an analysis of human action in terms of the agent’s convictions about God and the world, especially as those convictions are embodied in narratives which shape the identity of the moral agent (see the works of Stanley Hauerwas in the Bibliography). In a quite different direction, others (such as T. Rendtorff, in Ethics 1, ET, Philadelphia, 1986, and J. Gustafson), continue to urge the independence of ethics from dogmatics, and to locate Christian moral theology alongside the human and social sciences in contributing its particular analysis of common human reality. These different approaches to the theological content of moral and pastoral theology often reflect different accounts of the relation of Christianity to its cultural setting. Those who see significant correlation between faith and its context stress the necessity of integrating secular learning with Christian doctrine; others, unwilling to surrender heavy theological content, tend towards opposition to prevailing cultural trends or modes of knowledge, on the grounds that Christian faith in God proposes a radically distinct account of reality.

2. The Christian doctrine of God

a. Father, Son and Spirit. The Christian doctrine of God is the doctrine of the Trinity. This point is often obscured by treating some questions about ‘God’ (such as proofs of God’s existence) in isolation from questions about the Trinity, a process which results in a reduction of trinitarian doctrine to a particular version of more general theistic ideas, failing to see trinitarian teaching as the distinctively Christian understanding of God. Although sometimes regarded as the fruit of inappropriate metaphysical speculation, trinitarian doctrine is best seen as the attempt to reconstruct the concept of God as creator, redeemer and perfector of all things, on the basis of God’s self-gift in Jesus Christ. Trinitarian doctrine condenses the scriptural account of the acts and being of God and the church’s experience of salvation (see Sin and Salvation†), furnishing an analysis of the divine identity as subject and agent in those acts.

The biblical writings do not yield explicit trinitarian doctrine, though there are formulae and patterns of argument (especially in the NT epistles and John’s Gospel) through which later trinitarian constructs could be warranted. Trinitarian categories are an implication of the primary Christian confession that the contingent human person Jesus is Lord, that is, he is one whose historical particularity embodies the universal presence and effectiveness of God’s saving rule. Confession of Christ’s lordship accords him more than provisional, partial or local significance: as Lord, he constitutes the most comprehensive framework within which all things are to be known and judged. His person and acts, supremely his death and resurrection, reorder the relation of the entire creation* to God in a fashion so radical and completely effective that it can only be understood as divine in character. Hence Jesus occupies the absolute, i.e. non-relative, place characteristically occupied by God and attracts to himself, in the NT and elsewhere, language characteristically reserved for God alone.

This confession clearly leads to a reconstruction of the concept of God, since severe strain is placed upon received language and concepts by this bringing together of the transcendent (God) and the contingent (Jesus). This does not mean straightforward identification of ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ in which those terms become interchangeable (though passages in early writers like Ignatius of Antioch, c. 35- c. 107, come close to this). In developed patristic thought, the doctrine of God incorporates affirmations of a distinction within the Godhead between Father and Son. This distinction was bound up with a further distinction in incarnational theology between the divinity and humanity of Christ. This latter distinction rooted the man Jesus in the being of God, whilst at the same time preventing unqualified literal ascription of the history of Jesus to God and affirming the unity of the two ‘natures’ in the one historical ‘person’ or subject, Jesus of Nazareth. The differentiation between Father and Son was characterized by the awkward notion of the ‘begetting’ or ‘generation’ of the Son by the Father. This term identifies the Father as absolute origin or founding purpose, fulfilling his eternal resolve in relation to the Son who is distinct and derivative from, but (against Arius, c. 250- c. 336) in no way subsequent or subordinate to the (ingenerate) Father. Behind these distinctions lies the prime soteriological intention of retaining the divinity of Christ as agent of salvation, without compromise to the freedom or completeness of the being of God. Trinitarian language accomplishes this by making the relation of Jesus to the Father into the embodiment of an intrinsic ‘relatedness’ within God’s very being.

The doctrine is completed by affirmations of the divinity of the Spirit, which stem from an understanding of the radically creative power of Christ present as Spirit in the Christian experience of regeneration. Since the Spirit effects union with Christ and the church’s adoption into the divine life, the Spirit’s being and agency are divine. For the Western tradition, this third trinitarian distinction has been less secure (partly because of heavy concentration on Christology, partly because Augustine’s* interpretation of the trinitarian ‘persons’ as ‘substantial relations’ emphasizes unity rather than differentiation). In the East, a more richly elaborated theology of Spirit has encouraged a more pluralistic understanding of the Trinity.

The overall thrust of trinitarian doctrine is thus that the Christian meaning of the term ‘God’ is established out of the history of Jesus Christ, understood as the embodiment of God’s saving will, activity and being, and as presently effective in the Spirit. So defined, God is not an undifferentiated self, but intrinsically relational; God’s essential unity consists in the ‘relation’ of the ‘persons’ of Father, Son and Spirit (the metaphorical force of ‘relation’ and ‘person’ is not to be elided). Crucially, this intra-trinitarian relatedness is the ground of God’s relation as creator, redeemer and perfecter to what is outside himself. Hence trinitarian language interprets God’s acts towards the creation as the expression of his very being, rather than as external acts conducted through intermediary agencies.

Trinitarian doctrine is, then, fundamental to Christian reflection on ethical and pastoral practice. As an account of the identity of God, the doctrine of the Trinity also establishes the main lines of a Christian understanding of the way the world is and the ways in which human agents are to act in the world. Both the moral field and the moral agent are to be construed out of God’s self-manifestation as creator, redeemer and sanctifier. Thus, from a trinitarian perspective, the world will be seen as created by, and related and unconditionally obligated to, God the Father who is the one from whom its purposive ethical order derives. The world will, further, be seen as caught up in and transfigured by the redemptive activity of the Son in which creation’s original purpose is renewed and consummated. Finally, as the sphere of the operation of the Spirit, creation (and above all the church* as new creation) will be seen as realities in process of transformation through reorientation towards the purposes of God which they are newly empowered to serve.

b. The attributes of God. Language about God’s attributes seeks to characterize God as this particular being in his self-manifestation. The subject of such attribution (God) defines the predicates, and vigilance against inappropriate carry-over from the human contexts of our language is necessary. The attributes have been classified in a large number of ways of greater or lesser elaborateness. Most accounts work with a core distinction between those attributes which display God’s absolute freedom and those which display God’s unreserved love. As free, God is utterly self-originating, possessing aseity (lit. ‘from himself’), undetermined by any reality beyond himself (and hence ‘impassible’), governed only by his own will in shaping his intentions and acts, unresolvable into any prior state of affairs. As such, God’s relation to creation is gracious, the fruit only of his own disposing of himself, and one in which he retains his absolute majesty, sovereignty, glory and holiness. In his freedom, God transcends the conditions of creaturely existence, such as time, space and contingency, and so God is eternal, unchanging, omnipresent and omnipotent. This transcendence, however, is not such that God is unrelated to contingency or incapable of freely assuming those conditions when the Word becomes flesh. Above all, God’s freedom is not to be thought of as absolute lack of constraint but as the liberty in which as Father, Son and Spirit he chooses, creates, sustains, redeems and sanctifies his creation. God’s freedom is his freedom to love; his sovereignty is his undefeated rule in favour of his creation; his holiness is his power to sanctify; his righteousness is his act of upholding his cause (and therefore the cause of his creatures) against the disorder of sin; his glory is known in his sharing of his glory with humanity; his unity as the triune God is displayed in his establishment of fellowship with himself by the creation and election of humanity into covenant. God’s attributes thus do not describe a divine reality anterior to God’s saving self-manifestation, but point to his purposive acts in creation and covenant, sealed in Jesus Christ, as the locus of his being.

3. God, ethics and pastoral theology

a. God, belief and action. Fundamental to Christian conviction about reality is the proposal that ‘God is’. Accordingly, any account of Christian moral and pastoral action has to be simultaneously an account of God and God’s action: moral theology and pastoral theology are modes of the doctrine of God. Christian agenda cannot be detached without irreparable loss from Christian credenda concerning God’s character and purposes. Reflection on Christian action is thus informed by the basic belief-structure of the Christian community. That belief-structure is articulated in a variety of activities, credal, cultic and practical, but above all in Scripture, which furnishes the normative and critical account of Christian identity as it is shaped by the creative and redemptive activity of the triune God. Christian beliefs, encoded in this way, give rise to a certain understanding of self and world on the part of Christian believers. These beliefs characterize the field within which moral and pastoral action take place, and also characterize agents within that field, above all by reference to convictions about God. Belief in God, then, though it has a primary objective reference to God’s transcendent reality, also has ‘self-involving’ aspects intrinsic to it: it describes the world in which Christian agents act, prescribes moral roles, and enjoins or dissuades from certain practices, habits and patterns of deliberation and action (see D. D. Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement, London, 1963 ). An account of the connection between belief in God and moral action must go beyond the formal precept-obedience model by filling out the connections between belief-structure, self-understanding and practice.

b. The field of action. The Christian doctrine of God issues in a particular understanding of reality. That understanding is not merely ‘theistic’ in a generic sense, but more properly an understanding of reality as the sphere of God’s creative and redemptive action. Above all, the Christian understanding of reality is specified by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as the anticipation of the re-creation of all things. His resurrection, and the gracious participation in that resurrection by the people of God through the power of the Spirit, constitute the ‘new creation’ which is determinative of the creation’s very being. Out of Jesus’ resurrection, creation can be seen as in process of transformation into glorious perfection (Rom. 8:19-23). The ‘newness’ of the creation means that its eschatological transfiguration is not the realization of latent possibilities, but the entire alteration of creation, precisely so that it can reach its consummation by becoming what God intends.

This eschatological process constitutes the order of reality as creation. The order of creation is not determined primarily by reference to its original ordering ‘in the beginning’, but by its redemption through Christ in which its true end is accomplished. Thus the moral order of creation – its meaningfulness or orderliness as a sphere for human action – is a divine accomplishment and gift. This means, first, that moral order exists: reality is not mere random process. Secondly, it means that moral order is discovered by obedient action rather than imposed by autonomous agents. Here the Christian faith diverges from existentialist (see Existentialist Ethics*) understandings of moral value as the pure creation of the human will, as well as from exclusively technological understandings of reality as having no order apart from that which is given to it by human purposes. Hence in ethical deliberations concerning the status of the human foetus, for example, the Christian doctrine of God opposes attempts to define (and thereby circumscribe) that ...