The contributors to this volume are motivated by two concerns. First, we want to clarify the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics. Second, we want to specify the contributions that Christian ethics makes to religious ethics.1 Apart from this Introduction, however, our respective contributions are not methodological ones. Some of us directly address these concerns. For others, these concerns are part of the intellectual landscape that informs our implicit background assumptions. But for all of us, our primary aim is to show, rather than say, what normative Christian ethics is and why it matters for contemporary religious ethics.2
How do we view the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics? In our view, the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics is analogous to that between rectangles and squares. That is to say, not all religious ethics (in the plural) are Christian ethics.3 But all Christian ethics are religious ethics. Likewise, not all Christian ethics are confessional. But much confessional ethics are Christian ethics. In other words, the ethicistās intellectual expertise can be Christian ethics without the ethicistās spiritual experience concomitantly being Christian. Among the contributors to this volume, some of us are confessing Christian whereas others are not. Some of us are Catholic and some are Protestant. Our respective confessional (or non-confessional) identities notwithstanding, we hold that Christian ethics is religious ethics. Not because Christian ethics is a species of some universal genus of either religion or ethics; rather, because the persons and practices involved with Christian ethics also act and interact with those involved in religious ethics.
To be sure, in this broad sense Christian ethics is religious. We hope to refine the distinction between religious ethics and Christian ethics and redefine their relation. What motivates this hope? Following decades-long trends in religious ethics, we seek to distinguish between confessional (theological) and non-confessional (philosophical) approaches to Christian ethics. To our minds, the ethicist doesnāt need to identify as a Christian to do work in Christian ethics. Being Christian isnāt a necessary condition for doing Christian ethics. Against some other decades-long trends, we further wish to distinguish between descriptive and normative approaches to Christian ethics within religious ethics. We believe that ethicists can and should do normative Christian ethics as religious ethics. This places us between Christian ethics and religious ethics as they are commonly understood.
On the one side, many Christian ethicists deny that Christian ethics shouldāor even couldābe religious ethics. Some contest the very category of religious ethics itself. For example, Stanley Hauerwas frequently and influentially argues that the sheer variety of disparate practices and beliefs that are counted as āreligiousā or āreligionā creates insoluble descriptive and comparative problems. Given this variety, he writes, āI have worried that a phrase like āknowing aboutā another tradition is not sufficient to understand the practices of another traditionā (2003, 400). Because there simply does not exist āsome one quality, character, or essenceā (403) that can be ascribed to everything scholars routinely refer to as a religion or the religious, Hauerwas ādoubt[s] that there exists any standpoint that makes such comparison unproblematicā (400). On views like this, the intrinsically normative dimensions of Christian ethics do not allow for the description and comparison that are characteristic of religious ethics.4
On the other side, religious ethicists and other scholars of religion find the normative methodologies of Christian ethics similarly problematic. Genealogists like Talal Asad (2003) and Saba Mahmood (2005) suspect that normative methodologies necessarily relies on sociopolitical hegemony and cultural hierarchy that perpetuate presumptions of Western Christian superiority. In order to avoid such hegemonic and hierarchical presumptions, Elizabeth Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker note that contributors to their volume, Religious Ethics in a Time of Globalism: Shaping a Third Wave of Comparative Inquiry (2012), ātopically ā¦ pursue themes that are not commonly addressed in philosophical and theological ethics, such as bodily vulnerability and relations of dependence within families and teaching groupsā (2012, 2 emphasis added). Moreover, āMethodologically, this research builds from textual analysis, ethnography, or other extended case studies to provide thick descriptions of culturally embedded ethicsā (2). On views like this, the inherently descriptive and comparative dimensions of religious ethics do not allow for the normative dimensions that are characteristic of Christian ethics.
We attempt to refine the distinction between Christian ethics and religious ethics, and to redefine the role of normative ethics within religious ethics, not as a complaint against the comparative and descriptive turn in religious ethics, but rather as a complement alongside this turn. In one sense, we see our contributions as companions and conversation partners for the contributors to Bucar and Stalnaker (2012). Likewise, we see this volume as a modest counterpoint to the turn away from comparison and description in Christian ethics. In short, we put forward approaches to, and appropriations of, the normative dimensions of Christian ethics that we believe make constructive contributions to religious ethics.
To that end, we organize our contributions around three normative dimensions in Christian ethics: scripture, tradition, and reason. By āscripture,ā we mean the narrative witness of the matriarchs and patriarchs, the prophets and priests of Israel, and the apostles of the earliest Church as recorded in the two testaments of the Bible. By ātradition,ā we mean the collective and collected wisdom of Christian communities across time, whether or not that wisdom is articulated explicitly in texts and/or embodied formally in institutions. (The absence of Creeds and Confessions, or Bishops and Popes, is not the absence of tradition.) By āreason,ā we mean critical reflection on the substance and basis of Christian belief and practice, especially normative judgments about ethics.
To single out these three dimensions is not to deny the existence of others. For example, the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral adds experience to these three. Christian practices could be distinguished as a further subset of tradition, and so on. To focus on these three dimensions is to isolate them neither from one another nor from others. Nor is it to set them out once and for all as stable and immutable givens. Each dimension is fluid. Moreover, the relations between and among them are dynamic. All have been and remain subject to contestation and revision. For example, there are tensions among the priestly, prophetic, and kingly strands of the Tanakh. There are contradictions within the Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline Epistles. The canon of scripture itself varies across Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and various Protestant communities. And the relative center of gravity within the canon shifts within those communities across time and place.5 Nonetheless, scripture, tradition, and reason inform the rules of the game, so to speak.6 But while they provide rules, these dimensions donāt predetermine how the game will be played. Indeed, they cannot. Despite whatever consensus exists and might emerge among the contributors to this volume, dissensus remains, to say nothing about the diversity and heterogeneity within Christian ethics and religious ethics more generally.
We approach the normative dimensions of Christian ethics as scholars trained in religious ethics. Although our aim is to soften the distinctions and surmount the divisions between Christian ethics and religious ethics, they remain relevant to the temperament and techniques that shape our respective contributions. We all have been trained in a approaches oriented toward Christian ethics as a form of religious ethics rather than toward an exclusively theological form of Christian ethics. We have benefited from an intellectual landscape in which the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) has become the premier venue for publication, and in which the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) holds its annual meeting concurrently with those of the Society of Jewish Ethics (SJE) and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics (SSME). Moreover, like earlier religious ethicists, all of us have been trained in moral and political philosophy, and integrate insights from those disciplines in our work. And although each of us focuses on Western religious thought and Christian ethics, we are conversant with other religious traditions as well.
Consent to and dissent from the rules of the game, however, arenāt limited to something as narrow as Christian ethics. Consent and dissent affect the study of religious ethics more broadly as well. Consider, for example, the history of religious ethics. In the āEditorialā (1973) introducing the JRE , the editors comment upon the state of religious ethics. āGiven the present state of our discipline,ā they write, āwe have no illusion that essays on Buddhist, African, Hindu or Islamic ethics will come our way as readily as will essays on Christian or Jewish ethics. We realize that we will not easily escape in our in...