The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics

Part I: Studying Ethics Through Worship

1 Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

2 The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

3 Why Christian Ethics Was Invented

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

4 How the Church Managed Before There was Ethics

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

CHAPTER 1

Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

The aim of this volume is to stretch, inspire, and develop the reader’s conception of Christian worship in order to challenge, enrich, and transform the reader’s notions of the form and content of Christian ethics. To suggest that assumptions about Christian worship could benefit from an overhaul might be regarded as uncontroversial. To suggest, however, that assumptions about Christian ethics might be altered, and, furthermore, that that alteration might take place through the exploration of the liturgy, might come as rather more of a surprise. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why the authors of this volume have chosen to perceive the discipline of Christian ethics through the lens of Christian worship, most particularly the Eucharist.

The book is written for those who sense that the problem with Christian ethics is not just the complexity and elusiveness of the questions it faces, but also the methods and environments in which it is understood to be studied. Hence the book is written in a style that is designed to be accessible to an introductory student, but it is hoped that even the most experienced practitioner in the field will have much to discover and ponder in its pages. The issues raised concern not just Christian ethics but Christian theology as well. Christians approach worship with an expectation that God will be made known through the liturgy, and Christians who approach ethics in ways informed by worship come with a similar expectation that God will be made known in their deliberations, investigations, and discernment. The study of how God is made known is, of course, generally regarded as the field of theology, and it is hoped that students who find the living God in the pages of this study will pursue their enquiry through more conventional theological literature.

Why Study Ethics Through Worship?

But first we must confront the understandable reaction that may come from some quarters that to study the practice of worship is no way to explore the field of Christian ethics. What has the altar to do with the lecture hall? The connection of the two may seem incongruous to many, absurd to some. The simplest reason for this reaction is that the connection has not often been made. Its apparent novelty might seem to be its weakness. For those involved in pastoral ministry, the disconnection of the two is frequently experienced as a cause of great bewilderment. So often it appears that lay Christians have a thriving life of personal devotion, an active life within a worshiping community, and an engaged life fulfilling a range of professional and public roles in the workplace, neighborhood, and family: but comparatively seldom do lay Christians have an equally developed way of bringing these three parts of their discipleship together. Similarly, a great many theologians, at every level of seniority, have a corresponding range of involvements and commitments. But how often do the convictions and assumptions that shape one aspect of life genuinely interact with the key dynamics of another?

For a certain view of ethics – perhaps a dominant one within the academy over recent generations – this is just as it should be. The assumption has been made (or the aspiration has been held) that ethics is something more than worship – that it is broader, or deeper, or more objective, or more significant. Hence worship has been relegated to the lower divisions of the academy, regarded as the realm of the merely pious, open to sociological and psychological investigation certainly, but remote from the frontiers of truth. Of the reasons why worship has tended to be separated from ethics, four appear to stand out.

(1) Ethics is about the real, worship is about the unreal. This kind of assumption can be expressed in a number of different ways. Ethics is about the tangible, worship about the spiritual. Ethics is about the real world, in which it is taken for granted that the flesh is weak, people break their promises, and every motive is mixed. Worship aspires to the ideal world, in which hearts find their rest in God, resolutions are kept, and heavenly justice and peace rain down. In short, ethics knows that people are bad, worship tries to make them good. More subtly, worship is a kind of play, a temporary escape from real life to an environment where normal rules are suspended; by contrast, ethics is serious, by no means play, and an uncompromising squaring up to the sometimes unpleasant responsibilities and requirements of adult life.

Such an understanding stands very much in the tradition of Immanuel Kant. His distinction between the immanent world of experience available to us through our senses, and the unreachable (though interesting) transcendent world of which religious language speaks, has been immensely influential and represents the foundation of conventional distinctions between doctrine and ethics. It undergirds all perspectives that regard talk of God as speculation, while describing talk of ourselves, human beings, as observation.

This book challenges these assumptions because its authors believe that, contrary to the popular slogan, life is a rehearsal. Worship is indeed a kind of play with a different set of rules – for, without such games, who would recognize that real life is also a set of games with their own rules? Worship has a set of rules that time, tradition, and providence have honed and honored, and Christians believe the set of rules they practice and embody in worship is a good set of rules, a set by which they may identify and judge other sets. In the process they may critique the kinds of binary distinctions that appear to make terms like unreal, spiritual, and ideal meaningful and, at the same time, secondary, exposing the social locations and power relations of those who unselfconsciously describe their own perspective as real. More ambitiously, many of the authors of this volume would go further in terms of outnarrating Kant, and suggest that life is in fact a rehearsal for worship – that, within an eschatological perspective, it is worship for which humanity and the creation were made, and it is worship that will make up the greater part of eternity, within which what is called life and the real will appear to be a tiny blip.

(2) Worship is about beauty, ethics is about the good. (The logic would generally follow that theology – or philosophy – is about truth.) A set of corresponding assumptions follow, which see worship as subjective, ethics as objective. Worship is about the heart, ethics about the head. It may, for example, be supposed that ethics is about judgments of right and wrong, whereas worship is more about discerning what is fitting. It may be assumed that ethics is about establishing unarguable reasons for decision, while worship is about exploring aesthetic grounds for choice. More significantly, worship is an activity in which only a limited number of people, perhaps a minority in North Atlantic cultures, would see themselves as engaging. It is therefore a practice for only some, whereas ethics is generally taken to be a discipline that has a bearing on everybody. Worship is something of an occasional voluntary pastime, whereas ethics touches on an obligation for which one may be accountable at any time.

This set of understandings rests on an assumption that goodness, truth, and beauty are detachable from one another, so that they may even come into conflict with one another. It is one of the foundations of modern liberal democratic culture that this detachment is not only possible, but is also necessary, if peoples with diverging and even contradictory perceptions of goodness, truth, and beauty are to live among one another without violent conflict. What tends to happen, however, is that a different set of forms, notably the functional, the instrumental, and the transferable, become the central language of liberal democratic culture. These are regarded as objective, and those who insist on talking of, still less practicing, goodness, truth, and beauty are tolerated under the label subjective. Ethics therefore deals with the functional, the instrumental, and the transferable, leaving worship muddling along in the backwaters of goodness, truth, and beauty.

This book challenges the distinction between subjective and objective that characterizes these assumptions. This challenge shares the already-mentioned suspicion about binary distinctions that presuppose the speaker has the global view. It distrusts the notion of objectivity, if objectivity assumes there was ever such a thing as a disinterested observer. It similarly questions the idea that goodness, truth, and beauty are detachable from one another. For, in worship, Christians seek the God who combines all three, while maintaining their overflowing abundance. To exemplify or amplify one in no way reduces or downplays either of the others. Worship proclaims a universality that invites people to unite about where they are going to, not to dissent about where they are coming from. There is no shortage of goodness, truth, and beauty: there is no need for competition for scarce resources, or deliberation over their just distribution.

Meanwhile, worship challenges assumptions about what goodness, truth, and beauty mean in the light of the Gospel. That which might appear to exemplify beauty may look very different in the context of worship. For example, as preachers, we have both found that in almost every congregation in which we have preached regularly, across every social class, there has been at least one adult who would leave no rhetorical question unanswered. Such a feature of worship, such an embodiment of the way a community can welcome, nurture, and empower people who might be seen as having a disadvantage or a disability, might on first, perhaps jarring, encounter be regarded as undermining the goodness, truth, and beauty of the liturgy, but, on deeper reflection, might be relished as embodying all three.

(3) Worship is about the internal, ethics is about the external. This perception is similar to the subjective-objective assumption discussed previously, but it rests rather more on a distinction familiar in contemporary culture. Ethics is public, worship is private. To put it a different way, ethics is political, worship is (or should be) apolitical. Ethics is concerned with the good ordering of issues that affect the public sphere – crises over the beginning and ending of life; questions over the conduct of business, medicine, and technological research; the rights and wrongs of war; justice, the distribution of wealth, and human rights. Worship has no specific contributions to these questions – it merely concentrates on reconciling people with their God. (An exception is often made for issues that are considered to belong in the private sphere – notably questions of sexual relationships and the family.)

This portrayal of ethics and worship clearly rests on a very particular notion of politics. Here is a remarkably tidy world, where every question that arises can be filed neatly under either public or private. Politics is about the reasoned distribution of scarce resources, about the efficient management of publicly accountable and fiscally funded services, about the maintenance of order and the integrity of borders, about the upholding of legitimate rights and the respect for diverse expression. In this notion of politics, ethics is likely to be drawn into the constraints of the legislative process, the reduction of what is right to what can become legal, the exaltation of tolerance and the tendency to address the virtues – justice, truth-telling, peacemaking – as if they could be isolated from one another and fulfilled alone.

By contrast, this book portrays a rival perception of politics. It aspires to a politics that discerns the best use of the unlimited gifts of God, rather than the just distribution of the limited resources of the world. It regards the contrast between public and private as yet another binary distinction that misrepresents the call of the Gospel and the nature of the Christian life. For example, in baptism, Christians (or those speaking on their behalf) are called to give up any sense that they own their bodies. So the notion of private makes no sense. Yet this creates a profound conception of politics, seen now as the best working of an organism – the body of Christ – that sees itself as being genuinely a body, rather than a mass of discrete individuals. Worship is, or aspires to be, the manifestation of the best ordering of that body, and is thus the most significantly political – the most ethical – thing that Christians do.

(4) Finally, worship is about words, ethics is about action. This may seem a strange way of talking about ethics, which, for a discipline that is taken in this sense to be about action, has nonetheless generated a remarkable number of words. So it may help to give another corresponding portrayal. Worship commemorates the past, ethics empowers the present – and prepares for the future. Or again, worship is about stories from the past, ethics is about life in the present.

This perception rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of worship. Worship is about words and actions. Worship is an ordered series of activities that Christians carry out regularly together in obedience to Jesus’ command, as a way of becoming more like him, and as a witness to God’s world. Words constitute these actions as well as enrich and amplify what is done. This is an easy point to miss in an age of constant liturgical renewal, driven largely by the production of huge numbers of words, available in every kind of paper and electronic format. This mass of words should not obscure the fact that Christian worship is shaped primarily by instruc­tions and habits of action: Baptize them … , Do this … , Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, When two or three are gathered.

Worship does indeed commemorate the past, because it sees the past as the theater of God’s definitive and self-revelatory actions in his world. But worship also anticipates the future, particularly through the Eucharist, in which Christians share a meal that anticipates the heavenly banquet. Ethics that has no conception of good patterns of action, treasured from the past; that has no place to go to find communities that inhabit such corporate action in the present; and that has no embodied configuration of the communal eschatological future to anticipate: this is a discipline that is almost bound to experience its context as one of daunting scarcity. The liturgy offers ethics a series of ordered practices that shape the character and assumptions of Christians, and suggest habits and models that inform every aspect of corporate life – meeting people, acknowledging fault and failure, celebrating, thanking, reading, speaking with authority, reflecting on wisdom, naming truth, registering need, bringing about reconciliation, sharing food, renewing purpose. This is the basic staple of corporate Christian life – not simply for clergy, or for those in religious orders, but for lay Christians, week in, week out. It is the most regular way in which most Christians remind themselves and others that they are Christians. It is the most significant way in which Christianity takes flesh, evolving from a set of ideas and convictions to a set of practices and a way of life.

How Does the Liturgy Inform and Shape the Christian Life?

The American Roman Catholic priest Vincent Donovan was sent in the late 1960s to evangelize the Masai people of Tanzania. In his remarkable book, Christianity Rediscovered, he portrays the successes and failures of the mission. In vivid terms he describes how a series of communities came to grasp the significance of the Eucharist, and how the regular practice of the liturgy informed and shaped their common life.

Reluctant to pass on to new converts the more rigid and formalistic aspect of Roman Catholic liturgy, Donovan began with the essentials.

The first Masses in the new Masai communities were simplicity itself. I would take bread and wine, without any preceding or following ritual, and say to the people: … On the night before he died, Jesus took bread and wine into his hands, blessed them and said, ‘This is my body. This is the cup of my blood of the New Covenant, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in my memory.’ That served as Offertory, Preface and Canon. The people took it from there. (Donovan, 1982: 121–2)

But already the ethical dimensions of this practice were profound, and were lost on no one. There was no tradition of Masai men eating with Masai women. Women, due to their status and condition in the culture, were understood to pollute such food as was consumed. This raised a serious problem about how it might be possible to share the bread and wine of the Eucharist. But it also sharpened the significance of the Gospel as one that recognized neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female. That Gospel was one the Masai were free to accept or reject; but if they accepted it, a social revolution was likely to come with it. They did accept it, after a traumatic period of discernment; and a group of teenage girls told Donovan later that the good news was really good news for them.

Donovan began to develop some misgivings, however, that the Eucharist had almost too significant a role in the people’s notion of Church:

At one point I thought the people were badly confusing the meaning of the Eucharist, or that of the church, or both. They already referred to the church as the orporor, the brotherhood. Now, from time to time, I heard them calling the Eucharist the orporor sinyati, the holy orporor, or the holy brotherhood. They would ask questions like ‘Next time you come, are we holding or making the holy orporor?’ It did not seem to make sense until I remembered St Paul’s saying, ‘This bread that we break, is it not the koinonia of the body and blood of Christ?’ … These Masai communities did, in fact, build up and make the church in each Eucharist they celebrated. (Donovan 1982: 123)

The Masai’s way of resolving arguments was for one person to offer a tuft of grass (the vital food of cattle) and a second to accept it, as a guarantee and embodiment of peace. And this helped the elders to decide whether there was to be a Eucharist on a certain day.

We had tried to teach these people that it was not easy to achieve the Eucharist. It was not an act of magic achieved by the saying of a few words in the right order. … If the life of the village had been less than human or holy, there was no Mass. If there had been selfishness or hatefulness and lack of forgiveness … let them not make a sacrilege out of it by calling it the Body of Christ. And the leaders did decide occasionally that, despite the prayers and readings and discussions, if the grass had stopped, if someone, or some group, in the village had refused to accept the grass as the sign of the peace of Christ, there would be no Eucharist at this time. (Donovan 1982: 127)

With this understanding of the Eucharist, it became the principal way in which the priest and people discerned the good for their common life. A highly significant example of this came in relation to another tribe, the Sonjo, who were expert dancers. In the hands of the Sonjo, the Eucharist took on a new dimension. It became the practice through which the community discerned the good. The following words epitomize the understanding this volume seeks to present of the role of worship in ethics.

They brought their music directly to the place where the bread and wine were later to be blessed, and performed it there deliberately and carefully. Some of their music was decidedly secular. The elders in that community pointed out to me that the purpose of such a procedure was to make an actual judgement on a very important area of their lives. The time of the Eucharist was the time for that judgement. They were not ashamed of that dance in their own lives, so they wanted that part of their lives to be offered with the Eucharist. There were some dances they were ashamed to bring into the Eucharist. By that very fact, a judgement had been made on them. Such dances should no longer be a part of their lives at all. Eucharist served as judgement for them. (Donovan 1982: 125)

It will be clear by now that the ethos of this volume is entirely constructive. While the judgement of the Eucharist found some aspects of the Sonjo’s culture wanting, so likewise the judgement of the Eucharist as explored in this volume finds some aspects of contemporary culture and some of the methods often used in Christian ethics wanting. In particular, a number of chapters find that the consumer culture prevailing in contemporary North Atlantic countries and elsewhere creates a hazy mist through which it is difficult to see the Gospel, indeed any aspect of life, straight. By suggesting that worship, especially the Eucharist, offers a lens through which to see life, this volume seeks to offer to its readers what Vincent Donovan offered to the Masai: a corporate practice for discerning the good. And it is not a new practice: it is one that has been at the heart of many of the world’s cultures for hundreds of years.

Worship As a Series of Practices

Because the Eucharist incorporates so many practices, one could easily fall into the habit of using the term in a sweeping manner, to suggest that the Eucharist is the answer to every question that arises in contemporary Christian ethics. This is a danger, because not only does it risk overlooking the detail of what those specific practices are and how they are best carried out, but it can also slip into making the Eucharist an abstraction, a theoretical panacea detached from embodied practice – the very opposite of the intention. Thus, even though the Eucharist must always be understood as a whole, this volume largely treats it as an ordered series of specific practices. By so doing, detailed attention may be given to these particular practices, and concentrated emphasis may rest on how the performance of these practices shapes the character of Christians and the mind of the Church as a whole.

The volume is shaped in an ecumenical spirit, and includes contributors from the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Mennonite, and Pentecostal traditions. The outline of the Eucharist is intended not to mimic that performed in any one of these traditions alone, but nonetheless to take a form that any Christian would recognize. Indeed, no effort has been made to elide differing perceptions of the nature and significance of aspects of the liturgy. The variety of ecclesial identification is part of the reality of the Church, and conflict is part of that heritage. To establish an internal consistency in the volume that ignored the unhealed divisions in the Church would be hopeful but less than truthful.

The practices of the Eucharist have been treated under five broad sequential headings. (It is taken for granted that, contrary to some popular usage, the term Eucharist refers to every action of the liturgy from greeting to dismissal, not simply to the specific activities of blessing and consuming the bread and the wine.) All the headings are participles, emphasizing the kinetic, or action-based, emphasis of this volume’s understanding of worship. No effort has been made to make each chapter’s treatment of a particular moment in the liturgy an exclusive one. It is inevitable and right that most of the chapters treat not only their specific practice but make reference to other practices in the liturgy and in some cases to the Eucharist as a whole. There is bound to be a small dimension of arbitrariness in the way the practices and the ethical issues have been assigned, but the reader is encouraged to treat the volume as a whole, rather than to judge the argument on any one particular chapter. The overall objective is to take worship from being a curiosity in ethical discussion to being considered so significant that it is taken for granted in every debate and permitted to generate questions that shape the whole discipline.

The first heading, describing the first group of practices, is Meeting God and One Another. This refers to the four principal introductory activities that most congregations carry out early in their time together. They gather; they greet God and one another; they confess sin; and they celebrate forgiveness and other blessings, often musically. The chapters on the themes of gathering and greeting consider the social and political significance of the very fact that Christians gather at all, and the questions of identity and purpose that arise from such basic elements of being Church. The chapters on praise and celebration consider how hymn singing and similar practices inform the Church’s understanding of the arts in general, and modern communication in particular; and an additional chapter reflects on the way the developmentally disabled may in some cases praise more readily than they may reason. The chapter on confessing sin focuses on how the practice of reconciliation might shape general understandings of juridical punishment.

The second group of practices is called Re-Encountering the Story. This is perhaps the most conventional part of the volume, because it considers how the Scripture shapes the character of Christians and the mind of the Church. But this section is interested in the Scripture not just as a written text, but as a performed and enacted Word. Thus reading and preaching are only two of the practices discussed: there is also consideration of the discipline of listening, the recital of the Nicene Creed, and, most easily missed, the pause between sermon and creed, in which the body discerns the ways in which the truth of the Gospel reveals both God and the world for what they are and empowers the Church to anticipate, experience, and participate in liberation. The chapters in this section consider such significant issues as authority, justice, truth, and description, issues that underlie any approach to Christian ethics.

The third group of practices is treated under the name Being Embodied. This is the point in the service, after the proclamation of the Word, in which other elements may be included before the sharing of food begins. Hence the volume includes two specific practices that are not a part of most celebrations of the Eucharist, but are a part of some – namely baptism and marriage. All the chapters in this section consider aspects of what it means for the Church to regard itself as living as one body. The practice of intercession is considered in relation both to human need (poverty) and one highly influential model of response to scarcity (management). The question of posture in relation to gender and sex is also addressed here. Baptism offers a series of practices that shape Christians’ understanding of the body, and thus is the right way in which to consider abortion and cloning. It also provides a poignant context for a theological consideration of race. Likewise, marriage is about a shared embodiment. And lastly, the sharing of the peace provides a corresponding chapter to that on confessing sin, underlining the practices necessary to maintain trust and thus sustain the body, and a consideration of class.

The fourth and largest group of practices considers the preparation and consumption of the eucharistic food itself, and this section is called Re-Enacting the Story. The first three chapters address the material of the Eucharist and the way it is handled, and reflect on how this informs Christians’ relationship with the material world. The next two chapters reflect on the powerful forces at work at the altar, and notions such as sacrifice that emphasize the dimension in which blessing and breaking bread is the heart of the Christian response to what seem to be the most powerful forces in the world – such as war and capitalism. After that come three chapters that meditate on the practice of eating together as the definitive form of Christian witness, and the way in which this simple but profound activity might shape a wide range of issues from euthanasia to homosexuality. The last two chapters in this section all consider the conclusion of the meal, and include differing notions of how the meal ends and the way those different endings offer significant statements about the Church’s understanding of its membership, purpose, and witness.

The final group of practices concerns the two principal ways in which the service as a whole is completed. There are two reflections on being blessed, one that addresses the notion of blessing as material abundance, another that treats blessing in terms of having and rearing children. Last comes the dismissal, and the comprehensive understanding of how what has taken place in the service has informed, shaped, changed, or transformed the body and whether it will now better carry out its vocation in the world.

A Story

Some years ago, one of us became the priest-in-charge of a small church in a notoriously marginalized and antagonistic neighborhood. One distressing aspect of life there was that services would frequently be interrupted by children and young people who were not interested in participating, but nonetheless took to bursting in, looking for attention and hoping to get some kind of a reaction. On one particular occasion, at the Sunday Eucharist, things became more sinister. A gang of seven surly 12- and 13-year-old boys entered the church purposefully just as the prayer of consecration had been completed and the bread was being broken. They strode up and stood tall across the altar. The leader, pointing at the consecrated bread, said, Are you going to give us some of that? The congregation winced – not just from horror (sadly, this was no more than an extreme example of confrontational behavior), but because the question of how best to respond in such circumstances had for some time caused a good deal of conflict amongst the regular church members. It was time to put the consecrated bread down for a few moments, and try persuasion. The words flowed. If you look behind you, you will see a small group of people who are here to do the most important thing in their lives. I don’t think this is the most important thing in your life. I hope it may become so one day. But for now, I suggest you wait outside until we’ve finished, and then we’ll have a chat about what things are really important and how we learn how to do them. Contrary to expectation, the boys did exactly as they were asked. A conversation followed the service, about what things matter, how to treat oneself, people, and things, and whom to trust.

This book is written to inform such a conversation. It is written to show how the Eucharist really is the most important thing we do in our lives. And it is inspired by the congregation in that challenging neighborhood, and others like them, who have allowed their characters to be shaped by the worship of the living God, who accompanies God’s disciples, and is made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Reference

Donovan, Vincent (1982) Christianity Rediscovered (London: SCM).

CHAPTER 2

The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

God’s Holy Spirit gives God’s people everything they need to follow Jesus. In the context of contemporary Christian ethics, this claim may seem incomprehensible, bewildering, and absurd. Incomprehensible, because it suggests that ethics is about being disciples and witnesses (following Jesus); bewildering, because it speaks of the abundance of resources rather than their scarcity (everything they need); absurd, because it suggests the subject of ethics is not those who self-define and self-express, but about the one who gives (God’s Holy Spirit). This chapter sets out to witness to this extraordinary claim.

It suggests that what God wants is for God’s people to worship God, to be God’s friends and to eat with God: in short, to be God’s companions. The Eucharist offers a model of this companionship. Disciples gather and greet; are reconciled with God and one another; hear and share their common story; offer their needs and resources; remember Jesus and invoke his Spirit; and then share communion, before being sent out. Through worship – preparation, performance, repetition – God’s Holy Spirit gives God’s people the resources they need to live in God’s presence.

If God’s Holy Spirit offers God’s people this gift, why would anyone overlook, ignore, or neglect it? Yet that is what conventional Christian ethics does. This is a great mystery. God’s Holy Spirit has shown God’s people how to commune with God the Holy Trinity, but much contemporary Christian ethics strives to act Christianly without using the resources designed for the purpose. It tries to make Christian an adjective, an epithet, a style, when what God’s Holy Spirit offers God’s people is particular actions – verbs – through which they can become and be distinctive nouns – people, disciples, witnesses. Thus conventional ethics so often finds its task impossible. It is trying to make a better world without us needing to become better people. Not only is the task impossible, but it is neglecting its chief resource – the way God’s Holy Spirit chooses to form God’s people. This chapter is about that resource and how the Church is to use it.

What follows has been inspired by a range of theologians, some indicative, some interrogative, some imperative (Ford, 2007). In its emphasis on worship, it owes much to the Reformed tradition, though the importance of corporate worship is a more Catholic theme; on friendship it follows Thomas Aquinas, and before him Aristotle. In its concentration on God as subject it follows Karl Barth; in its perception of God’s abundance in the face of quasi-Stoic scarcity it follows John Milbank; in its emphasis on tradition and practice it follows Alasdair MacIntyre. When it comes to seeing the heart of Christianity in corporate discipleship, it is aided by George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic proposal; perhaps most of all, its careful delineation of practices is inspired by John Howard Yoder. In its portrayal of exile it follows Tom Wright; in its perception of God’s commitment to the poor it follows Gustavo Gutiérrez. Its attempt to see the practices of the local church put under proper theological scrutiny follows the invitation of Nicholas Healy, and its confidence that they will meet the challenge is encouraged by William Cavanaugh.

If this chapter lies within some traditions, it clearly lies outside others. It is not an attempt to ground an ethic on a reading of human nature and society in the style of Immanuel Kant; it does not seek a calculus of happiness like Jeremy Bentham, or a litmus test of love like Joseph Fletcher. It does not seek to secure a valued place for Christianity in a liberal-democratic consensus bounded by sin and compromise after the manner of Reinhold Niebuhr, nor seek a middle path between gospel values and contemporary realities with William Temple. It makes no claim for a God that all can subscribe to as James Gustafson does, or a global concern that all can share as pursued by Hans Küng. It seeks not to deride or pity these approaches, but simply to demonstrate the resources they have neglected, and inspire the reader to explore the gifts and demands of worship, discipleship, and witness. Then may the Church set aside what it knows of human scarcity, and open its life to divine abundance. For ethics begins and ends with God.

God

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. (Matt. 3:13–17)

The baptism of Jesus is the foundation of Christian ethics. Here Jesus speaks his first words in the Gospel, explaining to John the Baptist the purpose of Christian ethics: to fulfill all righteousness. Here is revealed the source of Christian ethics, which lies in the interrelationship between the members of the Trinity – the Father who opens heaven and speaks; the incarnate Son who goes down, rises, and fulfills all righteousness; the Holy Spirit who descends and rests upon.

The context of Christian ethics emerges in understanding the setting of the baptism story. The story is set at the River Jordan, the very river that Joshua had crossed to take possession of the Promised Land. The crossing of water echoes the crossing of the Red Sea, the definitive act by which God shows God’s power and God’s love for Israel and God’s desire to give them freedom from slavery. Yet at the time of Jesus’ baptism, Israel does not possess the Promised Land, and has not done so for centuries; the land belongs to an occupying power. And Israel does not experience the freedom enjoyed in the Exodus from Egypt – indeed, she experiences that the exile has in many ways not yet come to an end. In these circumstances Israel’s plea is a constant hope for God’s intervention: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down (Isa. 64:1), and her prophecy similar: Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness (Isa. 45:8). The setting of the story is thus one of bewilderment, longing, desperation – in short, need – and fervent expectation.

This is the context of Christian ethics. Need and expectation are also the context of Christian intercession. Intercession brings human need to God in an expectation that God will transform that need. Thus, as for the blind man, the hope is always that God’s works might be revealed through the concerns raised (John 9:3). Ethics and intercession are two halves of the same Christian practice.

Christian ethics is therefore a discipline that seeks to help Christians fulfill all righteousness from and with the Trinitarian God of Jesus Christ. And it is a practice that takes place in the context of need and in the spirit of expectation that God will be made known through the faithful pursuit of God’s will.

Within this context takes place the event – the content – of Christian ethics. The Gospel proclamation is that God has decisively acted to change the context of life. This is what is enacted in the baptism of Jesus. Three dimensions of the baptism of Jesus constitute the event of Christian ethics, and make possible the whole discipline. First, heaven, which has been closed for a long time, is opened. This epitomizes the fruit of Christ’s work. The Gospel begins with the tearing of the heavens and ends with the tearing of the temple curtain. The veil between God and God’s people has been torn. Heaven is open to those who stand where Christ stands. There is no limit to God’s purpose for God’s people: it is an eternal purpose. The open heaven also confirms that earth is the theater of God’s action. The author has joined the drama. The key events of the world are key also to the life of God. God has shaped God’s life – and that of the world – so as to be for and with God’s people. God hears the people’s prayers.

Second, God’s Spirit descends like a dove. At the end of the Flood, the dove brought the twig of new life back to Noah. Now the dove descends on Jesus, bringing the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Temple of God’s Holy Spirit. He is the place where others will encounter God. He bears the promise that through him his people may become the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the place where God’s glory dwells, the place of encounter. God gives the people power.

Third, God speaks, and God tells the people how precious is the gift they have in Jesus. The voice tells God’s people that Jesus means everything to God, and that God is made fully known in Jesus. It also holds out the promise that, just as God gives everything to Jesus, everything God gives to Jesus, God gives through Jesus to God’s people. And, ultimately, the promise of this is that God’s people mean everything to God. Jesus has everything the Father has to give, and he gives us this everything in the unlikely place called baptism in the church (Bruner, 1987: 94). God gives God’s people everything they need.

Thus Christian ethics is the study of how God meets the needs of those who call upon him in need and expectation, thus enabling them to fulfill all righteousness. The attitude of Christian ethics should be one of intercession, from an experience of need. But heaven is open, and prayers can be heard. God is intimately concerned with the destiny of God’s people. God makes God’s people new through the power of the Holy Spirit. Christian ethics is about how God makes people who are capable of fulfilling all righteousness; it is about how people are shaped to live good lives before God. And God gives God’s people Jesus – who is everything they need. Christian ethics names the ways the Church inherits and embodies what God gives God’s people in Jesus.

We have witnessed the foundation, the source, the context, and the content of Christian ethics – all of which lie in God’s gracious action, crystallized in the baptism of Christ. It remains to witness the goal of Christian ethics. The goal of Christian ethics names the things the baptism of Christ enables Christians to do. These are also the purposes for which God created God’s people. They are the same things that exile and slavery inhibit them from doing. The baptism of Christ announces the end of slavery and exile, and inaugurates the new crossing-over into dwelling with God. God wants to be worshiped by the people of God. For God made God’s people to glorify and enjoy God forever. God also wants the people of God to be God’s friends. Friendship is at the center of the moral life, because the virtues God’s people learn in being friends of one another are vital in learning what it means to be God’s friends forever. The word that best expresses this friendship is companion – one who shares bread. The principal eschatological image of the Gospels is the banquet. The image of the great feast declares that God longs for God’s people to worship God in a friendship that is embodied in eating together. Christians practice this longing when they habitually and faithfully share the Eucharist. In the Eucharist they recognize that God wants them to worship God, to be God’s friends, and to eat with God. It is through baptism, the baptism of Christ embodied in their own baptism, that Christians are enabled to realize these goals; and it is in the Eucharist that the goals of God’s creation and redemption come to fruition. The goals of Christian ethics are none other than these very same longings and realizations. This book is a study of how Christians, in great things and small, may practice Christian ethics by fulfilling God’s longing for them to worship God, be God’s friends, and eat with God.

The Gifts of God

God’s Holy Spirit has given God’s people everything they need. What God wants is that they worship God, be God’s friends, and eat with God. Through employing what God has given them to these ends, they will become the people God wants them to be. So to understand Christian ethics, it is necessary to explore the gifts God gives to God’s people. We shall explore how God’s Holy Spirit gives God’s people one gift, Jesus, in three forms. These three meanings of the gift of Christ are a way of understanding how Jesus epitomizes all of God’s gifts. Each of these three meanings is conveyed by the term the body of Christ.

In the first place, the body of Christ means Jesus, born of Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and who rose again. In understanding the gift of Jesus, God’s people recognize the gift of Scripture. Scripture is the story that identifies God’s people. It is the memory and heritage that they share. It is a story that reminds them that they are not the first to be loved by God; that God has unfolded God’s call and purpose over countless generations; that in each era many have tried to follow, and a great number – perhaps most – have failed significantly, but that as much can be learned from the failures as from those whose faith was strong. The story teaches that the service of God is perfect freedom. It tells how this freedom can be sustained despite human fragility, iniquity, and hostility. It delights in the embodiments of God’s faithful purpose – the Commandments, the Ark, the Temple, the Land. It recalls how precarious was the thread by which the exiled people held on to their vision. It acknowledges how far from God’s freedom God’s people many times strayed, and the perils of those who called them back. It shows how Jesus embodied all the promises of God and the yearnings of Israel; how he recapitulated Israel’s life as prophet, priest, and king; how his death and resurrection broke open the purposes of God and the possibilities of God’s people; how the Church began, grew, and faced early setbacks; how, finally, dispersion became no longer a sign of defeat and despair, but always a sign of growth and joy.

This is the gift of Scripture: a story that shows the definitive workings of God, but invariably shows how those workings are laced around the strivings of God’s people. Jesus embodies the way God’s action takes shape in human form. He is the direction and the purpose of the story. But Jesus also steps out of the pages of Scripture in a way no other character does. He is part of a story about the past, but he is not limited to that story. He points always beyond the story, to the kingdom. The kingdom is the fulfillment of the purposes of God, all creation in perfect service and harmonious relationship and joyful communion. The kingdom expresses the hope of God’s people, just as Scripture incorporates their memory. And just as Scripture points to and illustrates the gift of Jesus, so, likewise, the kingdom is defined and identified by Jesus. God’s people long for a time of perfect service, because they have seen perfect service in Jesus (not what I will, but what you will). They long for harmonious relationship, because they have seen harmonious relationship in Jesus (I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you). They long for joyful communion, because they have seen joyful communion in Jesus (Father, may they be one, as we are one). If Scripture is about heritage, kingdom is about destiny. For God’s people, if Jesus is the person they remember, he is also the person they look forward to. They look back to the one crowned on the cross, and forward to the one enthroned in judgment. They thus perceive that those in distress and agony are by no means outside God’s purposes now, and that those who have been trodden down and abused may look forward to vindication on the great day.

If Scripture points back to the pattern of God’s action expressed fully in Jesus, and kingdom points forward to the fulfillment of God’s purpose expressed in Jesus, then God’s people look to God to bring these gifts into its present life. This God does through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings the remembered word of Scripture to life and transforms the anticipated hope of the kingdom into action. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of Jesus is made ever present and ever new. Through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, what would otherwise be words, stories, and ideas become practices, habits, and patterns of action. The Holy Spirit teaches God’s people and thus makes followers into disciples. People learn how to read Scripture, and to read their own story as narrated by the scriptural story. People learn how to look to and pray for the coming of the kingdom, and how to let the form and content of their practice be transformed by the anticipated character of life with God. Thus the Holy Spirit trains God’s people to recognize God’s hand at work, shapes the ways they reflect God’s character, and empowers them to express that character in the world.

An understanding of Scripture, the hope of the kingdom, and the work of the Holy Spirit are all therefore needed in order to explore what it means to see God’s gift of the body of Christ as Jesus. A second understanding of the body of Christ is as God’s gift of the Church. Up to this point we have used the designation God’s people to refer to that aspect of creation that has responded to its creator and redeemer in faith. That we now begin to use the word Church is an affirmation that the Church is itself an aspect of God’s gift in Jesus. The Church is not (and was not) an assembly of people whom Jesus happens (or happened) to visit; it is a people assembled only in the strength of Christ’s coming and being among them. To call the Church the body of Christ does not appeal to a static, hegemonic identification with a timeless ideal; it simply confirms that the Church’s existence is always a gift and that that gift is always delivered and shaped by the incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus.

God gives many gifts to the Church to form, shape, and maintain its life. Some of these gifts are practices, regular patterns of action that embody the goods that God conveys. Others are powers or charisms, faculties that enable the Church to carry out the sometimes demanding practices God has given it. We shall briefly explore the dimensions of the gifts God gives God’s people in the gift of the Church.

The gifts God gives to the Church for its formation are those that bring people into the company of the faith. Preaching alerts the listener to the awe and wonder of the scriptural testimony. The preacher’s role is to unfold the breadth of God’s purpose, the depth of God’s love, the length of God’s forbearance; to acknowledge the mystery of human indifference, the tragedy of alienation, the waste of glory; and to focus on the urgency of the moment, the intensity of God’s longing, and the faithfulness of God’s promises. While preaching should certainly aspire to renew the Church through conviction, its primary goal is to constitute the Church through conversion. Preaching is by no means the only way that people come to faith, but it symbolizes the other routes because it emphasizes that the Gospel is good news in the form of a liberating story. This liberating story is accompanied by transforming practices, such as catechesis. Catechesis names the process by which the new believer is conformed to Christ in body, mind, and spirit and made ready to become a disciple. In catechesis, the new believer discovers how the story and practices of the Church enable disciples to worship God, be God’s friends, and eat with God. The process of catechesis prepares new believers for the event of baptism. Baptism embraces the whole of God’s story, from the water of creation to the fire of judgment. It enacts the crossing-over from slavery to freedom, darkness to light, death to life, despair to hope. It is the principal way in which those who turn to God are incorporated into Christ’s body. It defines the Church.

Another set of gifts and practices shape the regular life of the Church – the ongoing deliberation of common goods and purposes that is called politics. These practices begin with praise, in which God’s people accord to God all that they long to offer, responding to God’s love with listening ears, singing hearts, and serving hands. Praise is a continual blend of the joyful telling of God’s wondrous deeds and the humble joining of the angels’ constant celebration. It is the stretching of words to their limit, and the embracing of action when words fail. Closely associated with praise is thanksgiving, in which the Church records not just God’s deeds, but their grace and mercy, and the miracle that they extend to the most unlikely and unworthy and unexpected. In silence God’s people recognize that God’s activity in the world always precedes their own; they listen for signs or indications of that activity, and are drawn into the intimacy of God’s presence. Meanwhile, in intercession, the Church comes before God with the anticipation of the kingdom and the burden of all in creation that falls short of the kingdom’s fulfillment. Much of the rest of the regular practice of the Church may be taken together under the single designation witness. For witness names the Christian hope that every action – whether for peace, for justice, for stability, for alleviating distress, for empowering the young or weak, for comforting the lonely, for showing mercy to the outcast, for offering hospitality, for making friends, or for earning a living – points to God, and invites an inquiry into the joy that inspires such actions.

While the foregoing gifts and practices form and norm the Church, a third set is needed for the many times the Church’s supposed witness and discipleship fail to imitate God and jeopardize God’s friendship. God gives the Church practices through which God maintains and restores its character as the body of Christ. These include admonition, the speaking of truth for the sake of God and the sinner; and involve penitence, the sinner’s naming of their own sin and request for forgiveness. They center on reconciliation – the restoration of perpetrator and victim to relationship and communion, with self, one another, community, and God. They can require discipline, the use of persuasion, warning, constraint, and even punishment in an effort to bring the offender to truthfulness, penitence, and reconciliation.

This then is the second understanding – the gift of the Church and the accom­panying gifts that enable God’s people to be formed, to witness, and to be restored to relationship. The first two portrayals of the body of Christ have explored what it means for God’s people to worship God (through Jesus) and to be God’s friends (through the Church). The third understanding therefore concerns what it means to eat with God. This is the body of Christ as the Eucharist – or, more particularly, the living bread, broken for the life of the world.

This third understanding is the one most commonly considered and received as a gift. Indeed, the presiding minister says, in some traditions, when inviting the congregation to the table: The gifts of God for the people of God. What gifts accompany the gift of the body of Christ in the food of the Eucharist?

The regular practice of a shared meal on the day of the Lord’s resurrection is the principal way in which Christians bind time. If it were not a meal, which requires preparation, it could take place anytime, anywhere Christians spontaneously came together. If it were not a corporate activity, it could take place privately, whenever was convenient for an individual. But because it must be corporate and requires preparation, it makes the Church find a regular rhythm of celebration. And this regular rhythm of celebration comes to order the shapelessness of time. Life is no longer a linear flow of one thing after another, but an ebb and flow, a constant sending out to love and serve and share, a constant return and gathering to praise and repent and ask. What is not done by the beginning of the next celebration can wait; and all that has been done is transformed. Each celebration looks back to the last, and forward to the next; and meanwhile looks back to the Passover and Exodus, the Lord’s Supper, crucifixion and resurrection, and forward to the final banquet. Thus, worship gives the Church time.

Likewise, gathering gives the Church space. Because Christians need each other if they are to be able to experience the gift of the body of Christ in the food of the Eucharist, they cannot be just anywhere when they worship. Because the Eucharist is an embodied, corporate practice, God’s people need to come together in one place. They become for that period, if for no other, a visible community. The Church is not, for that period, a vague idea, a marvelous principle, an invisible influence. It becomes something, and thus can no longer be anything, gives up being everything, and is much more than nothing. This is a sacrifice, because being able to be anything offers flexibility, to be everything offers power, and to be nothing offers anonymity and therefore safety. By becoming something, somewhere, the Church locates itself in space, and is made visible. Only thus can it begin to relate to all in God’s creation that has taken the freedom of God’s patience not yet to believe.

Gathering to eat together gives the Church its identity, because it gives God’s people a definitive practice. Learning to perform this action well informs and educates Christians in their performance of all other actions. In performing the action well, the Church realizes its need to incorporate into its worship most of its other characteristic practices, at least in elemental form. To be ready to receive the body of Christ, people of God need to remind themselves of the identity of Christ, and of the nature of their existence as a body. By so doing they prepare themselves to become what they eat – the body of Christ. This activity, eating, is particularly related to sustaining the body. It therefore locates the Church in relation to the whole of creation, as a body that, like other bodies, needs food, but, being a special body with a special purpose on behalf of all other bodies, is given special food.

Thus the gift of the Eucharist comes alongside the gift of the Church and the gift of Jesus as the third understanding of the body of Christ. The gift of the Eucharist demonstrates and in many ways embodies God’s gift to God’s people of time, space, and action, and their relation to the rest of creation. It completes the argument of this chapter that, in the body of Christ, God has given God’s people everything they need: everything they need to know about the past and the future; everything they need to do to form, shape, and maintain their shared life and witness; everything they need in