Abstract

Theological ethics is the reflection about the significance and the implications of a faith for the good and the right. A central problematic of any theological ethics is the way that it deals with tensions between the proper area of religion and ethics. At least it is conceivable that the content of the one collides with the other in such a way that the tension develops into a real conflict that could lead to a division of the estate or to some form of substitution in which one absorbs the other.

The thesis of this paper is that Christian theological ethics or moral theology is only possible for those who conceive such a conflict as an opportunity for a fruitful dialectics between faith and ethics. Furthermore, it would be my thesis that experience and practical reflection in the area of ethics are time and again needed to critically improve the very ethics of religion.

Ethics and theological ethics

In a very general way, ethics is the human endeavour to inquire about the good and the right. Also in a very general way, theological ethics is the reflection about the significance and the implications of a faith for the good and the right. Therefore, it can be stated that whatever religion is having it's own kind of ‘theological ethics' in the way the faithful relate faith and ethics with one another, such a theological ethics gains in prominence to the degree that God or the gods are really involved in the world and human affairs. To the same extent, such involvement increases the need for some exploration and delineation of the proper relationship between explicit statements of faith and insights that are provided by human ethical experience. At the same time, a central problematic of such a theological ethics is the way it deals with tensions between the proper area of religion and ethics. At least it is conceivable that the content of the one collides with the other in such a way that the tension develops into a real conflict that either leads to a division of the estate or to some kind of substitution by which one absorbs the other.

The history of Christian ethical reflection shows some oscillation between these tendencies, with an inclination to decide a conflict in favour of the priority of faith. My thesis in this lecture will be that a Christian theological ethics or moral theology is only possible for those who conceive such a conflict as an opportunity for a fruitful dialectics between faith and ethics. Furthermore, it would be my thesis that experience and practical reflection in the area of ethics is time and again needed to critically improve the very ethics of religion.

Faith and action

My point of departure for an adequate moral theology is the insight that Christian faith in God holds anything but an impartial - let alone a ‘separate' - position with regard to the relationship between ‘faith' and ‘works'. On the contrary, so much does it belong to the core of Christian faith that it induces a ‘passion for ethics'. Quite paradigmatically is the admonition against any dualism formulated by the author of the New Testament letter of James: “But someone will say: ‘You have faith and I have works'. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith” (James 2:18).

This passage seems to me to be important for three different but complementary reasons. First of all, it formulates the Christian position with regard to the involvement of faith and action with each other, an involvement wherein the movement goes in both directions. On the one hand, the author suggests that faith cannot be demonstrated without presentable acts and on the other hand, he maintains that there are acts which really allow to prove his faith.

The second reason why the passage is important lies in the fact that the example which is named by the author is authoritative because it refers back to one of the founding fathers [no inclusive language here] of the Jewish faith in God, namely Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac: “Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works” (James 2:21-22). The significance of this lies in the consciousness for Christians that their professed and lived relationship between faith and ethical action is not a proprium, let alone a novum, but an inheritance which directs their outlook towards its origin.

And the third reason why the passage is important lies in the proper moral content of the example. Please notice that Elohim's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering, is probed by Abraham as somehow problematic: hence his explanation to the servants that father and son will worship and then come back; hence also Abraham's answer to the observation of Isaac that they do have fire and wood, but no animal for the offering (Genesis 22:5&8). Furthermore, the doubtful morality of the whole enterprise is also discerned by the author of the passage in Genesis and - somehow - located by the introductory sentence: “After these things God tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1). However, what really catches my eye is the way Abraham deals with this dubious command - let it be an ‘ordeal' - namely with a resigning obedience that according to Scripture really brings him on the verge of child murder. This becomes even more striking contrasted with Abraham's relation to JHWH in Genesis 18:23-32 - their conversation on the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah - where Abraham's intervention and protest can function as a model for a prudential attitude which in the context of intended destructive violence carefully inquires about the dividing line of morally acceptable ‘collateral damage' and the death of ‘innocent bystanders'.

To avoid a possible misunderstanding: it is not at all my aim here to suggest some connection between the differences in the name of God and the un/ethical behaviour in the actions of God and/or Abraham. What I am trying to bring into focus is the risk that the importance of the reciprocal relationship between faith and action together with the legitimate presumption on the necessary consensus between the both of them, leads to obedience towards what on the one hand is discerned as ‘the will of God' in spite of the acknowledgement on the other hand that this will of God is ethically substandard. In other words: the risk that some experienced dissent between God and humankind is solved by forcing a consensus which - how could it be otherwise - puts the right at ‘God's side'. That this risk and such a forced solution are not imaginary is very well illustrated by the way in which Thomas Aquinas dealt with the moral problem of God's command to Abraham.

God's immorality?

In his very influential discussion of the natural law (lex naturalis) in questio 94 of the first part of the second part of his theological masterpiece Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas raises the question whether the natural law can be changed (STh I-II, 94, 5). Just for a proper understanding: this ‘natural law' does not concern the law of physical or biological nature, but refers to the insight about the good and the right that human beings can acquire by making use of their created ratio by which they participate in the great order of being created by God. Therefore, ‘natural law' stands for the order of morality that is obligatory for human beings because and to the degree that they themselves become aware that this order is or becomes synonymous with the good. In Thomas' own words: “Now, as ‘being' is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so ‘good' is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. Consequently, the first principle of practical reason is one founded on the notion of good, viz. that ‘good is that which all things seek after'. Hence, this is the first precept of law, that ‘good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided'. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this; so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man's good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided” (STh I-II, 94, 2 respondeo).

After this solid and confident definition, Thomas proceeds in the fifth article to the question “Whether the natural law can be changed?” According to scholastic custom, he formulates himself under the heading ‘objection' an argument in favour of such a change: “[Further], the slaying of the innocent, adultery, and theft are against the natural law. But we find these things changed by God: as when God commanded Abraham to slay his innocent son (Genesis 22:2); and when he ordered the Jews to borrow and purloin the vessels of the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35); and when He commanded Osee to take to himself ‘a wife of fornications' (Osee 1:2). Therefore the natural law can be changed”.

For my own train of thought, it is highly interesting that Aquinas - like the author of Genesis 22 and the Abraham he is staging (and even stronger: the Abraham of Genesis 18) - experiences the tension between the implication of faith in the form of a God-given command (or of the intended action of God) and its ethically dubious status. The solution proposed by Aquinas is according to me the crux of the matter: such a difference is unbearable but the looked-for consensus is not the result of a thinking-through of the tension, but it is a real ‘solution' of the tension by streamlining one component in such a way that it absorbs the other. The tension and dissensus were only apparent and, of course, the truth can only be on God's side. In his answer, Thomas uses this fatal approach as follows: “All men alike, both guilty and innocent, die the death of nature: which death of nature is inflicted by the power of God on account of original sin, according to 1 Kgs. 2:6: ‘The Lord killeth and maketh alive'. Consequently, by the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever. In like manner, adultery is intercourse with another's wife; who is allotted to him by the law emanating from God. Consequently, intercourse with any woman, by the command of God, is neither adultery nor fornication. The same applies to theft, which is the taking of another's property. For whatever is taken by the command of God, to Whom all things belong, is not taken against the will of its owner, whereas it is in this that theft consists. Nor is it only in human things, that whatever is commanded by God is right; but also in natural things, whatever is done by God, is, in some way, natural, as stated in the I, 105, 6, ad 1”.

I have deliberately cited both Aquinas' objection and his refutation in full, because this shows that his approach towards the tension between ‘morality' and ‘religion' in these cases of murder, theft and adultery is quite consistent. This very pattern is at the same time fatal for a fruitful tension between morality and religion, and even worse, the used ‘image of God'  is not only the solution of the tension, but also induces traits of immorality within God. This immorality consists of a formal and a material element. The formal is the equation between what is discerned as the will, the law, the power or some prerogative of God - such as in the song of thankfulness by Hannah in 1 Samuel 2 (‘The Lord kills and brings to life' - v.6a) - and the necessity for human beings to accept this in complete obedience. The material element - as the concrete filling in of such a voluntaristic heteronomy - consists of images of God that ordain a ‘demarcation line' between God and humanity by which some set of actions are forbidden because they constitute trespassing the threshold of the territory reserved for God.

God's morality

From history, we can learn how such images of God have undermined the plausibility of a fruitful connection between Christian faith in God and ethics. The slogan, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted”, that tries to prove the necessity of a God imposing rules and regulations, is nothing but a weak bid. This is shown in the first place by the inhumanity that was and is perpetrated in the name of the same God in for example extermination of heretics, crusades, inquisition, witch trials, preaching in the New World, racial and sexual apartheid. This appears furthermore each time a moral contrast experience was and is invalidated by the irrefutable catchword: “Deus volente!” However, instead of giving in to some late/post modern tendency towards division of the estate - in which, by the way, fundamentalist faith and its theology in their resulting ‘splendid isolation' can see the confirmation of their own being right because their ‘prophetical attitude' clashed by definition with ‘the world' and its individual egotism - I would like to argue in favour of indeed there being a crosstie, but from another notion of the tension and dissensus.

Moral theology - once again: the reflection on the implications of Christian faith in God and our moral being and acting - should according to me not try to ‘solve' the tensions described. The real task of moral theology is, however, to reflect on the compatibility of some images of God as present in scriptures, liturgy and praxis and the very ethical life to which this faith in God fundamentally calls. Tension and dissensus have to be looked upon as a possibly fruitful dialectics. This means first of all that whatever representation of God and humanity as competitors is inadequate - if only because of the unabandonable ‘analogy of being' that both connects and differentiates Creator and creature. This means furthermore that both fides et ratio put to the test their involvement with each another and towards the cause of humanity by the yardstick of this very same ‘cause of humanity', pure and simple because this is also the very core of God's involvement. This is the perspective that can lead us away from the almost spasmodic efforts to ‘solve' tensions between faith and ethics by human subordination to ‘god' and opens at the same time the space in which we discern the perichoresis of humanity's truth with God and God's truth with humanity.

Therefore, any theological ethics of Jewish-Christian signature should time and again remember the intimate covenant between ‘grace and law' as this is shaped in Scripture's narratives of Exodus. If I see things correctly, an inexhaustible ethical dynamism begins with the very name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14 - a name which turns out to be a verb: “I am who I am”. The context of this name is the initiative of JHWH to bring about liberation and it is therefore this very context which is again recalled in the passages further down in Exodus and also in Deuteronomy that we know as ‘The Decalogue' or ‘The Ten Commandments'. For the record: the extend to which a morality of imposed commandments permeated liturgy and catechesis can very well be illustrated in the leaving out of this ‘context of liberation' in the so-called catechetical formulations of the ten commandments in which the interaction between God's initiative - grace - and the response of human beings - law - was lost sight of. Now it is not only this interaction that allows me to argue in favour of tension as dialectics, because there is also a highly significant shift in the formulation of the tenth commandment. I take this shift to be an example of the ethical dynamism towards which God calls and inspires us.

Exodus 20:17 reads as follows: “You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or male of female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour”; Deuteronomy 5:21 has: “Neither shall you covet your neighbour's wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbour's house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour”. The shift is remarkable  because in the first text, the wife is named following the house, including her as part of the properties belonging to her husband, whereas in the second formulation the commandment is now a diptych in which the wife comes first, followed by a description of what kind of things belong to ‘the house'. To the extent we agree that this second formulation is not just a stylistic change but really from the ethical point of view an improvement for both the neighbour and his wife, this would almost be impossible to argue if we follow the line that in case of a tension between a divine commandment and a human ethical insight, the first has priority over the second and that therefore things should have remained as they were. Let us for a moment speculate that the author of Deuteronomy was confronted with a reproach such as: “it is all very well that the relation between a neighbour and his wife is more ethical if she is not counted directly as part of his property, but, however, this is how God's law demands it...” -  a reproach to which the answer might have been: “indeed, that is the way it was laid down in writing, but the spirit of a God who is aiming at the well-being and liberation of human beings calls me to improve on the letter, because God's law should be nothing but the mirror of God's grace”. Therefore, Deuteronomy can rightfully claim - not notwithstanding but exactly because of this change/improvement - to present its reading as ‘God's commandment'.

Sadly, I have to add that this ethical dynamism needed many more centuries before the ethical truth dawned that ‘male or female slave' are both figurative and literally untenable in the eyes of a God of liberation, a God which becomes encapsulated every time the contrast between ethical insight and concrete images of God is explained away as a dissensus in which human beings lose out against a God who always ‘knows  best'. The tailpiece of this dynamics and at the same time the light yoke for whatever notion of ‘moral law' that wants to maintain the qualifying adjective ‘Christian', is the saying of Jesus in Mark on the relation between ‘law' and ‘humankind': “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27a). The importance of this can only be realised if one refers to the substantiation of the command to keep the Sabbath in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. After all, the ‘weight' of this substantiation is almost matchless: in Deuteronomy 5:12-15 with direct reference to God's liberation out of slavery; in Exodus 20:8-11 by reference to God's universal work of creation and the connected rhythm of six days of work and rest on the seventh day. All the same, this - I dare to say: exactly this - commandment is declared ‘relative' by Jesus: it is only its relationship to humankind which unfolds the meaning and significance of the commandment and an apparent transgression is therefore not to be valuated ipso facto as a dissensus to be rejected but as a moment of ethical truth.

Humankind's morality

Until now, I oriented my attention towards the tension between Jewish-Christian religiosity and the ethical and made a plea for not taking this to be a dissensus but a dialectics. The very condition of possibility for the fruitfulness of such a dialectics – and thereby also of moral theology – is the consonance between the content of the ethical and the peculiar dynamics of the Christian image of God. In the final part, I would now like to focus my attention on ethical truth as practical truth – meaning the truth ‘of' human beings – and on the meaning of consensus and dissensus from such a perspective.

On the one hand, it is of course to kick in an open door that the praxis of ethical activity is characterized by both agreement and diversity; on the other hand we have to ask the critical question whether we have to strive for a diminishment or even the abolition of tensions or if there is another way to shape the relationship between disagreement and truth. My thesis would be that the crucial question is about the lasting plurality of ethical truth.

In the unfolding of this question, I made the difference – not the separation – between the level of the good and the level of the right. It is essential that both levels deal with values: the content of the good and the right does not consist in ‘facts' but in the interpretation of facts which through their relation with the humanly desirable or with the humanly feasible can be called ‘good' and ‘right'. Now we don't have to think of these relations as abstract or pre-given, simply because this would be to the detriment of the very hermeneutics that is constitutive for the good and the right. Even more: abstract or pre-given ‘values' are exactly no real values because they only say something ‘about' human beings and what would be good for them without the involvement of human beings themselves. Furthermore, the protest against the imposed and so-called objective unanimity of such ‘values' all to easily turns into an unfruitful type of dissensus, because the rejection of a morality ‘about' human beings deteriorates towards a subjective ethics ‘in' human beings. Now I do have some admiration for those who in their resistance against a heteronymous ethics display the courage to venture into ego-nomy, but the risk remains that such dissensus gets stuck in another variety of voluntarism. Where in the first situation, values would be the result of a will which is standing above and beyond concrete human beings – and the strongest example is, of course, the so-called ‘will of God' – then in the second situation we have an inversion that remains voluntaristic because now it is only ‘me, myself and I' who decides on values and ethical truth. A factual disparity with regard to the good life is then no longer experienced as a tension, but only as a factual result of ‘freedom'. As a result, the so-called pluralism can be found everywhere on the scale between tolerance and indifference, including the worthless mixtures of tolerant indifference or indifferent tolerance.

My plea for involvement, on the other hand, means that values are ‘for' humans beings to the degree they are ‘of' human beings. Deliberately, I am employing here the plural ‘human beings' in combination with the word ‘of' because only in this way, we can escape both from the abstract supra-ethical of heteronomy and from the infra-ethical of egonomy. In this, the participation which each and every human being as individual is having – or should have – in the discovery, in the thinking about and in the practice of the good life, no longer falls under imposed obedience to external or internal voluntarism, but it qualifies as responsibility taken up with regard to oneself, the others and the traditions in which all of us are always already standing.

Such participation and responsibility align in their orientation on the contours of the good life – this means the contents of an adequate and integral ethical anthropology – with the dialectics between faith and ethical reason. They therefore strive towards a consensus on those values which are ‘of humans' to such a degree that their realisation for all becomes part and parcel of the task of each of us. However, the tensions that will surface in the transition from this – always to be refined – consensus with regard to the good life towards concrete right activity are in my opinion not to be characterised as dissensus, but as real differences that first and most result from the real individual and situational concreteness of such activity. Beware: such differences are not a priori necessary, as if concrete ethical activity would be typified by singular unicity, but their importance increases in proportion to the ‘weight' that the situation has in the process of formation of conscience and the activity that follows from that. The stake for this space for differences is the resistance against a theory of moral action in which at least some concrete actions can be judged as ‘in itself' immoral on the basis of the object of the action alone, disconnected from the situation, the intention of the acting person, the circumstances and the consequences. This resistance is based in part on the insight that at least the possibility of difference must be kept open to offer a space for alternatives, and it is based in part on the insight that each and every concrete action to an (un)certain degree remains a mixture of values and disvalues in the contingent entwining of goals aimed at, known and/or foreseen effects and all kinds of further side-effects. The claim that practical ethical truth given enough effort and endeavour really should have uniformity as final goal, fails to notice this stubborn element of reality: the consequential behavioral norms therefore are only of nominal significance.

This means at the same time that concrete human morality and a plausible theory of moral action can only exist through the courage of the seemingly imperfect – seemingly, because this very imperfection is both the shelter and the splendour of ethical truth.

Jan Jans studied moral theology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) where he obtained his doctorate in 1990. Since 1991 he has been assistant professor at Tilburg Faculty of Theology (the Netherlands) and since 2001/2002 a visiting professor at St Augustine College of South Africa. Besides his research interests in fundamental moral theology, his academic interests also extend to the interface of technology and ethics in the fields of medicine and electronic media.

 

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