Pastoral Ethics Study Notes L
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———————————————— THINK AGAIN PASTORAL ETHICS STUDY NOTES L ———————————————— ———————————————— David Atkinson PERSONA 1 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— Contents THINK AGAIN Preface Introduction 1 The place of the Bible in Christian ethics Part One: Pastoral Ethics and Personal Relationships 2 Marriage 3 Once married—always married? STUDY NOTES L 4 Sexuality 5 The church and homosexual people 6 The future of the family 7 Forgiveness Part Two: Pastoral Ethics and Social Issues 8 Rulers to obey? 9 Christian concerns in the nuclear debate 10 A Christian theology of work 11 Christian faith and physical science 12 Green religion and green science R. J. Berry, Professor of Genetics, University College, London 13 Power and powerlessness Dr Nigel Biggar, Fellow and Chaplain of Oriel College, Oxford 14 The world of business Dr Richard Higginson, Lecturer in Ethics at Ridley Hall, Cambridge Part Three: Pastoral Ethics and Questions of Life and Death 15 Towards a theology of health 16 The Christian church and the ministry of healing 17 Problems of human embryo research 18 ‘Every child a wanted child’ PERSONA 19 Thou most kind and gentle death? 20 Causing death and allowing to die Epilogue 2 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— 1 Preface THINK AGAIN Since much of the material in this book first appeared in 1989, there have been a number of significant changes. More church reports have appeared about sexuality; there is wider public acceptance of cohabitation; changes have been proposed in divorce legislation; the enormous changes in Eastern Europe have placed discussion of STUDY NOTES L nuclear deterrence in a different light; the Gulf War and the situation in Bosnia have brought the reality of modern conventional warfare much more clearly into focus; and medical ethics continues to advance faster than many of us can keep up with. When the possibility of reissuing this material in this new format as a textbook was being explored, we were faced with a choice: do we try to update all the chapters, giving different contemporary examples, while realizing that they, too, may not remain in the headlines very long? Or do we let most of the original text stand, since the primary focus is on the principles of pastoral ethics, and the examples serve to root those principles in pastoral practice? We have taken the latter course, in the hope that, as this book is used for class work in theological colleges and seminaries, individual readers will wish to relate the theoretical and theological material here to a wide range of current situations appropriate to their own pastoral settings. I am delighted that it has been possible to extend the scope of the previous publication drawing on the expertise of Nigel Biggar, Richard Higginson and Sam Berry. I am very grateful to them for their contributions, which I hope will considerably extend the usefulness of this book. PERSONA I am very grateful to Robin Keeley of Lynx Communications for his encouragement and enthusiasm in making this material available again. 1Atkinson, D. J. 1994. Pastoral ethics (5). Lynx Communications: London 3 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— Introduction THINK AGAIN This book is a series of essays in what I like to call pastoral ethics. It is offered to the general Christian reader in the hope that it might stimulate some thought, give some guidance in the processes of decision making, increase sensitivity to the complexity and delicacy of some of the moral and pastoral questions which face us, and perhaps STUDY NOTES L provoke some action. I have drawn on, modified and updated some material which I have written before. Latimer House published a small paper called Tasks for the Church in the Marriage Debate, some of which has found its way into Chapters 2 and 3. The chapters on sexuality and homosexuality adapt a paper which I prepared for a conference organized by Care and Counsel. The chapters on the state, nuclear deterrence and science have all grown out of lectures to churches in Michigan and Oxford. The work on medical ethics has made use of background material I prepared for my little book Life and Death (Oxford University Press), from the Tyndale Ethics Lecture of 1982 (published in the Tyndale Bulletin, 1983) and from articles in Crusade and Third Way magazines. I am very grateful to David Brown, formerly Fellow and Chaplain of Oriel College, Oxford, and now Van Mildert Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham, for his ready agreement to my including the chapter ‘The Future of the Family’. He and I wrote this chapter together for Stepping Stones, edited by Christina Baxter, and published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1987. I am also grateful to the editor and the publishers of that book for their agreement PERSONA that this chapter may be reproduced. I hope that in offering the material in this present form, it might become a basis for some discussion in church groups, and perhaps help some people in the development 4 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— of a more Christian mind, more pastoral heart and socially more sensitive conscience. Just as our theology should be integrally related to and an THINK AGAIN expression of our commitment to Christ and his gospel, so our ethics should be integrally related to our theology. Good theology, so it seems to me, has three related features. It is ‘dogmatic’ in the proper sense of asking critical and probing questions into our knowledge of God, with the expectancy of receiving some answers, and trying then to get that STUDY NOTES L knowledge into some order. It is ‘doxological’ in the sense that all we learn of God and say of God should become part of our worship of God. It is ‘pastoral’, or ‘practical’, in the sense that it must then affect how we live with one another within God’s world, and how we treat the world within which we live. I have called this book Pastoral Ethics because it is the third of these features of the theological task which is primarily in mind. And here we need to work at several different levels. As Don Browning has shown in his Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care (Fortress Press, 1983), there are many ingredients in the mix from which moral decisions are made, many levels to the moral and pastoral task. There are, first of all, the empirical facts of a particular situation, including the needs and temperament of the decision maker. A decision to divorce, for example, might mean one thing in the case of a rich young man of twenty- one who married against all advice at eighteen, only to find that he had made a mistake. It might be very different in the case of a woman of fifty-five who has struggled for years to stay with her drunken and violent out-of-work husband, on the seventeenth floor of their high-rise apartment block, and who simply cannot cope any more. The personal and social PERSONA context forms part of the moral decision. Secondly, there is the framework of assumed moral values within which the empirical facts are evaluated. Some people make moral judgments mostly on the basis of moral principles, of right or wrong attitudes or actions. Others decide on the basis of which action is believed to lead to the 5 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— best consequences in the long run for those involved. The debate in the church on homosexuality, for example, illustrates how moral judgments based on the morality of THINK AGAIN actions can lead to a different view from those based on what is believed to lead to the greatest personal happiness and fulfilment. Many writers in Christian ethics rightly show that neither of these approaches to moral decisions are adequate on their own. They are neither appropriate to the sort of God who STUDY NOTES L makes himself known in history, in the Scriptures and supremely in Jesus Christ—a God who relates to us in personal love, and before whom the moral task becomes a form of personal response. Nor are they appropriate to the complexity of the moral situation, involving as it does people made in all the richness of God’s image, and yet still living as sinful people in a fallen world. So thirdly, behind a person’s assumed moral values lies a set of even more fundamental assumptions about the world, and about what makes for the best for human life. If we were to start with Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to human personality, for example, we would understand human beings mainly as biological mechanisms, and the good would be achieved by controlling lower instincts. Freud’s ‘ultimate metaphor’ is mechanistic. By contrast, Jung’s ultimate metaphor is of opposites (male-female, good-evil, and so on), and wholeness for him is found in integrating the opposites in a person’s experience. More recent psychologists, such as Maslow, work with a hierarchy of personal needs, on the basic assumption that ‘self-actualization’ is the highest good. Within an explicitly Christian worldview, it is also true that different basic assumptions—our guiding metaphors for PERSONA God, for example—lead Christians to different ways of seeing moral questions. If a person understands God mostly as Creator, Law-giver and Judge, the moral life may be approached primarily in terms of obedience to moral rules. If a person’s guiding metaphors for God are Redeemer, Reconciler and Sanctifier, however, the moral 6 LIVING WORD AMI PASTORAL ETHICS ———————————————— ———————————————— life may be understood much more as a journey towards wholeness through forgiveness, healing and growth. Clearly a whole range of metaphors including all these are THINK AGAIN important, and the understanding of the moral life may be more complex than we often think.