LECTURE 1:
INTEGRITY, NOT DISTINCTIVENESS
The skeleton of the argument
1. The concern for integrity and its causes.
2. Theological integrity.
3. Theological narrative integrity—including soteriology and eschatology · expressive of a reassertion of orthodox theological realism.
4. Theological narrative integrity that is directly shaped by an historically particular Christology of non-violence (Stanley Hauerwas). · Yes, Christology should shape directly—but only at the appropriate points. · Yes, Jesus’ normative import involves the refusal of violence—but not as an absolute rule.
5. So yes to theological narrative integrity, partly for the sake of public responsibility: neighbour-love requires Christians to tell it how they see it.
6. Integrity, however, is not distinctiveness.
7. Pace Hauerwas, Christian churches should not aim to be distinct from ‘the world’, for in this ambivalent saeculum the world is not the World, nor churches yet the Church.
8. How then should we achieve integrity? Not by insisting that ethics be directly determined by theology at every point. · Pace Karl Barth, Germain Grisez, Martin Honecker · and Richard Hays: the direct drawing of ‘imaginative analogies’ is no substitute for the abstraction of principles and their discriminate negotiation with cases. · Cp. Barth in principle: (discriminate) openness to non-biblical and non- theological sources.
9. Theological integrity is achieved, not by indiscriminate self-differentiation from ‘the world’, but by the discriminate shaping of ethical concepts at the appropriate points by relevant moments in the whole theological narrative.
Nigel Biggar Christ Church Oxford
TENSE CONSENSUS
The skeleton of the argument
1. Theological narrative integrity is what matters, not distinctiveness. Sometimes Christian ethics does echo common sense. And sometimes it shouldn’t be ashamed to.
2. Theological narrative integrity itself leads Christian churches to expect common ground with others. Creation: objective universal order. Fall: absolute loss of subjective moral grasp? No, on four grounds: · empirical · biblical: borrowings from religiously foreign cultures (Wisdom literature; Pastoral Epistles) · ecclesiological: we can’t discern with certainty who belongs to the Church among the members of secular churches and the secular world. · soteriological: since Christians are in via to salvation, they remain fellow-sinners alongside others, from whom they may expect to learn.
3. This expectation of common ground is expressed in the doctrine of natural law: Aquinas and the Anglican Hooker, but also the Lutheran Melanchthon, and Luther himself, Calvin, and Barth.
4. To affirm natural law is to say that sinful human beings can and do grasp the principles of morality: the basic goods and the general norms of behaviour that these generate.
5. From this some infer the independence of ethics from the theological narrative, concluding that there is no specifically Christian ethic. E.g., the Danish Lutheran, Knud Løgstrup, for whom the norm of neighbour-love (= the Golden Rule) is universal. Svend Andersen agrees that theology does not affect the material norm, but adds that a theological view of the self as sinful and so of the need for self-mortification fuels our motivation to keep the Rule. BUT scope remains for controversy over who is my neighbour, what is his well-being, how we should rank component goods, and whether we may intentionally harm one for the sake of others.
6. Likewise, the RC school of autonomy-ethics: theology bears upon context and motivation, not norms of action. BUT the soteriological moment of the theological narrative, which finds its sharpest focus in Jesus, restates obscured norms, adds new ones (e.g., remedial spiritual and liturgical practices), and modifies others (e.g., rectificatory justice in terms of forgiveness).
7. Germain Grisez’s version of natural law is close to the mark: revelation remedies moral motivation and cognition, even at the level of norms of action. BUT he fails to notice the extent to which his own account of practical ‘reasonableness’ is determined by eschatological hope.
8. So the doctrine of natural law should lead Christians to expect moral agreement with others about certain goods and norms of conduct. Nevertheless, the theological narrative endows certain virtues, ways of ethical reasoning, practices, and obligations with a rationality that they otherwise lack. So the overlapping consensus will be fragmentary, provisional, and internally controversial. It will be Augustinian rather than Rawlsian, not stable but tense.
Nigel Biggar, Christ Church, Oxford;
WHICH PUBLIC?
The skeleton of the argument
1. Ecclesial publics are important, but our focus is on ‘secular’ publics where Christians engage with non-Christians. Why? Because: members of churches spend most of their lives outside them; Christians should follow God in caring about the health of ‘the world’; the Christian ethicist has valuable skills that public health needs; and the Christian should be keen to show how communion with God is important for social well-being.
2. Because a secular public is plural, it is often argued that religious people should suppress their unintelligible theology when talking in public, and adopt ‘secular’ language instead. This usually assumes the secularization thesis. E.g., Jürgen Habermas, despite his recently heightened appreciation for religion, still holds that translation in formal public institutions must be one- way—from religious into secular language.
3. Habermas’ views raise three questions about the nature of secular publics: (1) Are Western publics predominantly non-religious? (2) Does respect require ‘secular’ translation? (3) Do neutrality and political stability require it?
4. (1) Because H. thinks that the dominant culture in the West is ‘secular’ (i.e., non-religious), he reckons it politically prudent for believers to eschew theological talk. BUT his sociology is more prescriptive than descriptive: even British data do not support the assumption that a democratic majority is hostile or impervious to religious discourse. · Cp. media ‘secularism’
5. (2) H. also thinks a one-way translation from religious into secular language is justified because respect requires believers to present their views to non-believers in terms acceptable and persuasive to the latter. BUT surely respect also requires unbelievers to do the same for believers?
6. FURTHER, respect does not require that we succeed in persuading others, only that we sincerely attempt to persuade them (Christopher Eberle). Given that attempt, believers may support legislation that, if passed by majority vote, would coerce others. Such coercion is a normal and unavoidable in democratic politics.
7. Qualifying addendum: in attempting to persuade, believers are obliged to employ terms that are ‘secular’ in the sense that they refer to temporal social/public goods—but not in the sense that they eschew theological references integral to their own understanding of such goods.
8. (3) H. also argues that discourse in formal public fora should be ‘secular’ (non-religious), since the exercise of state power must be worldview-neutral, if political stability is to be maintained on a principled, as distinct from merely expedient, basis. BUT cp. John Rawls: ‘public’ reasons are integral, not alien, to religious ‘comprehensive doctrines’; and ‘public reason’ is plural and contains controversy. STILL, Rawls failed to notice what he implies: that the cause of controversy within public reason is the operation of comprehensive doctrines, including theological ones. Thus ‘public reason’ is not a neutral and conflict-transcending language, but a particular set of virtues and practices that disciplines controversy—‘public reasonableness’.
Nigel Biggar, Christ Church, Oxford;
CAN A THEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT BEHAVE?
The skeleton of the argument
1. The argument so far. Christians should maintain the theological integrity of their ethics; and they may expect a measure of ethical consensus with non-Christians. They should want to say it as they see it (i.e., theologically) in polyglot, secular publics; and they should be allowed to. Today’s question. Given the history of civil strife kindled by religious misbehaviour, how can Christians both speak authentically and behave in public?
2. The varieties of theologico-ethical arguments. In an academic theological public, there will be primary reference to moral theological tradition, because: demonstration of scholarly competence; demonstration of denominational loyalty; recognition that creaturely thought is historical; desire to learn before one teaches; accountability to the fundamental witness of the Bible; achievement of intellectual liberation from the prison of common sense. But beware the temptation to find in classic texts more a refuge than a resource.
3. In an ecclesial public, the primary focus will be on contemporary and practical concerns—and only secondary reference will be made to theological tradition as a relevant resource. Does this apply to the Bible? Since the Bible is the source of the fundamental Christian theological narrative, more reference than to post-biblical theological tradition. However, whether there is any reference at all will depend on the brief. If to explain the moral import of a characteristically Christian vision of reality, then reference to fundamental, biblical elements will be necessary. But if to judge a moral question, these might not be directly relevant.
4. What place for biblical and theological references in polyglot, secular publics? No place for sheer appeals to authority, because imprudent and disrespectful. Ethically illustrative appeals to the Bible could be rhetorically prudent and respectful. Explanatory/justificatory appeals to theological beliefs are more problematic. Sometimes because the argument is poor. But careful theological references need not baffle. Non-Christians may grasp some of what is meant—at least anthropological, if not theological. Besides, the actual world not being neatly divided into Church and World, what others will grasp is unpredictable. The demonstration of the ethical import of theology can be apologetically cogent.
5. Behaviour is not just content, but manner. The Christian creed should issue in a manner of conversing expressive of certain virtues: docility, tolerance-as-care, charity-as-respect, charity-as- optimal-construal, fraternal candour, denunciatory impatience with grave and shameless injustice, patience with everything else (including apparently impervious dogmatism), forgiveness.
6. Are these virtues too academic, too elitist? Answer: (i) not so academic; (ii) not so absent from the public; (iii) rarity due to media rather than the essence of political life; and (iv) public life cannot afford their lack.
7 What’s their matrix? Given their creed, the Christian churches should be nurseries of communicative virtues. Hence the manner in which churches conduct their own controversies is a vital test of integrity, a vital part of their witness, and a vital contribution to public well-being.
8. A theological argument can behave in public—but on its own grounds and sometimes in its own way. *
IN SUM, this series of lectures has argued for a third way both between ‘autonomists’ who deny the existence of a specifically Christian ethic, and ‘narrativists’ who make excessive claims for its distinctiveness; and between secularists who would ban theology from public discourse, and religious dogmatists who would misbehave in it.
On the one hand, that Christians should maintain the theological narrative integrity of their ethics—partly out of loyalty to what they believe to be true and important, and partly out of their duty to communicate it for the sake of public well-being.
On the other hand, that Christians have good theological reasons to expect ethical consensus with non-Christians—albeit not blanket, but occasional; and not radical, but contingent.
On the one hand, Christians should be free to say it as they see it (i.e., theologically) in plural, polyglot publics that are ‘secular’ in an Augustinian, rather than a Habermasian or an official Rawlsian, sense.
On the other hand, Christians should behave both in what they say and how they say it—but for reasons of their own, not alien ones.
A dithering third way? A milquetoast via media? No. If it combines all the half-truths of unbalanced alternatives into a coherent synthesis, then a third way is a better way.
Nigel Biggar Christ Church, Oxford