The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of a Reformation Legacy 9780567665959, 9780567665980, 9780567665973

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The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist

The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist The Future of a Reformation Legacy

Edited by Brian Brock and Michael Mawson

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Brian Brock, Michael Mawson and Contributors, 2016 Brian Brock and Michael Mawson have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-595-9 PB: 978-0-56768-364-9 ePDF: 978-0-56766-597-3 ePub: 978-0-56766-596-6 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Acknowledgementsvii List of Abbreviations ix Contributorsxi INTRODUCTION1 Michael Mawson Chapter 1 CITIZENS OF HEAVEN11 Stanley Hauerwas Chapter 2 KARL BARTH AND THE PLIGHT OF PROTESTANT ETHICS17 Gerald McKenny Chapter 3 THE MESSIANIC CONTOURS OF EVANGELICAL ETHICS39 Hans G. Ulrich Chapter 4 LIVING IN THE WAKE OF GOD’S ACTS: LUTHER’S MARY AS KEY TO BARTH’S COMMAND65 Brian Brock Chapter 5 HOW TO DO OR NOT DO PROTESTANT ETHICS93 Stanley Hauerwas Chapter 6 ANABAPTIST ETHICS AFTER YODER: ACCEPTING THE LIMITS ON THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN ETHICIST107 Paul Martens Chapter 7 THE POLITICS OF JESUS AND THE ETHICS OF CHRIST: WHY THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN YODER AND BONHOEFFER MATTER127 Michael Mawson

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Chapter 8 ‘WE, AS TO OUR OWN PARTICULARS …’ CONSCIENCE AND VOCATION IN QUAKER TRADITION145 Rachel Muers Chapter 9 SLEEPERS WAKE! EUDAIMONISM, OBLIGATION AND THE CALL TO RESPONSIBILITY159 Jennifer A. Herdt Chapter 10 ON WHAT WE LOST WHEN (OR IF) WE LOST THE SAINTS175 Michael Banner Bibliography191 Index of Biblical References 203 Index of Names and Subjects 204

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The essays in this volume are revised versions of papers that were presented at the conference, ‘The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist’, which took place at King’s College of Aberdeen University in October 2014. We gratefully acknowledge those who assisted with organizing this event, in particular Jonathan Chaplin, Chris Dodson, Kevin Hargaden, Rachel Hughes and Philip Ziegler. The conference would not have been possible without the financial support of both the University of Aberdeen’s School of Divinity, History and Philosophy and the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE). Chris Dodson deserves special mention for his editing and formatting work on this volume, and, in particular, for putting together the bibliography and index. We are grateful to others who read over and commented on the essays: Claire Hein Blanton, Andrew Errington, Ross Halbach, Kevin Hargarden, Caireen Likely, Nathalie Mares, Benjamin Paulus, Joel Pierce, Justin Pritchett, Sam Tranter, Dick Wivell and Philip Ziegler. Finally, we have appreciated the enthusiasm and support of Anna Turton and Miriam Cantwell at T&T Clark Bloomsbury. Brian Brock and Michael Mawson.

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Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics, 14 vols. Translated by Geoffrey Bromiley. London and New York: T&T Clark, 1957–75. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., translated by H. Martin Rumscheidt.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Creation and Fall. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by John de Gruchy, translated by Douglas Stephen Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. Discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Geoffrey Kelly and John D. Godsey, translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001 Life Together/Prayerbook of the Bible. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Geoffrey Kelly, translated by Daniel Bloesch and James Burtness. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Ethics. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Clifford Green, translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles West and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Clifford Green, translated by Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Berlin: 1932–1933. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by Larry Rasmussen, translated by Isabelle Best and David Higgins. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009. Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Edited by H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, translated by Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles from the 1559 edition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960. Martin Luther. Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958. Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 15–20. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1961. First Lectures on the Psalms: Psalms 1–75. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Hilton C. Oswald. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1974. First Lectures on the Psalms II: Psalms 76–126. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Hilton C. Oswald. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1976.

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List of Abbreviations Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1956. Lectures on Galatians 1535. Chapter 1–4. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1963. Lectures on Galatians 1535. Chapters 5–6. 1519. Chapters 1–6. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1963. Career of the Reformer I. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Harold J. Grimm. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1957. Church and Ministry III. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Eric W. Gritsch. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1966. The Christian in Society I. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by James Atkinson. St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1966. The Christian in Society II. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Walther I. Brandt. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1962. The Christian in Society IV. Luther’s Works. American Edition. Edited by Franklin Sherman. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981.

CONTRIBUTORS Michael Banner is Dean and Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has had wide involvement in ethical thinking and policymaking in government and the private sector, as chair or member of committees across Whitehall departments from Health to Defence and in the City of London. His publications include: The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014), Christian Ethics: A Brief History (2009) and Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (1999). Brian Brock is Reader in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He has published on the use of scripture in Christian ethics (Singing the Ethos of God, 2007), the ethics of technological development (Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, 2010) and the theology of disability (Disability in the Christian Tradition, 2012), and most recently, Captive to Christ, Open to the World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public (2014). Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University and Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Among his many books are: Approaching the End (2013), A CrossShattered Church (2013), Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (2010) and The Work of Theology (2015). Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Yale Divinity School. Her publications include: Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008) and Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (1997). Paul Martens is Associate Professor of Religion at Baylor University. His primary research interests are in post-Enlightenment attempts to articulate or display the relationship between religion and morality. His publications include The Heterodox Yoder (2012). Michael Mawson is Lecturer of Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen. He is co-editor of Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship (2013) and has published articles on Bonhoeffer, political theology and Christian ethics. He is working on a book on Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology. Gerald McKenny is Walter Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (2010) and To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body (1997). He

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is currently writing a book on the normative status of human nature in human biotechnology debates. Rachel Muers is Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Leeds, having previously held posts at the University of Exeter and at Girton College, Cambridge. Her publications include: Testimony: Quakerism and Theological Ethics (2015), Living for the Future: Theological Ethics for Coming Generations (2008) and Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (2004). Hans G. Ulrich is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg, and former president of the European Ethics Society (Societas Ethica). His publications include Wie Geschöpfe leben: Konturen evangelischer Ethik (2005).

I N T R O DU C T IO N Michael Mawson

The essays in this volume have been revised from papers that were presented at the conference, ‘The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist’, at King’s College of the University of Aberdeen, 24–5 October 2014. The aim of this conference was to explore the significance of the Protestant Reformation and its legacy for ongoing work and debates in Christian ethics. A number of leading theologians and Christian ethicists from the United Kingdom, Germany and North America presented papers engaging with Protestant figures and theological claims, and reflected on whether these have any enduring value. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the presenters rose to the occasion and met this challenge head on. The conference papers were creative and insightful, and the ensuing discussions rigorous and impassioned. During a panel at the end of the conference, one presenter observed: ‘What this conference has indicated is that Protestant ethics is alive and well. I wasn’t so sure before I came here. But now I am.’1 Why even hold a conference exploring the significance of the Protestant Reformation and its legacy for contemporary Christian ethics? This topic has not been high on the agenda for most Christian ethicists and moral theologians during recent decades. Some scholars working in this discipline have viewed the Reformation as the source of the problems now besetting Christian ethics.2 Others have simply chosen to focus their energy and efforts elsewhere. There are two trends in particular that bear mentioning here. First, in recent decades, Christian ethicists have given significant attention to interdisciplinary conversations and engagements, in particular with the social sciences and related disciplines. Scholars have sought to understand what developments and work in political science, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies might contribute to Christian reflection and engagement. To take one important example, a number of scholars have recently been turning to ethnography as a way of grounding and enriching more narrowly doctrinal and theological accounts of church life.3 Second, Christian ethicists have been focusing energy on ecumenical discussions and engagements. For Protestants this has especially meant attending to and learning from the rich and vibrant work being done in Catholic moral theology.4 As a result Protestants have become increasingly conversant with and committed to virtue and natural law approaches to ethics. This is evident, for instance, in the

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emergence and growth of ‘Protestant Thomism’,5 as well as in the increasing body of work exploring what Protestant traditions might contribute to such virtue and natural law approaches.6 These trends have clearly been significant and have produced some important work. Nonetheless, they have also contributed to the marginalization of some other ways of understanding ethics: most notably, those grounded in more distinctly Protestant theological claims.7 The interest of this volume is, therefore, in exploring and assessing a more distinctly Protestant theological approach. Does such an approach have anything to offer within the contemporary landscape? Can central Protestant claims and commitments provide for compelling and viable accounts of the Christian life? In raising the question of a more distinctly Protestant approach or contribution to ethics, two points should be noted at the outset. First, the essays in this volume are not directly concerned with Protestant identity, or with attempting to secure or shore up a Protestant profile. Indeed, several of the contributors rightly express ambivalence about whether Protestant ethics should exist or have a future as a distinct subdiscipline. As Jennifer Herdt observed in the closing panel of the conference: ‘I don’t know that I care about the future of Protestant ethics per se, but I think it’s a very worthwhile question to ask what kind of lasting contribution it has to make.’8 Similarly, other contributors display ambivalence about their status as Protestant ethicists. Reflecting on his earlier career (and time at Notre Dame), Stanley Hauerwas writes in his essay: ‘It did not occur to me to identify as a Protestant or Catholic ethicist. I simply thought I was doing Christian ethics.’9 My point, then, is that the interest of this volume is in the theological contribution of the Protestant Reformation and its legacy. As Hans Ulrich noted in the closing panel: ‘One main overlapping point [from the conference papers] is that Protestantism is not … another religion or denomination, but a paradigm of how human beings are exposed to God’s acts, God’s activities.’10 Second, this ambivalence about issues of identity does not signal a retreat from concrete issues and realities. While the essays in this volume are not directly concerned with Protestantism as such, they are still interested in what Protestant claims and commitments look like on the ground. Stanley Hauerwas provides an example here. In a sermon delivered shortly before the conference (and included in this volume), he worries that Luther’s emphasis on faith alone has often had negative effects. ‘When I lived among Lutherans’, he recollects, ‘I discovered that this doctrine of justification … often produced a deep anxiety.’ Hauerwas’s concern is that this doctrine can too easily lead to an individualistic and internalized understanding of the gospel. The result is that Christians have ‘forgotten that salvation involves making us citizens of a time and space’.11 The challenge, then, is whether a more distinctly Protestant approach to ethics can contribute to genuine Christian freedom (not just to deeper anxiety) and provide concrete guidance and insight. What are these more distinctly Protestant theological commitments and claims? One way of approaching this is by returning to Martin Luther’s programmatic

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1520 treatise, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’.12 At the heart of Luther’s treatise is the claim that Christian righteousness depends solely on faith in the promise of God’s grace. Luther famously advances this claim through two contradictory theses, which he also uses to structure the treatise: ‘The Christian is lord of all, completely free of everything; A Christian is a servant, completely attentive to the needs of all.’13 Developing the first thesis, he insists that faith in God’s grace provides the Christian with an ‘inner freedom’ from the world and its claims: ‘No external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom.’14 If Christian righteousness and freedom is possible through faith alone, this means that Christians no longer need to concern themselves with external works. In particular, they no longer need to strive after and secure righteousness through their own activity. Accordingly, Luther writes that: ‘it ought to be the first concern of every Christian to lay aside all confidence in works and increasingly to strengthen faith alone and through faith to grow in the knowledge, not of works, but of Jesus Christ, who suffered and rose for him.’15 Faith in the gift of God’s grace involves relinquishing knowledge of and confidence in works as foundational for the Christian life. Developing the second thesis, however, Luther makes clear that for all its radicality faith does not simply lead to negative freedom.16 Faith not only frees Christians from the world and its claims, it frees them to be in and for the world in a new way. By freeing Christians from the anxious pursuit of good works, faith allows them to love and serve their neighbour more directly. Faith thus allows the Christian to respond and attend to the concrete neighbour as such. Christians are able to do this, according to Luther, precisely because they are no longer being driven by fear. If Luther’s account of Christian freedom provides a sharp critique of one kind of approach to Christian living and ethics (i.e. works righteousness), it also provides the basis for a new kind of approach. This emphasis upon faith and freedom was of course highly influential for subsequent Protestant thinking. Most obviously, it has been central for many Lutheran and Reformed approaches to the Christian life.17 In addition, Radical Reformers and non-conformist (i.e. free church) Protestants were quick to take up and extend this claim to freedom. In various ways they insisted that the freedom of faith is not solely or primarily inner and spiritual in nature, but that faith also entails religious and political freedom. The basic emphasis upon freedom, however, united the Magisterial and Radical Reformers. A number of essays in this volume expand the discussion by exploring and assessing the legacy of the Radical Reformation.18 In the last century, these Reformation or Protestant claims and commitments were taken up and restated in an especially sharp way by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both of whom also feature prominently in this volume. In the Barmen Declaration, as Hans Ulrich outlines in his essay, Barth insists that the freedom that comes with faith is accompanied by joyful service and responsive action.19 ‘Through him [Christ]’, Barth proclaims in Barmen thesis II, ‘befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his

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creatures.’20 As with Luther, Christ frees us from the world and its claims so that we might freely serve others. As Paul puts this in Galatians, ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5.1). In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer likewise insists that faith involves a new way of being in the world. Moreover, he explicitly draws attention to how this radically resituates what ethics is: ‘God’s commandment permits human beings to live as human beings before God – as human beings, not merely as the makers of ethical decisions, as students of ethics.’21 For Bonhoeffer, living freely as human beings with God entails relinquishing any direct knowledge and pursuit of the good. ‘In freely surrendering the knowledge of our own goodness [or ‘self-justification’22]’, he writes, ‘the good of God occurs.’23 In faith, Christians make themselves available to God and participate in God’s own work. The point, then, is simply that these Protestant claims about faith, God’s grace and Christian freedom have been central for many past theological approaches to and understandings of the Christian life. Can these theological claims and commitments still be compelling as a basis for ethics? In exploring the contribution of the Reformation and its legacy to Christian ethics, the essays in this volume draw upon and critically engage these claims and commitments, as found in Luther, the Radical Reformers, Barth, Bonhoeffer and other Protestant figures and traditions. As a final exercise, it will therefore be helpful to briefly overview the essays. It seemed appropriate to begin a volume on Protestant theology (as we opened the conference) with some preaching. The first chapter in this volume, ‘Citizens of Heaven’, is a sermon, which was delivered by Stanley Hauerwas at King’s College Chapel on 22 October 2014. As mentioned above, Hauerwas reflects upon some of the potential dangers of Reformation theology, especially the claim that we are made righteous solely through faith. He worries that this doctrine, along with Luther’s forensic account of justification, can too easily lead to a disembodied (and de-Judaised) version of the gospel. For Hauerwas, what is lacking is an equally robust account of sanctification: we need to recognise that ‘it is possible for us to be a people who are an alternative to the worldly politics’.24 In the second chapter, ‘Karl Barth and the Plight of Protestant Ethics’, Gerald McKenny expresses some similar concerns. He suggests that while the Magisterial Reformers gave clear emphasis to the priority of divine action – to a God who acts on our behalf and in our place – they did so in ways that ultimately displaced and devalued human agency and action. McKenny suggests that Karl Barth’s theology provides a way out of this situation. In McKenny’s reading, Barth follows the Reformers in emphasizing the priority divine action, but more clearly shows how God establishes a corresponding (and fully) human action. ‘In taking up our cause and acting in our place’, he writes, ‘Barth’s God is indeed everything, but only in order that as such we, too, may be everything in our own place, on our own level and within our own limits.’25 Hans Ulrich’s wide-ranging chapter proposes that an apocalyptic–messianic grammar is the genuine core and legacy of Protestant ethics. On the one hand,

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he insists that such an ethics or ethos involves attending to God’s messianic presence and actions in the midst of this world. On the other hand, it also entails witnessing to the apocalyptic inbreaking of God’s whole story, to how God’s story overturns the indeterminacies of our own stories. ‘The inseparability of the apocalyptic and the messianic in God’s actions’, Ulrich writes, ‘stands apart from any theology or philosophy that attempts to “think” or “find” God beyond, beside, or behind his messianic–apocalyptic encounter.’26 Ulrich develops this apocalyptic– messianic grammar of Christian ethics in close dialogue with Luther, Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Bonhoeffer, Hans Joachim Iwand and many others. Brian Brock’s chapter, ‘Living in the Wake of God’s Acts’, similarly explores the significance of God’s activity for how we conceive of human agency and Christian ethics. First, Brock endorses recent work on Karl Barth’s ethics by such scholars as Gerald McKenny, Paul Nimmo and John Webster. For Brock, these scholars have rightly drawn attention to the fact that, ‘Barth refuses any framing of the discipline of Christian ethics that assumes human beings can be understood without reference to a living God.’27 Second, he suggests that Martin Luther has some significant resources for deepening and expanding upon this Barthian insight. While similarly prioritizing divine activity, Luther gives greater attention to the material and bodily ways in which God encounters and claims human beings. And ‘Luther’s understanding of the quotidian setting of the divine working’, Brock proposes, ‘can help us give flesh to a theological ethic.’28 Brock develops this claim through a sustained and nuanced reading of Luther’s 1521 commentary on Mary’s Magnificat. In the fifth chapter, ‘How to Do or Not Do Protestant Ethics’, Stanley Hauerwas argues for the importance of the Radical Reformation and its legacy. The Radical Reformers, he writes, ‘underwrote the clear Protestant emphasis on “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”’, yet did so ‘without excluding the importance of works.’29 He suggests that they were able to do this because of their emphasis upon the visibility and concrete reality of the church. In Hauerwas’s reading, the Radical Reformers can thus be seen to hold together both (broadly) Protestant and Catholic concerns and commitments. Constructively, he suggests that this provides a precedent for bringing together Aquinas and Barth in contemporary ethics. Because today, Hauerwas concludes, we need ‘all the help we can get’.30 Whereas Hauerwas focuses upon the positive contribution of the Radical Reformation and its legacy, in ‘Anabaptist Ethics After Yoder’, Paul Martens expresses concerns about this legacy. In particular, he examines an Anabaptist tendency, evident in the Schleitheim Confession, to contrast the visible holiness of the Christian community with the inherent violence of the state. For Martens, this contrast too easily leads to a ‘false and self-righteous sense of confidence’ on the part of Christians. Martens substantiates this concern with reference to the sexual abuse perpetrated by John Howard Yoder during the 1970s and 1980s, and more specifically the failure of Anabaptist leaders and institutions to recognize this sin and respond by involving the state. After Yoder, Martens concludes, ‘the relationship between the church and government must be revisited from the ground up’.31

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The essay by Michael Mawson, ‘The Politics of Jesus and the Ethics of Christ’, draws attention to some theological differences between John Howard Yoder and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whereas Yoder holds that Christians are to actively adopt and realize the political option of Jesus, Bonhoeffer insists that the living Christ calls and claims his disciples directly, which means that Christians are to obey or follow after Christ. Moreover, Mawson suggests that Bonhoeffer, when separated from Yoder in this way, challenges a tendency in more recent ethical approaches to focus directly upon human agency and activity: ‘Bonhoeffer’s theology challenges any assumption … that we are responsible for making Christ present in the world or forming Christian community.’32 In Chapter 8, ‘We, as to our own Particulars…’, Rachel Muers explores the role that freedom has historically played for Quaker communities. She does so by examining the rich theology of the 1660 ‘Declaration of the Harmless and Innocent People of God’. While contemporary accounts of the Quakers tend to focus on questions of conscience and political freedom, Muers demonstrates that the Declaration has a deeply pneumatological theology of freedom. Its adherents believed that they were free to refuse prevalent forms of violence and coercion because of a conviction that God’s Spirit breaks open and brings forth new and unanticipated possibilities. As Muers insists: ‘the “witness of God in the conscience” and … the convicting and guiding work of the Holy Spirit, lead to an open-ended … commitment to being formed into holiness, collectively and individually’.33 In her chapter, ‘Sleepers Wake! Eudaimonism, Obligation and the Call to Responsibility’, Jennifer Herdt takes up a Reformed strand of the Christian tradition that has tended to be highly suspicious of eudaimonism, and has instead emphasized obedience to God for its own sake. Herdt admits that such an emphasis precludes a standard ‘reason–source’ eudaimonism, but suggests that it can still be seen to display a kind of ‘agent-perfective’ eudaimonism. In Barth’s theology, she observes, there is a ‘joy of obedience; it is the joy of being addressed and of responding to that address, of being addressed into responsibility to God and to one another’.34 Following Barth, there can be genuine freedom and joy in and through obedience to God, even while such joy is not itself the goal. In the final chapter, ‘On What We Lost When (or If) We Lost the Saints’, Michael Banner explores the continuing importance of the Saints after the Reformation. First, Banner points out that although many of the Reformers decried ‘the role of saints as intermediaries or intercessors’, they still retained a place for them as moral exemplars.35 Second, he suggests that in order properly to appreciate the saints as moral exemplars, we need a more sophisticated account of exemplarity. Drawing on anthropological work by Joel Robbins and Juliet du Boulay, he suggests that such exemplarity need not involve a direct imitation of the saints, that is, adopting their lives as models for our own. Rather, we should understand the saints as functioning within a broader moral economy that leads us to critically reflect upon and evaluate our own values and practices. Banner concludes by suggesting the saints should continue to function in this way: ‘In moral theology … the lives of the saints have largely been neglected, when they

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surely comprise a vast and rich meditation on human life, one of the key sites at which the Christian imagination of what it is to be human has been crafted and expounded.’36

Endnotes   1. This remark was made by Gerald McKenny.   2. See Stanley Hauerwas, ‘The End of Protestantism’, in Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 87–97. In Unlearning Protestantism, Gerald Schlabach similarly views Protestantism as having made an important contribution, but no longer viable in itself. See Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2010). For a broader account of how the Reformation and its theology contributed to the problems of modernity see Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).   3. In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on ecclesiology and ethnography, Pete Ward writes: ‘Put simply, the proposal is that to understand the church, we should view it as being simultaneously theological and social/cultural … So the very practice of understanding is both theological and social/cultural. This means that to do ecclesiology we must embrace methods of research that are simultaneously theological and “ethnographic” and that these methods must arise from our situatedness as church.’ Pete Ward, ed., Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 2.   4. For a few examples of recent Catholic work on virtue ethics see: Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (London: SPCK, 1994); Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); and Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). For examples of recent work on natural law, see: John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); and Matthew Levering, Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).   5. See John Bowlin, ‘Contemporary Protestant Thomism’, in Aquinas as Authority: A Collection of Studies Presented at the Second Conference of the Thomas Instituut Utrecht, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris and Carlo Leget (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 235–1. See also Eric Gregory, ‘The Spirit and the Letter: Protestant Thomism and Nigel Biggar’s “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited”’, in Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, ed. Daniel Migliore (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 50–9. A number of ethicists seem to be adopting this designation. Recent examples include Nigel Biggar, Behaving in Public (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 107f.; and Esther Reed, Theology for International Law (London: T&T Clark Boomsbury, 2013).   6. Some recent examples here include: Joel Biermann, Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014); Robert Baker and Roland Ehlke, eds, Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal (St Louis: Concordi, 2011); Jennifer Moberly, The Virtue

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of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2013); David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Stephen Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Commenting on this trend, Gerald McKenny has written: ‘One tendency among Protestant moral theologians today is to emphasise their potential commonality with the Catholic tradition where sanctification is concerned, rescinding from or simply bracketing the strong claims about the sufficiency of divine grace entailed by classical Protestant understandings of justification.’ McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth and Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 291. See also fn.1 in his essay in this volume.   7. In his essay in this volume, McKenny observes that ‘Protestants appear to have lost confidence in the viability of their most distinctive theological commitments.’ McKenny, ‘Karl Barth and the Plight of Protestant Ethics’, 17.   8. Jennifer Herdt made this remark during the closing panel of the conference.   9. Hauerwas, ‘How to Do or Not Do Protestant Ethics’, 95. 10. Rachel Muers observed during the closing panel of the conference: ‘Protestant ethics is good at training ethicists not to solve problems … This is linked to the very clear sense that comes across from all the papers of the profound capacity for the anti-idolatrous move in ethics.’ 11. Hauerwas, ‘Citizens of Heaven’, 12. Hauerwas has elsewhere written: ‘Protestantism helped to create, but also to legitimate, a form of social life that undermined its ability to maintain the kind of disciplined communities necessary to sustain the church’s witness.’ Hauerwas, ‘The Importance of Being Catholic: Unsolicited Advice from a Protestant Bystander’, in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), 99. 12. The title of the conference and this collection of essays is, of course, invoking Luther’s treatise. 13. Emphasis added. Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, LW 31, 344. 14. Ibid., 344–5. 15. Ibid., 347. 16. The second thesis of Luther’s treatise has often received less attention. See Reinhard Hütter, ‘The Twofold Center of Theological Ethics’, in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, ed. Karen L. Bloomquist and John R. Stumme (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 40–2. 17. For an example of a contemporary Lutheran approach along these lines, see Oswald Bayer, Freedom in Response: Lutheran Ethics: Sources and Controversies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a recent account of the role of freedom in Calvin’s theology, see William R Stevenson, Jr, Sovereign Grace: The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18. See the essays in this volume by Stanley Hauerwas, Paul Martens, Michael Mawson and Rachel Muers. 19. On Karl Barth on Christian freedom, see John Webster’s essay ‘Freedom in Limitation: Human Freedom and False Necessity in Karl Barth,’ in John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 99–123. 20. ‘The Theological Declaration of Barmen’, in Book of Confessions: The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1996), 311. 21. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6, 383.

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22. As the editors of DBWE 6 note, Bonhoeffer had crossed out ‘self-justification’ on his manuscript and replaced it with ‘our own goodness’. Ibid., 285, fn.164. 23. Ibid., 284–5. 24. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Citizens of Heaven’, 14. 25. Gerald McKenny, ‘Karl Barth and the Plight of Protestant Ethics’, 33. 26. Hans Ulrich, ‘The Messianic Contours of Evangelical Ethics’, 44. 27. Brian Brock, ‘Living in the Wake of God’s Acts’, 67. 28. Ibid., 77. 29. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘How to Do or Not Do Protestant Ethics’, 99. 30. Ibid., 100. 31. Paul Martens, ‘Anabaptist Ethics After Yoder’, 121. 32. Michael Mawson, ‘The Politics of Jesus and the Ethics of Christ’, 138. 33. Rachel Muers, ‘We as to Our Particulars…’, 156. 34. Herdt, ‘Sleepers Wake! Eudaimonism, Obligation, and the Call to Responsibility’, 171. 35. Michael Banner, ‘On What we Lost When (or If) we Lost the Saints’, 178. 36. Ibid., 189.

Chapter 1 C I T I Z E N S O F H E AV E N * Stanley Hauerwas

‘And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness’ (Gen. 15.6). This sentence, this innocent, but all too significant sentence, has created the time in which we now live: a time best characterized as ‘after the Reformation’. Hence, Brad Gregory’s argument in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society that the ‘Western world today is an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of mediaeval Western Christianity, in which the Reformation era constitutes the critical watershed’.1 Our complex and tangled lives bear testimony to the significance of this sentence from Genesis for how we must now live. In particular, how this sentence was read by the Reformer Martin Luther, I believe, has made it difficult for us to imagine what it might mean to be Christian in a time when Christendom is waning. We have employed Luther’s reading of this sentence in ways that have allowed us to forget that salvation involves being citizens of a time and space, and in a way that is in tension with all other forms of citizenship. As a result, we have been robbed of resources that we desperately need if we are to know how to live in this time ‘after the Reformation’. These are strong claims that no one sermon should bear – and some of you may even doubt that this is a sermon. But let me at least try to suggest why I am taking this approach by first directing your attention to what Luther actually says about Abraham. With his usual love of exaggeration, a characteristic with which I deeply identify, Luther declared in his lectures on Genesis that the fifteenth chapter of Genesis is one of the most important chapters in the Bible. The fifteenth chapter has such importance, according to Luther, because here we are told that the Lord reckons Abraham as righteous, simply because he believed in the Lord. This sentence, in which the Lord reckoned Abraham righteous, Luther argued, is one of the most important in the whole Bible. If Luther had been raised in the South (of the United States), he would have been even more impressed: the very fact that * This sermon was delivered at King’s College Chapel, University of Aberdeen, 22 October 2014.

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the Lord ‘reckoned’ Abraham as righteous clearly indicates that God must have a southern accent. Luther supported his claims about the significance of this chapter and sentence by calling attention to Paul’s use of it in Romans 4.23 and Galatians 3.6. Luther wrote, ‘from this passage he constructs the foremost article of our faith – the article that is intolerable to the world and to Satan – namely, that faith alone justifies’ (Rom. 3.28). Luther continues by explaining that to have faith ‘consists in giving assent to the promises of God and concluding that they are true’.2 For Luther, our righteousness before God comes from trusting in the divine promises of Christ. Luther argues that faith, the steadfast and unwavering reliance on God’s grace in Christ, is what saves – not the works of the law. After all, Abraham believed before the law had been given. Luther thundered that ‘this very believing or this very faith is righteousness or is imputed by God Himself as righteousness and is regarded by him as such’.3 Luther explains that our whole Christian doctrine rests on the claim that those who believe in Christ are justified solely by God’s grace. Such faith justifies, not as our own work, but as the work of God. This understanding of justification by faith through grace is the very heart of the Reformation. Just as important, I assume the doctrine of justification by faith is the heart of our hearts as Protestants. What could possibly be wrong, therefore, with Luther’s use of this sentence to remind us that our salvation is not our own doing but rather what God has done for us? Surely Luther was right to direct our attention to the centrality of this sentence in the letters of Paul. I have no reason to deny either of these claims. My worry is simply that the use of this sentence to ‘sum up’ the Gospel can tempt those of us who identify ourselves as Christians to forget that our salvation comes from the Jews. Moreover, when we lose the Jews, we lose our heavenly saviour, and when we lose our heavenly saviour, we no longer believe or, better, desire that our humiliated bodies will be transformed into the body of his glory: made citizens of heaven. You have got to be thinking – ‘What did he just say?’ The connections between God’s promise to Abraham, what it means to live lives determined by the cross of Christ and the glorification of our bodies so that we become citizens of heaven are hardly clear. But let me at least try to explain these connections by suggesting that what is at stake is the recognition that our salvation is about the engrafting of our bodies into a politics begun by God’s promise to Abraham. The emphasis on justification by faith as the summation of the Gospel can tempt us to forget our salvation entails that we are made citizens, a people; this just is our salvation. When I lived among the Lutherans, for example, I discovered that the doctrine of justification by faith alone, a doctrine that should provide a profound sense of joy, often produced a deep anxiety. Lutherans were haunted by the thought that they might not be justified by their faith. Accordingly, they worked very hard at believing that they were justified by their belief, that they were justified by faith. Faith, so understood, turned out to be an act of believing that did not require you



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to actually drag your body to church. Even more ironically, if faith is understood as trying very hard to believe that which it is hard to believe, then this is exactly what Luther meant by a work! There is another small problem. When the emphasis on justification is made the heart of the Gospel, it is no longer clear why Jesus ended up on the cross. If his preaching was to assure those to whom he preached that they were saved by faith alone, then why was Herod trying to kill him? If the Gospel is the proclamation that ‘You are accepted’, an unfortunately vulgarized, but widespread rendering of justification, then it is surely a profound mistake to kill someone like Jesus, that is, if his central message was that we accept our acceptance. Nor do I think Luther’s reading of God’s ‘reckoning’ Abraham righteous to be a problem of the relationship between faith and works. Luther had no intention of denying the importance of works. In his lectures on Genesis, he says without hesitation ‘that a faith without works is no faith at all … Faith stretches forth its hand and lays hold on what God has promised.’4 The question for Luther was not whether works (and virtues) follow from faith, but rather whether faith justifies sinners prior to our doing good works. Luther, however, forcefully asserted that what must clearly be rejected is the ‘pernicious doctrine’ that faith obtains its value from love. The problem is not that Luther has no way to account for works, then, but rather that he does not attend to the content of Abraham’s belief that he would have descendants that would be as numerous as the stars. The Lord reckoned Abraham righteous because Abraham believed that God would make him the father of a great people. God’s declaration that Abraham was righteous – what it was that God ‘reckoned’ to him – was a declaration about bodies. Abraham, a man well past the age of begetting children, believed God would make him the father of a people. The righteousness that God reckoned to Abraham is to be found in Abraham’s belief that he would be the father of a people who, by their very existence, are God’s glory. When justification by faith is isolated from Abraham’s belief that he would be the father of a people, then the results can be (and have been) disastrous: thus, Luther’s chilling judgement that the Jews are no longer God’s people.5 According to Luther, the Jews have been rejected because of their unbelief. God promised to redeem the Jews at a definite time but Luther observes that obviously has not happened. As a result, they cannot explain why for hundreds of years they have had to wander the earth without a home, a kingdom or a true worship. Luther proclaims that the Jews ‘are no longer God’s people, but have been rejected by Him on account of their unbelief, because they have refused to accept the Saviour whom God has sent them’.6 Luther missed the fact that even without a home, God’s reckoning of righteousness to Abraham had been fulfilled. From generation to generation, Jews refused to let their homelessness – as well as the persecution they endured at the hands of Christians – prevent them from having children. Abraham looked to the heavens to see what God had promised and his descendants reflected the heavens. God’s reckoning of righteousness to Abraham is not some general

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declaration of acceptance, but rather the fleshy existence of a people who exist so that the world might know the God who keeps his promises and refuses to abandon us. Christians are no less fleshy, but there is a difference. Paul tells the Philippians they are to imitate him by observing those who live according to the example he represents. But Paul is without wife and children. That he is without descendants – other than the Philippians and us – is a crucial fact. For it turns out that we believe, on Paul’s authority, that those of us who follow Christ are Abraham’s heirs. We are, moreover, no less bodily than the Jews. But the bodies we bring to the covenant are bodies determined by baptism through which we are made citizens of heaven. The Lord told Abraham that his people would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. It is, therefore, no accident that Paul tells the Philippians – and us – that our true citizenship is in heaven. Heavenly citizenship does not sound bodily. However, if we attend to Paul’s claim in his letter to the Philippians, we learn that it is in heaven that we are given our true bodies. It is from heaven that we expect the Lord Jesus Christ whose body will transform our bodies, our humiliated bodies, into the body of his glory. We wonder what that could possibly mean. In the Kingdom and the Glory, the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested that the emphasis on glory by Christians is paradoxical.7 It is so, because glory is the essential property of God’s eternity, which means nothing can increase or diminish God’s glory; yet we are told that all creatures are obligated to glorify God. Agamben argues that for God to desire that his creatures glorify him would be contradictory, because God’s glory means he needs nothing. What Agamben misses, however, is that the glory God would have us reflect is the glorified body of Christ. That body, the body of Christ, is the body we participate in through this meal we share. It is that body, a body that has learned like Jews to live in diaspora, that God reckons righteous. In this time ‘after the Reformation’, a time when Christians must learn again how to live in a world we know not, it becomes all the more important that we live as heirs of Abraham. To so live means we will be without the security of a place other than heaven, but surely that is the grandest security to be had. Even more wonderful, God has given us all we need to go on, that is, he has given us a meal of bread and wine, of Jesus’ own body and blood, to sustain us on the journey. If we are to live faithfully in this time ‘after the Reformation’, then let us live as confident and bold bodily creatures who trust, as Abraham trusted, that by so living our bodies might reflect the glory of the One alone capable of making us citizens of heaven. At the very least, I should think that might mean that because we have been reckoned righteous through the cross and resurrection of Christ, we manifest an infectious joy because we have no doubt that the Lord reckoned Abraham – and us – righteous. We are citizens of a heavenly politics that makes it possible for us to be a people who are an alternative to the worldly politics that is based on the presumption that God has not kept his promise to Abraham. But God did reckon Abraham righteous and on that our salvation depends.



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Endnotes 1. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized a Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2. 2. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 3, 19. 3. Ibid., 41. 4. Ibid., 26. 5. See Martin Luther, ‘The Jews and their Lies’, LW 47, 268–93. 6. Ibid. 7. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

Chapter 2 K A R L B A RT H A N D T H E P L IG H T O F P R O T E STA N T E T H IC S Gerald McKenny

The field of Protestant theological ethics is in decline. Symptoms of the decline are not difficult to find. They can be seen in the replacement of chairs of theological ethics by chairs of generic applied ethics in universities in Germany and Great Britain, in the gradual displacement of theological ethics by ‘religious ethics’ in universities in these countries and in the United States, and in the relative vitality of Catholic moral theology over Protestant theological ethics in the United States. But what is more disconcerting than these symptoms is the general equanimity of Protestant theological ethicists in the face of these trends. There is, of course, anxiety over the job prospects of Protestant (post)graduate students, but there is little sense that something of irreplaceable value would be lost if Protestant theological ethics were to disappear from the academy. As it is in their church life generally, so it is in their academic ethics: Protestants appear to have lost confidence in the viability of their most distinctive theological commitments. It is this loss of confidence that I refer to in my title as the ‘plight of Protestant ethics’. In naming it as a plight, I want to make clear that in no way do I call for a polemical reassertion of these commitments against alternative commitments of other Christian communions. It is possible to hold to these commitments, and even to defend them vigorously, while readily conceding that they are not the only legitimate expression of Christian faith and offer no grounds for dividing the church. Moreover, I also want to make clear that I endorse many of the concerns that have rendered many of these commitments problematic. However, before Protestants abandon these commitments they should inquire whether they necessarily pose the problems they are thought to pose and whether their loss would deprive the church of a form of witness to the gospel that is not available from any other perspective. That is what I hope to do in this essay with one very distinctively Protestant commitment, namely, the notion that God acts apart from our action.1

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I. The Problem of Grace The notion that in God’s salvific act, God acts for us or in our place, apart from our action, is historically central to those Protestant theological traditions that locate their origins in Luther and Calvin. The exclusiveness and decisiveness of God’s act is, of course, paradigmatically instantiated in the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine of justification. When combined with the thesis, which gained currency in the later Lutheran tradition (though with roots in Luther’s work), that justification is ‘the article on which the church stands or falls’,2 or by Calvin as ‘the chief hinge upon which religion turns’,3 the terms are set for the notion of grace as something God works apart from our activity to become something like an essential component of the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions, so that one could not faithfully adhere to these traditions without adhering to that notion of God’s salvific act. However, the notion that God acts entirely apart from our agency is deeply unattractive today. There are multiple reasons for its unattractiveness. One reason is that the soteriological need that once made it plausible to look for solace in an entirely external act of grace is no longer felt as acutely. Few people today are filled with anxiety at the prospect that all that we are capable of doing is judged by a wrathful God to be utterly unworthy, and in the absence of this kind of worry, an act of grace that occurs apart from our agency may seem unnecessary. Another reason is that certain ethical concerns that have taken the place of this soteriological need have rendered a purely external working of grace problematic. These ethical concerns have to do with the importance we now place on the agency of the human creature and the negative implications for this agency that are thought to inhere in the notion that God acts apart from our action. There are at least two notable worries here. First, the interruption, suspension or circumvention of human agency by God’s act appears to be incompatible with respect for the integrity and continuity of human agency. Second, the notion that we are placed in a right relationship with God by an act that interrupts, suspends or circumvents our agency appears to underwrite, and perhaps even encourages indifference to, conditions that deny or compromise the agency of others, and it may even justify authoritarian social and political arrangements. In sum, the notion that God acts apart from our agency is thought to be both soteriologically unnecessary and morally dangerous. This line of criticism joins two other lines of criticism that have been pressed against the notion that God acts apart from us. The first of these criticisms involves the relationship between justification and sanctification. If the divine act that determines our standing with God is accomplished by God alone apart from our agency, then the nature and status of God’s involvement in our conduct, where it is obvious that we, too, must act, become problematic. It is important to avoid superficial versions of this criticism, which falsely charge that an emphasis on justification as God’s work alone makes good works unnecessary. In fact, both Luther and Calvin strongly insisted that those who are justified will go on to perform good works, and both maintained this confidence on highly



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credible grounds, such as the reality of the union of the justified with Christ, the indwelling of Christ in the justified or the efficacy of God’s word that pronounces the sinner to be righteous. Thus, the connection they drew between justification and sanctification was not only drawn with consistency, but also on the basis of principles that are clearly capable of supporting it. Nevertheless, it is unclear that either Luther or Calvin gave an adequate account of the matter. Calvin distinguished two modes of operation of grace – one, having to do with justification, in which its work, with respect to us, is instantaneous, external and fully effectual for our salvation, and another, having to do with sanctification, in which its work is gradual, internal and inseparable from our salvation. Calvin’s explicit insistence on the dual operation of grace (duplex gratia) guaranteed that sanctification would receive its due in the Reformed tradition along with justification.4 But because the two operations of grace differ in their principles of operation and their effects in the believer in spite of their simultaneous conferral in the union of the believer with Christ, it is incumbent on Calvin to explain the relationship between these two modes of operation and demonstrate their mutual consistency. Calvin, however, ultimately left all of this unclear.5 For his part, Luther gave various accounts, which are left to his interpreters to reconcile.6 And, while the causes of the secondary status of the regeneration or renewal of the justified sinner in the subsequent Lutheran tradition are no doubt many, surely one of them is the failure of Luther and his successors to articulate an explicit analogue of Calvin’s duplex gratia in order to account for the working of God’s grace in sanctification. The final line of criticism is similar to the first line of criticism, regarding agency, insofar as it has to do with the way the exclusivity of God’s act in justification suspends, breaks with or circumvents the exercise of the capacities of our created nature. Not only are we unable of ourselves to fulfil God’s will by exercising these capacities, as all non-Pelagian Christians hold, but on the view of justification we are considering our righteousness before God is secured, not by imparting grace to these otherwise impotent capacities, but by bypassing them altogether. The problem many people have with this position has to do, in part, with the question of what then becomes of these capacities in the lives of the justified. Once again, it is clear that both Luther and Calvin believed that creaturely capacities are renewed by the working of grace in the lives of the justified. Yet once again, neither Luther nor Calvin offered an explicit account of the renewal of these capacities of our creaturely nature. Specifically, they ignored matters that were worked out with great sophistication and precision in the Thomistic tradition, which was able to state explicitly the senses in which our natural capacities are continuous through the operations of grace on them and the senses in which they are transformed by those operations. I am not suggesting that Luther, Calvin and their successors should have adopted a Thomistic account, but their failure to offer an adequate alternative account had negative implications for the doctrine of sanctification. These implications have been especially severe in the Reformed tradition, which has oscillated between two equally problematic positions: one in which the sanctifying work of the Spirit more or less replaces the exercise of human capacities and

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another in which moral growth is entirely attributable to the natural workings of our created capacities, and grace is reduced to mere acceptance by God.7 To summarize, three significant problems have been attributed to the notion that God acts apart from our action, as paradigmatically exhibited in what came to be the standard Lutheran and Reformed doctrine of the justification of sinners. First, this notion fails to pay the required respect to human agency; second, it generates irresolvable tensions between justification and sanctification; and third, it inhibits an account of what becomes of our creaturely capacities through the workings of grace. These problems, especially the second one, have been on the agenda of research on Luther and Calvin in recent years.8 The thrust of this agenda is to relativize the significance of justification or at least of the notion that God acts apart from our agency. I will leave it to experts in Reformation-era theology to debate whether that project is faithful to the texts of Luther and Calvin or not. My own interest is the relevance of these problems and their proposed solutions for Protestant theological ethics today. With this interest in mind, I want to pose two questions. First, even if it is clearly demonstrated by superior readings of their works that Luther and Calvin are capable in principle of avoiding the problems of agency, justification/sanctification and creaturely capacities, does the position that emerges from their writings, now properly understood, approach the rigor consistency and plausibility of the accounts of grace and nature in the Thomistic tradition, and in particular to its formulation and elaboration of the principle that grace does not destroy nature but restores, perfects and elevates it? In other words, are the efforts to retrieve a Luther or a Calvin who avoid the three problems destined to result in a position that would be stronger if it rested on Thomistic premises? This question is a pressing one inasmuch as some of the most prominent and accomplished Protestant scholars in the field of theological ethics are currently commending one or another version of ‘Protestant Thomism’.9 It would be a mistake to overestimate Protestant Thomism at this point. The motives behind it vary; it remains at a very early stage of development and its prospects are uncertain. However, my point in bringing it up is that even if a retrieval of Luther and Calvin succeeds in avoiding the three problems with a God who acts apart from our action, it may now have to go on to demonstrate that it is more worthy of our attention than a Protestant appropriation of Aquinas would be. The second question, which I spend the rest of this essay discussing, follows on from the first one. If the notion that God acts apart from our action is, in any case, ineradicable from the theology of Luther and Calvin and will inevitably complicate any effort to exclude it from a theological ethic rooted in these traditions, can it be recovered in a way that not only solves the three problems, but also contributes something to theological ethics that cannot be contributed by any other perspective? In what follows I claim that Karl Barth: 1. Holds unambiguously and unqualifiedly to the notion that God acts apart from our action; 2. Nevertheless avoids or overcomes the three problems; and



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3. Contributes something of great worth to theological ethics that can only be contributed if we insist on retaining the notion that God acts apart from our action. If the three problems with the notion that God acts apart from us, which I have identified, are indeed problems, it seems futile or even perverse to call on Karl Barth for a solution. Far from rejecting or even qualifying this notion of divine action, Barth in fact radicalizes it. Not only does he extend it from its proper locus in the doctrine of justification to include God’s sanctifying work as well. He also extends it to the doctrine of creation, insisting that in the divine work of creation God acts in the place of the creature no less thoroughly and decisively than in the divine work of reconciliation. Instead of solving the two problems, then, Barth seems to exacerbate them. At the same time, however, in all of these contexts – justification, sanctification, creation – Barth stresses that God acts in our place and apart from us not to take anything away from us, but rather to establish us as agents or subjects in our own right. To quote a remark that could be taken to sum up his entire theology, Barth rejects the criticism, directed against his position, that grace replaces human agency with divine agency. ‘It is apparent at once that the formula “God everything and man nothing” as a description of grace is … complete nonsense … In the giving of His Son, God is indeed everything but only … in order that as such [man], too, may be everything in his own place, on his own level and within his own limits.’10 If Barth’s summary of his position in these terms is accurate, then we should expect to find in his doctrines of reconciliation and creation accounts of how God’s exclusive act establishes the human being in her own place, on her own level, within her own limits – that is, in her integrity as the being she is, with her distinctively human characteristics and capacities. In what follows, I will demonstrate that this is precisely what we do find.

II. Election and the Problem of Agency I will begin with the problem of agency, though I will pose it in a slightly different way, in terms of the subject, rather than the agent. Put in these terms, it is clear that Barth’s doctrine of the election of grace avoids the problem of agency. This doctrine may be briefly summarized as follows: from eternity God determines Godself to be God with and for another who is not God, and God determines this other to be the one whom God is with and for. With this dual determination, God establishes a covenant: ‘I will be your God, and you will be my people.’11 The covenant, however, is not exhausted in this dual divine determination. The one who is determined by God to be the one whom God is with and for is not (as the English word ‘determine’ might suggest) determined mechanically, as a mere object of God’s determination. It is, of course, God’s determination, and as such it is secured or guaranteed by God. However, what God determines is that the other is to be God’s partner. God’s determination is accordingly addressed to her by God

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and, thus, calls for her response to it. Precisely as one who is determined by God to be God’s partner, this other is questioned concerning her determination by God. ‘As election is ultimately the determination of man, the question arises as to the human self-determination which corresponds to this determination.’12 As the human partner’s determination by God is posed to her as the question concerning her stance towards it, she is made answerable (verantwortlich) to God for it. Constituting her as answerable in this way, her determination by God establishes her as a genuine partner of God: a subject in her own right and not a mere object.13 It is easy to overlook the remarkable point that for Barth it is already in God’s act of election from eternity, and not that of creation or reconciliation, that the human being is established as a subject. Election itself – the ultimate instance of an act God performs apart from our action – is for Barth unintelligible apart from its establishment of a free and responsible subject, a genuine counterpart to God. This subject, moreover, is established from eternity and it is this subject that God will bring into existence as a creature, will reconcile and will redeem. The point, however, is that here, at the beginning of all God’s ways, where God is the only one who can act, God acts graciously, and precisely, as such, also acts to establish this other as a subject. In election, then, ‘God is indeed everything but only … in order that as such [man], too, may be everything in his own place, on his own level and within his own limits.’ The description I have just given is incomplete; it abstracts from the Christological ground of election. This Christological ground both clarifies the doctrine of election and ultimately makes the doctrines of reconciliation and creation fully intelligible. For Barth, the dual determination, of God and of God’s partner, is made primarily and decisively in Jesus Christ, who from eternity is both the electing God and the elected human. In the historical Christ event the twofold determination of election is realized in time. In Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension, God is God with and for humanity, and humanity is the one whom God is with and for. This axis – God’s dual determination from eternity and God’s realization of it in time – is the very core of Barth’s mature theology, and at both ends of it Christ acts in the place of all other humans and apart from their action. It is he who, in the divine resolve, is the human being elected from eternity and it is he who, in the divine execution, realizes the election of humanity in time. Other humans are elected in and with the election of Jesus Christ from eternity and in Jesus Christ the determination that is addressed to them as God’s covenant partner is fulfilled in their place in time (so that it addresses them as those for whom it has already been fulfilled and the answer it requires of them is to exist in their conduct of life as those for whom it has been fulfilled). All of this is to say that other human beings are constituted as subjects by their participation in Jesus Christ, in whom their election is both established and fulfilled. The nature and significance of this participation of other humans in Jesus Christ becomes clear as we turn to reconciliation and creation, where we confront the second and third problems, respectively.



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III. The Problem of Justification and Sanctification We turn first to reconciliation. In the Christ event God not only fulfils the covenant but also vindicates it in the face of human rejection of it. To be more precise, the act in which God realizes the election of grace in time is also the act in which God reconciles the sinner who has rejected grace. This brings us to the second problem, which is that the notion that God acts apart from our action seems to generate unrelieved tensions between justification and sanctification. Barth solves this problem by: 1. Insisting with Calvin (and perhaps also with Luther) that both justification and sanctification are constituted in our union with Christ; 2. Regarding both justification and sanctification as alien in the familiar Lutheran sense of that term; and 3. Placing justification and sanctification together under his gospel–law schema so that reconciliation establishes human action rather than replaces it. According to Barth, justification and sanctification differ in their material content but they are identical in their ground and form.14 The material content of justification is righteousness. Justification places humans in a right relation to God. In it, God upholds the covenant of grace between God and humanity, with its dual determination, which sin has violated. God does so by vindicating God’s right as the One who has chosen from eternity to be God with and for humanity and by restoring the right of humanity, forfeited by sin, to be the one whom God is with and for. The material content of sanctification is holiness. Sanctification frees humans for obedience to God. In it, God liberates the human, whose right God has restored, to exist in her life conduct as the one whom God is with and for and thus as the faithful covenant partner of God.15 However, in spite of their difference in content, justification and sanctification are grounded in Christ in the same way and the relation they establish between Christ and other human beings is identical in form. First, with respect to their grounding in Christ, both justification and sanctification are accomplished by Christ in full, prior to, and apart from, human action.16 It is not the case for Barth, as it was in the Reformed tradition (with some precedent in Calvin, despite his insistence on their inseparability), that justification occurs instantaneously (given in its fullness in its first reception), while sanctification occurs as human actions are progressively conformed to Christ. Rather, in both cases Christ acts in our place and apart from our agency. In Barth’s words: ‘He took our place and acted for us, not merely as the Son of God who established God’s right and our own … but also as the Son of Man who was sanctified, who sanctified Himself.’17 Second, with respect to the form of the relationship they establish between Christ and other humans, because justification and sanctification both occur in Christ, who acts in our place, both the righteousness of justification and the holiness of sanctification are alien not proper, just as the grace that accomplishes both is, in this sense, extrinsic not intrinsic.

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In conceiving the ground and form of justification and sanctification in this way Barth remains entirely within the familiar terms of the Lutheran and Reformed doctrine of justification. His innovation lies in his radicalization of this framework, as he extends the terms that govern justification to sanctification as well. However, Barth also insists that justification and sanctification are constituents of our participation in Christ, who acts in our place in justifying and sanctifying us.18 The primacy Barth accords to participation in Christ has two important implications. First, while they are alien insofar as they are constituted in Christ rather than in us, justification and sanctification are not merely facts about our status before God. Because for Barth (as we will soon see) our very being as humans is constituted in our relation to Christ, which itself is ultimately grounded in our election in Christ, the justification and sanctification Christ accomplishes in our place are determinations of our being and not mere facts about our status.19 Specifically, they overcome the contradiction to our being that consists in our sinful refusal to be those whom God is with and for. Second, because justification and sanctification are constituted in our participation in Christ, the human act of faith, which corresponds to God’s justifying act, does not actualize justification or bring it into play (as it does for Luther), and the same is true of human acts of love, which correspond to sanctification, but do not actualize it. Justification and sanctification are both accomplished in full, prior to, and apart from, any action on our part, and we enjoy them by virtue of our participation in Christ, which itself is ultimately secured by our election with Christ from eternity. Yet, as we would expect from our determination by God to be genuine partners in covenant with God and not mere objects, we participate in Christ as genuine subjects, and from this standpoint the status of our actions as those who are justified and sanctified becomes clear. Faith is the human act that corresponds to God’s act that puts us in right relation to God while love is the human act that corresponds to God’s act of making us holy before God. In both cases, we participate actively (and thus as the genuine covenant partners we are) in what has already been done for us by Christ, apart from our action. In our actions we confirm in our concrete existence what we are in our being, or as I prefer to say, we enact ontically what we are ontologically. Thus, while Barth radicalizes the Lutheran and Calvinist conception of justification by extending the exclusiveness of divine action to sanctification as well, he does so only to place both justification and sanctification, and thus the Christian life as such under his more basic and determinative conception of gospel and law. According to this conception, gospel refers to the act of God that is fully accomplished in our place and apart from us, while law is the ethical imperative, which summons, directs and empowers us, as those for whom God has acted in this way, to exist in our conduct of life as those for whom God has done this. As in election, then, so in justification and sanctification: in acting apart from us and in our place in the act that makes us holy no less than in the act that puts us in the right before God, God does not nullify or replace our action but rather establishes it. Thus, to quote Barth once again, in justification and sanctification ‘God is indeed everything but only … in order that as such [man], too, may be everything in his own place, on his own level and within his own limits.’



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IV. The Problem of Grace and Nature I turn now to the last and most difficult of the three problems, which has to do with the relation of grace to our created nature. The problem, to state it once again, is that the divine justifying act that is accomplished apart from our action bypasses our created characteristics and capacities, which sin has rendered incapable of contributing anything to that act. But if sin nullifies our created characteristics and capacities to the extent that they contribute nothing to God’s justifying act, and if that act accomplishes salvation without making use of those characteristics and capacities, how are we to understand sanctification as their renewal? This question was not adequately addressed by Luther and Calvin, who both clearly believed in the renewal of our creaturely nature, but did not offer anything like the rich account of it that one finds in the Thomistic tradition, with its notion of grace. There are grounds for suspicion that the omission is due not simply to a relative lack of interest in the question, but to a deeper problem with these Reformers’ notion of grace. If our created characteristics and capacities are so far gone that grace cannot make use of them in making us right before God, but must instead operate altogether apart from them, then it is unclear how sanctification can make use of them either. If we want to avoid the conclusion that entirely new capacities must be created for sanctification to get going, two options suggest themselves. One option is that grace somehow works in us apart from our creaturely capacities, just as it does in the case of justification. In this case, the notion that God acts apart from our action is preserved, but our creaturely nature is basically excluded from genuine participation in the work of grace. The other option is to reduce grace, as the act that acts apart from our action, to mere acceptance of us by God as God’s own, while leaving to purely natural processes the gradual conformity of our created characteristics and capacities to God’s will. Once again, the notion that God acts apart from our action is, thereby, preserved, but grace plays no role in the renewal of our creaturely nature. As I noted above, the Reformed tradition has tended to divide or oscillate between these two problematic options. What is needed is an account of the relation of our creaturely nature to grace as that which acts apart from the latter, that is as thorough and plausible as the Thomistic account of the relation of our creaturely nature to grace as that which works in and through it. This section shows how Barth offers such an account.20 Once again, Barth avoids the problem not by qualifying or abandoning the notion that God acts apart from us, but by radicalizing it. Grace, so understood, pertains not only to God’s act of reconciliation but also to creation. Not only in our standing before God, but in our creaturely nature itself we are what we are by virtue of grace that acts apart from our action. Once again, the fundamental role played by election is the key to Barth’s position. The human creature is brought into being by God to be the covenant partner who from eternity God determined to have. In other words, the being (Wesen), which God brings into existence with the creation of humanity, is the being determined by God to be God’s covenant partner. Theological anthropology, asserts Barth, ‘asks what kind

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of a being it is which stands in this relationship with God’.21 That it stands in this relationship with God is ontologically decisive. The very being of humanity (Sein des Menschens) – what the human creature is, in distinction from all other creatures – is constituted by its determination for covenant fellowship with God. Ontologically speaking, humanity just is that creature, among all others, that is determined for a covenant relation to God: ‘He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos.’22 But exactly what kind of being is it that is so determined? Barth’s answer is that it is as a creature with this nature (Natur) that it is to enjoy covenant fellowship with God. ‘But if we are to understand him as God’s covenant-partner … we must return to the fact that God has created him and how He has done so, regarding him … as this particular cosmic being.’23 In other words, it is precisely as a creature of this kind, with these characteristics and capacities and not some others, that humanity is determined by God to be God’s covenant partner and brought into existence as such.24 If this were not the case, then the nature of the creature God created to be God’s covenant partner would be indifferent or even hostile to the covenant determination that is the very reason God created this creature in the first place (as well as the feature that most fundamentally distinguishes this creature from others). God would have to recreate the creature in order for this determination to be realized. But why would God, who brought this creature into existence to be God’s covenant partner, not create it in the first place with a nature that is appropriate to that determination? In Barth’s words, ‘If God gives him this determination … he is obviously … a being to which this determination is not strange but proper.’25 Barth leaves no room for doubt on this matter. ‘There is no existence of the creature in that it can originally belong elsewhere than to this compact. It has no attributes, no conditions of existence, no substantial or accidental predicates of any kind, in virtue of which it can or may or must be alien to the Founder of this covenant … By its whole nature [Natur] the creature is destined and disposed for this covenant.’26 As we have seen, the covenant for which God determines the human creature, and to which (as we now know) the nature of that creature is suited, is a covenant of grace. God not only resolves on this covenant from eternity in Christ, but realizes it in time in Christ, who acts apart from our action and in our place.‘That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man [wirkliche Mensch], is decided by the existence of the man Jesus … It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man.’27 The human creature, then, is brought into existence not only as the creature that is determined for covenant fellowship with God, but as the creature for whom Christ is the fulfilment of this determination.28 As the being of humanity is constituted by its determination for covenant fellowship with God, it is constituted, in Christ, by grace that acts in our place, prior to, and apart from, our action. It follows that the creature God brings into existence to be God’s covenant partner, and whose nature is suited to this determination, will not be a creature whose nature can be disrupted by this form of grace. If the nature of the human creature must, as we have seen, be suitable to the covenant determination of this creature, then it must be suitable to a working



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of grace that acts apart from our action, since that determination consists in such an act of grace. ‘Even in his … human nature [Natur], man cannot be man without being directed to and prepared for [hingewiesen und vorbereitet] the fulfillment of his determination, his being in the grace of God, by his correspondence and similarity to this determination for the covenant with God.’29 By virtue of this correspondence and similarity the nature of the creature ‘is simply its equipment for grace’.30 Its nature prepares the human creature to be God’s covenant partner. But covenant partnership with God is itself the meaning and purpose of creaturely nature. As such, the latter ‘prefigures and to that extent anticipates’ the covenant and ‘is itself already a unique sign of the covenant and a true sacrament’.31 The nature of this creature points to grace: ‘Consciously or unconsciously, he is the sign here below of what he really is as seen from above, from God.’32 For Barth, it is, therefore, a mistake for theological anthropology to begin by describing human nature and, then, asking how it is that a being with this nature is brought into covenant fellowship with God. If we proceed that way, the notion of a God who acts in our place and apart from us to place us in covenant fellowship with God will disrupt our creaturely nature, which (as this view has it) exists prior to God’s act of bringing us into covenant fellowship, and will thereby generate the third problem. Rather, theological anthropology begins with election, in our determination from eternity to be God’s covenant partner by God’s grace alone, and it goes on from there to show how our creaturely nature equips us for and points to that determination. Here we face one of the most difficult themes in Barth’s theology, and one that will require more elaboration than the themes of the two previous sections did, but I will try to clarify it by making three points. First, if our creaturely nature is not hostile or indifferent to our covenant determination but rather proper to it, we should expect to find some sort of correspondence between that nature and our covenant determination, such that our creaturely nature reflects in some way our being as those for whom God acts in our place apart from our action. That this is what we do find can be illustrated by any of Barth’s treatments of the characteristics of our creaturely nature, but I will illustrate it by his treatment of time. In his treatment of this characteristic of human nature Barth is partly concerned to show how our temporality corresponds to God’s eternity, but he is also interested in the fact that our lives unfold in a span of time bounded by two events, birth and death, which we do not control and in which we are not agents. Barth concedes that at first glance our bounded lifespan appears not to correspond to our covenant determination but to be radically inconsistent with it. The covenant relationships in which we exist seem to be incompatible with our temporal limitation. ‘For man belongs to God. And he belongs to his fellows … What but an unlimited, permanent duration could be adequate for the fulfillment of this determination?’33 Moreover, life with God requires conformity to God’s perfection, and what else but an unbounded life would allow for the attainment of that perfection? Even on the grounds of our determination for a covenant relationship with God there is, then, a case to be made in favour of the endless duration of human life over against the bounded character it in fact exhibits.

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Not surprisingly, however, Barth rejects the case for the appropriateness of endless duration. He rejects it, moreover, on Christological grounds, which should now be familiar to us, pointing out that God fulfilled our covenant determination precisely by becoming incarnate in the bounded lifespan of Christ’s humanity. Once we understand the significance of the incarnation we can see how a bounded life, with a beginning and end that elude our agency, is not inimical to our covenant determination but proper to it. An unbounded life would not attest in its very temporal structure the dependence of our lives on the gracious gift of Christ’s incarnate life which determines our lives from outside themselves. By contrast, bound as it is by a beginning and an end that elude our control, our lifespan signifies our belonging to God. In Barth’s words, ‘By his nature, in virtue of its peculiar character as an allotted span, he is referred and bound to the gracious God as the One who is wholly and utterly outside him but wholly and utterly for him.’34 An endless duration thus only seems to do justice to our covenant relationships; when we consider that it is a covenant of grace that constitutes it apart from our action, it becomes clear how a limited span whose beginning and end points elude our agency corresponds to these relationships. Nor is this all: a bounded life also confronts us with the limits of our responsibility for our perfection. It signifies that it is not up to us to accomplish all that can be and must be accomplished for our covenant determination to be fulfilled. A bounded life thus prepares us to live by God’s grace. Once again, the apparent appropriateness of endless duration turns out to be illusory. Finally, Barth points out that it is above all in one’s birth and death that one is ‘irreplaceable, indispensable, and non-interchangeable’. In these two events, one is uniquely, unqualifiedly and unalterably oneself. In contrast to endless duration, they thus give the life that runs from the one to the other the singular identity that is a condition for a specific human vocation. It is the bounded character of human life that endows the particular, the contingent, the temporary, which would otherwise be meaningless, with incomparable worth. Second, if the nature of the human creature is related to his covenant determination in this way, namely, as ‘the sign here below of what he really is as seen from above, from God’, it follows that human nature for Barth does not need to become anything other than what it is, as created by God, in order for humans to enjoy covenant fellowship with God. To continue with the case of our temporal nature, grace does not have to and, indeed, cannot transform our bounded lives into unbounded lives in order to make us capable of fellowship with God. More generally, the work of grace as Barth understands it is not to transform or extend our creaturely characteristics and capacities so that they become adequate to fellowship with God. As the creaturely nature of the covenant partner, these characteristics and capacities are already adequate to fellowship with God. To be sure, adequacy to fellowship with God is not capability for the latter. Our creaturely nature is not capable of establishing or maintaining us in God’s covenant with us. Even apart from sin, Barth assures us, our human nature has no ability (Fähigkeit) or power (Potenz) to enter into or remain in covenant fellowship with God. It is only by grace that our exercise of our characteristics and capacities takes place in genuine fellowship with God and our fellow human beings rather than in sinful



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violation of that fellowship. Nevertheless, it is in and with these created characteristics and capacities – and not some transformed or extended version of them – that we enjoy covenant fellowship with God. For Barth, then, the question of the ethics of creaturely life is not what grace must do to our created characteristics and capacities so that we can enjoy fellowship with God. They have already been created as suitable for that fellowship. Rather, the question is how grace enables us to exercise these characteristics and capacities in a way that confirms or corresponds to our covenant determination as the latter has been fulfilled by Christ and thus enacts the meaning and purpose for which they were created. Will we, in our creaturely nature, exist as the covenant partner whom God is with and for, or will we, still in our creaturely nature, exist as those who must be with and for themselves? To return once again to the case at hand, will we accept the limited yet intensive responsibility for our perfection that befits creatures whose bounded lives signify that our lives belong to God who has already accomplished our perfection for us yet also calls us to a unique vocation? Or will we presume godlike responsibility under the conviction that the events that bound our lives are merely limits to be overcome? Third, as the point just made indicates, neither our sin nor God’s grace disrupts our creaturely nature; rather in both cases it is always a matter of some expression or other of our creaturely nature. Sin does not destroy or even change the creaturely characteristics and capacities that are suited to our covenant determination. Sin is instead the condition – from which Christ alone delivers us – in which we exercise those characteristics and capacities in ways that contradict that determination. And since creaturely nature itself is not destroyed, changed or even corrupted by sin, grace does not restore nature but rather overcomes the contradiction in which nature is involved and enables it to be what it is as created by God, namely, ‘the sign here below of what we are as seen from above’, in God’s determination of us as covenant partners. ‘Becoming a sinner, he has not vanished as a man, or changed into a different being, but still stands before God as the being as which he was created … And as God makes Himself his Deliverer, He merely exercises His faithfulness as the Creator to His creature, which has not become different or been lost to Him by its fall into sin.’35 This third point puts us in a position to understand exactly how, according to Barth, human nature relates to the covenant history of grace and sin in which our determination for fellowship with God is concretely enacted. To clarify this relation, I must add to what I said above about the relation of human nature and human being in Barth’s theological anthropology. As we have seen, Barth distinguishes between human nature (Natur) as the sum of created characteristics and capacities and the possible activities inherent in them, on the one hand, and human being (Sein) as the determination for the covenant relation to God (and to other humans) for which humans (in their creaturely nature and as the kind of creatures they are) have been created, on the other hand. Barth elaborates this distinction by drawing a further distinction between ‘state’ and ‘history’. Human nature comprises the state (Zustand) of human beings – the possibilities inherent in their creaturely nature – while their being (Sein) is concretely lived out in their

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participation, precisely as the creatures they are (that is, in their nature or state with all its possibilities), in their covenant history (Geschichte) with God: the concrete history in which God carries out God’s determination of humanity for covenant fellowship with God. In this history God’s grace, while remaining apart from their nature, enables humans to act in correspondence to their covenant determination (and thereby to confirm their proper being). One way to put this point is to say that humanity exercises its own-most being (Sein) – that is, its determination for covenant fellowship with God – in the active expression (Betätigung) of its created nature (Natur) by and in response to grace as the latter encounters humanity in the covenant history.36 Crucial to this view is that the human act is an expression of creaturely nature and that it is in response to grace that it occurs. Because the being of humanity is the determination of human beings for a covenant relation to God that is constituted by God’s grace, human action is never merely the actualization of possibilities inherent in human nature but is always the active expression of natural capacities in response to grace – whether in acceptance of grace (and thus in affirmation of human being) or in rejection of it (and thus in contradiction to human being). The clearest account of this relation of human nature to the covenant history in which it is actively expressed is found in two of the several treatments of agape and eros in the Church Dogmatics.37 This is not the occasion for a critical examination of Barth’s treatment of these two forms of love, which in the two passages that concern us are associated, respectively, with a movement from self to other that values the other for her own sake (agape) and the drawing of the other into the sphere of the self as the self ’s possession (eros).38 These associations, along with other features of Barth’s account, are not unproblematic, but his treatments of agape and eros interest me in the present context only insofar as they illustrate what, according to his position, does and does not happen to human nature in the covenant history in which it is actively expressed. The crucial point is that for Barth both agape and eros as human acts are expressions of human nature that occur in the covenant history in which the being of humanity as determined for fellowship with God is lived out: the former in correspondence with that being, the latter in sinful contradiction to it. They are not expressions of human nature in itself, apart from this history. ‘Neither the one nor the other rests on a possibility of human nature as such.’ However, taking place in this history, they truly are expressions of human nature. ‘It is the same human nature, which … shows itself to be capable (fähig) of this or that form of love, not with a capacity (Fähigkeit) which is proper to it, but with one which is (shall we say) generally contingent to it, i.e., which comes upon it, in the history and existence of man.’39 That this is the case should come as no surprise. If the very being of humanity is constituted by its determination for fellowship with God, so that human beings exist concretely in the covenant history in which this determination is enacted, then it makes sense that human nature – the nature of the creature that exists in this history – is actively expressed in its encounter with grace in this history and is not simply enclosed in itself and left to actualize its own possibilities. To say otherwise would be to abstract human nature from human being. At the same



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time, in neither case – in the act of agape or that of eros – does the covenant history in which humans live out their being change human nature or make it something other than what it is in its creatureliness, as God has created it. ‘Neither in eros nor agape, therefore … can there be any question of an alteration of human nature. Whether he loves in one way or the other he is the same man engaged in the expression (Betätigung) of the same human nature.’40 In both cases it is a matter of an entirely human act and an expression of creaturely human nature as created by God. Agape does not involve the elevation of human nature beyond its creaturely capacities, and eros does not involve the destruction of human nature or even its corruption. ‘Whatever form the history of man may take, there is broken neither the continuity of the divine will for man nor that of the nature (Natur) which man is given by God … The only thing is that, as man loves in one way or the other, it comes upon him that the one unchangeable, perennial human nature is put by him to a very different use and given a very different character.’41 What exactly is the natural human characteristic that is actively expressed as agape or eros? For Barth it is our being-with-others. By their nature, as created by God, human beings are not isolated individuals but are constitutively related to their fellow humans, just as they are temporal. Just as our bounded lifespan equips us for our determination for covenant fellowship and is thus the sign here below of what we are as seen from above, so our being-with-others equips us for and signifies that determination. But Barth stresses that we actively express our being-with-others in acts of eros as well as in acts of agape. Both are, in the strictest sense, natural acts, that is, acts that express a natural human characteristic (namely, being-with-others). However, it does not follow for Barth that acts of agape and eros are equally valid expressions of our being-with-others. For him it is of course agape that properly expresses the relation of human nature to grace that acts apart from us. In the covenant history grace encounters human beings as that which God has already accomplished in their place, and it makes possible human action that corresponds to grace and thereby enacts the covenant fellowship to which human beings are determined. Thus Barth, following Romans 5.5, describes agape as ‘the gracious gift of the Holy Ghost shed abroad in the hearts of Christians convicted of sin … yet assured of their justification and preservation … In love they respond to the revelation of the covenant fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in which God comes to them as their merciful Father, Lord and Judge, and they see their fellow-men as brothers and sisters, i.e., as those who have sinned with them and found grace with them.’42 Grace alone makes this act possible; humans would not be capable of it apart from its encounter with them. Yet the act that grace elicits is a natural human act. It is not an act that human nature of itself is capable of producing, but it is an act that involves no other than human creaturely capacities. An act of agape is thus an expression of our creaturely nature that both corresponds to and is made possible by the divine grace that acts apart from our agency. Inasmuch as it is the active expression of our creaturely nature in response to this determination, then, agape is more ‘natural’ than eros. Yet eros, too, is an active expression of our being-with-others. It expresses, albeit in a sinful way, a genuine

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characteristic of human nature which (like all such characteristics) suits us to covenant fellowship. Even as it contradicts the determination for which it exists, it expresses that characteristic, and on this ground Barth pointedly criticizes the unqualified denigration of eros by many Christian thinkers. Barth does not deny or even qualify his judgement of its sinfulness (indeed, insofar as it manifests a self-enclosed human subject it is for him an exemplary sin). Yet he also insists that respect and even admiration are nevertheless due to eros insofar as it is a uniquely powerful expression of being-with-others. At least in the form it took in ancient Greek culture, which Barth considered its richest historical instantiation, eros discloses an aspect of being-with-others – namely, the element of joy or delight that is essential to this characteristic of human nature in its fullest form – in a way that Barth finds superior to anything that is to be found in the historical sphere of biblical revelation, and he observes that it is disclosed there in such a compelling way that the Apostle Paul saw fit to commend this aspect of it as exemplary for Christian agape.43 So far is even this paradigmatic sin from destroying human nature that it can even instruct Christians regarding this characteristic of human nature and keep them from their dangerous and foolish tendency to extol agape in a way that denigrates human nature. There is much more to be said in regard to this theme.44 For present purposes, however, the point is that Barth’s treatment of eros leaves no doubt that, for him, what we become in the history of the covenant as sinners and those who are saved by grace does not destroy our creaturely nature (sin) or break with it (grace) but rather expresses it. To sum up the discussion of this section, Barth’s account of the relation of our creaturely nature to the grace that acts apart from us solves the third problem which that notion of grace is thought to involve. His account fills the lacuna left by Luther and Calvin, avoids the inadequate options bequeathed by the Reformed tradition and offers an alternative that does for this notion of grace what Thomistic accounts of grace and creaturely nature do for their notion of grace.45 The upshot of this account is that for Barth, the notion that God acts apart from our action does not disrupt our creaturely nature but establishes it. Our creaturely nature is the nature God gives us as suitable to us as creatures who are to live in and by God’s grace, and the life we live in and by God’s grace is lived by actively expressing our creaturely nature in ways that confirm and correspond to God’s grace. Since God has created a nature that consists in characteristics which, as in the case of the bounded lifespan and being-with-others, are proper to a creature that is to live by God’s grace, God’s grace will not disrupt that nature but will rather establish it and will overcome our contradictory exercise of it. With respect to our creaturely nature, then, we see once again that ‘God is indeed everything but only … in order that as such [man], too, may be everything in his own place, on his own level and within his own limits.’

V. Conclusion Karl Barth demonstrates that the notion of a God who acts apart from our action can avoid the problems related to agency, to justification and sanctification and to



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the implications of grace for our creaturely capacities. Moreover, he avoids these problems not by qualifying that notion but by radicalizing it, extending it from its home base in justification to encompass sanctification and creation, all on the basis of its fundamental and decisive place in election. At all of these points (election, creation, reconciliation) we have seen how in acting apart from our action God establishes God’s covenant partner as a genuine human subject: a subject who is answerable to the God who questions her concerning her election, who is created with a nature which in its own integrity equips her to be God’s covenant partner and who is freed by God’s reconciling work to be who she is as God’s covenant partner. She is constituted as a subject in Christ, who takes her place by answering the question of election addressed to her so that it addresses her as grace and not as a grace-less law, by living in his creaturely life her covenant determination so that she may live that determination in her creaturely life, and by becoming her justification and sanctification so that she may live free of her contradiction to her being as God’s covenant partner. In short, as constituted in Christ, she is the one whom God, in Christ, is with and for. Yet in all of this she is established as a subject by gracious acts in which God acts apart from her own action. However, Barth does not merely succeed in avoiding the three problems. He also shows how the notion of grace that acts in our place and apart from our action is a uniquely attractive notion. In closing I want to reflect briefly on the significance of this point. For Barth, the human being is not fundamentally an agent on whom and in whom grace works in an ultimately mysterious way. She is most fundamentally a subject whom God addresses and who responds in her full integrity. Precisely because God acts apart from her action, she herself can act as God’s human covenant partner in her own right. From her eternal election through her creation, reconciliation and redemption she is the unambiguous and unqualified subject of her response to what God does for her apart from her action. There is no agency operating within her for which she is not fully responsible and with which she is not fully identifiable, and there is no point at which her acts involve any characteristics or capacities other than those of her creaturely nature. It is true (indeed crucial) that her capacities are prompted and empowered by the Holy Spirit (and it is here that grace cooperates with her action), and that she can act as the covenant partner she is only by the Spirit’s prompting and empowering. But this act of grace fully respects the integrity of her creaturely nature. In its working, her capacities are not extended, altered or transformed into another state. Fully determined by God for life with God, she is fully herself. In taking up our cause and acting in our place, Barth’s God is indeed everything, but only in order that as such we, too, may be everything in our own place, on our own level and within our own limits. The notion that the sovereignty of God’s grace and the integrity of the human subject can both be affirmed in such powerful and uncompromising terms is a contribution to the broader church that no other Christian tradition is in a position to make. It would be a profound loss, not only to Protestant theological ethics, but to the church universal and the world the church serves, if those who are in a position to offer that contribution were to fail to recognize its worth.46

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Endnotes   1. In the conclusion to an earlier work on Karl Barth, I suggested that the relation of grace and ethics in Barth’s theology constitutes a viable alternative to the Augustinian–Thomist tradition and yields a more viable Protestant contribution to the church universal than Protestant versions of the Augustinian–Thomist tradition are likely to yield. See Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 291f. This essay is an elaboration of that suggestion. At the time, I had a clear view of one context, namely that of the relation of justification and sanctification, but not as clear a view of the context of divine grace and human agency and that of divine grace and creaturely nature. For my understanding of the issues involved in these contexts, my sensitivity to the problems they pose for the notion of grace I want to defend and my concern to show how Barth addresses them in an attractive and persuasive manner, I am deeply indebted to Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). I hope to demonstrate in this essay that Barth is a fruitful interlocutor in the conversation Herdt has so brilliantly initiated.   2. For a concise summary of the history of this phrase, see Alister E. McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 450 fn.3.   3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill, translated and indexed by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), III. xi.1, 726.   4. See especially Calvin, Inst. III.iii.19, 613; III.xi.1, 725; and III.xvi.1, 798.   5. A concise statement of the problem is found in George Hunsinger, ‘A Tale of Two Simultaneities: Justification and Sanctification in Calvin and Barth’, in Hunsinger, Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Karl Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 194–8.   6. Most prominent among these accounts are those found in Luther, ‘Two Kinds of Righteousness’, according to which the Christ who dwells in believers by faith produces good works in them; ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, according to which good works are motivated by gratitude toward God for God’s undeserved favor; and the ‘Treatise on Good Works’, according to which good works follow from the union of the believer with Christ. See Luther, ‘Two Kinds of Righteousness’, in LW 31, 297–306; ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, 333–77; and ‘Treatise on Good Works’, in LW 44, 15–114.   7. In her recent Ph.D. dissertation, Angela Carpenter demonstrates this tendency by attending to the accounts of sanctification offered by John Owen and Horace Bushnell. See Angela Carpenter, ‘Sanctified Children: Natural Moral Formation and Sanctification in Reformed Theology’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2014).   8. Regarding Luther, see Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); and the selections in Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Regarding Calvin, see Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).   9. See Nigel Biggar, Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and John Bowlin, ‘Contemporary Protestant Thomism’, in Aquinas



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as Authority: A Collection of Studies Presented at the Second Conference of the Thomas Instituut Utrecht, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris and Carlo Leget (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 235–51. Jennifer Herdt’s Erasmian correction of Aquinas – the most promising recent alternative to Lutheran–Calvinist views – runs on similar lines. See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 72–127, 341–52. 10. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 89. 11. See CD IV/1, 3–66 12. CD II/2, 510. 13. The foregoing description of Barth’s doctrine of election, and the elaboration of its Christological ground which follows in the next paragraph, attempt to summarize material found in CD II/2, 1–76, 509–18. 14. The following description of Barth’s views of justification, sanctification and the relation between them is drawn broadly from CD IV/1 and IV/2, and more narrowly from CD IV/2, 499–511. For the best brief account of Barth on justification see Bruce McCormack, ‘Justitia aliena: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Evangelical Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness’, Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Bruce McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 167–96). For an excellent account of Barth on sanctification see Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Inquiry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). For an excellent account of the relation of justification and sanctification in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation see George Hunsinger, ‘A Tale of Two Simultaneities’, 200–14. 15. The material contents of justification and sanctification are stated concisely in CD IV/2, 503. 16. See CD IV/2, 501f. 17. CD IV/2, 516. 18. See CD IV/2, 503, 511, 518–20. Barth rightly stresses that he is following Calvin in his emphasis on the twofold grace of justification and sanctification as given by God through participation in Christ (see especially Calvin, Inst. III.i.1, 537f.; III.xi.1, 725), but the same could be said, though less explicitly, of Luther. 19. This is not to say that justification and sanctification become properties of our being as humans. Barth does not resurrect the views of the sixteenth-century Lutheran Osiander, which Calvin stridently opposed (Calvin, Inst. III.xi.5-12, 729–43). We will see that for Barth the being of humanity is being with God in the fellow human Jesus, a ‘being with’ that is ultimately grounded in the election of other humans in Jesus Christ. Justification and sanctification have ontological significance insofar as they determine this relationship; they do not constitute it. 20. Barth’s account of the relation of grace and nature and its relation to Thomistic accounts has been examined with great competence by Kenneth Oakes, ‘The Question of Nature and Grace in Karl Barth: Humanity as Creature and as Covenant–Partner’, Modern Theology 23 (2007): 595–616; Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010); Amy Marga, Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine of God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); and D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). However, of these authors only Oakes undertakes a comprehensive treatment of Barth’s mature position articulated in CD III/2. (Marga neglects the latter because her scope is limited to an earlier stage of Barth’s thought.) The exposition that follows is distinct from but consistent with Oakes’s interpretation. Like Oakes, I will

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draw widely on CD III/2, while also referring occasionally to anticipations in CD III/1. 21. CD III/2, 19. 22. Ibid., 203. 23. Ibid., 204. 24. An important implication of this point is that God will never require anything of human beings that denigrates, harms or violates their creaturely nature. 25. CD III/2, 205f. 26. CD III/1, 96f. 27. CD III/2, 203. 28. I regret that I must forgo the treatment of the relation of other human beings to the human being Jesus Christ, which is fundamental to Barth’s conception of the being of humanity as I have presented it here. Barth’s description of that relation is intricate and complex enough to demand a more thorough treatment than I can present here. However, I can at least signal its importance by noting that everything Barth says about the being and nature of humanity is true first and most properly of Jesus Christ and of all other human beings in and with Jesus Christ. 29. CD III/2, 207. 30. CD III/1, 231. 31. Ibid., 232. 32. CD III/2, 207. 33. Ibid., 555f. 34. Ibid., 570. 35. Ibid., 274f. 36. This formulation is entirely mine, not Barth’s, but I think it concisely states his position in CD III/2. 37. See CD III/2, 274–85; and CD IV/2, 727–51. While Barth discusses agape and eros in several other volumes of the Church Dogmatics, these two treatments are especially relevant in the present context. 38. For a helpful and comprehensive overview, see David Clough, ‘Eros and Agape in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2 (2000): 189–203. 39. CD IV/2, 471. 40. Ibid., 742. 41. Ibid., 742. 42. CD III/2, 275. 43. Ibid., 282–5. Barth has in mind Philippians 4.5, 7f.; I Corinthians 13.4-6; and Romans 12.15. 44. An especially important question is whether Barth’s account of agape and eros, and with it his broader concept of the relation of grace and nature, perpetuates the legacy of the splendid vices that has been brilliantly analysed and criticized by Jennifer Herdt in Putting on Virtue. An adequate response would have to address other themes in Barth’s work, but a partial and provisional answer can be ventured here. On the one hand, Barth’s account confirms certain features of Herdt’s description. Barth’s eros is, in sharp contrast to his agape, ordered to self rather than to God and is thus a semblance of genuine love for the other that is easily exposed as self-love. Moreover, it is agape alone, and not eros, that is a work of God’s grace, and it alone corresponds to grace while eros, insofar as it asserts the self-enclosed subject, contradicts grace. In these respects Barth’s account appears to exemplify some



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key failings of the tradition of the splendid vices, which for Herdt include anxiety over the distinctiveness of the works of grace over against merely human works, injustice to human agency and ordinary human capacities, and the secularization and distortion of these capacities when they are regarded as outside the workings of grace. On the other hand, Barth insists, as we have seen, that both agape and eros express the selfsame natural human characteristic. And while critics of pagan virtue, including the denigrators of eros whom Barth opposes, are eager to unmask eros as a semblance of love, Barth insists that it is a genuine and indeed powerful expression of human nature. Its exemplary sinfulness serves Barth’s point that even that which contradicts grace cannot destroy nature but rather expresses it, and indeed does so in a concrete historical form that is in a crucial respect superior to the concrete historical forms often taken by agape, in which respect it is commendable for Christians even as they rightly extoll agape. Barth denies that eros and agape are on a continuum in which awareness of dependence on grace increasingly disposes one to the latter, but in other contexts he affirms pagan or secular expressions as implicit responses to grace. 45. The fundamental difference between Barth’s account and the most prominent Thomistic accounts is this: for Barth, there is no purely natural good which fulfils human nature considered only in itself and which human acts are in principle capable of achieving apart from grace, nor is there a supernatural good which transforms our nature and extends its capacities beyond their merely creaturely possibilities. Instead, for him there are acts that involve the exercise of natural capacities, yet are possible only in response to grace. It is entirely natural capacities that are exercised, but the capability to exercise them in a manner that corresponds to our covenant determination comes from grace alone. And the one human good – which, though one, is as diverse as the set of characteristics that comprise human nature – consists in acting in ways that correspond with our covenant determination. 46. I am grateful to Dr Michael Mawson and Dr Brian Brock for inviting me to participate in the conference on ‘The Freedom of the Christian Ethicist’, held at the University of Aberdeen at which I presented the initial version of this essay, and for their splendid hospitality during my stay in Aberdeen. I am also grateful to them and to my fellow participants at the conference for their helpful and challenging questions and comments on the version I presented at the conference.

Chapter 3 T H E M E S SIA N IC C ON TOU R S OF E VA N G E L IC A L E T H IC S Hans G. Ulrich

How can Christians today properly articulate what it means to ‘be in’ Jesus Christ? To set this question within the domain of theological ethics only apparently narrows its scope to this question: what does it mean to ‘live in’ Jesus Christ? Investigating this question will take us deep into the whole scope of Christian theology, preeminently into eschatology. In this paper, I investigate what is at stake for Christian ethics in different eschatologies, specifically, messianic and apocalyptic eschatologies. To examine the grammars of two important contemporary accounts of eschatology is, in fact, to ask how best to understand the way in which God’s creative, reconciling and redemptive works locate the divine condescension to and proximate claiming of the individual believer. In more general terms, it is to ask how the immediate encounter of the redeemer situates the believer who receives it within the wider horizon of temporality. Using the Barmen Declaration to focus the exposition, the essay’s first section will explain why an account of divine deliverance is crucial for a theological account of freedom. A second section will then clarify how the reign of Jesus Christ breaks in to liberate human beings from the powers of this world age. This will entail, third, exploring just what is at stake theologically for Christian ethics when it conceives this inbreaking as both messianic and apocalyptic. The emphasis in this section will be on describing how each construal of eschatology configures our understanding of the political horizon of human action. A fourth section will contend that because the Christian ethos is centred on and grows from the prayer ‘Thy Kingdom come’, it is grounded in an apocalyptic–messianic reality. A concluding section will briefly clarify how this approach funds sharply focused forms of culture–critical theological engagement that effectively reframe human action in ethically generative ways. Only after these connections have been elucidated can we meaningfully address the fundamental question of Christian freedom, and thus what might be called the Protestant character of Christian ethics.

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I. How to Talk about Freedom – the Protestant Grammar of the Christian Ethos Why and how should we thematize the ‘freedom of an ethicist’ as it appears within the Protestant tradition (if there even is such a thing)? This question immediately calls to mind the second thesis of the 1934 Barmen Declaration: “Jesus Christ, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1.30). As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness is he also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us [widerfährt uns] a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures. We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords—areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.1

‘Deliverance from the godless fetters of this world’ can only be confessed because Jesus Christ has been made our wisdom, righteousness and sanctification. At the very minimum this is to affirm that this deliverance concerns our ‘wisdom’ and our thinking – the renewal of our mind – as we read in Paul’s description of the ‘ethical existence’ in Romans 12.2: Do not be conformed to this world [i.e. do not live in accordance with the “patterns” of this world age], but let your shape of life [your character] become transformed by the renewal [innovation] of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect [or fulfilled].2

This is a deliverance promised to be realized concretely within the Christian community (as we read in the verses that follow in Romans 12) and also in the third thesis of the Barmen Declaration: “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body [is] joined and knit together” (Eph. 4.15-16). The Christian church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.3



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I am reminded of another theological voice that catalysed the rediscovery of the theology of ‘Christ’s lordship’ as it appears in the Barmen Declaration. In 1958, two years before Ernst Käsemann’s groundbreaking essay on the apocalyptic origin of Christian theology,4 Ernst Wolf wrote in his ‘Königsherrschaft Christi’ that ‘the lordship of Christ which calls us to be his witnesses demands first of all the realization of the deliverance from the bondage of a ‘Christian ideological and institutional thinking’.5 This affirmation presumes that the freedom of an ethicist who belongs to the Christian church can only be realized through God’s ongoing deliverance. The Christian’s freedom rests on God’s very own freedom as it appears in his story in Jesus Christ and its fulfilment in Christ’s lordship, since the essence of that lordship is to deliver human beings. Thus, to become part of this story entails being freed from all other forms of bondage and all other determinations. It is important to realize that in Barmen thesis III the Christian church is addressed as that community in which Jesus Christ is presently acting through the Holy Spirit. This affirmation commits us to thinking through how the deliverance that comes through the Holy Spirit accomplishes the ‘renewal (innovation) of our minds’ and the ‘deliverance’ from all ideological bondage and all patterns of thinking that conform to this world age. The logic of the Barmen Declaration – as clarified by Ernst Wolf – rests upon Christ’s ongoing action to deliver human beings from their bondage to other ‘sources’ or media (in the sense of a sustaining environment) of living that diverge from the singular source and mediator Jesus Christ. My interest is in how the logic or grammar that organizes the Barmen Declaration can be understood to be distinctly present within the Christian ethos and in our engagement in the discipline of Christian ethics. How does God’s own living activity remain present within the Christian ethos? In other words, how can it be made obvious that the Christian ethos is directly determined by God’s living together with us, that is, as God’s creatures, partners and children? This may be called the Protestant grammar of the Christian ethos; and it is also a thoroughly biblical grammar. When I use the term ‘ethos’ I am indicating that place where we are at home, the context that decisively shapes our perception and action. To explicate the Christian ethos further, then, we will need to return to examine in more detail the way freedom is transmitted to us: namely, God’s deliverance of humanity from bondage as the condition of all genuine human freedom. God’s Deliverance It is significant that biblical texts rarely use ‘freedom’ as a noun. Old Testament Hebrew does not even have a word for freedom. And, in the New Testament, the language of freedom is closely linked with the stories of God’s active deliverance, as in Gal. 5: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free.’ The biblical texts consistently refuse to talk about freedom apart from divine actions of deliverance (Befreiung), which are exclusively God’s very own actions.6 So we read in Psalm 3.8, for example, ‘deliverance belongs to the Lord’. There are about two hundred verses in

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Scripture that speak of God’s deliverance. Biblically, then, we might say that deliverance is the grammar of God’s actions. It is the core of the story that takes place between God and Israel, and between God and all of those who then participate in this story. If we take the biblical usage of the language of freedom seriously, we are led to understand deliverance into creaturely freedom as deeply integrated with the story of God’s own free actions. Because God is not trapped by the dynamics and trajectories of creaturely history, God is free to intervene and liberate human beings from their bondage to other realities, to anything that we might today call ‘history’. This means that to live in freedom is to live in accordance with God’s deliverance and actions as they become apparent through his story.7 In the Lord’s Prayer Christians pray, ‘your will be done’. Translating more literally, we might say, ‘your will may or should be realized’. Should one ask, ‘realized by whom?’, then the answer is obvious: the fulfilment of God’s will is realized by God’s own activity, in which he deigns to involve us. The most intensely focused theological description of this connection is found in Karl Barth’s account of the ‘ethos’ of the Lord’s Prayer and its central request, ‘Thy Kingdom come’.8 In Barth’s treatment, we see how this prayer remains a permanent reminder that the Christian life is oriented by looking for and waiting upon God’s very own actions.

II. God’s Messianic Presence in his Very Own Actions Within the biblical traditions, there are a set of actions that are exclusively God’s actions. Most obviously, this includes God’s acts of creation, reconciliation and redemption. But this set also includes God’s acts of ‘authoritative speech’, forgiveness (as we read in Psalm 130) and judgement, a judgement that realizes justice and brings renewal (as innovation).9 These are all ways that God in his mercy makes a new beginning. Indeed, mercy exemplifies all of God’s actions in that it is exclusively attributed to God (Jer. 30.18).10 Only in a derivate sense are human beings asked to be merciful or forgive, and thus participate in God’s very own actions. We forgive ‘in his name’ precisely because forgiveness (as mercy) belongs exclusively to God.11 We are commanded to be merciful not like God, but as God is merciful (Lk. 6.36).12 The grammar of God’s own actions operates throughout the biblical narrative, but is particularly evident in the prayers of the Psalms. Here God is honoured and praised because of his manifold and rich activity. Psalm 103.1-6, for example, presents us with a clear list of the actions exclusively attributed to God: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits – who forgives all your iniquity,



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who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.13

To Keep God’s Actions Present The foregoing suggests why we might claim that the essential and entire task of Christian witness is to hold God’s actions before ourselves and others as his free and merciful acts. We do this only as we maintain the connection between God’s story with us and his story as a whole, including the whole cosmic array of his actions.14 In his 1523 treatise, ‘On Temporal Authority’, Martin Luther draws out the importance of this connection: How can a mere man see, know, judge, condemn, and change hearts? That is reserved for God alone, as Psalm 7[:9] says, “God tries the hearts and reins;” and [v.8], “The Lord judges the peoples.” And Acts 10 says, “God knows the hearts”; and Jeremiah 1: [17:9-10], “Wicked and unsearchable is the human heart; who can understand it? I the Lord, who search the heart and reins.” A court should and must be quite certain and clear about everything if it is to render judgment. But the thoughts and inclinations of the soul can be known to no one but God.15

Luther focuses our attention and analysis on a specific aspect of God, God’s ‘being in action’,16 i.e. on the God who acts continually and who in his freedom shares his story with his people and with we human beings.17 This God becomes present and apparent through that story. What we need to realize is that this story of God’s active and innovative rescue exhaustively names the reality that sustains our lives; our lives persist only within the nexus of God’s rescuing and upholding acts. God’s being in action is therefore a recurrent concern of the biblical writers, and again nowhere more intensively than in the Psalms. The Psalms present God in his authentic manifestation.18 The psalmists focus on what the dogmatic tradition has given the technical description as God’s ‘opera ad extra’, his manifest works or economy (oikonomia). Here we see what I call a ‘messianic’ or ‘apocalyptic–messianic’ drive in God’s will. This drive originates in God’s genuine free act of election of human beings as his partners and of Israel as his people (as emphasized by Barth in his Church Dogmatics). God continues this election by remaining faithful to this calling over time, but also by his continual merciful actions of deliverance and renewal (sanctification). God’s actions are focused and summarized in the story of Jesus Christ, who is both Messiah and Lord. My emphasis here is on how the story of Jesus Christ names God’s presence in creation or to us as both messianic and apocalyptic. God’s claiming of the world includes his encountering us with his definitive

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story, of which we are a part and in which we are involved. Here the designation ‘messianic’ indicates direct, personal and immediate encounter and coexistence. This means there is no messianism without a Messiah, nor any true spirituality without God’s Spirit. Barth continually and rightly emphasizes the directness and immediacy of the human encounter with this Messiah. The designation ‘apocalyptic’, in contrast, indicates the character of God’s story in its totality, that is, in the encompassing reality of creation, reconciliation and redemption. That this is a total or completed narrative means it breaks open the seemingly ironclad continuities we observe in our limited world age.19 The inseparability of the apocalyptic and the messianic in God’s actions stands apart from any theology or philosophy that attempts to ‘think’ or to ‘find’ God beyond, beside or behind his apocalyptic– messianic encounter. When we raise the question of an explicitly ‘theological’ ethic, we must recognize the mode of God’s apocalyptic–messianic appearance, the total narrative of all of God’s free actions from creation to redemption. The New Testament’s language of ‘en Christo’ situates the human ‘within that apocalyptic–messianic story and God’s actions’, as we might gloss 2 Cor. 5.17.20 We are addressed as people who exist within God’s story and are being made his witnesses. This necessarily leads to conflict with the apparently invulnerable powers and historical realities of this world age. But it also reveals that we do not in fact exist in any alternative or rival ‘reality’, articulated perhaps within one of several of the pictures of universal and generic rationality such as the ‘human condition’, the ‘history of being’ or ‘nature’ to name a few of the obvious claimants. Nor is it appropriate to begin a Christian ethic with observations about how we all find ourselves in some given ‘relationship’ or disposition towards ‘God’, such as the disposition of being hopeful or feeling ultimately dependent. This is reinforced by Barth’s axiomatic claim that the very substance of God’s story depends on the divine ‘election’ of human beings to be his partners in Christ.21 We read in Barth’s Church Dogmatics: From the New Testament context we derive in the first instance two basic things. The first is that it has a strictly eschatological content and character, that is, that it looks toward an act of God as the goal and end of all human history and of all the history of faith and the church within it. The second is that it has its basis and meaning in the totality of this history, but in a definite event within it, in a specific, once-for-all, and unique history within that history. Coming from this specific history, Christians pray ‘Thy Kingdom come.’ Hence their prayer is not – the New Testament gives us not the slightest reason for this view – the expression of a hope manufactured by people and cherished by the human race as such, the hope of a final solution of the complicated problems of world history which takes place in more or less pure transcendence.22

Jesus teaches and commands us to pray ‘Thy Kingdom come’ to no other end than the fulfilment of God’s own story in its totality. With this prayer, so central to Christian worship, we actively remain participants as a worshipping community



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within God’s story. In recognizing the act of prayer to be the centre of the Christian ethos, Barth rightly saw that this ethos is focused on God’s honour, and not primarily on the dignity of the human being.23 This brings us to the crucial question of how Christian witness can keep God’s story present as God’s very own action, which is continually verified (bewahrheitet) or confirmed by God’s faithfulness. Messianic Time These insights into biblical theology from Barth’s Church Dogmatics are not unfamiliar. But we might ask what specific difference it makes to call God’s presence ‘apocalyptic–messianic’. The point of this designation is that it recognizes that God’s story appears in its totality within this world age. It both appears and apocalyptically confronts this world age, and anything within it that claims to be reality or history. The real story is one that happens amidst this world age, but that contradicts and struggles with its processes and conditions. In other words, God’s apocalyptic–messianic story is neither beyond nor remote from this world age. Rather, it directly confronts every so-called ‘history’ that claims to be transforming our world age. God’s faithfulness is to bring his story into this world age to provoke what we may call true history. Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasized this ‘apocalyptic–messianic ’ logic as determinative for the Christian ethos. We read the following in his Ethics: In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name. In Christ all things exist (Col. 1.17).24

God’s narrated and articulated reality includes all the cosmos, which is claimed within this world age as created by God.25 The distinction between the cosmos and this world age is determined by God’s story as summarized in the story of Jesus Christ; Christ appears in this world age as Lord of the cosmos. The evident distinction between the cosmos and this world age is an apocalyptic–messianic one, which is comprehended materially within God’s own story. This recognition frees us from several alternatives: from having to discover or construct the meaning of history, from needing to come to terms with a fate into which we have been thrown or even from having to flee from the trials of this world age into a meta-history. We have been delivered from these fundamental – and godless – bondages, in a way that is paradigmatic for the deliverance from bondage to any mediation of God’s reality. Divine deliverance involves us directly in God’s story and God’s very own actions. Liberation from the bondage to all framing ideas and worldviews includes the idea of a secularized world with its search for meaning in history. As Karl Löwith has insisted, God’s story cannot be ‘secularized’ without losing its essential logic,

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precisely because as an apocalyptic history it can never be translated into history.26 The notion of a ‘meaningful history’ rooted in the historical Christian tradition (or West) is categorically different to the apocalyptic–messianic grammar of God’s story as presented in Scripture. Reality The theological point here is that God’s presence is made manifest exclusively by his actions, which are never alienated from his agency or handed over to the immanent dynamics of mediating processes or realities. God’s actions are exclusively mediated by Jesus Christ, even in and through the Christian community.27 In the Church Dogmatics, Barth comments: According to what the New Testament says concerning baptism, it is highly and even supremely probable that this Christian action is not to be understood as a divine work or word of grace which purifies man and renews him. It is not to be understood as a mystery or sacrament along the lines of the dominant theological tradition. According to the New Testament, man’s cleansing and renewal take place in the history of Jesus Christ which culminates in His death, and they are mediated through the work of the Holy Spirit. The New Testament does not refer to any additional or accompanying history or mediation of salvation. It mentions no duplicate of this one divine act and word.28

The point here is that the ongoing apocalyptic–messianic drama must not be obscured by any phenomena or reality (including religious phenomena) that we might hold to be indispensable for God’s self-revelation. The Greek word for ‘near’ or ‘close’ (ἐγγύς) – ‘The Kingdom of heaven has come close’ (Mk 10.7) – emphasizes this unmediated directness.29 There is a crucial difference between a philosophy or theology whose task it is to offer descriptions of or reflections upon these mediating realities and processes, and one that instead knows its task to be to witness to God’s story. At this point it is worth mentioning Franz Rosenzweig’s 1925 essay ‘The New Thinking’,30 which (as with Bonhoeffer) is an impressive attempt to escape the Hegelian paradigm in which meaning arises through historical processes. It is astonishing how many theologies of hope and theological eschatologies have been configured by the quest to discover meaning in history and have used Hegel’s philosophy as the template. They have taken up Hegel’s approach despite the criticisms levelled against it by Nietzsche and Rosenzweig, which are not different in kind from those emerging from biblical theology. The point of mentioning the philosophical problems with defining history here is to emphasize again that the central biblical message is that Christians have been freed from even the most powerful and all-absorbing patterns of thinking that colonize their world age. The way we understand history and its meaning – and indeed any theory of reality or all-encompassing worldview – provides an important example of the ways in which we need liberation. This also illustrates



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how our freedom involves being made witnesses of God’s action in its present manifestation. To be made a witness is to have those phenomena that obscure or obliterate God’s own actions ripped away. The paradox here is that these phenomena, which seemed to be real, are in fact now revealed as fundamentally indeterminate: what seemed to be stable and non-negotiable realities are interrupted and unveiled as ephemeral. In view of God’s apocalyptic–messianic deliverance, we recognize that our own conceptions of history obliterate God’s story, our conceptions of the future obliterate God’s coming, our ideas about spirit obliterate God’s Holy Spirit, our moralities obliterate God’s ethos, our laws obliterate God’s commandments, our reasoning obliterates God’s Logos and our abstract ‘relational existence’ obliterates a very specific relation to the one God. In short, when we find ourselves able to reason and perceive in ways that mediate God, we are in fact obliterating God’s own speech or word. In the final analysis, it is essentially God’s Logos or Word – a paradigmatically apocalyptic–messianic reality – that breaks the indeterminacy, indifference or ‘reign of vacillation.’31 This is not only a paradigm shift within ethics, but an apocalyptic intervention: namely, the transition from thinking and reflecting upon the sources, conditions and exercise of human agency to recognizing God’s own reality and agency, that is, God’s own ethos within which his partners or children participate.32 It is by suffering such an intervention that we become witnesses to God’s story. The Presence of the New Reality – and its Realization We can now turn to the question of how this witness happens. How are God’s actions acknowledged to be constantly present to the human agent as creating and bearing the new reality? In his Ethics Bonhoeffer writes the following: The subject matter of a Christian ethic is God’s reality revealed in Christ becoming real [Wirklichwerden] among God’s creatures, just as the subject matter of doctrinal theology is the truth of God’s reality revealed in Christ. The place that in all other ethics is marked by the antithesis between ought and is, idea and realization, motive and work, is occupied in Christian ethics by the relation between reality and becoming real, between past and present, between history and event (faith) or, to replace the many concepts with the simple name of the thing itself, the relation between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The question of the good becomes the question of participating in God’s reality revealed in Christ.33

For Bonhoeffer the central concern of Christian ethics is serving the realization of the reality that is given with the story God shares with us in Jesus Christ. No concept receives more emphasis in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics than ‘reality’.34 But why and in what sense is ‘reality’ to be emphasized? The short answer is that an emphasis on the realization of God’s new reality corresponds to an equally intense emphasis

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on God’s story in its unmediated and determined totality as invading this world age. In order to be intelligible, the notion of the invading reality of God in this world age requires this strong emphasis on realization. It is this realization, then, that constitutes the ongoing drama of the Christian ethos.35 The drama concerns the present appearance of God’s story with us human beings, in Jesus Christ. This is what constitutes its ‘messianic’ character, a label indicating a specific cluster of moments in the biblical narrative and which presupposes a ‘messianic’ drama or a messianic time, that is, a messianic ‘today’.36

III. Distinguishing between Apocalyptic Event and Messianic Time It may still be unclear what this emphasis on the apocalyptic–messianic appearance of God actually contributes to the freedom of the Christian ethicist. In itself the claim that God’s story has an apocalyptic logic is fairly uncontroversial, given the apocalyptic scenes and resonances of the biblical texts. But the positive rediscovery of the apocalyptic grammar of theology (beginning with Barmen and further inspired by Käsemann) is also a provocation to think through the implications for theological ethics. God’s apocalyptic–messianic appearance has an inherently political character, apparent in the promise of 1 Cor. 15.25: ‘For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.’ An apocalyptic theology presses us to ask how this promise concerns the present time and our world. Recent attention to Paul’s letters has given us a renewed awareness of the genuinely apocalyptic contours of God’s story, sharpening our understanding of what apocalyptic actually means. As J. Louis Martyn writes in his well-known commentary: Paul’s apocalyptic is not focused on God’s unveiling something that was previously hidden, as though it had been eternally standing behind a curtain (contrast 1 Cor. 2:9-10). The genesis of Paul’s apocalyptic – as we see it in Galatians – lies in the apostle’s certainty that God has invaded the present evil age by sending Christ and his Spirit into it. There was a “before,” the time when we were confined, imprisoned; and there is an “after,” the time of our deliverance. And the difference between the two is caused not by an unveiling, but rather by the coming of Christ and his Spirit.37

And we read again: Christian theology is from its beginning a witness of the “real” story confronting any “reality” which we may call world, history, or nature.38 This confirms with a specific accent the enlightening thesis of Ernst Käsemann – that “apocalyptic is the mother of theology”.39

Deliverance occurs as and when God freely invades what is false and obscured with a new reality in its concluded totality. This has always been the grammar



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of deliverance in its genuine theo-logical logic – the moments of God’s sharing his story with his people. The apocalyptic narrative encompasses the whole of reality – because it is the reality that belongs to God – including the cosmos and human beings. Thus, the apocalyptic narrative is by its very nature in messianic confrontation with any so-called ‘reality’ that opposes it, which Käsemann and others often denote as the ‘fallen world’. We may say that fallen reality is destined to disappear precisely as God’s works in all things become luminously present and visible. And this fallen world, what Paul calls the ‘old reality’, has already been overcome, even if it has not yet disappeared, and this world age remains. As Martyn (and Käsemann) have emphasized, the apocalyptic witness announces a situation of warfare, an ongoing conflict between God and ‘the powers’,40 even though the outcome has been already decided. We call this ‘today’ messianic as a reminder that the divine rescue we experience is not to be assumed to be the final dramatic end still to come. Messianic time is nevertheless wholly determined by that apocalyptic story, which includes its own passage of time even though the events of this sequence remain hidden to us. To follow Paul’s logic is to be made aware of the distinction between the apocalyptic final end and time here and now, that is, a present messianic time generated and determined by the apocalyptic story, and thus still characterized by contradiction and struggle (1 Cor. 15). Nevertheless, messianic time still has its own genuine messianic presence. While apocalyptically determined, messianic time is still the time of God’s ongoing activity and thus the time of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit apocalyptically invades our rational or spiritual worlds, however they may be configured, precisely in order to realize God’s own work of transformation and creation. In his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben has insisted with special intensity on the distinction between the apocalyptic final end and messianic time, which he calls ‘the time that remains’.41 Agamben’s point is that this messianic time has its own proper meaning and substance and makes a concrete appearance in our present time within the wider apocalyptic story, but in its own content or as a distinct ethos. Agamben thus helpfully clarifies how an ethos that is out of step with the present world can appear as messianic. Agamben is aware that the apocalyptic story has already begun and concretely determines the present time, but heavily emphasizes that the final fulfilment remains deferred or held back.42 Why does Agamben insist on this deferral or a reserved and hidden time? Why does the messianic time that precedes the final end seem to have a grammar disconnected from or only ambiguously related to it? Agamben’s answer suggests a philosophical and general notion of an ‘operational time’ that is given with any procedures of a final fulfilment. Without going into the details, I simply note that this solution is a metaphorical transformation of a linguistic configuration into a theory of time. This can be contrasted with Rosenzweig’s insistence that God’s coming into our world age is inseparably bound to his story with his people, which is far more insightful in refusing to locate apocalyptic time on a different level of world history or as a meta-history. Only by following God’s story with his people – i.e. the story of Jesus Christ with its own messianic procession – do we remain within the biblical logic.

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We may recall here that Barth too accepted that there is an apocalyptic deferral that needs to be heard and considered theologically. Barth’s answer, however, unfolded a dogmatic logic quite different from the philosophical deferral proposed by Agamben. As he puts it in the Church Dogmatics: … the presence of Jesus in His community is full of import for the future. His presence impels and presses to His future, general and definitive revelation, of which there has been a particular and provisional form in the Easter history. Hence even the presence of Jesus in the Spirit, for all its fullness, can only be a pledge or first instalment of what awaits the community as well as the whole universe, His return in glory. But it must never be forgotten that He who comes again in glory, this future Jesus, is identical with the One proclaimed by the history of yesterday and really present to His own to-day. The thorough-going eschatology for which the interim between now and one day necessarily seems to be a time of emptiness, of futility, of lack, of a progressive and barely concealed disillusionment, is not the eschatology of New Testament Christianity. And again it is only an unspiritual community which can tolerate such a view. The fact that the man Jesus will be includes the fact that He is; but the fact that He is does not exclude that He is “not yet”.43

And we read again: … the “not yet” in which the world, the community and we all exist has its basis in the fact that it is the good will of Jesus Christ Himself to be not yet at the goal but still on the way, so that the rest of creation has no option but to participate in and adapt itself to His situation … it is because Jesus Christ … is the victorious Aggressor, and because it is His good will to act and show Himself as Victor in the fight against darkness, as light illuminating and irradiating the world, that power and opportunity are given to the enemy to make his fatal resistance, that darkness may exist, that the conflict of light against it is not ended, that its goal and end, and therefore the goal and end of the history of the prophecy of Jesus Christ, are still future and not yet present. … the provisional nature of our situation has its true basis and determination in the fact that it is the good will of Jesus Christ to move from the commencement of His revelation to its completion, not causing the commencement and the completion to coincide, but Himself first to be provisionally who He is and to do provisionally what He does, giving Himself time and place for combat. The world, the community and we ourselves have thus no option but to participate in the fulfilment of this good will of Jesus Christ, to tread with Him the way which He wills to take, to fight with Him the battle which He wills to fight, in short, to follow Him. Since He precedes us, and it is His good will to act as He does, the only possible thing for the world, the community and ourselves, and indeed the only right thing, is to follow Him, to accompany Him on the way to His goal.44



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Barth obviously refuses the idea of a dualistic reality as constituted by some power capable of holding back God’s final fulfilment. In that sense Barth refuses any static posture of ‘apocalyptic disposition’ while also describing the present time as an apocalyptic–messianic drama in which a fight is ongoing. It is this ongoing conflict that frames the essentially apocalyptic–messianic contours of Christian discipleship. Christians are challenged to live within the apocalyptic story in a messianic way, in a messianic time – meaning that the apocalypse is not just the judgement of this aion, but also has its very own positive appearance and determined reality. This is crucial for the characterizing of the apocalyptic–messianic contours of Christian ethics. The latter is, in essence, concerned with the Christian ethos as a lived witnessing to God’s present actions initiating and realizing God’s new reality. Thus far this description appears abstract because we have been concentrating on describing the grammar of the way God claims human beings. The next step is to investigate how this grammar concretely appears in our own practices. In any case, we now have the heuristic key for recognizing these practices in their genuinely apocalyptic–messianic contours and substance, a substance I have already identified as characteristically Protestant.

IV. The Messianic Time and its Ethos Barth rejects the idea that the time between the messianic advent and the final apocalypse can remain an empty, indeterminate saeculum. A Christian community that becomes comfortable in the interminable negotiation of the saeculum, he argues, is an unspiritual community. Christians have to realize what it means to affirm that messianic time is not empty. It is not the time of continual waiting for an apocalyptic inbreaking, as for Heidegger;45 rather, it is a time for enacting the messianic ethos. Agamben begins to develop a description of a messianic ethos as derived from key concepts found in Paul, such as the concept of ‘klesis’ (vocation) and Paul’s notion of the ‘hos me’ (‘as if ’).46 Even more directly, we find this messianic ethos described in Barth’s ethics, especially his ethics of reconciliation, as well as in the works of Bonhoeffer, Hans Joachim Iwand and Stanley Hauerwas. Apocalyptic Invasion and Messianic Presence – Within the Worshipping Community We can now ask how this apocalyptic–messianic reality and its ethos remain transparent to God’s story in its totality, as well as to its messianic directness, the directness of God’s ongoing actions. How can we hold before us the new reality that comes to us as God’s story in its (synchronic) wholeness – and in its ongoing messianic appearance? This is the heuristic key to unlock the genuinely apocalyptic–messianic contours and substance of theological ethics. Barth’s description of the messianic ethos is focused on the presence of God in his ongoing actions, which are simultaneously his faithfulness to us. The messianic ethos is here the ethos generated by God’s faithfulness. Indeed, the same

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Hebrew word means both ‘truth’ and ‘faithfulness’ (emunah), and ‘faithfulness’ and ‘justice’ also coincide in one Hebrew word (tsedakah). Our tendency to separate these concepts is challenged by this semantic overlap. This in turn points to the messianic appearance of God’s story as a direct coexistence of God and his partners and children. God and human beings have come together because human truth and justice exist only within God’s faithful and continuous acting. The Messianic Ethos of the Worshipping Community It is significant that Barth describes this messianic ethos as the ethos of the worshipping community. The Christian ethos is the liturgical existence and worshipping activity of the community as it witnesses to God’s ongoing actions, which is to say, the actual living God. As we noted briefly above, this is why the defining activity of the Christian ethos is prayer, and more specifically prayer which asks after the coming of God’s Kingdom. This prayer is the entry point for God’s coming Kingdom. In a paradigmatic way, such prayer maintains our awareness that the only reality Christians are looking for is that which is, first and foremost, sustained exclusively by God’s actions, and derivatively by his cooperation with his partners and children. The coming Kingdom is God’s very own action, and the paradigmatic form of this action.47 Barth calls prayer ‘the primal and basic form of the whole Christian ethos’ because it reflects the petitionary character of the prayer, ‘Thy Kingdom come’.48 In addition, prayer is the genuine political action of Christians (Barmen thesis I) not only because it concerns the Lordship of Christ, but also because it springs from Christ’s acts, which as God’s own acts are a new beginning in the believer. Barth writes: [This, then, is a sketch of] the invocation of God for and to which his children are liberated and invited and summoned, and which must become an event in the lives of Christians as thanksgiving, praise, and prayer, and therefore as the primal and basic form of the whole Christian ethos … Only with great surprise, profound amazement, and even consternation and fright can one speak of the fact that there may and should be this calling upon God by Christians as his children. We stand before the mystery of the covenant – in its way no less a mystery than that of the incarnation and resurrection of the Lord – when we reckon with it that this is so. Something very special has to have taken place, and to keep on taking place, when certain people may not only be called the children of God but are this, and as such are qualified, entitled, able, and willing to call upon God as their Father, when in this calling, in their thanks and praise and prayer, the Christian ethos is actualized and maintained and continued and developed. This is not only not self-evident; it is totally inconceivable. We can count on it only as on a fact of unique order that the existence of such people and their action is possible, not once alone, but in the continuity of their lives … What has to take place, and to keep on taking place, if people are to be



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Christians, is a special movement and act of God in which he gives to the Word of his grace – the Word of the reconciliation of the world to him accomplished in Jesus Christ – the specific power to reach these specific people among the many to whom it goes out and is directed, so that they open themselves up to it in freedom.49

The political agency of Christians, their messianic–political ethos, is thus focused in their prayer for God’s coming Kingdom. This prayer is concerned with the coming of God’s reality in its totality, as it is already present in that given directness of the coexistence of God and his children. The political action that is characteristic of the Christian ethos is embedded in this particular kind of relationship with God. It is the political action of God’s children. If praying for the coming of the Kingdom keeps us attentive to God’s action, so too do the practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the unfinished part of his ethics, Barth planned ‘to describe the divinely willed and commanded Christian life … as man’s path from the divine foundation to the divine renewal of his required faithfulness, and in this connection as his path from baptism to the Lord’s Supper’.50 Here again the worshipping community appears as the community of those living within Christ’s acts. As Barmen thesis III puts it: ‘The Christian church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit.’51 In word and sacrament, the witness of the Christian church depends upon this paradigmatic worshipping form of the Christian ethos. Christians only live within and with Christ’s acts. They are under the reign of the Word of God and receive forgiveness and renewal from the Holy Spirit. Christian worship represents the messianic ethos in its essence. It is in this way that God’s reality is realized, as in Bonhoeffer’s idiom. God’s Speech – The Messianic Witness of his Word Luther’s description of the focus of the Christian ethos emphasizes the transforming power of God’s Word through preaching and being ‘under the reign’ of the word of God as it mediates God’s genuine and constitutive act. Like prayer, preaching too expresses the genuinely messianic character of the Christian ethos. We can find expansive descriptions of preaching that emphasize this messianic character in the ethics of both Luther and Barth. Barth approaches this task by describing the word through which God works on his partners and children. In the Church Dogmatics: The Word of God, which the Christian has heard and may, it is to be hoped, hear again, is among all the factors that determine his life the only one that works and speaks unequivocally. In making God known, already in the present it points radically, unbrokenly, and definitively beyond the regime of vacillation and ambivalence that characterizes the present … As God speaks his Word, he makes himself known to those who receive and accept it as the one who has overcome the division in his creation in which we exist and who will manifest

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The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist this defeated division, and therefore his own glory, before the eyes of all. In the lives of those who recognize it, this gives his Word a distinction, a majesty, a dignity, which marks it off and differentiates it absolutely from all other factors in their lives when it comes among these factors and close to them, no matter how estimable or worthy or significant or positive these factors may be, no matter how seriously they must be taken.52

‘God speaks his Word’ and with this act we are in the midst of messianic worship. The witness of preaching that is focused on God’s own speech is paradigmatic in this respect because it demonstrates the apocalyptic–messianic character of the Christian ethos by embodying the invasion of God’s Word in a given time and place. God’s own speaking contradicts all linguistic worlds that resist, obscure and obliterate God’s message. Hearing the word of God is the paradigm of the advent of grace extra nos, and this in turn reveals that preaching is its corresponding form of genuine witness. This is because preaching is a human activity paradigmatically transparent to God’s own speech.53 Preaching is, therefore, a paradigmatic locus of divine speech and offers a place where we can learn about the transparency of other types of human action to God’s acts. The essential point is that we are able to keep God’s action present because God’s presence is itself articulate. It is only this articulacy that keeps us from confusing God and phenomena, and so misunderstanding God’s deliverance. Bonhoeffer’s description of communal life in Life Together explores the accompanying practices through which God works to contradict the linguistic worlds that entrap humans in the worshipping community – such as prayer or reading the Bible together. If the hidden presence of God is not articulated by praying and preaching, then we will not come to understand what it means to praise God in all things. Conversely, a church whose praying and preaching are not transparent in this way obliterates the congregation’s ability to comprehend God’s acts. This is what we may call a Protestant messianism: it is Protestant in that this apocalyptic–messianic grammar gives it its protesting or contradicting character. The paradigmatic stance of such Protestantism is articulated by the prayer of Psalm 130.5, with its hopeful yearning for God’s speech: ‘I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.’ The Christian Ethos in its Determined Reality We have discovered that the insistence on God’s apocalyptic–messianic story in its determined appearance – which we find in the descriptions of the Christian ethos by Bonhoeffer, Barth Iwand and Hauerwas – highlights the central task of Christian ethics. This central task is to witness to the character of the Christian ethos as it becomes real with and within the Christian community. My emphasis has been upon the transparency of this witness to God’s continuous actions, and in this sense upon its messianic character within a worshipping community. Having said this, it is important to note the ways in which this ethos of the community as a whole permeates all aspects of the embodied life of the Christian



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community, through the habits, character and the good works of its members. Again this point is central to the Barmen Declaration. The Christian church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and Sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.54

All these features of the Church – faith, obedience, message, order – are features of a witness that is transparent to God’s activity. Only in this way does the Church witness to God’s honour, soli deo Gloria. A messianic ethics is essentially concerned with God’s honour. If it is a glory that is finally still to come, it is nevertheless one that is beginning to become apparent here and now.55 Jesus himself makes this point: ‘let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’ (Mt. 5.16). Commenting on this passage, Barth writes: They (Christ’s disciples) have to be witnesses, shining lights of hope, to all men. They have to make the promise known to them in its direct wording and sense as a call to faith. There arises here the missionary task of the Christian community in the narrower sense, a task in which each individual Christian will naturally have to have a part. But Christians cannot be content with this. This call needs a practical commentary in the acts of those who issue it to men – just as Jesus Christ himself proclaimed the Kingdom of God not only with words but also with significatory acts. Man is right in wanting to see the good works of Christians in order to praise their heavenly Father (Matt. 5.16). They also have to be witnesses to him by resolutely being there – and not as the last on the scene – when on this side of the deliverance that God has begun and will complete, in relative antithesis to human disorder and the lordship of demons, there is wrestling and fighting and suffering for a provisional bit of human right.56

In Barth we find confirmation of the messianic character of the Christian ethos, now further described in terms of its missionary character. By means of these good works in their determinacy (and also in their apocalyptic invading character) and through no other kind of mediation does messianic time have material substance. This substance is nowhere more apparent than in Jesus’ works of healing: These works and the habits of Christians in community signify messianic time, the time of God’s coming and presence. It is the time of God’s honour, as we learn from Barth. Within the Christian tradition, it is the ethos of good works that proves to be the medium of a messianic existence in messianic time. It was the most radical critic of a distorted ethics of good works, Martin Luther, who ultimately offered the most robust defense of an ethos of good works. This ethos is apparent in Luther’s exposition of the Ten Commandments:

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The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist The Fifth ‘You shall not kill.’ What does this mean? Answer: We should fear and love God, and so we should not endanger our neighbor’s life, nor cause him any harm, but help and befriend him in every necessity of life. … The Seventh ‘You shall not steal.’ What does this mean? We should fear and love God, and so we should not rob our neighbor of his money or property, nor bring them into our possession by dishonest trade or by dealing in shoddy wares, but help him to improve and protect his income and property.57

To display these good works in our daily life – this is the messianic reality with which we, guided by a determined hope, have been confronted. The rediscovery of the apocalyptic logic of God’s story has placed renewed emphasis upon the determinate character of this reality. As we read in Paul’s writings, these are not potential or possible works, but works that confront and claim us in concrete settings: For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life (Eph. 2.8-10).

Bodily Life – A Critique of Vitalism Significantly, Käsemann – in ways paralleled latterly by John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas – directs us to the manner in which this ethos enters the bodily life of the Christian community, the body of Christ. Käsemann’s essay on the ‘subject of early Christian apocalyptic’58 emphasizes that the crucial issue for the early Christians was the reality of the saving event that manifests Christ’s effective reign. The Christian community as the body of Christ in its own significant (witnessing) substance was therefore emphasized. Käsemann writes: In the bodily obedience of the Christian, carried out as the service of God in the world of everyday, the lordship of Christ finds visible expression and only when this visible expression takes personal shape in us does the whole thing become credible as Gospel message. But this rounds off the curve which enables the bodily obedience of the Christian to be described at once as an abiding in the power of the Resurrection, as the manifestation of the new life, and as the reversionary expectation of the reality of the Resurrection. We saw indeed from I Cor. 15.20–28 that resurrection for Paul is not primarily oriented towards



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the reanimation of the dead or any such thing, but towards the reign of Christ … Because Christ must reign, he cannot leave his own in the grip of death. Conversely, his own are already engaged today in delivering over to Christ by their bodily obedience the piece of world which they themselves are; and in so doing they bear witness to his lordship as that of the Cosmocrator and thus anticipate the ultimate future of the reality of the Resurrection and of the untrammeled reign of Christ.59

This formulation contrasts sharply with those undetermined realities that everywhere efface God’s determined actions. It is crucial that we become aware of the ways in which this effacement occurs, especially when we are confronted by worldviews which treat individual lives as ‘bare life’60 or those forms of politics that have been labelled biopolitics, in which the citizens of a political community are treated as a resource. For perspectives in which ‘life’ is inflated to describe reality as a whole, we lose sight of the more determinate reality, namely, the reality of a Christian life as determined by its hope in Christ’s resurrection. Because the resurrection of Christ is part of God’s apocalyptic story it invades our reality and becomes real by breaking any mere vitalism that would set itself up as the absolute evaluator or apotheosis of life in supposing its indeterminacy, in order to overrule and to dominate it. In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer went out of his way to criticize such vitalism as a paradigmatic example of the ways that generalized worldviews and ideas destroy human life and freedom: Natural life is formed life. The natural is the form that inheres in and serves life. If life severs itself from this form, if it tries to assert itself in freedom from this form, if it will not allow itself to be served by the form of the natural, then it destroys itself down to its roots. Life that makes itself absolute, that makes itself its own goal, destroys itself. Vitalism ends inevitably in nihilism, in the destruction of all that is natural. In the strict sense, life as such is a nothing, an abyss, a ruin. It is movement without end, without goal, movement into nothingness. It does not rest until it has drawn everything into this annihilating movement.61

The description of ‘movement without end’ also applies to God’s story, as long as we understand this to be the movement of the resurrected Christ becoming present in the worshipping community, thereby contradicting all the descriptions of rival movements that would seek to determine human life. The task of theological ethics is to unfold God’s story within concrete and detailed narratives that contradict every indefinite, generalized, independent – and, therefore, fatal – process or history. Such processes are present in all supposedly independent phenomena, including the phenomena of morality or hope, and even in any universalized concept of messianic ethos that displaces prayerful attention to God’s work (as apparent in Agamben’s commentary).62 To keep God’s actions present means constantly to recall God’s story as a narrative with a contradicting logic. Christian hope is kept Christian only as it constantly

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refers to God’s story, and is not transformed into a general kind of utopianism or optimism. The manner in which the messianic inbreaking evokes a counter-narrative to vitalism exemplifies how Christian ethics serves God’s own contradiction and interruption of other ideological patterns, which must similarly be confronted through carefully calibrated counter-narratives. As vitalism deprives human beings of the recognition that formed life is part of God’s good creation, so too individualism deprives us of the real human person elected into God’s story, and futurism or utopianism deprives us of our hope in God’s own gifted future. Moralism, too, belongs to this brand of ideology in that it attempts to offer recipes to satisfy the (insatiable) desire for a justification apart from hope in God’s mercy and forgiveness.

V. The Witness of Broken Indeterminacy As we have seen, the Christian ethos functions as a heuristic allowing us critically to discern that a whole world of independent phenomena subsists in unstable indeterminacy. The fragility of this indeterminacy has been recognized and engaged by some philosophers, such as Axel Honneth. In his reflections on ‘pathologies of individual freedom’,63 Honneth examines what it means to ‘suffer from indeterminacy’ and seeks strategies for discovering a determined reality (as in a certain ethos). His own philosophical approach remains, however, within the Hegelian search for a meaningful (i.e. determined) context for living. Here we come again to the crucial point of God’s invading story in its totality and reality. Christians are no longer bound to some history of ideas with its indefinite contours, but are given a different story, which determines every phenomena. When Christians talk about children, for example, they are not simply talking about reproduction; when they talk about dying, they are not just talking about the end of life; when they talk about identity, they are not talking about self-affirmation; and when they talk about God’s friendship, they are not talking about a relational existence as such. The indeterminacy of any and all such general narratives and the distortions they cause in how phenomena appear to us have been broken apart by the determinacy of God’s story. We can call this the grammar of deliverance, an apocalyptic–messianic deliverance. Accordingly, the moralism of self-justification has been broken apart by God’s judgement and justice; the processes of obligation by God’s merciful forgiving (and our forgiving in God’s name); the processes of liberalization by God’s own liberating election of his children; and the processes of interpretation by God’s own meaningful word.64 These moments of God’s story oppose the world of phenomena in all its indeterminacy. The apocalyptic–messianic appearance of God’s story in its wholeness constitutes the new reality that becomes apparent with it. This again clarifies why prayer is the primary human action within an apocalyptic–messianic ethos. Barth’s emphasis on prayer as the entry point of the Christian ethos arises from his



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determination to find a way to describe the role of human action without losing the dramatic reality of life with God. Thus, he comes to understand prayer as impelling apocalyptic–messianic action. As we see in Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane, prayer is simultaneously God’s act and a petition for God’s act. Prayer yields an understanding of freedom that does not require us to do something (or take responsibility), but allows us to participate in something that is already being done by God. The indeterminate world will disappear. It is the place of an infinite, endless, undetermined waiting for an advent. It fails to recognize – in its blindness – that the advent of God’s actions has already been realized in his Messiah. And God’s story continues to break the indeterminacies of this world age. In its witness the testimony of the church exposes them as indeterminacies. According to Romans 12, it is God’s renewal of our minds that most visibly displays this transition into a different logic or paradigm. The freedom of an ethics that follows the apocalyptic–messianic contours of God’s story comes from beyond the logic of liberty and limits; it does so because it has been initiated and completed with the given determinacy of God’s own story. Finally, when we attend to the biblical language, we notice that the Hebrew concept of ‘story’ overlaps with being born. A story represents, like the birth of child, a beginning, something unique entering the world, as Hannah Arendt has elaborated in her discussions of ‘natality’.65 Arendt’s account of newness does, however, remain bound to the idea of an individual who is still in some sense undetermined. In contrast, the rabbinic tradition has emphasized that newness or a newborn child is given with stories which the newborn joins. The child receives its own story because it is determined and provoked by the stories into which it is born.66 We can go even further and say that there are stories at all only insofar as there are people who have been determined by God’s unique story and initiated into this story by his mercy; otherwise each new human being would be simply another cog in a process of aimless reproduction. The ways we now talk about reproductive medicine, for example, or about human reproduction more broadly, are indicative of the fatal indeterminacy that obscures God’s action. We no longer talk of children as a promise of a new beginning as displayed, paradigmatically, in the birth narratives of Jesus Christ. Every narrative in the biblical text is to be seen within the context of all the other narratives that make apparent the one and only coherent story. It is a story enacted by God, by God’s mercy, and carried out by his grace and faithfulness. It begins on the other side of a temporal horizon that we may be curious to peek over. But to indulge this desire would be to embark on a theology of glory – and would contrast with the way of a theology of the cross that witnesses to what we have encountered in God’s own story. From here we can turn to Brian Brock’s instructive reading of Luther’s exegesis of the Magnificat as a paradigm for the apocalyptic–messianic encounter that transforms a person’s life and transfers it into God’s story. Here, we can see even more concretely the messianic contours of the Christian ethos as it appears within the life of the saints.

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Endnotes   1. ‘The Theological Declaration of Barmen’, in Book of Confessions: The Constitution of the Presbytarian Church (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1996), 311.   2. Additions mine.   3. ‘Barmen’, 311.   4. Ernst Käsemann, ‘On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic’, New Testament Questions of Today, ed. Ernst Käsemann, trans. W. J. S. L. Montague (London: SCM Press, 1969), 108–37.   5. My translation. Ernst Wolf, ‘Königsherrschaft Christi’, Theologische Existenz Heute 64 (1958): 60–1.   6. There are only a few exceptions.   7. Mt. 6.10: ‘your will be done’. Greek: ‘ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου.’   8. Karl Barth, The Christian Life, CD IV/4, 30. This is a translation of Barth, Gesamtausgabe. Abt. II: Das christliche Leben – Die Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/4, Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Vorlesung 1959–1961 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1999).   9. Martin Buber’s translation of the biblical language of ‘Word of God’ as ‘speech of God’ is theologically crucial in that it makes clear that there is no Word of God that is not addressed to us. 10. Deliverance happens only through God’s mercy, and within the biblical language mercy too is attributed exclusively to God. He is the one who in his mercy remains faithful in his story. Mercy, therefore, points to God’s actions of deliverance that bring those who are held captive back into God’s own sphere of action. See Ulrich, ‘Mercy: The Messianic Practice’, in Mercy, ed. Gerard den Hertog, Stefan Paas and Hans Schaeffer (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2016). 11. This grammar is evident in the story of Joseph and his brothers in Gen. 50. 12. Greek: ‘Γίνεσθε οἰκτίρμονες καθὼς [καὶ] ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν οἰκτίρμων ἐστίν.’ 13. Emphasis added. 14. Deut. 6.20-5: ‘When your children ask you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?” Then you shall say to your children, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. The Lord displayed before our eyes great and awesome signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his household. He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land that he promised on oath to our ancestors. Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our lasting good, so as to keep us alive, as is now the case. If we diligently observe this entire commandment before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, we will be in the right.”’ 15. Martin Luther, ‘On Temporal Authority,’ LW 45, 107. 16. We might even say, following Jean-Luc Marion, a ‘God without being’. Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 17. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, DBWE 2, 110–16. The contrast Bonhoeffer draws here is with any ‘idol’ that we identify and address. 18. The Psalms approach this from one angle and the biblical narratives from another. The emphasis on making God’s acts present is an important insight in the context of contemporary debates about the role of narrative in Christian ethics. 19. CD IV/4, 247 (Das christliche Leben, 426–7).



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20. ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God’ (2 Cor. 5.17-20). 21. Greek: ὁ γὰρ νόμος τοῦ πνεύματος τῆς ζωῆς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἠλευθέρωσέν σε ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου τῆς ἁμαρτίας καὶ τοῦ θανάτου (Rom. 8.2). 22. CD IV/4, 247. 23. This would be to reify the human being by isolating it from God’s own story. See ibid., §§77–8. 24. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6, 54. See also Larry L. Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 16. 25. See Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). 26. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Agamben’s critique of Löwith can be found in his The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 63ff. Agamben’s claim here is that Löwith does not properly distinguish between messianic and the apocalyptic time. I discuss this in more detail below. 27. This is attested in Barmen thesis III. 28. CD IV/4, 125–6. Barth continues: ‘If, however, baptism is not a sacrament, its meaning, as indicated in the preliminary thesis, is to be sought in its character as a true and genuine human action which responds to the divine act and word.’ 29. This point is emphasized throughout Barth’s Church Dogmatics, as well as Agamben’s The Time that Remains. 30. Franz Rosenzweig, ‘The New Thinking’, in Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’, ed. Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 67–104. 31. German: ‘Regiment der Schwebe’. For the background of this pattern see Vagn Andersen, Transformationen Gottes: Abwandlungen des Begriffs des Unbedingten in der Moderne (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2008). 32. This includes our attempts to search for the ‘sources of the self ’, as in Charles Taylor’s sense. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 33. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 49–50. Bonhoeffer continues: ‘Good is no longer an evaluation of what exists, for instance my essence, my moral orientation, my actions, or of a state of affairs in the world. It is no longer a predicate that one can apply to something that exists of itself. Good is the real itself [das Wirkliche], that is, not the abstractly real that is separated from the reality of God, but the real that has its reality only in God.’ 34. See Adam C. Clark and Michael Mawson, eds, Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2013). This same emphasis on reality can be found in the ethics of Barth and Hans Joachim Iwand, and throughout Luther’s theology. 35. Oliver O’Donovan, ‘History and Politics in the Book of Revelation’, in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present, ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 25–47. 36. ‘But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today”, so that none of you

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may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion”’ (Heb. 3.13-15). 37. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (London: Yale University Press, 1997), 99. 38. Ernst Käsemann, ‘The Beginnings of Christian Theology’, in New Testament Questions of Today. Käsemann writes: ‘The Gospel cannot maintain its identity without the Gospels. The kerygmatic proclamation becomes the proclamation of an idea only, unless it is narration as well; and unless it is always being grasped afresh in the very process of narration, it becomes a document of mere history,’ 97. 39. Käsemann’s claim is that since the preaching of Jesus cannot really be described as theology, it is the apocalyptic material that gave rise to Christian theology. See Martyn’s discussion of this point in ‘A Personal Word about Ernst Käsemann’, Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012), xiii–xv. 40. Or, as Bonhoeffer sometimes describes it, between God and the devil. On the powers, see Scott Prather, Christ, Power and Mammon: Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder in Dialogue (London: T&T Clark Bloomsbury, 2014), 13–53. 41. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 42. Here Agamben refers to 1 Thess. and also to Carl Schmitt’s widely influential theory – but one that is fatefully crippled by its refusal of all definite determination within the present time. See Julia Hell, ‘Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future’, Germanic Review (2009): 283–326. 43. CD III/2, 468. 44. CD IV/3, §§69, 329–30. 45. See Jakob Deibl, Menschwerdung und Schwächung: Annäherung an ein Gespräch mit Gianni Vattimo (Vienna: V&R UniPress, 2013), 48–52. 46. See Gianni Vattimo, ‘Os mé. Zur Haltung des “als ob nicht” bei Paulus und Heidegger’, in Zwischen Verzückung und Verzweiflung 2 (2001): 169–82. 47. Barth writes: ‘It is also a pure prayer because in it they turn to God, with whom alone it rests that his Kingdom should come, that is, that he himself should come as King and Lord, by his intervention putting an end to human unrighteousness in both its dimensions, destroying the lordship of demons, and creating peace on earth among men of his pleasure’. CD IV/4, 245 (Das christliche Leben, 423). 48. Barth writes: ‘It is no accident, then, that the invocation of God the Father which Jesus taught his disciples in the Lord’s Prayer takes the form of pure petition. The invocation of God consists of prayer. It does not detract from the thanks and praise that are due and must be offered to God, but gives definitive honour to their character as thanks and praise, when invocation is multiple petition presented to God with empty outstretched hands. Only thus is their invocation totally serious as the movement of men in their humanity turning to God in his deity. In this light one can see precisely why invocation is commanded by God and must be performed in obedience to him. His grace to men is as such a strict direction to seek grace and to cry for it.’ Ibid., 89. 49. Ibid., 89. 50. Ibid., 288. 51. Emphasis added. ‘Barmen’, Book of Confessions, 249. 52. CD IV/4, 177 (Das christliche Leben, 298).



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53. Again, recall Buber’s translation of God’s Word as God’s speaking (and we might even say God’s preaching), which is discussed above. 54. ‘Barmen’, 311. 55. This should be differentiated from Agamben’s distinction between the coming glory and the messianic time. See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 56. CD IV/4, 270 (Das christliche Leben, 469). 57. Martin Luther, ‘Small Catechism’, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans./ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 343. 58. See Ernst Käsemann, ‘On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic’, New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1969), 108–37. 59. Emphasis added. Ibid., 135. 60. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 61. DBWE 6, 178. 62. We should mention in passing that it is inaccurate to label this process of the church being made real as a process of ‘secularization’. This would be a category mistake in that God’s story cannot be translated into another general story or idiom without the loss of its substance. 63. Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 64. Here we can follow Samuel Wells’ description of the manifold transformations that occur with the realization of God’s story. Samuel Wells, Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998). 65. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). 66. Micha Brumlik, Messianisches Licht und Menschenwürde: Politische Theorie aus Quellen jüdischer Tradition (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013), 256–63.

Chapter 4 LIVING IN THE WAKE OF GOD’S ACTS: LUTHER’S M A RY A S K EY T O B A RT H ’ S C OM M A N D Brian Brock

Throughout his career, Barth defined responsible human action as a matter of attunement to God’s working. In this essay I will suggest why this emphasis is best understood as a representation of core insights of his precursor and formative teacher Martin Luther.1 In so doing I will offer a reading of Luther as an extension of an appreciative reading of Barth, one which aims in turn to illuminate the inner architecture of Barth’s theological ethic. It is only in the endnotes, however, that I will explicitly discuss how the Luther presented in the main text resurfaces in Barth. The connections being drawn in the minor essay in the endnotes will illustrate why Barth’s much maligned and often misunderstood command language cannot sensibly be extracted from his theological ethic – and should be read in a more supple and theologically rich manner. The point of connection between the two trains of thought is the claim that Barth’s ethics as a whole is an attempt to articulate in his own idiom the promeity that is central to Luther’s account of Christian ethical orientation. This investigation thus flows from the pregnant question of how best to describe the encounter with Jesus Christ that both thinkers take to be the essence of theological ethics. While affirming that the good works which in Christ Jesus have been ‘prepared beforehand for us to do’ (Eph. 2.10) are concretely actualized in the believer by the Spirit, Barth is so vigilant against the over-specification of how this divine claiming of human life actually occurs that he resists asking how this claim might be mediated through creatures. I think Gerald McKenny is right to worry at this point that what he calls the ‘absence of a sacramental mystery’ in Barth’s theology complicates contemporary attempts to imagine concretely living out the Christian life as Barth describes it.2 It is this question that orients my engagement with Martin Luther’s theological ethics. I will proceed in two broad movements. First, I will briefly set out the role played by Barth in shaping the modern discipline of Christian ethics. I will then move, second, into a thick description of Luther’s understanding of the relationship between divine works and human acts. Third, I will indicate how he understands the human disciplines and virtues to be called forth from those

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who desire to remain with God. What I aim to do with this depiction is to offer a worked example of how one influential theologian has understood Christians to find their determinate form through the work of Jesus Christ.3 In 1521, Luther wrote ‘The Magnificat’ as an exercise in moral and pastoral theology.4 As we watch Luther and Prince Fredrick gather around the Magnificat we will be able to see how Scripture functions as the shared acoustic space within which Fredrick’s desire to live as a Christian in his time and place is opened up and reoriented. We may well find it difficult to label it an exercise in theological ethics since Luther’s approach diverges so widely from contemporary practice. His well-known belief in the inextricable coinherence of the sola fides–sola Christus–sola scriptura triad frees him to reason with and under Scripture without belabouring the task of comprehensively collating the biblical passages that seem to contain the relevant ‘moral teachings’.5 My attending to Luther’s exegesis of Mary’s Magnificat is, therefore, best understood as a performed confession that the Christian’s determinative location within the economy of God’s working in the world is most profitably sought in the communion of saints gathered around Scripture.6 By starting from a theological understanding of the communio sanctorum we are enabled to push back against our default tendency to embed our intellectual investigations within some version of universal rationality. Only with the saints can we properly ask today: ‘What does it mean faithfully to engage in speaking about Christian ethics?’ As I will indicate in the conclusion, this is a question that presses in an especially acute way on those of us involved in the perhaps dubious enterprise of answering it within the modern academy

I. Divine Command versus Responsivity to God A cluster of fine scholarly works have recently defended the coherence of Karl Barth’s account of theological ethics against a charge that gained widespread currency early in his English-speaking reception: that he so foregrounds God’s action in Jesus Christ that little room is left for human moral agency.7 It was a defense as much against the earliest English-speaking interpreters of Barth’s ethics as his powerful detractors.8 Despite this confusion and resistance, Barth’s work was nevertheless to set the terms within which the modern discipline of theological ethics was forged, as Hans Ulrich has recently suggested.9 This is an important observation, he continues, because Barth explicitly understood his ethics as an elaboration of the tradition of the magisterial Reformation.10 This recent scholarship has shown why the generally dismissive labelling of Barth as a ‘divine command ethicist’ obscured the centrality of Barth’s manifold attempts to articulate a Christian ethics essentially concerned with how human decisions and acts can welcome and so be determined by the divine decision and judgement. Christian ethical thought, on his view, is not first a method of reasoning, but a consciousness-raising activity inviting human beings into lives of dynamic responsivity to God. Ethical acts are, subsequently, defined as responsive embraces of God’s concrete claim and gifts. While affirming that rational analysis



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is able to delimit better and worse courses of action, Barth nevertheless sharply distinguishes this rational activity from the responsivity to God, which embraces and enacts any one course of action.11 Theological ethics, thus construed, addresses human beings primarily as interpersonally responsive creatures whose basic ethical context is the economy of divine working which has incorporated them into the gathered communion of saints. It thus differs in kind from those ethics that address us as essentially rational evaluators of situations and moral arguments. Barth refuses any framing of the discipline of Christian ethics that assumes human beings can be understood without reference to a living God.12 By foregrounding the divine–human encounter in his ethics, Barth is attempting to do justice to the insistence of the Magisterial Reformation as he understands it, in which rational ethical evaluation can and should be distinguished from the divine confrontation experienced in the midst of our daily lives.13 Barth assumes that the theological ethicist can only serve God’s freeing deliverance by offering human beings a theologically framed heuristic for discerning God’s working in the unique circumstances of their own lives. Because they arise from particular contingent times and places in which agents are often faced with several legitimate, but conflicting, claims on their attention, and in which sinful and tragic circumstances often converge and conflict, these circumstances can never be fully described in ethical theory.14 We act in messy worlds marked at a myriad of junctures by structural violence and injustice and in which our understanding of outcomes is limited. Barth’s framing of Christian ethics is at this point an elaboration of Luther’s well-known interest in Christian living in everyday contexts – domains normally crisscrossed by multiple overlapping responsibilities. The tensions between these fields of responsibility become paralysing if our ethics ‘dissects the knotted growth of life’, as Bonhoeffer succinctly glossed Luther.15 Christian ethics must prepare us for the reality that life must be lived as it comes to us. This is why Luther devoted little energy to generating general ethical maxims, preferring instead to plumb the tangled web of competing moral claims that must be negotiated each day by Christians in various walks of life, and that he believed would only dissipate through regular and prayerful engagement with God’s word. What we desperately need is for the situations of our lives to become intelligible as ones in which we can meaningfully act, which is to be released from the sensation that we are caught in a sequence of mere happenings to which we can do little more than react.16 It was these powerful insights that were to establish a tradition of thinking about Christian ethics in which divine agency is understood to play an irreducible role.17 From this perspective, ethical discourses, whether theological or not, that do not reckon with the divine person entering into and cutting through the welter of competing moral claims and responsibilities which characterize lived existence will tend to entrench us in self-reliant rationalization – and this will increase our anxiety levels rather than offering gospel freedom.18 These observations make it clear that the struggle over the definition of Christian ethics is a struggle over what forms of thought are considered essential in sustaining Christian living. As we will see, Luther situates Christian ethics by bringing to the fore a question that

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is always lurking in the background of Christian living: What does it really mean to live with God?19

II. Living in the Wake of God’s Acts Though he loved many of the biblical personalities, Luther looked to one figure especially to unite the church, correct its misperceptions and show it the way to a more just engagement in the world’s structures of political authority: the Virgin Mary.20 I will try to substantiate this counterintuitive claim through a reading of Luther’s treatise on Mary’s Magnificat. Not wishing to challenge or even discuss orthodox claims about the virgin birth, Luther presents her song as a tangible, divinely provided offer to Christians of the universal grammar of Christian faith. To sing Mary’s song truly is to discover how responsive human living with God should look, and Luther proposes that her ethos not only claims him but should claim every Christian. His opening prayer clearly signals his felt reliance on the living communion of saints, who are not silent but continue to speak, with the Virgin at their head. May the tender Mother of God herself procure for me the spirit of wisdom profitably and thoroughly to expound this song of hers, so that your Grace [Prince John Frederick] as well as we all may draw from it wholesome knowledge and a praiseworthy life, and thus come to chant and sing this Magnificat eternally in heaven. To this may God help us. Amen.21

Luther finds in Mary’s song three main themes: the great works and deeds of God, the strengthening of the faith of believers and the simultaneous comforting of those of low estate and the rendering responsible of the politically powerful. ‘We are to let the hymn serve this threefold purpose,’ concludes Luther, ‘for she sang it not for herself alone but for us all, to sing it after her.’22 Because I am offering a reading of Luther that does not attempt to distil his ideas into a ‘Lutheran ethic’, and which differs substantially from Luther as he is typically presented in English-speaking theology, I will allow him to speak for himself through regular quotation of his own wordings.23 It is important to attend to his pregnant and intentional use of metaphors and biblical images, with which he approaches traditional doctrinal claims from angles that he hopes will open ethically potent new ways of perceiving in his audience.24 I also think that the way Luther uses Scripture in ‘The Magnificat’ is highly instructive for those working in ethics today. Becoming Aware of God’s Activity No aspect of Luther’s theology is more relevant today than his insistence that at the heart of the Christian life is the problem of living what has already been confessed. From the very beginning of his call for reform, Luther wanted to



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drive theological thinking into the conflicted borderland between rational thought and gut feeling in order that trust in God might be given the space to unify Christians’ actions with the confessions of their minds and mouths. His quest is to come to terms with what it means to live in peace, to live as those to whom God has not just promised, but is actually bringing peace.25 His starting point in describing the genesis of human peaceableness has a counterintuitive ring to contemporary ears: from Mary we learn that becoming peaceable begins by becoming tangibly aware of God’s acts as the dominant force in world occurrence. we confess in the creed: “I believe in God the Father, the Almighty.” He is almighty because it is His power alone that works in all and through all and over all … This is a most important article of faith … It points out the reason why God alone is to be exalted – because He does all things. That is easily said but hard to believe and to translate into life. For those who carry it out in their lives are most peaceable, composed, and simple-hearted folk, who lay no claim to anything, well knowing it is not theirs but God’s. This, then, is the meaning of these words of the Mother of God [glossing Luke 1.49]: “In all those great and good things there is nothing of mine, but He who alone does all things, and whose power works in all, has done such great things for me.” For the word “mighty” does not denote a quiescent power, as one says of a temporal king that he is mighty even though he may be sitting still and doing nothing. But it denotes an energetic power, a continuous activity, that works and operates without ceasing.26

For those of us used to thinking about divine action in the terminology of general revelation, common grace or natural law accounts (and this is most of us, I would suggest), this opening move by Luther will be comprehensible only if we grasp the distinctive grammar of Luther’s understanding of the pervasiveness of the divine working.27 In a characteristic passage from his commentary on Psalm 2, he says: [God] wills to speak … when we, almost despairing, decide that He will keep silence forever … Here we must observe the Hebrew way of expression. For when Scripture says that God speaks, it understands a word related to a real thing or action [verbum reale], not just a sound, as ours is … when He speaks, the mountains tremble, kingdoms are scattered, then indeed the whole earth is moved. This is a language different from ours. When the sun rises, when the sun sets, God speaks. When the fruits grow in size, when human beings are born, God speaks. Accordingly the words of God are not empty air, but things very great and wonderful, which we see with our eyes and feel with our hands. For when, according to Moses, the Lord said “Let there be a sun, let there be a moon, let the earth bring forth trees,” etc. [Gen. 1], as soon as He said it, it was done. No one heard this voice, but we see the works and the things themselves before our eyes, and we touch them with our hands.28

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God’s speaking is performative in the most perfect sense: it both means and does precisely what it says.29 This emphasis on articulacy of divine acting is reiterated in Luther’s treatment of the Magnificat when he writes, we find men today who do not praise the goodness of God, because they cannot see that they have received the same things as St. Peter or any other of the saints, or as this or that man living on earth. They imagine they also would praise and love God if they possessed as much as these, and they despise the good gifts of God which are showered so abundantly upon them and which they altogether overlook – such as life, body, reason, goods, honor, friends, the ministrations of the sun and all created things. And even if they had all the good things of Mary, they still would not recognize God in them or praise Him because of them.30

Though affirming that human beings are concrete recipients of God’s creative and sustaining works, Luther emphasizes the importance of appreciating these divine works as outflowings of God’s personal regard. ‘His good things are merely gifts, which last for a season; but his grace and regard are the inheritance, which lasts forever, as St. Paul says in Romans 6.23: “The grace of God is eternal life.”’ Thus, Luther concludes, ‘In the gifts we touch his hand, but in his gracious regard we receive His heart, Spirit, Mind and will.’31 In the City of God, Augustine explains the distinction between rational and experiential knowledge by suggesting that in heaven we will rationally recall our sin and redemption but forget the experience of them.32 The opposite, Luther is suggesting, is true in this life. We may rationally know Christ, but what matters is that this knowledge be filled out as experienced redemption, which is the only way that rational knowledge can become real or complete knowledge. At the heart of Luther’s Reformation discovery was the affirmation that Christian language and doctrine must be discovered not only in their conceptual depth and richness, but crucially, in all their meaning as applicable to my case.33 We may be able to recite and affirm that God is the Creator and Redeemer, but to live trusting this claim is another matter entirely, and indeed the central and enduring challenge of Christian faith.34 The decisive connections between Christology, pneumatology and the orienting specificity of divine action are made clear in Luther’s Eucharistic theology. Here Luther takes the Lord’s Supper to be the primal liturgical form in which the goodness of all God’s works can be learned, the place where Jesus Christ’s power to open eyes and ears is held out to humans.35 The Eucharistic feast offers human beings a hermeneutic key opening up the ways of God’s action in the world by making nature’s fertility tangible as an articulate act of divine mercy.36 This Eucharistic theology in turn rests upon a reading of the creation account. The second paragraph of Luther’s treatise on the Magnificat extends his opening appeal to the work of the Spirit as the divine person who creates life from the wretched and dead – so linking creation ex nihilo with justification and sanctification.37 This cluster of background moves lends the pivotal scene in the Genesis account, the giving of the first command, an unexpected scope and intelligibility: ‘You may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge



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of good and evil you shall not eat’ (Gen. 2.17). At the very outset of this story we are shown how God’s word, which through the Spirit gave form to the very structure of the world, also indicates the proper human relation to that world. The creation texts thus draw us into a theologically articulated account of the web of relations between divine words and things. The first command is luminous until a new set of questions heralds the human defection from God’s speaking via moral casuistry: Do you mean this apple, or that one, they ask?38 This is why the question of how God’s speaking comes through and connects to things is the primary arena in which life with God and responsibility to creatures must be discovered.39 Luther’s theology assumes both that the fine grained activity of discernment that is required for human living is essential to living with God and that its content is not contained in Scripture that, by definition, is equally close and far away from every time and place. Only because the same Word who is creator has promised to speak through the sheer materiality of creation can we affirm that obedience is not only possible, but is already awakened in the gift of perceiving which are the salient surfaces of a multi-surfaced created world. Christian ethics in such a register is like empiricism in assuming that engagement with the material world is constitutive of knowledge and action. Christian faith renders this engagement a genuinely critical one in always being ready to be confronted and corrected in its faith that all interaction with the material world is first and primarily an engagement with the Trinitarian God. This is to understand the academic discipline of Christian ethics as serving the attempts of the faithful to know and live as an act of grateful response to the divine works of creation and redemption – an act of celebration of the performative divine Word finding its consummation in human lives. Being Claimed by God through Creaturely Bodies My formulation here takes for granted that for Luther the essential continuity of the Old and New Testaments is to be found in the relation of word and worship in locating human action. These connections are succinctly laid out in his Genesis commentary: the Word must always be taken into consideration and honored as that by which God takes hold of, and, as it were, clothes the creatures; and a difference must be made between the creature and the Word. In the Sacrament of the Altar there are bread and wine; in Baptism there is water. These are creatures, but creatures apprehended by the Word. As long as the creature is apprehended by the Word, so long it is and does what the Word promises … Consider only whether there is a promise and a command; for this is what imparts to the creatures a new power beyond that power which they have through nature.40

To ask which creatures are ‘clothed’ by the divine Word in a manner that makes a claim on us is to insist that Christian ethics remain an investigation into life with the Trinitarian God, and, moreover, that this God does not claim us for

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responsibility by way of general rules that we have to apply, but as the divine Word appears, as Bonhoeffer tended to put it, ‘standing between’ us and other creatures.41 The incarnate Word will have to ‘clothe’ particular creatures in order that we can respond to God by responding rightly to creatures. The agent of any such making-of-connections will be the Holy Spirit, and we will need to explicate how the work of the Spirit relates to the work of the other two persons of the Trinity. I have been stressing that as we do so, Luther insists that we keep constantly in mind that central strands of the biblical traditions teach us to expect this divine articulacy normally to meet us through creaturely bodies.42 Conceiving of right human action as a responding to the divine works is not only superior to ethics concerned with defining good acts, but also to theological ethics that derive ethical claims from assertions about the being of God. As Luther continues in his comments on the Magnificat:43 Many philosophers and men of great acumen have also engaged in the endeavor to find out the nature of God … [and] yet all have gone blind over their task and failed of the proper insight. And, indeed, it is the greatest thing in heaven and on earth, to know God correctly if that may be granted to one. This the Mother of God teaches us here in a masterly fashion, if we would only listen … in and by her own experience. How can one know God better than in the works in which He is most Himself? Whoever understands His works correctly cannot fail to know His nature and will. His heart and mind. Hence to understand his works is an art.44

This formulation is a challenge to modern Protestantism on two fronts. First, Luther insists that divine action is the sole point orienting faithful human action. And second, he emphasizes the embedding of divine action in creaturely mediation. He asks us to conceive the dynamics of human ethical orientation as grounded in an attentiveness to God’s work in the world which draws us out of and beyond our own narratives, rather than forcing us inward into a life oriented by the promptings of the conscience and inward examination. Later Lutherans like Bonhoeffer emphasize this in observations such as: ‘Conscience is not the voice of God within sinful human beings; instead it is precisely their defense against this voice.’45 To be creatures, Scripture insists, is to be those whose essential sustenance is the hearing of the word of the Lord.46 Luther’s ethic emerges from his observation that in the depictions of good human action depicted in the biblical traditions a central role is played by ‘hearing the word of the Lord’. In this recovery, Luther refused to disparage creaturely, bodily sensation, and therefore understood ‘hearing’ to go beyond the auditory organs and to encompass a wide spectrum of bodily sensitivities. He thus challenges us to give up the narrower idea that ‘hearing the word of the Lord’ is something that never happens to us moderns, or happens only to prophets on mountains or through the occasional sermon. It is an account that also assumes the radically anti-modern presumption that interpersonal trust rather than rational certainty is the fundament of Christian



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life, a claim that challenges post-Enlightenment accounts of the relation between theoretical and experiential knowledge.47 As creatures with limited powers of perception, our trust is always liable to being invested in the wrong powers and subjects, and so perpetually needs to be revised, corrected and redirected. It is for this reason that Christians confess their perpetual reliance on the Holy Spirit as teacher (διδακτοῖς, 1 Cor. 2.13). It is neither a derivative form of knowledge nor an embarrassment that human knowledge is temporal and local in nature and, thus, reliant on this instruction. On the contrary, to admit that we know God and creatures in this sensate way is to embrace our status as creatures, rather than as gods who can somehow possess complete knowledge. To stress this point Luther opens his comment on the Magnificat with an appeal to the Holy Spirit, reminding the reader from the outset that his whole approach falls apart if his pneumatology is overlooked: In order properly to understand this sacred hymn of praise, we need to bear in mind that the Blessed Virgin Mary is speaking on the basis of her own experience, in which she was enlightened and instructed by the Holy Spirit. No one can correctly understand God or His Word unless he has received such understanding immediately from the Holy Spirit. But no one can receive it from the Holy Spirit without experiencing, proving, and feeling it. In such experience the Holy Spirit instructs us as in His own school, outside of which nothing is learned but empty words and prattle.48

Given this passage and others quoted above, it would be easy to read Luther’s account, with its apparent focus on the individual’s faith, as a precursor to the individualism of modern ethical decisionism. But if we are to take seriously that Luther’s treatise is a commentary on Scripture, we must keep firmly before us that the entire matrix of the piece is explicitly communal, ecclesial and so political. Scripture is an essentially communal form of the mediation of knowledge, and Luther’s treatise was composed as a pastoral response to a fellow believer. Luther’s treatment of the Magnificat thus presses a question back on us: can the contemporary and entirely appropriate emphasis on the primacy of the church in Christian self-understanding infinitely defer speaking of the inner tasks, discipline and daily living of the individual believer? Luther thinks not and in this he is taught by Scripture. For Christians, there is no ‘I’ except in Jesus Christ and therefore within the ecclesial ‘we’. There is also no ecclesial ‘we’ not constituted by those centres of agency which have been turned to Christ by the Holy Spirit. Only a truncated ecclesiology would deny some role to individual agency in Christian discipleship, and once admitted, the place and tasks of this agency also deserve the sort of focused theological description we find exemplified in Luther. So much for Luther’s account of the orientation of human by divine action; we now turn to the question of what this means for Luther’s understanding of Christian self-discipline.

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III. The Discipline of Embracing the Divine Vivification By emphasizing that the initiating agent of human transformation and ethical redirection is divine, Luther is not downplaying the inward intellectual and volitional work entailed in responding to perceived divine action. In the gap between intellectual beliefs and experience of the world, the human task of responding to divine acts entails sifting through and renouncing our selfinterested gut instincts in order to open ourselves to what we might call a God-saturated and therefore other-interested gut.49 Luther compares the location of this discipline of the self to the holy of holies in the tabernacle – an inner recess in which we must exercise trust in God by negotiating the inevitable gaps between our rational beliefs and felt experiences of divine action. Though ‘God dwells in the darkness of faith’ beyond affect and reason, it is out of this ‘beyond’ which can only be named from the human side as ‘trust’ that human affect, rationality and will are steered.50 Luther is resisting any moral theology that supposes that it is sufficient to call for an act of rationality or will to establish new and better habits. In Luther’s view, habit is what keeps people from being light and flexible, genuinely free to be diverted by the other through whom God claims us.51 What we really need is to have our affections reoriented by receiving a will to resist those habits of ours that have become settled ways of protecting ourselves from change.52 Here again Luther draws on a Hebraism: the eyes are the heart’s windows and perceive differently according to changes in the heart.53 It is in vain, therefore, to teach men to be humble by teaching them to set their eyes on lowly things, nor does anyone become proud by setting his eyes on lofty things. Not the things [Bilder] but our eyes [Sehweise, “visual range”] must be changed; for we must spend our life here in the midst of things both lowly and lofty … Moses does not tell us (Gen. 3.7) that Adam and Eve saw different things after the Fall, but he says their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked, though they had been naked before and were not aware of it.54

It was the turn to regarding the self in abstraction from God’s working that accounted for the changed visual range of the fallen couple. Any ethic they could have constructed would have simply been an expression of their desire to form their own identity outside of an external orientation on the ongoing works of God, thereby entrenching their rebellion. So, while the catalyst for Christian sanctification is the realization that God has approached me as a lowly individual, this approach is only properly received if we do not forget that it was genuinely a divine work. Recollection, Luther suggests, begins with the refusal to take my own narrative of my identity too seriously, which Luther defines as the virtue of humility. ‘[H]umility is so tender and precious a thing that … God must reserve to Himself the right to know and look at humility, and must hide it from us by setting before our eyes things of low degree and exercising us in them so that we may forget to look at ourselves.’55



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Luther finds Mary’s song a paradigmatic biblical performance of the Christian life in its subject-sensitive and yet outwardly focused attention to the divine working, an awareness of her place in the economy of God’s works that transfigures her relations with all her creaturely neighbours. Because she experienced God’s regard despite ‘the low estate of His handmaiden’ (Lk 1.48), her perception has been decisively reconfigured by her awareness of God’s regard for lowly things – including her.56 Perceiving God’s works, she has, in trust and therefore intellectually and volitionally, joyfully embraced them as tokens of God’s will to continue God’s story with humanity. Her joy at this revelation has made her a broadcaster in word and works of God’s will to rescue humanity: Mary confesses that the foremost work God did for her was that He regarded her, which is indeed the greatest of His works, on which all the rest depend and from which they all derive. From where it comes to pass that God turns His face toward one to regard him, there is nothing but grace and salvation, and all the gifts and work must follow.57

Since both the trust of the human heart and the acts of God are dynamic phenomena, it would be inaccurate to call Mary virtuous, which would stress the glory of the wrong agent as well as wrongly suggesting that attentiveness to God is a habit that could be narrated from the side of the human agent, and so could be cultivated regardless of whether or not God makes an appearance.58 ‘They, therefore, do her an injustice who hold that she gloried, not indeed in her virginity, but in her humility,’ Luther continues, She gloried neither in the one nor in the other, but only the gracious regard of God. Hence the stress lies not on the word “low estate,” but on the word “regarded.” For not her humility, but God’s regard is to be praised.59

Mary’s joy springs from her experience of a God whose regard for the lowly and humble has become patent. The moral example she offers to us lies in the form of her praise of God, into which, through Scripture, she invites us. Hers is a praise that retunes Christian perception away from tactics, strategy and success by asking us to appreciate the pervasiveness of the divine care and also to anticipate God intervening in the expected course of human affairs. ‘He who is mighty has done great things for me,’ (Lk. 1.49) Mary says, to which Luther responds: ‘these few words of the Spirit are so great and profound that no one can comprehend them without having, at least in part, the same Spirit.’60 Continuing to emphasize the inner source of good human action, Luther now describes good human action as works that are pleasing to God not because they praise in words, but because they are bodily caught up in the movement of God’s own grace and goodness. when one ponders well His divine works in the depths of his heart and regards them with wonder and gratitude so that one breaks out from very ardor into sighs and groanings rather than into speech; when the words, not nicely chosen

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The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist or prescribed, flow forth in such a way that the spirit comes seething with them, and the works live and have hands and feet, in fact, the whole body and life with all its members strives and strains for utterance – that is indeed a worship of God in spirit and truth, and such words are all fire, light, and life.61

It is perennially tempting to analyse ourselves to see if we have achieved the virtue of humility. Mary, however, models behaviour going even further than a disinterest in self-presentation. Those who are truly humble gladly and naturally associate with those of low status and in doing so they not only resist the urge to publicize their acts but it also ‘never once enters their mind that they are humble’, observes Luther.62 It also does not enter their mind to speak about God neutrally or objectively: God’s genuine acts are not ones that can be discussed with detachment.63 no one can praise God without first loving Him. No one can love Him unless He makes Himself known to him in the most lovable and intimate fashion. And He can make himself known only through those works of His which He reveals in us, and which we feel and experience within ourselves. But where there is this experience, namely, that He is a God who looks into the depths and helps only the poor, despised, afflicted, miserable forsaken and those who are nothing, there a hearty love for him is born. The heart overflows with gladness and goes leaping and dancing for the great pleasure it has found in God.64

Though not written in the context of Luther’s more formal disputations, this passage would not be out of place in his university lectures, and we find it in a work Luther explicitly understood as a treatise of instruction in political theology. It is certainly potent advice as a reply to Prince John Fredrick’s request for direction in how to understand his duties of governance. Luther concludes his reading of the Magnificat by quickly sketching a few of the political entailments of his account. When the Christian ruler has learned to recognize all good things as personally addressed divine gifts, and so not his by right of possession, he will handle them in responsibility to the divine giver, which means to exhibit a form of rule that holds one’s own human opinions and rights loosely in order to govern out of a lowliness of spirit.65 This starting point yields the following three political maxims: first, desiring a good end does not hallow every means. Second, it befits the responsibilities of the ruler to render political judgements that negotiate specific cases without losing sight of the good of the whole polis. Finally, because Christian faith is a matter of the heart, it cannot be forced. Thus, a policy of religious tolerance should be promulgated.66 Here Barth’s understanding of the distinction between responding to God’s acts and engaging in moral instruction helps us better to understand Luther. These political maxims are not a new moral law displacing the direct divine claim, but a few exemplary expressions of how political rule might be carried out by a ruler who, in having been made humble, now ‘finds great pleasure’ in serving the God who is caring for and lifting up the lowly. The condition of this new seeing and responsivity is her holding of her own ideas loosely as she looks to observe and serve God’s care for the whole community.



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IV. Conclusion: An Ethics of Responsivity I have displayed several ways in which the central theological emphases of Luther’s understanding of ethics as responsivity to God frame his account of the disciplines demanded of Christian faith. I hope it has also become clear why he has approached this question by asking how the eternal God reaches inside of the limited spaces in which we live to reveal ways forward in the face of our sense that all the options have run out, or that the moral pressures on us are hopelessly complex.67 The inherent riskiness of living with God has been displaced in the dominant streams of academic Christian or ‘religious’ ethics by the very different sensation that it is making any direct reference at all to the living works of God that is too risky to contemplate. Following Barth, I have suggested that such attempts always end in the sterility and silence that descends upon merely human attempts to derive and apply moral norms, in whatever school of thought. Ultimately, Luther is looking to train Christians to pay attention, to provoke them to a deeper responsivity to God’s care for others by weaning them from the desire to either live by ‘applying moral norms’ or to ‘form themselves’ into better people. What becomes clear in his advice to Prince Fredrick is that he thinks that only in this way can we come to inhabit a truly Christian ethic. Not harried by the tasks demanded by the local context, not trapped in routines and laws, the saints who Luther envisages are light and flexible, genuinely free because clinging to God allows them to hold loosely to their own ideas along with the idols and moral conventions of the day.68 Both more supple and mobile than dominant approaches today, such an ethic comes into its own in the vast gaps between those few narrow fields in which academic ethicists have written treatises. This developed corpus of ethical thought remains instructive when understood as a collection of displays of the arts of moral argumentation that can be used to supplement and train, but never replace, the awareness of the individual that we may know what we want to or should do, but that this is not to be equated with serving God’s own working. Our living is constantly beholden to follow a claim made on us from outside ourselves and that is always a calling of individuals as part of the community of the body of Christ.69 Here again Luther’s understanding of the quotidian setting of the divine working can help us give flesh to such a theological ethic since, at sensitive points, he is much more influenced by a biblical understanding of God’s active working and speaking throughout creaturely occurrence than Barth.70 Nonetheless, the demands that such an understanding of Christian ethics places on the academic theologian today are admittedly substantial. Having come to know themselves as insignificant beings who have been lifted up, the theologian, like all Christians, should now be characterized by a special attentiveness for the divine working in the lowly and despised. True humility: clings with all its heart and mind and senses to lowly things, sets them continually before its eyes, and ponders them in its thoughts. And because it sets them before its eyes, it cannot see itself nor become aware of itself, much less of

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The strong emphasis here on the power of divine works to direct attention to the lowly and to puncture self-important attitudes is a potent challenge to those of us working in the modern academy. What are we to make of the existential discomfort and methodological difficulties that such a comment provokes in the context of academic ethics today? Can there be a Christian ethics, let alone an ethics in the Reformation tradition, that evades talking of a loving God, or which is not visibly animated by the ‘great pleasure it has found in God’ and is not actively waiting for God’s lifting up of the ‘the afflicted and forsaken’ and which has not fallen prey to the idol of respect of persons? The reification of Barth’s talk of human responsivity to God’s actions into a ‘divine command theory’ was one of the more sophisticated and so devastating evasions of this challenge. Insofar as the momentum of the academy and our guild drives us to be absorbed in defending our positions and expanding our influence, or, as Hauerwas has so often put it, teaching Christians to be tolerant citizens out of the hankering to ‘make nations’ work, Luther’s call for Marian humility remains a challenging stance to strike while negotiating life as an academic ethicist. Prayerfully to conceive of human action in this way is only sustainable in the hope that life giving inversions of our self-understanding can be counted on from a God who has promised to liberate us from the tenacious orientation to our own projects that cannot but inflame our fears and propel destructive attempts to protect what is ‘ours’ at all costs.72 It thus foregrounds the problem of repentance and real change in Christian ethics not only for ‘the church’, but also for the theological ethicist.73 A theological ethics evoked by Luther and Barth will be characterized by sustained and careful attention to the problems that beset individual lives, and will be absorbed by the pastoral task of helping Christians to find their way by emphasizing the ethical implications of different ways of attending to the world and understanding ourselves. Loving God as God, instead of as the guarantor of our success, frees human beings to admit that God graciously judges the worth of our actions and in so doing frees us from the need to present ourselves as sinless agents.74 By confessing that it is impossible to give ourselves life, Luther has radically changed the ethical question. We no longer ask whether or how we can change ourselves, but rather how we can be changed.75 Every answer we dare to venture to this question will express a life-orienting trust in the hope held out to us by someone (or something).

Endnotes   1. George Hunsinger’s essay, ‘What Karl Barth learned from Martin Luther’, Lutheran Quarterly XIII (1999): 125–55, can only be considered a fruitful beginning in this direction.   2. Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford



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University Press, 2010), 217–18. While there are clues in his ethic of creation that might be read as concretizing the forms the divine claim on specific human lives might take, in order to pick out these clues we will need to be oriented by a more precise articulation of the mechanisms of the divine work of encounter than Barth is prepared to offer, but which may be excavated from Luther.   3. The language of ‘determination’ used here follows Hans Ulrich’s usage in the previous chapter in this volume.   4. Luther, ‘Magnificat’ (1521). LW 21, 298. Translated from ‘Das Magnificat verdeutscht and ausgelegt 1521’, in Luther Deutsch: Die Schriftauslegung, Bd. 5, ed. Kurt Aland (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 274–340.   5. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 68–94.   6. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Conversing with the Saints as they Converse with Scripture: In Conversation with Brian Brock’s Singing the Ethos of God’, European Journal of Theology 18:2 (2009): 125–36.   7. John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul T. Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007); Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace; William Werpehowski, Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); David Clough, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005); Daniel Migliore, Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Having myself been schooled by Barth and his appreciative British interpreters, most notably by Colin Gunton and Michael Banner, I can only welcome these new expositional defenses. See Banner, ‘Turning the World Upside Down – and Some Other Tasks for Dogmatic Christian Ethics’, in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–46; Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007).   8. The initial misreading labelled Barth a practitioner of ‘command ethics’ and gained influence through the first English language scholarly treatment by Robert Willis, The Ethics of Karl Barth (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Reacting against this misreading, many more recent interpreters swung to the opposite pole, notes Gerald McKenny. ‘Both the earlier and more recent interpretations of Barth’s practical ethics fall short precisely to the extent that they shift the focus away from this encounter [with the Trinitarian God], whether to the divine decision alone (arguing that Barth leaves no room for human deliberation and choice) or to the human decision (arguing that Barth offers a variation on a standard form of moral reasoning).’ What both misreadings overlook, McKenny continues, is that, ‘where other theories of ethics speak of moral reasoning, deliberation, or discernment, Barth speaks of ethical reflection as the attitude and practice in which we encounter God and of ethical instruction as the moral knowledge we pursue in order to prepare ourselves for this encounter.’ McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 228–9. Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the most influential of Barth’s English-speaking detractors (in the US, at least). He criticizes Barth, and also Luther, for repudiating the best moral insights and ‘ethical principles’ of unbelievers. Thus, ‘the theological movement initiated by Karl Barth has affected the thought of the church profoundly, but only negatively; and it has not challenged the thought outside the church at all.’ Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. II (London: Nisbet & Co., 1943), 165.

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James Gustafson’s infamous labelling of Hauerwas as ‘sectarian, fideist, tribalist’ is a marker of the hegemonic influence of Niebuhr’s assessment of Barth. Hauerwas has summarized the configuration of Niebuhr’s ‘almost unlimited animus against Barth’. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (London: SCM, 2002), 128 fn.33.   9. Stanley Hauerwas’s decision to frame his doctoral thesis as a correction of ‘command ethics’ is an especially obvious example of how: (1) Barth served as the matrix of a resurgent discipline of theological ethics; (2) Willis’s reading of Barth as a ‘divine command ethicist’ determined the English speaking reception; and (3) appreciative receptions of Barth tend to downplay the role he gave to divine agency (as noted by McKenny). See Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 2–10, 83–128. Hauerwas’s work was a child of the resurgence of interest in Barth at Yale catalysed by the teaching of Robert Calhoun and disseminated by George Lindbeck. See Robert L. Calhoun, Scripture, Creed, Theology: Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries, ed. George A. Lindbeck (Eugene: Cascade, 2011). 10. Hans Ulrich, ‘Karl Barths Darstellung Theolgischer Ethik: Forum für die gegenwärtige Verständigung über Ethik im englischsprachigen Kontext’, Theologische Literaturezeitung 138:3 (2013): 279–94; Hans Ulrich, ‘Zur Dringlichkeit des Barth’schen Paradigmas theologischer Ethik heute’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 29 (2013): 73–103; Ulrich, ‘Ethos als Zeugnis: Konturen christlichen Lebens mit Gott in der “Welt” bei Stanley Hauerwas und Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 29 (2013): 50–73. This is not to deny McKenny’s emphasis (in his chapter in this volume) that in his ethics Barth is trying to overcome perceived deficiencies in the ethics of Luther and Calvin, but to note that he does so explicitly as an attempt to repair and so extend what he understands to be their core emphases. The sharp point of my enquiry in this essay therefore concerns how the church’s constitutive practices are narrated, and it is at this point that important divergences between Luther and Barth become apparent. 11. Barth writes: ‘The problem of ethics generally – the law or good or value which it seeks as a standard by which human action and modes of action are to be measured, and according to which they are to be performed, the problem of the truth and knowledge of the good – is no problem at all in the ethics immanent in the Christian conception of God, in the doctrine of the command of God. … conversely, that which is no problem at all to ethical thought generally, or only a problem which can be lightly pushed aside and left open – the actual situation of man in face of the question by which he is confronted when he answers the ethical question, his actual commitment to the good, his actual distance from it and the actual overcoming of this distance (not by himself, but by the actuality of the good itself) – this is the burning problem of Christian ethics, the very aim and content of the whole ethical enquiry and reply.’ CD II/2, 519. 12. Barth writes: ‘[M]an is not content simply to be the answer to this question by the grace of God. He wants to be like God. He wants to know himself (as God does) what is good and evil. He therefore wants to give this answer himself and of himself. So, then, as a result and in prolongation of the fall, we have “ethics,” or, rather, the multifarious ethical systems, the attempted human answers to the ethical question. But this question can be solved only as it was originally put – by the grace of God, by the fact that this allows man actually to be the answer … The man Jesus, who fulfils



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the commandment of God, does not give the answer, but by God’s grace He is the answer to the ethical question put by God’s grace … The Son, who is obedient to the Father, could not possibly want to ask and decide what is good and evil. He could not possibly regard as the good that which He had chosen for Himself as such. No, it is as He is elected by the grace of God that the good is done.’ CD II/2, 517. Later in this volume Barth writes: ‘What right conduct is for man is determined absolutely in the right conduct of God. It is determined in Jesus Christ.’ CD II/2, 538. It is on these grounds that Barth concludes, ‘Certainly the existence of [a] general conception of ethics as an answer to the question of the good is an exceedingly instructive fact. It confirms the truth of the grace of God which as it is addressed to man puts the question of the good which such priority over all others … Strange as it may seem, that general conception of ethics coincides exactly with the conception of sin.’ CD II/1, 518. 13. Barth has a clear account of the role of ethical reasoning in framing human alertness to the divine claim, as McKenny observes: ‘[M]oral theology cannot determine which among the possibilities of action that in principle embody this character and meet these standards is the action that God commands. This kind of ethical inquiry can determine whether an act is a normal act that falls in the interior of a domain or a paradoxical act that falls on the boundary. But, it cannot determine whether, in a situation of decision, God will command a normal act or a paradoxical one.’ McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 261. In addition, Nimmo points out that Barth allows, but does not himself pursue, a set of subsidiary operations in theological ethics: ‘In a short but intriguing passage, Barth postulates that there could be a legitimate ethics alongside theological ethics called “Christian ethics” … This kind of ethics would have the same starting point, basis, and aim as theological ethics … However, it would not formally investigate these fundamental principles and would thus be distinct from theological ethics. A way would thus be open for a more practical and less academic presentation of ethics that was explicitly not attempted by Barth in the Church Dogmatics, but that would be possible and even necessary in the Christian life.’ Nimmo, Being in Action, 78. My proposal is that Luther teaches us to read Barth precisely because he does not suffer from the rift that McKenny and Nimmo are trying to heal in Barth. 14. The sharpest recent articulation of how Luther reads Scripture as liberating us from moral action understood as one long string of tragic compromises is Sean Doherty’s Theology and Economic Ethics: Martin Luther and Arthur Rich in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–70, 139–92. 15. Bonhoeffer, ‘The “Ethical” and the “Christian” as a Topic’, Ethics, DBWE 6, 384. 16. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, x–xxi. 17. It is worth noting that one of Ulrich’s definitions of ‘Lutheran ethics’ can clearly be applied to Barth, which suggests why we might refer to there being a ‘tradition’ of Christian ethics stretching from Luther to Barth to Ulrich. ‘Lutheran ethics has to be described as a tradition in a theologically determined meaning of tradition. Its grammar doesn’t follow a ratio (logos) according to an abstract relation between God and man, but it reflects a particular dramatic coexistence and cooperation of God and human beings as it appears in those practices.’ Hans Ulrich, ‘The Future of Ethics within the Reformation Heritage’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 25:2 (2012): 174–80, citation from 177. 18. If we translate the living God’s claim into a set of general rules or norms that we are responsible for applying in our particular contexts, Barth insists, we force people

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into the role of judges of good and evil. The effect is to insulate ourselves from the encounter with the claim of a living God that critically and productively overturns illegitimate human moral certainties. In Barth’s view the role of the ethicist is primarily to introduce Christians to the history of God’s acts in order to prepare them to encounter this divine claim. Such instruction informs believers’ prayerful anticipation of the divine encounter which they must always pursue individually, though never in abstraction from the ecclesia. This is not to deny that important critical questions have been raised about Barth’s description of the divine encounter. McKenny lists four of the most important in The Analogy of Grace, 233–4. These criticisms also alert us to the problem of the silence of God, which Barth, unlike Scripture (and Luther), seems to ascribe solely to the inability of the human agent properly to listen. See Barth, CD II/2, 648 and III/4, 12. Kathryn Green-McCreight’s Darkness is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), John Colwell’s Why Have You Forsaken Me? A Personal Reflection on the Experience of Desolation (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2009) and Kristin Swenson’s, Living Through Pain: Psalms and the Search for Wholeness (Waco: Baylor, 2005) remind us with their reflections on mental illness and ill health that Barth’s elision of this theme not only overlooks an important aspect of the biblical witness but also ethical questions with sweeping pastoral import. 19. Luther writes: ‘Moses said to the Lord … if I have found favour in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favour in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people. He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” (Exod. 33.12-14).’ The question I am here ascribing to Luther is also a gloss on Barth’s more expansive wording: ‘How can we really come to the point where, in accordance with the command, we may treat the good, not as something alien, but as our very own rendering to the command outward and inward obedience, as those who are obedient from their hearts, in fellowship with another, and in the inward peace which it obviously requires from us?’ CD II/2, 746. 20. As my treatment will make clear, Luther’s understanding of Mary operates entirely within the much more formal theological constraints enjoined by Barth, in CD I/2, 138–46. Late in his career Barth said if he were a Roman Catholic, he would write theology from the perspective of Mariology as here the relationship between the work of God and the work of humanity in salvation: humanity must only ever say, ‘I am the handmaiden of the Lord.’ Karl Barth, Table Talk, ed. John Godsey (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), 43–4. See also Gespräch mit Tübinger «Stiftlern» (2.3.1964). In Eberhard Busch, ed., Gespräche 1964–1968 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1996), 106–7. 21. LW 21, 298. 22. LW 21, 306. 23. For a recent and penetrating depiction of this gap, see Michael Laffin, Martin Luther in the Modern Political Narrative: A Constructive Reappraisal of Luther’s Political Theology with Special Reference to the Institutions in Critical Conversation with John Milbank and Jennifer Herdt (University of Aberdeen doctoral thesis, 2014). 24. My approach parallels that of Bernd Wannenwetsch, who comments, ‘Luther’s theology – as perhaps any good theology – has its integrity and coherence less on the formal level in terms of a systematic relation of its parts, but more on the “grammatical” level – in the harmonious way in which the different language games it engages are resonating with one another.’ Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘An Explanatory Ethics of Good Works: A Fresh Look at Luther’s Moral Theology’, unpublished manuscript.



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25. ‘So crafty is this enemy [the devil] that he does not present the entire Christ to us; he presents only a part of Him, namely, that He is the Son of God and Man, born of the Virgin. Eventually he attaches something else to this, some saying in which Christ terrifies sinners, like Luke 13.3: “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” By adulterating the genuine definition of Christ with his poison he produces this effect, that although we believe that Christ is the mediator, in fact our troubled conscience feels and judges that He is a tyrant and a tormentor. So Satan deceives us, and we easily lose the pleasant sight of Christ, our high Priest and Mediator. … If I define Christ this way, I define Him correctly, grasp the authentic Christ, and truly make him my own. I avoid all speculations about the Divine Majesty and take my stand in the humanity of Christ. There is no fear here; there is sheer sweetness, joy and the like. This kindles a light that shows me the true knowledge of God, of myself, of all creatures, and of all the wickedness of the kingdom of the devil.    We are not teaching anything novel, we are repeating and confirming old doctrines. Would that we could teach and confirm them in such a way that we would have them not only in our mouth, but in the meditations at the very core of our heart and especially that we might be able to use them in the struggle of death!’ Luther, ‘Lectures on Galatians’, LW 26, 38–9. On my reading, this emphasis on the moral unity of the believer is preserved in Barth’s shifting of Luther’s emphasis on peace and joy to joy and peace. See CD III/4, 374–85. 26. LW 21, 328. 27. Luther’s robust sense of God’s activity allows for the distinction which was to become dominant in Calvinism, and had in a different way been present in Thomism, between special and general revelation, and also between common grace and special revelation, but incorporates emphases present in both distinctions in a manner that makes clear the ineradicable articulacy of divine action. This insistence on articulacy is essential for Barth: ‘Because He is ours and we are His, He gives us His command. Because He will not cease to be ours, as we cannot cease to be His, He cannot cease to give us His command. We are able to hear it, as surely as we belong to Him and to no one else. The question cannot be whether He speaks, but only whether we hear. And this means that we are already faced again by the question of our obedience or disobedience, our faith or ungodliness. For obedience and faith begin as we hear, as we recognize what is spoken to us.’ CD II/2, 670. 28. Luther, ‘Ps. 2’, LW 12, 32. 29. Oswald Bayer, A Contemporary in Dissent: Johann Georg Hamann as Radical Enlightener, trans. Roy Harrisville and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), ch. 9. 30. Luther, LW 21, 320. 31. Ibid., 324. 32. Augustine, The City of God, bk 22.30. 33. ‘Mary begins with herself and sings what He has done for her. Thus he teaches us a twofold lesson. First, every one of us should pay attention to what God does for Him rather than to all the works He does for others. For no one will be saved by what God does to another, but only by what He does to you … In the second place, she teaches us that everyone should strive to be foremost in praising God by showing forth the works He has done to him, and then by praising Him for the works He has done to others.’ LW 21, 318–19. 34. Luther ‘Lectures on Galatians’, LW 26, 38–9, 54.

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35. In other words, the Christ whose central action is to open human senses (Mk 7.34-5) has not receded to a heaven beyond this world, but has promised to remain within arm’s reach. 36. Though bathed in the divine address, human beings are tempted to complacency about God’s care in both the material and ritual worlds. ‘[W]e cannot sufficiently marvel at [the Lord’s Supper] and contemplate it in eternity. And yet, when we hear about it, we clods … yawn about it and say: “Oh, is this the first time you have ever seen a rotten apple drop from a tree?’” Luther, ‘Ps. 111’, LW 13, 373. This is not to claim that the tangibility of divine action can be equated with what is empirically perceptible. In his sermon, ‘The daughter of the ruler of the synagogue raised from the dead, Matthew 9’, Luther extols to the example of the woman with the issue of blood. It is because in faith she already ‘sees peace’ that she reaches out to touch Jesus’ garment though all material reality denies this will be effective. ‘She desired nothing besides this Word, nor did she ask for more than merely to touch his garment, which she used as an external means and sign to gain the desired help. Likewise, we need nothing more in our lives and in the kingdom of faith than the external Word and Sacraments, in which he permits himself to be touched and seized as if by his garment.’ Therefore, ‘he who desires to learn how to perceive and understand God’s kingdom, power and work, must shut his mind and understanding, purify his eyes, cleanse his ears, and see and hear what Christ says in this matter, and how it is in his sight apart from this life, where our understanding, mind and thought cannot reach’. Luther, ‘The daughter of the ruler of the synagogue raised from the dead, Matthew 9’, in Sermons of Martin Luther, Vol. 5, Sermons on Gospel Texts for the 13th to the 26th Sundays after Trinity, ed. and trans. John Nicholas Lenker (Albany, OR: Books For The Ages, 1997), 311–12, 317–18. 37. Luther writes: ‘Just as God in the beginning of creation made the world out of nothing, whence He is called the Creator and the Almighty, so His manner of working continues unchanged. Even now and to the end of the world, all his works are such that out of that which is nothing, worthless, despised, wretched, and dead, He makes that which is something, precious, honourable, blessed, and living.’ LW 21, 299. 38. See Bonhoeffer’s chapter ‘The Pious Question’, in Creation and Fall, DBWE 3, 103–10. 39. For Luther and Barth, the grammar of the divine command is especially evident in the Eden account. Here, observes Barth, it is clearly depicted that what it means is that, ‘“what is good” has been “said” to man (Mic. 6.8), so that man has been forbidden to try to say it to himself, and bidden simply and faithfully to repeat what has been said to him.’ CD II/2,537. ‘We should not overlook the fact that, according to Gen. 3:1, this apparently well-founded objection was first raised – and raised by the serpent – when man was not at all confronted by a welter of possibilities, and could not evade the divine Law by exegesis and application, but when he was faced by the mandatum concretum or concretissimum, that he should not eat of a certain tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It will always be the case that when the divine command makes its impact upon us in its most concrete and piercing form we are most disposed to evade it by the suggestion that the divine will is so obscure that we have first to investigate and establish in what it actually consists.’ CD II/2, 670.    It is because he has this clear Edenic paradigm in view that Barth can later claim, ‘A general formal and abstract command is, strictly speaking, no command at all. First it must in all cases be heard, understood and acknowledged in itself; only on the basis of this apprehension and acknowledgment can it become a command. Even



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then, interpretation and application to a particular case – which is again left for us to carry out – are necessary so that something like a command can occur … A command whose truth is conditioned in this way is no command at all. A command – the command in its strongest sense, the command of God – is a demand that confronts us totally, over whose content we have no disposal and which therefore is in no need of filling out according to our own judgement.’ CD II/2, 665, translation modified according to McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 239. 40. LW 1, 228–9. 41. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, DBWE 5, 43–7. 42. It is on these grounds that Luther almost always reads ‘and God said’ in the Genesis accounts as spoken through a creaturely mouthpiece. See LW 1, 173, 262. With this line of reasoning, Luther comes near to projects like that of Eugene Rogers in Sexuality and the Christian Body (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), who is interested in how the Spirit opens eyes to other creatures. But Luther offers a more robust account of the ways that the given features of creaturely reality claim Christian discernment. This latter emphasis brings Luther into proximity with a work like Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), in which created order is understood to orient Christian ethical thinking. But again, Luther’s metaphysics of the divine Word play a more important role than the metaphysics of being and telos that orients O’Donovan’s work (along with most other versions of scholasticism, both Protestant and Catholic). The systematic task is to make sure that its foregrounding of the task of rightly hearing a living revelation mediated through the creaturely realm is presented in a manner that suggests neither an overly narrow nor an unhelpfully broad account of divine revelatory activity. 43. Luther draws a firmer and more traditional distinction between God’s being and acts than does Barth (as well documented in Nimmo, Being in Action, 17–61). Barth’s insistence on drawing the actualisim of the divine–human encounter back into the Godhead owes more to the systematizing framework of German Idealism, which shifted toward more univocal and symmetrical accounts of divine and human action than the earlier theological tradition. 44. LW 21, 331. God is magnified in our esteem for his works as experienced: ‘Mary says, “My soul magnifies him” – that is, my whole life and being, mind and strength, esteem Him highly. She is caught up, as it were, into Him and feels herself lifted up into His good and gracious will, as the following verse shows. It is the same when anyone shows us a signal of favor; our whole life seems to incline to him, and we say: “Ah, I esteem him highly”; that is to say, “My soul magnifies him.” How much more will such a lively inclination be awakened in us when we experience the favor of God, which is exceeding great in His works. All words and thoughts fail us, and our whole life and soul must be set in motion, as though all that lived within us wanted to break forth into praise and singing.’ LW 21, 307. 45. DBWE 3, 128. Here we find a clear rift between Luther, Bonhoeffer and, at least, the early Barth. In the Münster Ethics Barth deployed a neo-Kantian account of conscience as the central locus of moral orientation which we must ‘abandon any attempt to control’ it being the locus of ‘co-knowledge with God’ and when so described ‘a capacity which makes the enterprise of ethics very easy, but also in the true sense superfluous’. Barth, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 478–9. Barth continues: ‘Adam and Eve before the fall had no conscience to the extent that the ethical question was very simply posed by the command of life itself, not by a judicial voice in themselves which is

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in fact to the be distinguished from this command and which we call conscience … How can we have co-knowledge of that which essentially only God can know except on the presupposition that the “co-” is not just logically possible but – even perhaps as a logical impossibility – is indeed a fact? This factual reality, however, is our divine sonship, the reality of our eternal future reaching into our present, i.e. the future of the Lord who, in bringing himself to us, brings our own future. … To have a conscience is to know what is in God, to know his judgment of our conduct.’ Barth, Ethics, 476–7. The neo-Kantian resonances of direct divine knowledge in this account of conscience are significantly modified when in his late work Barth moves the themes of prayer and the work of the Spirit from sub-treatments under the theme of conscience to the main headings within which conscience is a subtheme. ‘In Johannine terms, God in the Holy Spirit makes himself the Paraclete, that is, their advocate in the forum of his judgment, but also their advocate at the forum of their conscience, the supreme and victorious advocate.’ Barth, The Christian Life: Lecture Fragments, CD IV/4, trans. Geoffrey Bromily (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 90. 46. Deut. 8.3, Amos 8.11, Mt. 4.4. 47. Luther writes: ‘For to praise the Lord with gladness is not a work of man; it is rather a joyful suffering and the work of God alone. It cannot be taught in words but must be learned in one’s own experience. Even as David says in Ps. 34.8: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is sweet; blessed is the man that trusts in Him.” He puts tasting before seeing, because this sweetness cannot be known unless one has experienced and felt if for himself; and no one can attain to such experiences unless he trusts in God with his whole heart when he is in the depths and in sore straits.’ LW 21, 302–3. ‘God cannot forsake those who trust in him … it is indeed necessary that we make a trial, and venture out on His Words; for Mary does not say that He has filled the full and exalted those of high degree, but: “He has filled the hungry and exalted those of low degree.” You must feel the pinch of poverty in the midst of your hunger and learn by experience what hunger and poverty are, with no provision on hand and no help in yourself or any other man, but in God only; so that the work may be God’s alone and impossible to be done by any other.’ Ibid., 347. 48. Ibid., 299. There are strong overlaps between Luther’s account of Mary’s prayer and Barth’s account of the work of receiving God’s claim and judgement. Barth writes: ‘The man who really prays never attempts to justify himself. In true prayer, he knows that he cannot do so. When we really pray, the voice of denial, which we have no power to stifle, definitely cannot be raised or heard. We are in the position where the only thing that we can hear is the divine sentence on man visited on Jesus Christ, and the only thing that we can express is the confession of the transgression and misery of man which Jesus Christ has one for all defeated. When we really pray we believe in Him; and the work of the Holy Spirit is in process of fulfillment.’ CD II/2, 752. 49. Greek: σπλαγχνισθεὶς. Mk 1.41, 9.22, Mt. 18.27, 20.34. 50. Luther writes: ‘In this tabernacle we have a figure of the Christian man. His spirit is the holy of holies, where God dwells in the darkness of faith, where no light is; for he believes that which he neither sees nor feels nor comprehends. His soul is the holy place, with its seven lamps, that is, all manner of reason, discrimination, knowledge, and understanding of visible and bodily things. His body is the forecourt, open to all, so that men may see his works and manner of life. Now Paul prays God [1 Thess. 5.23], who is a God of peace, to sanctify us not in one part only, but wholly, through and through, so that spirit, soul, body, and all may be holy … When the spirit is no longer holy, then nothing is holy. This holiness of the spirit is the scene



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of the sorest conflict and the source of the greatest danger. It consists in nothing else than in faith pure and simple, since the spirit has nothing to do with things comprehensible.’ LW 21, 304. Compare this with Barth’s later transitional account of conscience, which admits that the conscience is a zone in which faith must be exercised, where ‘guarding’ goes on against the self-assertive impulse – though, in contrast to Luther, it is not clear whether or not this is something which can be enjoined on the individual or which God accomplishes: ‘The command is not given by conscience but to conscience, so that it cannot first gain through conscience the definitiveness which alone makes it an effectual command … It is not, therefore, the function of conscience to interpret and apply, as though the command in itself were empty and needed concrete filling. In conscience, then, we are not made judges, but witnesses to the judgment to which we are subjected … Conscience itself – all the more in proportion as it is awakened by the divine command and we allow it to speak definitely – will warn us against every perversion of the divine command into the dictates of our self-will. Conscience guards the frontier between the will of God and our own will.’ CD II/2, 668. 51. This is because, comments Wannenwetsch, ‘In Luther’s theology, we do not become Christ-like through the exercise of good works, which would model our heart in the right way (building up a habitus) which would in turn invite Christ to take possession of it. Luther conceives it exactly the other way round: Christ takes possession of the heart in the first place – the gift of faith – thereby renewing it and shaping it into his own image; and from such a new heart – or persona – spring the good works in a natural way.’ Wannenwetsch, ‘An Explanatory Ethics of Good Works’, unpublished manuscript. 52. Hauerwas is undoubtedly right to make much in his early work of the claim that the language and life forms we have inherited may contain much unrecognized capacity to direct our decision-making in salutary ways. ‘Our particular acts are important, since through them we draw upon and discover the resources of our past – resources that we may have not even thought there. If in our past we have tried to form our actions and thus our self in accordance with our adherence to Christ, then we have inevitably embodied more in our life than we have actually become … Always in the present have we the opportunity of making use of the resources that have become ours in Christ.’ Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 221. Such a position does, however, raise the question of how the ethical formation we have received in local communities relates to God’s story as disclosed in Scripture. Where, precisely, are the ‘resources that have become ours in Christ’ to be located? Luther and Barth more strongly emphasize the sense in which Mary’s story is my story, and only because it is are we offered the intellectual resources necessary to raise questions about the language and formed Christian piety into which we have been born. (On this issue I share Hauerwas’s concerns on 210–11). But in putting things this way, they also refuse to call Mary’s song one of the ‘resources of our past’, since it is one facet of our true being and actual biography – Jesus Christ. This is the point where it becomes clear what it means to hold that the communio sanctorum is the fundamental context for Christian moral action and decision-making. Barth’s criticism of theories of virtue and habit challenges the other aspect of Hauerwas’s account here: its focus on the past. Barth emphasizes the importance of the eschatological framing of any Christian account of habit by locating character as the profile of our own specific struggle of the spirit against the flesh. In this struggle we can admit that character can be achieved, but not that the shape of this achievement can be foreseen: ‘Character is a

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work of the grace of God on man. He can acquire it only in a very different and more difficult struggle than the one against strange influences, external authorities, etc. can ever be – a struggle in which he must take the field not only for but primarily against himself and press on to freedom … In this struggle his abstract I is his real enemy.’ CD III/4, 388. 53. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Plurale Sinnlichkeit: Glaubenswahrnehmung im Zeitalter der virtual reality’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 42 (2000): 299–315. 54. LW 21, 316. 55. Ibid., 317. Barth makes this point using the language of self-possession: ‘What are we to do? We are to accept as right, and to live as those who accept as right the fact that they do not belong to themselves, that they therefore do not have their life in their own hands and at their own disposal, that they are made a divine possession in Jesus Christ. Against this alienation, against this objective assignment of our existence to the very different hand of the gracious God, there will always be raised the hostility of those who would rather belong to themselves, who have no desire to be dispossessed and deprived of their most primitive possession, namely, themselves, who think they see a robber and enemy in the One who does this to them.’ CD II/2, 580–1. Later in this volume he writes: ‘We never see ourselves as those we are before God; and of and by ourselves we never are those that God himself has chosen us to be. … What we see in our own life are all kinds of attempts and fragments, all kinds of unfulfilled and therefore very doubtful beginnings, all kinds of half-lights which may equally well be those of sunset or sunrise, which vouch less for our sanctification than for the fact that we have never come from the judgment of God according to the divine purpose, which testify just as much, and even more, against the factuality of our sanctification by God’s command.’ Ibid., 775. 56. Barth is also highly attuned to this aspect of Luther’s theology, which has sweeping effects in his material descriptions of the Christian life: ‘According to the Gospel of Luke and the Epistle of James, as also according to the message of the prophets, there follows from this character of faith a political attitude, decisively determined by the fact that man is made responsible to all those who are poor and wretched in his eyes, that he is summoned on his part to espouse the cause of those who suffer wrong. Why? Because in them it is manifested to him what he himself is in the sight of God; because the living, gracious, merciful action of God towards him consists in the fact that God Himself in His own righteousness procures right for him, the poor and the wretched; because he and all men stand in the presence of God as those from whom right can be procured only by God Himself.’ CD II/1, 387. Christians, ‘will be found at the side of the minority, the humiliated and oppressed. For they are what they are only by grace. Only by grace are they endowed with the gifts and held together as a fellowship. It is just in this disposition, as those who are endowed by grace, and therefore humble, and in this way held together in a unity, that they face the surrounding world which contradicts and opposes them, or rather stand as priests at its side. In this disposition they will certainly not pit themselves against their adversaries as one party against another (Rom. 12.17), requiting evil with evil, answering worldly arrogance and force with Christian. But in the sight of all men – whether the latter perceive it or not – they will work for the objective grace and the common weal of all. … within the limits of the possible, so far as in them lies, they cannot wish to be other than this universal and absolute offer of peace.’ CD II/2, 720. The political force of such formulations is well recognized. As Hannah Arendt once



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commented, ‘If you look at the history of revolutions, you will see that it was never the oppressed and degraded themselves who led the way, but those who were not oppressed and not degraded but could not bear it that others were.’ Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013), 73. 57. LW 21, 321. 58. ‘Not she is praised thereby, but God’s grace toward her.’ Ibid., 321. 59. Ibid., 314. 60. Ibid., 325. 61. Ibid., 326. Notice the remarkably anti-Aristotelian account of contemplation at work here, in which gazing upon God’s works initially prompts only inarticulate vocal utterance, but which the Spirit faithfully brings to articulacy of performance in the new action given to all the members of the body. 62. Ibid., 315. 63. Barth writes: ‘In faith man confirms that he is not merely present in the judgment of God’s command as hearer and spectator, but that he is its object, that he is himself the accused and the acquitted in this judgement, and that he can come from it as such. It is at once apparent that the idea of a purely theoretical faith separable from life can only be an absurdity – just as absurd, in fact, as that of a life separable from faith. If the existence of the judged man is the purpose of the divine judgement, the acknowledgement of this fact by man obviously cannot consist in any contemplation or conviction which may be differentiated or separated from the totality of his existence – as though he were only a spectator of the judgement – but only in the total shaping of his existence.’ CD II/2, 767. 64. LW 21, 300. Jaroslav Pelikan insisted that statements of this type expressed the heart of Luther’s understanding of Christian faith, and are not to be confused with pietism. ‘“While I was drinking beer,” he would say, “God reformed the church.” And he meant it … One does not understand Martin Luther until one recognizes above all that he was sustained neither by the support of others nor by his confidence in himself … Not the “heteronomous” authority of any human court or ecclesiastical structure, however venerable its continuity might be; nor the “autonomous” authority of Martin Luther, however filled with the Spirit he might be; but the “theonomous” authority of God as he had acted in Christ to redeem the world and as he communicated himself in the means of grace – this theonomy, “Spirit-determined and Spirit-directed,” in which “Spirit fulfills spirit instead of breaking it – ” was the ground of Luther’s confidence and the key to his character.’ Pelikan, Spirit versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (London: Collins, 1968), 136–7. 65. Luther writes: ‘If you fear God and think: “Lord, it is Thine; I will not keep it unless I know Thou willest me to have it. Let go what will: only be Thou my God” – then this verse is fulfilled: “His mercy is on those who fear Him,” who refuse to do anything apart from His will. … To confess the right and good is one thing, to obtain it is another. It is enough for you to confess that you are in the right; if you cannot obtain it, commit that to God. To you is committed the confession, the obtaining God has reserved to Himself.’ LW 21, 336.    Compare with Barth: ‘We are then ready, with a view to our next decision, to bracket and hold in reserve all that we think we know concerning the rightness and goodness of our past and present decisions, all the rules and axioms, however good, all the inner and outer laws and necessities under which we have hitherto placed ourselves and perhaps do so again. None of these has an unlimited claim to be valid again to-day as it was valid yesterday. None of them is identical with the

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divine command. Even at best none of them is more than a refraction of the divine command in the dim and fallacious prism of our own life and understanding.’ CD II/2, 646–7. See Nimmo’s discussion in Being in Action, 62–6. 66. LW 21, 336–9. 67. Nimmo concurs with my introductory comments about Barth on this emphasis: ‘While the picture of Hercules at the crossroads may in itself represent something of a “straw man,” it nevertheless serves as a profound rhetorical device to emphasize the radically different theocentric concept of human freedom that Barth is advocating. Johnson correctly notes that “Often we assume that true freedom means freedom to choose x or y, what philosophers call the freedom of deliberation, or contrary choice. Freedom for Barth, however, means something altogether different. To be mired in deliberating among contrary choices is not freedom at all but bondage.”’ Nimmo, Being in Action, 39, fn.113. Nimmo is quoting William Stacey Johnson, The Mystery of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 59. 68. The sentiment unendingly reverberates in Barth. See CD II/2, 585–603. 69. CD II/2, 649–57. 70. We will certainly need to investigate further how the activity of the divine speaking can best be understood. The category of the divine encounter as Barth deploys it is more monolithic and occasional than we find in many parts of Scripture. See, Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, trans. James Martin (London: SCM, 1972) and Tyler Atkinson, Singing at the Winepress (London: T&T Clark, Bloomsbury, 2015). This is not to suggest that we cannot find hints in this direction in the heartland of Barth’s ethical formulations. Barth embraces Luther’s insistence that the God to whom Christians relate is the God we encounter in divine acts, while still resisting aspects of his account of the mediation of these acts. The first affirmation, however, runs deep. Barth stresses that it is not God’s immutable essence and nature that Christians must learn in moral instruction, but God’s ways – how he moves, the characteristic forms of his activity. In biblical language, says Barth, both the Hebrew and Greek terms for knowledge do not indicate, ‘the acquisition of neutral information, which can be expressed in statements, principles and systems, concerning a being which confronts man, nor does it mean the entry into passive contemplation of a being which exists beyond the phenomenal world … Knowledge in the biblical sense is the process in which the distant “object” dissolves as it were, overcoming both its distance and its objectivity and coming to man as an acting Subject, entering into the man who knows and subjecting him to this transformation … There is never any suggestion in all this of merely an objective seeing and understanding of the divine nature and being. What is always meant is to know his ways (Ps. 67.2), to know that the Lord has done this or that (Isa. 41.20).’ Accordingly, Barth concludes: ‘The “knowledge of the Holy One” according to Prov. 9:10 is practical understanding.’ CD IV/3.1, 183–4. In a recent response to Paul Nimmo, McKenny has mused on this question from the direction of ecclesiology, a speculative trajectory with which I am in sympathy. ‘I could try to argue that the command of God is in principle always given through another, even when the person who hears it is in fact by herself, pleading that Barth’s unambiguous rejection of “an attempted humanity in which the fellow-man has no constitutive function” must surely not fail in the very encounter with God in which God’s command is given and heard. I could then try to account for points in CD III/4, where Barth seems to regard the hearer of the command as alone before God by ascribing them to the necessary activity of testing before God what one hears from another (an activity that Barth quite clearly



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describes as occurring between the individual moral agent and God). I believe that an argument along these lines would show Barth’s position to be both consistent and plausible. However, there is insufficient evidence to claim that Barth himself made such an argument.’ Gerald McKenny, ‘Response to Paul Nimmo’s Reflections on The Analogy of Grace’, in Scottish Journal of Theology 68:1 (2015): 104–5. I have shown that Luther’s purportedly individualistic ethic offers the thicker account of mediation in the ecclesial context that McKenny attempts to find in Barth. 71. LW 21, 315. ‘This picture of the outward focus of the Christian life is the animating center of Barth’s later discussion of “playfulness” as unselfconscious absorption in the world.’ Barth, CD III/4, 553–5. Bonhoeffer later outlines in some detail what this self-forgetfulness entails in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, DBWE 4, 137–61. 72. Barth writes: ‘Faith is practical acknowledgement that right is done to us by God. … We believe when we live before God and with God as those who are judged by Him, whom He has made His own, in whom He has glorified Himself by humbling and exalting them as He has done in His judgement. All sin, great or small, conscious or unconscious, flagrant or refined, consists in the fact that we do not do this. It consists in an attitude in which we ignore in practice where we have our origin and what God has done in us and for us. All sin consists in unbelief.’ CD II/2, 766. 73. This usage of the idea of ‘change’ points to the open-ended remaking that both Luther and Barth understand to be entailed in sanctification. Barth writes: ‘It is to be noted that the continuity of divine grace in our life, and our obedience to it, will be maintained only in so far as we do not refuse the discipline of the new beginning of our life and understanding brought about by moral reflection. The continuity of a life which steadily affirms itself from one decision to another, developing from within itself, can only be the continuity of disobedience. … The principle of necessary repetition and renewal, and not a law of stability, is the law of the spiritual growth and continuity of our life. It is when we observe this law that we practise perseverance … in the biblical meaning of the term; a perseverance corresponding to the steadfastness of God himself, which does not signify the suspension, but the continuing and indestructible possession and use of His freedom.’ CD II/2, 647. This is not to suggest that all our past must be repudiated as sin, as Hauerwas points out in his critique of Rudolf Bultmann in Character and the Christian Life, 166. Rather, it is to affirm that the past that matters for us is the past of God’s working in us. Only in affirming this particular past can we rightly orient our actions and intentions. As Hauerwas puts this point, Barth’s ‘concern is not to deny real continuity in the Christian life, but rather he wants to make clear that any attempt of man himself to attain such continuity on his own can only shut out the genuine continuity that comes only as God’s gift. For if man concerns himself with the continuity of his life, he only tries to dictate to God and place His grace under his own control. Barth is not denying the significance of continuity for our lives, but rather is arguing that such a continuity cannot be made a static end in itself in relation to God’s grace.’ Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 174–5. 74. Luther writes: ‘[T]he bare goodness of God is what ought … to be preached and known above all else, and we ought to learn that, just as God saves us out of pure goodness, without any merit of works, so we in our turn should do the works without reward or self-seeking, for the sake of the bare goodness of God. We should desire nothing in them but His good pleasure, and not be anxious about a reward. That will come of itself, without our seeking. … A son serves his father willingly and without

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reward, as his heir, solely for the father’s sake. But a son who served his father merely for the sake of the inheritance would indeed be a wicked child and deserve to be cast off by his father.’ LW 21, 312. Compare with Barth, CD II/2, 552–9. 75. Bonhoeffer, ‘Ethics as Formation’, DBWE 6, 93.

Chapter 5 H OW T O D O O R N O T D O P R O T E STA N T E T H IC S 1 Stanley Hauerwas

I. On Being a Protestant Christian Ethicist I should like to say that I care deeply about the future of Protestant Christian ethics. I should like to say that I care deeply about the future of Protestant Christian ethics because I am after all a Protestant. Yet, honesty requires me, or at least candour requires me, to confess I am not particularly concerned about the future of Protestant Christian ethics. That I must make such a confession expresses my existential situation, that is, I have never thought of myself as someone deeply committed to being a Protestant. I was, after all, raised an American Methodist, which means no matter how much you study Wesley it is very hard to take your denominational identity seriously.2 I have, moreover, described my ecclesial identity as being a high-church Mennonite. That description has taken on a life of its own, but, at the very least, as I will suggest below, it indicates that I think of myself as being on the Catholic side of the Reformation. I do so partly because, as I will suggest below, I think the way the Anabaptists understood church put them on the Catholic side of the Reformation. That is not to deny that, increasingly, Luther is being recovered, particularly by Finnish theologians, as a Catholic thinker.3 Of course that I have little at stake in the future of Protestant ethics – or even being a Protestant – is a very Protestant position. Only a Protestant theologian or ethicist would think that it makes little difference whether they are or are not Protestant for the work they do. Yet, my lack of passion or commitment to Protestantism, as well as the commitment to do ethics in a manner that can be identified as Protestant, risks making me a representative of that most despised position, at least despised by me, namely, the theologian as a ‘thinker’. However, given the loss of any clear Protestant ecclesial identity, it is not apparent to me if a Protestant can avoid that fate in our time. What it means to be a ‘thinker’ I can illustrate by telling a story about a faculty meeting at Notre Dame during the time I was a member of the theology faculty. We were discussing yet one more time what it might mean to be an ecumenical department of theology in a Catholic context. My colleagues contributed to the discussion by indicating what difference they thought being Lutheran, Reformed,

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Anabaptist, Anglican and even Jesuit might make for helping us know better what it means to be Catholic. I was trying as hard as I could to think what special gift Methodism might bring to our endeavours. But, then, the thought hit me, ‘Hell! I am not a Methodist. I went to Yale.’ I think to be so identified is not peculiar to me, but applies to most Christian theologians and ethicists at this time – namely, we are people determined more by where we went to graduate school than our ecclesial identity. My disavowal of the significance of being a Protestant for how I do ethics, however, can be an invitation to self-deception. I am, after all, going to die the death of a Protestant Christian. I know this to be the case because my wife, who is an ordained Methodist, appointed to an Episcopal church, and I have bought a niche in the columbarium of the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Holy Family is an Episcopal Church, even if the name is primarily associated with Roman Catholic churches. I can assure you, however, that Holy Family is a Protestant church because we call the basement the undercroft. That clearly makes us Episcopalian, that is, people who are determined to let no pretension go unused. That I will die a Protestant does not mean that Catholicism has not had, as well as continues to have, a significant role in my life. Fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame cannot help but leave its mark on you. During those years I was drawn into a world I had not known existed prior to coming to Notre Dame. I had known from graduate school that something called Catholic theology and ethics exists, but, at least in America, Catholicism is a material faith that cannot be reduced to what Catholics may or may not think. That does not mean that what Catholic theologians and moralists think is not important, but neither is what they think that which makes Catholicism Catholic. While teaching at Notre Dame I, of course, became acquainted with theologians whom I had never heard of. They simply were not part of the Protestant canon. For example, soon after arriving at Notre Dame, I found myself on a committee for a dissertation concerned with Catholic modernism. I had never heard of Catholic modernism. Though I had taken a course with Bernard Haring during my graduate work, I was innocent of Catholic moral theology prior to Vatican II. I began to read widely in Catholic moral theology as well as the Social Encyclicals. I, soon, began to teach courses in Catholic moral theology because I assumed that was something even a Protestant should do given that most of our students were Catholic. That they were Catholic meant, of course, that they knew very little about Catholicism and even less about the Catholic moral tradition. I do not want to be misunderstood. I did not teach Catholic moral theology only because the students were Catholic. I taught Catholic moral theology because it is such a rich theological tradition. In particular, that Catholics had the confessional meant they had to think concretely about moral problems in a manner that was largely unknown to Protestants. Accordingly, I simply assumed that when I came to Duke Divinity School I should continue to teach Catholic moral theology along with the Social Encyclicals.4 I did so because I thought those going into the Protestant ministry would benefit from such a course, but I also thought graduate



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students needed to know the Catholic tradition because it was more than likely that a Catholic institution is where they would end up teaching. It did not occur to me to identify as a Protestant or Catholic ethicist. I simply thought that I was doing Christian ethics. What that meant can be illustrated by an exchange during my initial interview for the position at Notre Dame. I was asked what I would like to teach. Among the courses I mentioned, I said I would like to teach a course on Thomas Aquinas. In response I was asked why, as a Protestant, I wanted to teach Aquinas because Aquinas was a Roman Catholic. I challenged that description pointing out that Aquinas could not have known he was a Roman Catholic because the Reformation had not yet taken place. I then observed I had no reason to think Aquinas was only of use to Roman Catholics. As a Christian ethicist, I assumed Aquinas was fair game for anyone committed to doing Christian ethics in a manner that reflected what I thought to be the growing ecumenical commitments by Catholics and Protestants.5 Of course, the more pressing question was not whether as a Protestant I could or should use Aquinas, but rather how anyone like me, whose way of thinking had been deeply shaped by Barth, could also be influenced by Aquinas. Barth and Aquinas not only came from different ages and contexts, but their fundamental presuppositions seemed irreconcilable. The difference is at least suggested by a question I sometimes asked graduate students taking their preliminary exams. I would ask the student to comment on the proposition that Aristotle is to Aquinas what Kant is to Barth. As I will try to suggest below, if we are living in a postChristian world, I do not think it is absurd to think that Barth and Aquinas are important allies to help us negotiate that world. The fact that my identity as a Christian ethicist did not require me to be Protestant or Catholic does not mean, however, that I had a clear idea of what being a Christian ethicist entailed. How could I know what it means to be a Christian ethicist given the fact that Christian ethics is a relatively new discipline and lacks any generally agreed upon ‘method’ or clearly defined subject matter? I have tried to provide an account of the development of Christian ethics in America by focusing on figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, James Gustafson and John Howard Yoder. These are substantive figures, but it is not clear that their legacy has been sufficient to sustain a discipline called Protestant Christian ethics. Thus, my suggestion that Christian ethics in America has come to a dead end. It has done so because the subject of Christian ethics in America was America. Just to the extent that America became what Christians ethicists wanted, Christian ethics became unintelligible to itself.6 Of course, the question of the future of Protestant ethics is a question inseparable from the larger question of whether Protestantism itself has a future. The decline of Protestant churches is a stark reality. Of course, Protestant ethics as an academic subject may be able to continue in some form, even though there are few Protestants and, in particular, Protestant ministers left to read what Protestant ethicists write. But then, it must be asked if one of the reasons for the decline of Protestantism was, and is, due to the failure of Protestant theologians to do

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theology in a manner that could help Protestant Christians have a reason for being Protestant. The very description ‘Protestant’ suggests a movement of reform within the Catholic church. When Protestantism became an end in itself, when Protestant churches became denominations, Protestantism became unintelligible to itself. No doubt this suggestion is a generalization that threatens oversimplification given the complex historical development we now call the ‘Reformation’. But then, almost any attempt to say what the Reformation was turns out to be hard to sustain: a fact clearly indicated by the question of whether ‘Reformation’ is an accurate or useful description of what is alleged to have happened five hundred years ago. For as odd as it may seem, it is not at all clear that we know yet what happened then, even though what did happen resulted in some of us now being known as ‘Protestants’.

II. Yet the Reformation Matters To this point I have been engaged in what Jeff Stout rightly identifies as an extended exercise in interminable throat clearing. I have been delaying as long as possible, trying to say something about the legacy of the Reformation. Given the upcoming anniversary of the Reformation, it seems incumbent upon us to say something about how we understand the Reformation legacy to have informed how we do theological ethics. Of course, that entails some account of what one takes that legacy to be. The problem with trying to answer that question is there are too many ‘reformations’, each of which has a different legacy. It is generally assumed that there are at least four reformations – the Lutheran, the Reformed, the Anabaptist and the Church of England – but those descriptions fail to do justice to the complexity that the name suggests. Those reformations were not isolated from one another, which means they often shared more in common than they differed. It is also true that Catholicism can be thought to have gone through a reformation in response to the Reformation. That said, I am sure each of those ‘reformations’ have played a role in how I have learned to think about theological ethics, though it is not clear to me if I would recognize what that role has been. Moreover, any attempt to get a handle on the Reformation is complicated by recent developments that attempt to put the Reformation in a new light. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society are representatives of this development.7 Duffy and Gregory deny that they are romanticizing the past by arguing that the religious character of church and society prior to the Reformation was not nearly as corrupt as Protestant historiography has implied. They do not deny that the church needed reforming, but they imply that reformation could have been possible without dividing Christendom.8 It is beyond my competence to assess their arguments, though their work clearly has implications for how Christian ethics should take account of the Reformation legacy.



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There is, however, one glaring, undeniable and decisive influence of the Reformation on me that is crucial for how I have worked as a Christian ethicist. That influence bears a name – John Howard Yoder. I think it important to call attention to Yoder’s influence because he represents aspects of the Reformation that are often forgotten by those who think that the primary concern of the reformers was doctrine. Doctrine was, and is, extremely important, but equally significant was the question of whether the habits of Constantinian Christianity should be continued. That issue has doctrinal implication by making clear that the very isolation of doctrine from ethics and politics was, and is, a Constantinian strategy. I do not want to be misunderstood. The Magisterial Reformers’ recovery of the Christological centre of the Christian faith, expressed in the language of justification by faith through grace, is of singular significance. Yet, as Protestantism developed, the emphasis on justification became divorced from Christology and, as a result, justification by grace through faith became a description of the anthropological conditions necessary to have ‘faith’. In short, the Lutheran emphasis on justification became the breeding grounds for the development of Protestant liberalism and the subsequent ‘moralization of Christian theology’. By that phrase, I simply mean once justification was lost as a way to talk about the priority of God’s grace, Kant’s attempt to ‘save’ Christian convictions by construing them as ethics was inevitable. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is the great text in Protestant moral theology.9 Kant’s account of Christian ethics served to reinforce the general character of how the Christian life was depicted by Protestant theologians. For example, Kant insisted that the ‘sacred narrative’, which is appropriately employed on behalf of ecclesiastical faith, ‘can have and, taken by itself, ought to have absolutely no influence on the adoption of moral maxims’.10 The adoption of such maxims must be based on reason itself. The Christological implications are clear, that is, what is crucial is not what strikes the senses and can be known through experience by the appearance of the God–Man (on earth), but ‘rather the archetype, lying in our reason, that we attribute to him (since, so far as his example can be known, he is found to conform thereto), which is really the object of saving faith’.11 Kant’s philosophical transformation of Protestant theological ethics assumed, as well as reinforced, the ecclesial politics of the Magisterial Reformers.12 Troeltsch put the matter this way: ‘The Lutheran ethic is summed up in the following characteristic features: confidence in God founded on His grace, and love of one’s neighbor which is exercised in the social duties of one’s calling, combined with an obedient surrender to the order of Society created by the Law of Nature.’13 Whether Luther’s challenge to the theological and ecclesial presumptions of the day is understood as radical or not, there is no question that the Lutheran Reformation was politically and socially conservative. That it was so, moreover, had the effect over time of making it difficult to maintain the truthful status of fundamental theological claims. The underwriting of the status quo by the Magisterial Reformers is why it is so important that those groups, generally described by the not very useful name

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‘Anabaptist’, not be forgotten or ignored. Of course, it is by no means clear who the Anabaptists were. Some seemed to be quite mad. Some rejected the main tenets of the Christian faith, while others seemed not to know there were main tenants of the Christian faith. Some would baptize children, but others would not. Those who would not baptize children allegedly would not do so because they thought that you could be baptized only if you knew what you were doing. The matter is, however, more complex. For many believers baptism was a norm because the baptized must be ready to be subject to communal discipline. From my perspective, one shaped by my Methodist commitments, the most interesting way to understand the Anabaptists is to recognize they were rediscovering the congregational practices necessary to sustain the holiness of the church. Arnold Snyder observes in his Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction that at the heart of the radical reformers’ vision was the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit, which made possible the life of discipleship for all Christians. According to Snyder, what set the Anabaptists apart from more radical reformers, as well as the Magisterial Reformers, was an ecclesiology in which believers pledged themselves to be a community of discipline in solidarity with other members of the body of Christ – a solidarity that meant at the very least they could not kill one another.14 One of the frustrations in calling attention to the importance of the Anabaptists for how we should understand Christian ethics is that there is no decisive figure or document to which one can appeal as defining what makes the Anabaptists Anabaptist. The temptation is to try to make The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, a confession written by Michael Sattler – who not long after drafting it was executed in Zurich – the normative statement that defines what it means to be an Anabaptist. The Confession certainly deals with practices that have defined Anabaptist life, such as the refusal of infant baptism, the use of the ban, the significance of the unity enacted by the Eucharistic, the separation from the world or, better put, a refusal to compromise with what is clearly antithetical with being a disciple of Jesus, the authority of those in positions of leadership and the disavowal of the sword and of oaths.15 Each of these articles are important as markers of Anabaptist life, but to turn them into a checklist to decide who is and who is not an Anabaptist is not a very Anabaptist thing to do.16 Walter Klaassen observes in his classic book, Anabaptism: Neither Catholic or Protestant, what is at the heart of Anabaptist ecclesiology is the conviction that truth will be discovered through a communal process in which theology and ethics are not abstracted from one another. He puts what he takes to be the heart of Anabaptist life this way: Life in community is necessary in order not to lose hold on the truth. That the disciple will remain true is not axiomatic since the world is full of deception. The distress of persecution and the strain under which that puts a Christian becomes a convincing reason for not neglecting the close association with others of like commitment. The danger of being deceived and the reality of persecution make it imperative for one to know what is important and basic.17



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Klaassen suggests that the Anabaptist concern for the relationship between theology and life can be seen by its understanding of the Lord’s Supper. For Anabaptists, the Supper was not a meal for individuals, but was rather a corporate act signifying the oneness and unity of the church. To participate in the Eucharist was a pledge to be at peace with one’s neighbour and a commitment to the life of the community. That is why Anabaptists insisted that the Lord’s Supper should not take place without the practice of binding and loosing required by Matthew 18. The Supper was a feast of reconciled people.18 That Klaassen calls attention to the Anabaptist understanding of the Lord’s Supper, an account that is no doubt in tension with the presumption that most Anabaptists were followers of Zwingli, serves as evidence for his contention that the Anabaptists are neither Protestant nor Catholic. Rather they represent a recovery of the radical implications of an eschatological Christology in which the church is understood to be an alternative politics to the world. Klaassen defends his account of the significance of the Anabaptist Reformation by quoting Meno Simons’ fundamental conviction: The Prince of peace is Christ Jesus. His kingdom is the kingdom of peace. His Word is the word of peace. His body is the body of peace; His children are the seed of peace; and His inheritance and reward are the inheritance and reward of peace. In short with this king and in His kingdom and reign, it is nothing but peace.19

Klaassen argues that this understanding of Christ and the church is why Anabaptists are neither Protestant nor Catholic, but in many ways represent the best of both traditions. Though the Anabaptists underwrote the Protestant emphasis on ‘faith alone’ and ‘Scripture alone’ they did so without excluding the importance of works. They also insisted that Scripture was to be read through ‘the life and doctrine of Christ and the apostles’.20 Klaassen argues, therefore, that the Anabaptists were closer to the Catholics just to the extent they maintained that the church, a very concrete and visible church, must be the interpreter of Scripture. Though the Anabaptists were obviously critical of the Catholic church Klaassen suggests that the very seeds of the revolt the Anabaptist represented were present in Catholicism. That is why Anabaptists, Klaassen argues, can never completely dissociate themselves from Catholicism. He observes ‘it is the soil out of which we grew and we have brought with us more from that soil than we remember. We are children of the Catholic church and the sooner we acknowledge it the better for us, for it will help to rid us of our feeling of superiority.’21 I have called attention to Klaassen’s argument because I am obviously in sympathy with the main lines of his position. My general agreement with Klaassen’s understanding of the Anabaptist reformation was ably summed up some years ago by Gerald Schlabach: Hauerwas has discovered a dirty little secret – Anabaptists who reject historic Christendom may not actually be rejecting the vision of Christendom as a

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society in which all of life is integrated under the Lordship of Christ. On this reading, Christendom may in fact be a vision of shalom, and our argument with Constantinianism is not over the vision so much as the sinful effort to grasp at its fullness through violence, before its eschatological time. Hauerwas is quite consistent once you see that he does want to create a Christian society (polis, societas) – a community and way of life shaped fully by Christian convictions. He rejects Constantinianism because ‘the world’ cannot be this society and we only distract ourselves from building a truly Christian society by trying to make our nation into that society, rather than be content with living as a community in exile. So Hauerwas wants Catholics to be more Anabaptist, and Anabaptists to be more Catholic, and Protestants to be both, and the only way he can put this together in terms of his own ecclesial location is to be a ‘Catholic’ Methodist in roughly the way that some Episcopalians are Anglo-Catholic.22

Schlabach has got it exactly right. That is what I want.23 That is what I take to be a constructive way to go on ‘after the Reformation’. Klaassen’s understanding of the ecclesial process necessary for living truthfully with one another I take to be the heart of my way of doing Christian ethics. I should like to think that way of doing ethics is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but somehow is both. So as an attempt to make sense of this let me end by trying to suggest why I do not think my use of Barth, who is clearly a Reformation theologian all the way down, and Aquinas, who is not a Reformation theologian in any conceivable way, is not as strange as it may seem.

III. On Barth and Thomas Aquinas As Christians who are living not only ‘after the Reformation’, but – at least if the Anabaptists are right – after Christendom, we need all the help we can get. In such a situation we should not be surprised that the differences that seemed so defining in the past simply no longer seem that significant. At least in America denominationalism seems clearly to be coming to an end. Few people are Methodist because they think Methodism represents a holiness movement. Someone may, given the oddity of the difference, be a Freewill Baptist because they are convinced God’s grace does not override a free will, but that seems an odd place to draw a line in the sand to determine what makes a Christian a Christian. That we find ourselves in such an ambiguous situation is why I think I find it hard to identify as a Protestant ethicist. Of course, everything depends on who you think the ‘we’ is in the preceding sentence. I assume the ‘we’ is not only the Protestant ‘we’, but the ‘we’ of all Christians in the world in which we find ourselves. The help we need, moreover, is not what is so often identified as ‘ethics’, that is, some decision procedure. Rather, we need the ability to recover our distinctive way of speaking to God, and about God, and about the difference God makes for how our lives are lived. We will need all the help we can get for such a project. Yet, if we need all the help we can get then I see no reason why Barth and Aquinas, clearly two of the



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major theologians in the Christian tradition, cannot be used to help form the future of the church in a world Christians no longer control. I think it quite interesting, therefore, that we recently had published Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic–Protestant Dialogue, edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P.24 In his ‘Introduction’ to the book, White identifies three topics in which Barth and Thomas can be fruitfully compared: 1. How they approach theology considered as a science of divine revelation; 2. Why Christology as the core organizing principle for Barth and Trinitarian monotheism is central for Thomas; and 3. How Thomists and Barthians understand the status of theology in modernity.25 White’s elaboration of those topics suggests that in spite of the differences between Barth and Thomas, they, nonetheless, share a commitment to show the difference God makes and how that difference is manifest in the life of the church and the lives of Christians. Barth is clearly a modern thinker, yet, nonetheless, he is a tradition-determined theologian who, like Thomas, is rearticulating truths of patristic and mediaeval thinkers in a post-Reformation, post-Kantian and postHegelian way. In like manner, White suggests Thomas can be read in a more Barthian fashion if he is rightly seen as a quasi-eclectic thinker seeking to widen the scope of theological claims to include all the strands of philosophy in his time. Thus interpreted, for both Thomas and Barth it is ‘theology all the way down’.26 I call attention to White’s suggestion of how Barth and Thomas can be read in a complementary fashion without denying their differences because at the very least his analysis, as well as almost every essay in this extraordinary book, suggests that given where we are as Christians Barth and Thomas are resources for helping us learn the skills necessary to sustain our speech in a world that thinks that what we say is unintelligible.27 For it turns out that if we are to learn to live as Christians, how we say what we are and articulate what we do and do not do is crucial if our lives are to be witnesses to that which has made us possible. Barth and Thomas, to be sure in quite different ways, can be read as offering us essential exercises in Christian speech. In his book on Thomas, Denys Turner makes the observation that Thomas, as well as his teacher, Albert, had the virtue of ‘allowing words to speak for themselves’.28 According to Turner, you can only safely let words speak for themselves if it is the words’ effect that you want to make count for students or readers rather than the impression you make on either.29 Turner attributes Thomas’s ability to let words speak for themselves to Dominic who took the business of words so seriously he ‘could conceive of a community of preachers whose holiness would be won or lost in the success or failure of their pursuit of the bon mot’.30 Accordingly, there is an inherent relationship between that community called the church and what is said that cannot be said if the church did not exist as an alternative to the speech of the world. To so understand the significance of allowing words to speak for themselves is to refuse to force words to do more than they can. Non-violence is a grammar

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of truthful speech and that grammar often is in the form of silence, particularly when the speech is directed to or about God. According to Turner, Thomas exemplified the conviction that all theology emerges from silence, just as the millions of words of theology that Thomas wrote do. Those words participate in that same silence. The many words Thomas wrote end in silence because: ‘it is through the Son who is the Word that we enter into the silence of the Father, the Godhead itself, which is utterly beyond comprehension. For Thomas, silence is not the absence of speech. It is what the fullness of speech demonstrates – namely that, even at its best, speech falls short.’31 Theological speech, in particular, falls short. Speech is at once the glory and humbling of theology. It is so because speech must disclose the name of that silence from which the Word comes and returns. Turner reminds us that the name of that Word is God. Turner quotes Aquinas, a quote that could have been written by Barth, that ‘in this life we do not know what God is, even by the grace of faith. And so, it is that by grace we are made one with God quasi ei ignoto, as to something unknown to us.’32 It turns out, therefore, Thomas, like Barth, thinks we are only able to know we are in need of grace through grace. Accordingly the famous Thomistic phrase, ‘nature is perfected by grace’, does not mean that by nature we know what we want, but rather through grace we have revealed to us the depth of our need for grace.33 The stress on the importance of speech for Barth and Thomas may seem quite foreign to questions concerning the future of Protestant ethics. Nor is it clear how this emphasis on speech involves the ecclesial developments that I have associated with the Anabaptist Reformation and the end of Christendom. However, if our ecclesial future is one that cannot use violence to ensure our safety, nothing is more important than for the church to regain confidence in the words we have been given. For it is through learning the words we have been given that we might be a people capable of prayer. I think it no accident that Barth identified prayer as a crucial practice to sustain the moral life.34 Prayer reminds us that when everything is said and done this is about God. Barth even suggests that prayer goes ‘back’ to the knowledge of God, ‘as the basic act of human reason. Even as God summons man to pray to Him, He points to the fact that He has created him for Himself and appeals to this determination of his reason.’35 This is a claim with which I think Thomas Aquinas could only agree. We live ‘after the Reformation’. It remains unclear to me, however, if we know where we are, or in what time we are living, by that description. ‘After the Reformation’ is a description that assumes our history remains the history of Christianity. That assumption reproduces a Constantinian presumption. But if we are in the final stages of Protestantism it is not clear how we should tell the story of where we have been or what we think the future holds. Accordingly, I do not think we know what it might mean to be a Protestant ethicist now any more than I did forty years ago. In the meantime, however, I see no reason why we should not make the most of what we have got: that is, given the demise of Christendom we are finally free. It is not the task of the church to



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ensure a stable world. Our task is to be faithful to the Lord who has taught us to pray, asking that we be united by the Holy Spirit. To learn to pray, to learn the language of prayer, may make it possible for us to speak the truth to one another. If we Christians cannot hold one another accountable for our prideful divisions, this world has little resource for knowing peace.

Endnotes   1. This paper was written for a conference at the University of Aberdeen in October, 2014. The conference title was ‘The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of a Reformation Legacy’. The paper was first published in the book The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 2015) and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved.   2. For a more extended set of reflections on Protestantism and, in particular Methodism, see my chapter, ‘The End of Protestantism’, in Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 2013), 87–97. My use of ‘end’ in the title refers not only to questions of the continued existence of Protestant churches, but also to the telos of those churches.   3. For an introduction to the Finnish Luther, see C. Braaten and R. Jenson, eds, Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1998). Mannerma’s chapter, ‘Why Is Luther So Fascinating?’, is a particularly helpful guide to this turn in Luther interpretation. In short, Mannerma and his colleagues are suggesting that Luther’s understanding of justification by faith through grace is similar to accounts of theosis in the East. If that is right it also means that Wesley’s understanding of sanctification can be read in a similar way.   4. For my ‘take’ on the social encyclicals, see my chapter with Jana Bennett, ‘“A Recall to Christian Life”: What Is Social about the Catholic Social Teachings’, in Stanley Hauerwas, Working With Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade Publishers, 2013), 233–54.   5. For my attempt to respond to George Lindbeck’s question about my lack of interest in the Protestant ecumenical movement, see my chapter ‘Which Church? What Unity? Or An Attempt to Say What I May Think about the Future of Christian Unity’, in Hauerwas, Approaching, 98–119. Also relevant here is John Wright, ed., Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2012).   6. For my account of these developments, see my chapter, ‘Christian Ethics in America: A Report on a Book I Will Not Write’, in Hauerwas, A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000), 55–69.   7. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).   8. For a strong critique of Duffy, see David Aers, ‘Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s, The Stripping of the Altars’, Literature and History 3 (1994): 90–105. Duffy’s reply can be found in the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ of The Stripping of the Altars, xxi–xxv.

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  9. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore Greene (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934). 10. Ibid., 123. 11. Ibid., 110. Kant is equally clear about the atonement. Thus his claim that ‘no reasonable man’ who knows they merit punishment can believe that all he needs to do is accept forgiveness. Ibid., 107. 12. Thus Kant’s claim that the ‘sovereignty of the good principle is attainable only through the establishment and spread of a society in accordance with, and for the sake of, the laws of virtue, a society whose task and duty it is rationally to impress these laws in all their scope upon the entire human race.’ Ibid., 86. Kant, like most Protestant liberals, simply assumed that Germany was the norm for how Christians should live. 13. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Church, vol. 2, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: MacMillan, 1931), 509–10. This characterization of Luther’s politics has recently been challenged by Michael Laffin in his dissertation ‘Martin Luther and Political Theology: A Constructive Reappraisal of Luther’s Political Thought with Special Reference to the Institutions’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 2014). Laffin argues that if one attends to Luther’s sacramental and ecclesial reflections, Luther has a much more complex understanding of the role of the church in the world than the interpretation of Luther in terms of the orders of creation. 14. C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Thought: An Introduction (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1995), 95. 15. The Schleitheim Confession, ed. and trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977). 16. Harold Bender wrote a famous pamphlet in 1943 entitled ‘The Anabaptist Vision’ in which he identified as the ‘essence’ of Anabaptist theology and life three emphases: (1) discipleship, (2) the church as a brotherhood, and (3) a new ethic of love and non-resistance. His attempt at finding an ‘essence’ to characterize Anabaptist life was criticized by younger Mennonites like Yoder as an attempt to make the Mennonite church in America another denomination. For my discussion of Bender see Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1995), 65–78. 17. Walter Klaassen, Anabaptism Neither Catholic nor Protestant (Waterloo: Conrad Press, 1973), 24. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Ibid., 50. 20. Ibid., 77–9. 21. Ibid., 66. 22. Schlabach’s quote can be found in the ‘Preface’ to the Second Edition of Stanley Hauerwas’s After Christendom (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 9–10. Schlabach has developed this perspective in his lovely book, Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2010). 23. I have deep sympathy with how Peter Leithart has located his understanding of what it would mean to be a ‘Reformational Catholic Church’. He suggests such a church would mean that ‘insofar as definitional opposition to Catholicism is constitutive of Protestant identity, to the extent that “Protestant” entails “of-another-Church-fromCatholic,” insofar as Protestants, whatever their theology, have acted as if they are members of a different Church from Roman Catholics and Orthodox, Jesus bids



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Protestantism to come and die.’ Leithart, ‘The Future of Protestantism’, First Things, 245 (August/September, 2014), 26. That is an altar call that I believe must shape the future of Protestantism. 24. Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P., eds, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: On Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 2013). 25. Ibid., 6. 26. Ibid., 14–15. 27. There is not a bad essay in this book, but given the subject of this paper I should in particular call attention to John Bowlin’s chapter, ‘Barth and Aquinas on Election, Relationship, and Requirement’, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, 237–61. Bowlin argues that Barth and Thomas share a social theory of obligation, they agree about its basic features and they use those features to say how divine action creates human obligation. Ibid., 238. Bowlin also provides a stunning account of election as a form of friendship. 28. Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 5. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Ibid., 42. For a profound account of church history and theology in terms of silence see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (New York: Viking, 2013). 32. Turner, Thomas Aquinas, 44. 33. Ibid., 171. 34. Barth, CD III/4, 87–115. 35. Ibid., 87.

Chapter 6 A NA BA P T I ST E T H IC S A F T E R Y ODE R : A C C E P T I N G T H E L I M I T S ON T H E F R E E D OM OF A C H R I ST IA N E T H IC I ST Paul Martens

To write against all the false opinions and errors of the Anabaptists would involve me in too long a matter and would result in an abyss from which I would never come out. For these vermin differ from all other heretical sects in that they not only err in certain points, but they give rise to a whole sea of insane views. So much so that one will scarcely find an Anabaptist who is not tainted with fantasy. Therefore, to examine minutely, or even recount, all the corrupt doctrines of the sect could never be done.1 So begins John Calvin’s 1544 Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful Against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists. In the face of what I can only imagine would be Calvin’s disapproval, Anabaptism’s alleged ability to ‘deceive and misguide the simple, who lack the judgment to discern’2 has gained tremendous ground in the past decades. Aside from the work of Providence, we have two central characters to thank for the recent explosion of interest in and at least partial embrace of Anabaptism: the late twentieth-century Mennonite theological ethicist John Howard Yoder; and Stanley Hauerwas, Professor Emeritus at Duke Divinity School and part-time popularizer of John Howard Yoder.3 In brief, one could summarize the following comments as a preliminary attempt to come to grips with the status of Anabaptist ethics after John Howard Yoder. I do not intend to advocate a return to Calvin’s dismissal of Anabaptism. Rather, I merely intend to interrogate the limits of the Anabaptist rejection of force or, more specifically, the rejection of the appeal to force to limit allegedly Christian freedom in matters of church discipline. To do so, this essay: (1) begins with a brief summary description of how John Howard Yoder stands within the Anabaptist tradition’s affirmation of the freedom of the church from the violent politics of empire and Constantinian Christianity (Sections I and II); then (2) illuminates how Yoder extends this same logic to challenge the authority of his own Mennonite church (Section III); and finally (3) forces the question of whether Anabaptists ought to reexamine their alleged refusal of the use of force – even in matters of church discipline – by attending to the manner in which

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Yoder’s legacy provides an enticingly ambiguous affirmation of the freedom of a Christian ethicist, a legacy of the freedom of a Christian ethicist that is tainted with the sort of fantasy of which Calvin was worried (Section IV). In the end, as cryptically suggested by the subtitle, I will acknowledge that Anabaptist ethicists – particularly with reference to the example and ethics of John Howard Yoder – are in the precarious position of acknowledging that there are limits to the freedom of a Christian ethicist while finding themselves profoundly unprepared to come to an agreement about how to articulate those limits or even recognize that their current practice in limiting freedom occasionally outstrips the theology that has stood as central to the Anabaptist tradition. To begin to make this case, I will briefly turn to what many view as Yoder’s positive freeing of the Christian ethicist from the tyranny of what one might call the politics of empire.4

I. Yoder and Freedom from the Politics of Empire, or ‘Liberal Social Orders’ When Luther, glossing 1 Corinthians 9.19, proclaimed that ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none’,5 he was depending on a framework for Christian freedom that would eventually be challenged by many Anabaptists to follow. Employing an understanding of humanity as entailing a ‘twofold nature’, Luther’s primary concern was to convince his readers that a Christian soul – the spiritual, inner, new nature of the Christian – is free from the law, free from death and even free from the effects of the carnal, outward or old nature in the same person. This distinction served Luther well in that it made room for speaking about grace and not works as the true gospel of Christ. To cite Luther, ‘thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom’.6 In 1527, seven years after the publication of Luther’s ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, a group of persecuted Anabaptist leaders gathered in Schleitheim, Switzerland, to discuss and articulate their theological agreements. One of the results of their gathering was the creation and publication of The Schleitheim Confession,7 a brief summary of their shared agreements in seven articles. The cover letter reveals that a true understanding of the freedom of a Christian was one of the factors motivating the need for the confession: A very great offense has been introduced by some false brothers among us, whereby several have turned away from the faith, thinking to practice and observe the freedom of the Spirit and of Christ … They have esteemed that faith and love may do and permit everything and that nothing can harm nor condemn them, since they are “believers.”8

This passage reveals that the immediate impetus for Schleitheim was not a direct attack on Luther; it is clear, however, that the confession is directly challenging various Anabaptist appropriations of Luther’s emphasis on faith.9



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In short, what The Schleitheim Confession understood as offensive was any separation of ‘faith’, ‘love’, and ‘belief ’ from obedience. Or, to restate, the Schleitheim Anabaptists rejected any form of the claims that love permits everything or that nothing done by the flesh can harm the Christian. Against this perceived threat, they argued that the freedom of Christ is formed and resides in obedience: Note well, you members of God in Christ Jesus, that faith in the heavenly Father through Jesus Christ is not thus formed; it produces and brings forth no such things as these false brothers and sisters practice and teach. Guard yourselves and be warned of such people, for they do not serve our Father, but their father, the devil.10

With this in mind, it should then surprise no one that Schleitheim’s seven articles are concentrated on laying out the group’s shared convictions concerning obedience. It ought to be noted that contemporary Anabaptism is complex, diverse and, as such, does not necessarily mirror the contents of Schleitheim. Yet, in the contemporary world, Anabaptism in all forms has become identified primarily with non-violence, and this identification reaches all the way back to Schleitheim. In Article IV, one finds a succinct argument for Christian non-violence: ‘Thereby shall also fall away from us the diabolical weapons of violence – such as sword, armor, and the like, and all of their use to protect friends and enemies – by virtue of the word of Christ: “you shall not resist evil”.’11 A few pages later, one finds an explicit rejection of the use of the sword as it relates to worldly politics and political leaders. As Article VI nears its conclusion, it implicitly echoes Tertullian and Origen in its statement that: ‘it does not befit a Christian to be a magistrate … [T]he weapons of their battle and warfare are carnal and only against the flesh, but the weapons of the Christian are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil.’12 With this statement, the line between the church and the rest of the world is drawn unmistakably clear. There is more to the story than merely violence versus non-violence; what is up for debate is, at base, a theological anthropology that grounds the rejection of violence. At first glance, Schleitheim’s consistent insistence on non-violence might appear to appeal to a kind of differentiation between the soul and flesh not unlike that offered by Luther. What the Anabaptists were actually attempting, however, was the articulation of a way to maintain a unity of body and soul in the ongoing clash between the kingdom of God (the life in ‘the freedom of the Spirit and of Christ’) and the kingdom of the devil (the life of the flesh). In their language, they referred to this as a separation ‘from the evil and the wickedness which the devil has planted in the world’.13 Today, we might refer to this separation as a counter-politics in which violence can never be an appropriate mode of expressing Christ-like interpersonal relations: ‘Since then Christ is as is written of him, so must His members also be the same, so that His body may remain whole and unified for its own advancement and upbuilding. For any kingdom which is divided within itself will be destroyed.’14

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Years later, however, Calvin did not accept either the Anabaptists’ sharp distinction between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil or their assumption that body and soul could be united in the freedom from sin. With reference to the first – the Anabaptist claim concerning the use of the sword – Calvin harshly denounces them for being enemies of God and of the human race.15 Why? He clarifies: ‘we could not imagine a better way of trying to ruin the world and ushering in brigandage everywhere’.16 Calvin understood the sort of Christian freedom from participation in the rule of the world proposed by the Anabaptists to be completely wrong-headed; he believed the Anabaptist way of freely rejecting the sword would lead to chaos, and ultimately to the ruin of society in its entirety. This sort of charge, often using the language of sectarianism, has continued to haunt Anabaptists in the ensuing centuries.17 Yoder eventually attempts to argue why this charge is, in form and content, simply false. To understand Yoder’s argument, however, we must return to Luther for a moment. Of course, it is well-known that Luther expected Christians to perform good works.18 Even in ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, he energetically encourages Christians to free actions that reflect their new nature: ‘Thus from faith flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a cheerful, willing, free spirit, disposed to serve our neighbor voluntarily, without taking any account of gratitude or ingratitude, praise or blame, gain or loss.’19 Yet, the rhetorical emphasis on faith and the sharp dividing line between faith and works had unintended consequences that even the earliest Anabaptists intuitively grasped. Kierkegaard would apply Luther’s wit against his own legacy in the remark that ‘the world is like a drunken peasant: when you help him up on one side of the horse, he falls off the other.’20 What the Anabaptists and Kierkegaard could see was that Luther’s attempt to separate and free Christian faith from works (and the soul from body) left subsequent Protestant Christian ethics vulnerable to colonization by other forces. Or, perhaps better stated, Christian ethics was rather quickly colonized into Sittlichkeit, that is, a pseudo-Christian or secular form of what Luther referred to as one’s vocation, one’s role in society. It is this general understanding of Christian existence, birthed in the crucible of the Reformation and later revised and reified in the Enlightenment, that has become the nemesis for a significant strand of contemporary Christian ethicists, including many Anabaptists and Stanley Hauerwas.21 By the time one arrives at the twentieth-century narrative of Christian ethics sketched by Hauerwas, the Reformation understanding of faith has devolved, on one side, into pious individualism that had to be, by definition, depoliticized so as not to interfere with existing social order. And, on the other side, it degenerated into the state in which whatever social ethics were proclaimed as Christian (expressions of Christians as ‘dutiful servants of all, subject to all’ to use Luther’s terms) had to be articulated as universally understandable ethics that obeyed existing governing powers as divinely instituted pastors or shepherds (to use Calvin’s language) ordained to preserve order.22 The effect of this modern expression of Reformation Christianity, for Hauerwas, is that Christian social ethics usually became bound to the politics and interests of modern nation states, even if social ethics included attempts to



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also transform these same politics and interests (and Hauerwas frequently infers that Walter Rauschenbusch, H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr are representatives of this position).23 Then one day, Yoder rode into town ‘from the sectarian badlands’ as ‘the lone hero standing up to the mob’ that was willing to secure justice and order through the acceptance of violence and the false polity of the state.24 Even Hauerwas admits that his characterization of Yoder in this manner is misleading, but not because it overstates the importance of Yoder’s intervention.25 The climax of Hauerwas’s twentieth-century narrative is Yoder’s embrace of obedience to Jesus – the politics of Jesus – as specific to and normative for the Christian church. And, through this, the freedom of a Christian ethicist is restored. Hauerwas explains his interpretation of the link between following Jesus and freedom succinctly: In a manner that can only be described as catholic, Yoder returns Jesus to the center of Christian ethics by freeing us from the political presuppositions sponsored by liberal social orders … He shows us that our sense of the alternatives – that we must choose between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, between prophet and institution, between catastrophic kingdom and inner kingdom, between being political and being sectarian, between the individual and the social – derives not from categories intrinsic to the human condition but from a depoliticization of salvation that has made Christianity a faithful servant of the status quo.26

According to Hauerwas – and I think he is right about this – Yoder’s turn to the politics of Jesus does instigate a significant shift in post-Enlightenment Christian ethics.27 And, even though Hauerwas is targeting others like Ernst Troeltsch, the Niebuhr brothers and James Gustafson in his damning narration, he also appears to evoke some form of Luther’s account of the freedom of a Christian with his ‘faithful servant of the status quo’ quip. Of course, others before Yoder could and have served Hauerwas in his attempt to free Christian ethics from American liberalism – Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to name just a few.28 Yet, it is Yoder’s thorough-going critique of the violence of the empire alongside the constructive alternative offered in the practices of the church and the politics of Jesus that are of particular usefulness to Hauerwas. Yoder and Hauerwas together have profoundly changed the shape of twentieth-century social ethics – at least in America – by forcing the question of the prioritization of the church, and especially the normative non-violent politics of the church. Perhaps one might even say that Yoder and Hauerwas attempted to revive a radical Reformation account of the freedom of a Christian. As is clear in the above, Yoder’s account of the freedom of the Christian, like that contained in Schleitheim, does not stop at freedom from bondage to the state and its interests.

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II. Yoder and Freedom from Constantinian Christianity The politics of Jesus, according to Yoder, are about the revolutionary creation of a new society, a society unlike any that had ever been seen. He understood the very existence of such a group to be ‘itself a deep social change’.29 It is a voluntary society that could only be joined by pledging allegiance to its king; it is a mixed society in terms of racial, religious and economic backgrounds.30 This is what Yoder means when he refers to ‘the church’.31 What binds this new society together is a new way to live given and exemplified by Jesus, that is, a new way to deal with offenders, violence, money, leadership, corrupt society and gender relations – in short, a ‘new vision of what it means to be a human person’.32 As indicated above, this vision clearly relativizes the claims of other forms of politics usually associated with the politics of the nation-state. Yet, this vision also entails an implicit challenge to Constantinian Christianity in its many forms (including but not limited to what Yoder would call the ‘state-church Reformers’).33 To demonstrate the long reach of Yoder’s appeal to Jesus’ ‘original revolution’, a more sustained return to his understanding of Constantinianism is in order. For Yoder, what is most important in understanding Constantinianism are two features, namely, (a) that the church utilizes violence – which Yoder takes to be a non-Christian mode of interpersonal relation – in the service of its mission and, correlatively, (b) that the church loses its eschatological confidence that the Lord reigns and, instead, attempts to force history in a certain direction on its own terms (i.e. violently). Constantinianism, therefore, is first and foremost a charge against an unfaithful church and not against any governing authority.34 Because this is the case, Yoder also argued that Anabaptists (including Anabaptist ethicists) must be free from the tyranny of the assumptions and perspectives of the unfaithful or Constantinian church. To restate, the Anabaptist ethicist is free to redefine what following Jesus means regardless of the terms set by the history, traditions and practices of the Constantinian church. The unity of the church is not found in these. Rather, Yoder contends, remarkably like Schleitheim, that the unity between Anabaptists (the ‘faithful church’) and the rest of Christianity is found in obedience: ‘Unity does not mean that we approve of the present belief and behavior of another Christian; it means that we lay upon him the claims which Christ lays upon those who confess His name; we ask of him Christian obedience, Biblical baptism, separation from the world, and the rest of what the Gospel implies.’35 In this contention, Yoder returns to an Anabaptist theological anthropology that stood at the heart of one of the hotly contested theological debates of the sixteenth century. For Calvin, the Anabaptists’ understanding of the believer’s baptism was problematic.36 At a more foundational level, however, it appears that Calvin was even more disturbed by the Anabaptist inference that human obedience in the form of separation from the world, the employment of the ban37 and the like could serve as marks of the church. In addressing the ban, Calvin is very clear about the nature of his disagreement with the Anabaptists:



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If we did condemn the ban, or make believe that it was a superfluous and useless thing, or indeed taught that it had no place whatever in the church, then they might have reason to murmur against us. But in all that we are in sound accord. The debate is over this: they think that wherever this order is not properly constituted, or not duly exercised, no church exists.38

Calvin’s assessment seems to be a fair account of the sixteenth-century debate given that The Schleitheim Confession strongly demands shunning the abominations that include ‘all popish and repopish [Reformed] works and idolatry, gatherings, church attendance, winehouses, guarantees and commitments of unbelief and other things of the kind’ because they are ‘carnal or flatly counter to the command of God, after the pattern of all the iniquity which is in the world’.39 Yoder was separated from the Schleitheim circle by more than four centuries, yet it appears that the locus of the debate has not changed very much: the issue at stake is not merely in individual practices of various churches but the basic question of whether the church can be identified through its practices or, stated even more precisely, whether specific practices constitute the church. Yoder’s basic assumption is that true Christianity lies in the consistent ecclesial performance of the paradigmatic marks or sacraments of the church – baptism, ‘the rule of Christ’,40 Eucharist, ‘the fullness of Christ,’41 and the open meeting42 – that paradigmatically and non-violently prefigure the coming kingdom of the Lamb that was slain. Or, in short, where properly constituted politics do not exist, neither does the true church; where there are no works, there is no faith; there is no separation of body and soul – ‘Simul justus et peccator … is illegitimate in the realm of faith and ethics.’43 In the 1950s, Yoder argued that the Anabaptist tradition, and only the Anabaptist tradition, has that which ‘misinformed and seeking believers’ that belong to churches under the umbrella of the World Council of Churches are seeking.44 For Yoder, the terms have changed: non-Anabaptists are no longer ‘popish and repopish’ unbelievers; non-Anabaptist Christians are simply ‘groping and struggling’ because they have been cut off from the ‘insights’ concerning the identity of the church and the relationship between the church and world ‘which were seen with great clarity by the Anabaptists already centuries ago’.45 As Yoder matured, however, the language of ‘insights’ was quickly relegated to a form of liberalism that misconstrued the relationship between church and state.46 In its place, the language of practices and social processes came to the fore in the service of dividing reality along the lines sketched already in Schleitheim: not between the religious and profane, the ecclesiastic and the civil, nor the spiritual and the material, but between those who confess Jesus as Lord and those who do not. Those who freely confess Jesus as Lord can only do so as both secular and profane, spiritual and physical, and ecclesiastical and civil.47 In his own unique succinct way, Yoder thereby unites the free church, the radical reformers, non-violence and the political practices of the believers’ church: With the code word “free church” we have become accustomed to refer to a style of phenomenon diversely labeled by historians. We name the same

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phenomenon “peace church” when attention is given to social ethics. We say “radical reformation,” or “restitution,” or “restoration,” when attend to these groups’ critical perspective on the accumulated unfaithfulnesses of historically established Christendom. We say “believers’ church” when concerned for the composition of the visible community.48

In sum, only the believers’ church is the free church, the church that is the image that the new world casts ahead of itself, the ‘world on the way to its renewal’, the part of the world that ‘confesses the renewal to which all the world is called’, and ‘the instrument of that renewal of the world’.49 Or, the church is constituted by specific practices that Yoder confidently identifies and, as such, it is free from the unfaithfulness of historically established Christendom.

III. Yoder and Freedom from the Mennonite Church? To this point, I have simply reiterated that Yoder’s church is ‘free from’ Constantinianism, liberal social orders and the violent politics of empire. Aside from the rejection of violence, what this means constructively has been left relatively unexamined. To press what Yoder is driving at, however, requires a further concentration of focus on the specific modes in which the free church relates to the broader Christian tradition and the state. For Yoder, the fundamental mistake of Christendom is a theological mistake, namely, the misidentification of the place of the people of God in the world.50 What he meant is that Christendom assumed that Christian duty was demanded from everyone, thereby denying the freedom of unbelief. That is, all in Christendom were treated as the people of God, even those who refused to confess Jesus as Lord. This Yoder rejects. Like Schleitheim, he assumed that true confession that Jesus is Lord is not merely intellectual assent or a verbal statement; confession is doxologically proclaimed by the cultivation of a distinctive consciousness through practices, ‘a sense of reality running against the stream of the unquestioningly accepted commonplaces of the age’.51 But how is one to perform this doxology? In answering this question, Yoder begins down a constructive road that leads back to the ambiguous interplay between fantasy and freedom in Calvin’s critique of Anabaptism with which I began. The following is a brief attempt to sketch that road. For Yoder, to confess Jesus as Lord is to be empowered to discern which historical developments can be welcomed as progress (and which ones can be rejected as setbacks);52 to confess Jesus as Lord is ‘to learn to derive behavior from Good News, not from the concern for justification’;53 to confess Jesus as Lord is to own the Lamb’s victory in one’s own time because the victory is already assured.54 The new world is on its way whether one consents or not. In light of this reality, the church is free from needing to invest its time and energy in obtaining the capacity to coerce others and in holding on to its power.55 This much aligns with the negations outlined above in some detail. Obversely, the church is also free



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to create revolutionary ‘pilot projects’ that celebrate that new world – the deep social change – already on its way. Or, in short, the church is free to explore ways to affirm and further the revolutionary politics of Jesus. When applied to non-violence or pacifism, this logic has been widely accepted in Anabaptist circles and beyond. The application of this logic in another direction, however, has challenged Anabaptist ethics to an extent that has yet to be recognized. Since the early 1990s, it has become clearer that one of the ‘pilot projects’ that Yoder explored throughout much of his academic career was an experiment in new forms of Christian sexuality.56 Details continue to emerge about Yoder’s sexual abusing, but it is increasingly clear that ‘more than 100 women experienced unwanted sexual violations by Yoder’,57 violations that ranged from ‘superficial touching as a natural greeting’ to ‘exploration of partial/interrupted arousal/intermission’.58 Recently, David Cramer and I, borrowing from Yoder’s self-description, referred to this somewhat sarcastically as Yoder’s ‘grand, noble experiment’.59 In that context, we drew upon a ‘Memorandum to whom it may concern’, dated 18 March 1974, to illustrate how Yoder saw his sexual exploration as part of his ecclesiology. This memorandum also makes clear, correlatively, that his sexual exploration is riven with appeals to the freedom of a Christian: If we were able to free ourselves from the tyranny of assuming that relations between two persons must be seen as potential courtship, we would discover a new liberty for the expression of affection and moral support between persons, whether of the same sex or of both sexes, without being frightened by the fear of misrepresentation or unwholesome developments. In some places we may clearly have been taught by “the youth culture” to rediscover the possibility that spiritual intimacy and physical touching need not lead to sexual expression, so that the married person may be free to express affection physically to others than his or her spouse, and the single person may receive physical and spiritual affirmation from other of the opposite or the same sex without fear or scandal.60

Of course, the freedom for physical affection described by Yoder here is qualitatively different from the radical Anabaptist polygamy enjoined by Bernhard Rothmann and John of Leiden during the Münster Rebellion that was so odious to Calvin.61 Yet, Yoder’s freedoms from the ‘tyranny’ of prevailing sexual conventions were, contrary to his wishes, scandalous; they continue to be so. Various Mennonite institutions and interested persons tried, repeatedly, to put an end to Yoder’s sexual agenda for decades. Throughout, as Rachel Waltner Goossen’s narrative reveals, it is clear that Yoder resisted the authority of even his own church. He would not bend to the wishes of Marlin Miller, the President of Goshen Biblical Seminary, or the seminary’s further attempts to discipline through a Covenant Group (1980–4) and Confidential Task Force (1982); he would not bend to the challenge levelled by the elders of his own church, Prairie Street Mennonite Church (1986); and he doggedly resisted agreeing to the assessment, recommendations and stipulations of the Church Life Commission (1992–6), the Accountability and Support Group (1992–6) and the Executive Board (1992–7) of the Indiana–Michigan Mennonite

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Conference.62 Yoder was eventually restored to the Mennonite Church in 1996, an event that was celebrated by Hauerwas, Glen Stassen and other admirers. This did not, however, put an end to his attempts to enact his pilot project on human sexuality.63 Whatever one decides to make of Yoder’s psychological health,64 his resistance to discipline was buttressed by the theological foundation grounding his resistance to Constantinianism: namely, his appeal to the freedom of the Christian. It should come as no surprise, then, that Yoder was also more than willing to refer to Mennonite institutions – including the very ones he worked for – as forms of Christendom, the ‘Mennonite corpusculum Christianum’.65 At present, the Mennonite world – especially the Mennonite Church (MC) USA and the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary66 – is trying to come to grips with the ramifications of the manifold abuses performed by Yoder. In this wrestling, one common theme is pronounced even when it is not named: the freedom of Christian ethicists must be limited.

IV. Anabaptism and Limiting the Freedom of Christian Ethicists (and Other Leaders) The Schleitheim Confession is straightforward in its description of church discipline. It closely follows the normative suggestions found in Matthew 18 with the assumption that nothing further is demanded or needed. Its confidence is striking: ‘But within the perfection of Christ only the ban is used for the admonition and exclusion of the one who has sinned, without the death of the flesh, simply the warning and the command to sin no more.’67 Yoder’s actions challenge Schleitheim’s description of the ban from a direction quite different from the challenge posed by Calvin. The latter believed that the overconfident Anabaptist application of the ban lost sight of the need for grace. It lost sight of the reality that the communion of the church is the means to rescue the members who are sick and infected. It lost sight of the reality that it is God’s work to judge who or what constitutes the church.68 The 1995 MC USA Confession of Faith, however, seems to seek a balance between the basic convictions of Schleitheim and Calvin’s insistence concerning the need for grace: We believe that the practice of discipline in the church is a sign of God’s offer of forgiveness and transforming grace to believers who are moving away from faithful discipleship or who have been overtaken by sin. Discipline is intended to liberate erring brothers and sisters from sin, to enable them to return to a right relationship with God, and to restore them to fellowship in the church … Mutual encouragement, pastoral care, and discipline should normally lead to confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Corrective discipline in the church should be exercised in a redemptive manner … If the erring member persists in sin without repentance and rejects even the admonition of the congregation, membership may be suspended. Suspension of membership is the recognition that persons have separated themselves from the



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body of Christ. When this occurs, the church continues to pray for them and seeks to restore them to its fellowship.69

Despite the shift towards acknowledging the need for grace in church discipline, the present challenge to Anabaptists, however, still questions the overconfidence placed in the ability of its normative church discipline – even as worked out in the processes described in Matthew 18 – to address sin in the church. To bring this essay to a conclusion, I raise two of the several questions that emerge from Yoder’s appeals to the freedom of a Christian. 1. Does Yoder’s appeal to Christian freedom regress infinitely? To get to the answer to this question, allow me to review summarily the logic of Yoder’s appeal to freedom from the politics of empire and Constantinianism:

Step 1 – Obedience: a) Jesus is Lord; b) the term ‘Lord’ implies the demand for obedience; therefore: c) Jesus demands obedience. *A corollary of this claim is that there is no other Lord and therefore obedience cannot be demanded by any other.



Step 21 – Free Obedience: a) the practices of the church are performed in obedience to Jesus; b) obeying Christ is voluntary (free) and cannot be forced; therefore: c) the practices of the church can only be performed freely. *A corollary of Step 21 is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who obey Jesus freely and those who do not.

An extension of this distinguishing logic is also present in his thought in a slightly different form:

Step 22 – Obedience as the Politics of Jesus: a) those who obey Jesus follow the politics of Jesus; b) the church is constituted by those who obey Jesus; therefore: c) the church is constituted by those who follow the politics of Jesus. *A corollary of Step 22 is that those who do not follow Jesus do not constitute the church (i.e. they follow a different politics).

And, finally, building on the previous: Step 3 – The Circularity of the Politics of Jesus: a) the church is constituted by those who follow the politics of Jesus; b) the practical specification (i.e. communal casuistic or prudential reasoning) of the politics of Jesus is determined by the church; therefore: c) the specification of the politics of Jesus is determined by those who follow the politics of Jesus.

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*A corollary of Step 3 is that the specification of the politics of Jesus is taken out of the hands of any established administrative or hierarchical body and placed in the hands of those deemed to be practicing the politics of Jesus rightly. Throughout his rejection of the logic of empire, Constantinianism and Christendom, Yoder employs a form of 3.c. And, 3.c is critically dependent on the theological claim built into 22.c/3.a, a claim strongly challenged by Luther and Calvin (at least as far as one is referring to ‘the church’ as any empirically observable group of people). As long as Yoder is able to disqualify and exclude various people and groups of people from the church based on the performance of their politics, he is able to identify the church with his preferred politics. This is how the church remains free from the state and Constantinian Christianity. The question that persists, however, is that of whether this logic necessarily regresses infinitely. Or, to state the question in a more negative light: does this logic devolve into self-referential justification? For Yoder, the authority and demands of the state and Constantinian churches can be rejected because the politics of those who follow Jesus and those who do not are fundamentally different (and occasionally opposed) – the faithful move in the direction of the world that is on its way; the unfaithful (i.e. the Constantinian) resist, obstruct or undermine this movement. But if the politics of Jesus are determined by those who practice the politics of Jesus, who determines which politics of Jesus are determinative? At the end of the day, it appears that logic can devolve into a lone prophetic voice, as it did with Yoder’s sexual pilot project. But does his logic have to move in this direction? And, how would one limit the freedom of the church from the state and Constantinianism without succumbing to their coercive politics? Of course, practically, the Indiana–Michigan Mennonite Conference eventually suspended Yoder’s ministry credentials in 1992 in what appears to be an almost symbolic application of the ban (even though it could not stop the violence and exploitation of many women). This may be the inevitable and only traditional Anabaptist response to Yoder. Yet, in response, Yoder noted that he ‘would not be greatly concerned if his ties with the denomination diminished’.70 Is this the inevitable and only response Yoder could provide to a conference he thought was held captive to institutionalizing and domesticating the radical politics of Jesus? Therein lies one of the profound challenges that will continue to haunt those who have championed Yoder’s defence of the freedom of the Christian from the bondage of the state and the Constantinian church. Shifting gears from attending to the inner logic of the freedom of a Christian to the logic at work in limiting freedom in the church, Yoder exemplifies a challenge to Anabaptist thought from a very different direction. Specifically, Yoder’s acts of sexual violence have brought attention to the reality that sexual violence is not uncommon in Mennonite churches. And, if this is the case, are the accepted means of Anabaptist church discipline – whether found in Schleitheim, the 1995 Confession of Faith or elsewhere – sufficient? And sufficient for what? If not, what does this mean for some of the most treasured tenets of Anabaptism, including



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freedom from the state? In order to pry open what is at stake, I would like to pose a second question. 2. Should the state be called upon to interfere in church discipline? At first glance, this seems like a question that Anabaptists can and should answer with an emphatic ‘No!’. In reality, however, the answer is much more difficult. This is illuminated when reframing the question as follows: Can calling the police be necessary – or even acceptable – in intra-church disciplinary matters (that is, when sin is committed within the church)? In asking this question, the neatly interwoven elements presumed integral to Anabaptist theology and ethics begin to fray. When reflecting on Marlin Miller’s discovery of Yoder’s actions, Goossen recently stated: ‘One might reasonably imagine that, upon reading this memo, President Miller called the police and pressed charges against the 51-year-old professor who was methodically perpetrating sexual violence on female students and presumably other women on campus. But this was 1979.’71 In a similar manner, when Rebecca Slough – the current academic dean of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary – articulated the hope of shalom in the wake of Yoder’s actions, she openly admitted: ‘Nothing in this essay should be construed to circumvent the necessity of medical treatment, professional counseling, the involvement of protective services, or law enforcement.’72 Yet, what do these common-sense appeals to ‘reasonableness’ and ‘necessity’ mean? Since when did these serve as sufficient criteria for appealing to authorities prior to and above church discipline? To be clear, this is not asking the question of whether Anabaptists allow the state to act violently ‘outside the perfection of Christ’, to use the language of Schleitheim.73 I am also not asking whether Anabaptists are right to use armed resistance when their lives are threatened as exemplified by the Selbstschutz units organized in the Mennonite Ukrainian colonies in the early 1900s.74 Even closer to home, I am not asking whether Anabaptists can participate conscientiously in law enforcement.75 I am specifically asking whether the state – in the form of law enforcement, whether organized locally, regionally or nationally – has a role in matters of Anabaptist church discipline (especially prior to pursuit of the process outlined in Matthew 18). My point in interrogating the claims of ‘reasonableness’ and ‘necessity’ for involving government authorities in matters of church discipline – or at least matters among Christians of the same denomination with the same theological convictions – is simply to note that the practice of Anabaptism appears to far outstrip and perhaps even contradict its theological justifications.76 This may be a good thing, and in Yoder’s case it would undoubtedly have been a good thing – I am with Goossen and Slough on this. But nearly every conviction in Anabaptism’s anti-Constantinian framework militates against this. To illustrate, again, I simply point to the MC USA Confession of Faith. As quoted above, the Confession of Faith’s description of church discipline provides no space for referring to external authorities, especially those sorts of authorities that use force or utilize the threat of force to accomplish its ends. If

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Anabaptists assume their ecclesiology rests on the claim that ‘the church is God’s “holy nation,” called to give full allegiance to Christ its head,’77 then it logically follows that any other demands for allegiance are, at best, secondary and qualified by this assumption. When speaking directly about the church’s relation to government and society (Article 23) the Confession enjoins Christians to respect and pray for those in authority, while also allowing that Christians are allowed to participate in government and other institutions. Whatever sliver of theoretically possible rapprochement that might allow government to interfere with or participate in church discipline is quickly shut down when even participation in government is qualified as possible ‘only in ways that do not violate the love and holiness taught by Christ and do not compromise our loyalty to Christ’78 – it is far beyond the pale, therefore, to even imagine that the use of force could be deemed necessary in the church and among Christians, for that is the very definition of Constantinianism. As Article 22 makes clear, all Christian activity must be conditioned by the practice of non-resistance and peace, even in the face of violence and warfare, for that is how Mennonites follow Christ. Rounding off the circle, then, to resist evil with force or the threat of force is to fail to trust God; to resist with the threat of force is to fail to accept persecution for righteousness sake;79 or, to resist with the threat of force is to betray one’s allegiance to Christ as the head of God’s ‘holy nation’. In toto, this biblically rooted theological circularity with a long history stands behind Carolyn Holderread Heggen’s observation that Mennonite victims ‘may find it harder to resist violation and to report abuse’.80 If this logic is true, then how is it that Goossen, Slough, Heggen and many other Mennonites – all of whom would not imagine they are denying their allegiance to Christ – deem it appropriate to call upon law enforcement when there is sexual abuse in church? To answer this question positively requires no less than a complete reconfiguration of the relationship between the church and the sword as it is laid out in Schleitheim: Now many, who do not understand Christ’s will for us, will ask: whether a Christian may or should use the sword against the wicked for the protection and defense of the good, or for the sake of love. The answer is unanimously revealed: Christ teaches and commands us to learn from Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart and thus we shall find rest for our souls. Now Christ says to the woman who was taken in adultery, not that she should be stoned according to the law of His Father (and yet He says, “what the Father commanded me, that I do”) but with mercy and forgiveness and the warning to sin no more, says: “Go, sin no more.” Exactly thus should we also proceed, according to the rule of the ban.81

This form of discipline did not stop Yoder, and it has not stopped many other Anabaptists from violating meek and lowly women and men throughout the last decades and centuries. Perhaps it is time to reexamine theologically the alleged sharp distinction between the church and world that naïvely enables the perpetration of injustice. To state the obvious, it would seem that, if Anabaptists are



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going to appeal to the police when violated by other Anabaptists, perhaps they ought to get to work critically reexamining their most cherished theological convictions so that their walk and their words may become something close to commensurate.

V. Concluding Ambiguities Concerning the Future of Christian Freedom in Anabaptism The Anabaptist tradition, at least as idealized in its normative and confessional documents, appears to be exceptionally clear and confident that it stands apart from and free from the world. Those of us that have grown up in that tradition understand that this position is what one ought to aspire to; those of us that have grown up in the tradition also have experienced the failure of these ideals, some more traumatically than others. The high-profile case of John Howard Yoder has forced the dark undercurrents (the hidden brigandage?) within the Anabaptist tradition into the light of public scrutiny and, because of this, the rest of the claims of the tradition have been dragged under the microscope as well. In the above, I have attempted to illuminate how the case of John Howard Yoder provides a perspective for cross-examining the logic at work in freeing Anabaptism from the logic of empire and Constantinianism. In short, I have sought to demonstrate that the freedom of the Christian from Constantinianism and from the secular social order is neither as clean nor as clear as Anabaptists have imagined. Perhaps another way to state this is to acknowledge that the crucible of intra-state and inter-state warfare in which Anabaptist non-violence was forged – from the sixteenth to the twentieth century – has, in fact, yielded a false and self-righteous sense of confidence about the relationship between the church and government that must be revisited from the ground up. Right from the beginning, perhaps we ought to acknowledge that there are limits to the freedom of a Christian ethicist; perhaps we ought to begin with the acknowledgement that many Anabaptists today are willing to enforce the limits of ‘the particular social-political-ethical’82 of the politics of Jesus with the politics of the state. This is the precarious state of Anabaptist ethics after Yoder.

Endnotes   1. John Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists and Against the Libertines, ed. and trans. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982), 39.   2. Ibid., 37.   3. There are, of course, many others who have contributed to the resurgence of interest in Yoder’s Anabaptism. Some have done so through their criticisms of Yoder, including James Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume One: Theology and Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 74–6; James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of

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Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 150–66; and Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), especially 255–78. Some have done so with more sympathy, including Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 239–53; Peter Ochs, The Free Church and Israel’s Covenant (Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University, 2010); and Mark Thiessen Nation, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). That is not to say that there are no other formidable Anabaptist thinkers in the twentieth century. See, for example, Gordon Kaufman, Robert Friedmann, Harold Bender, Thomas Finger, A. James Reimer and J. C. Wenger, among others. It is merely to acknowledge that Yoder’s version of Anabaptism has been the form of Anabaptist thought that has come to predominate and represent the movement outside Mennonite circles.   4. Mennonite theologian Ted Grimsrud encapsulates this common sentiment directly: ‘The politics of Jesus say “no” to the politics of empire.’ Grimsrud, ‘Jesus to Paul’, in John Howard Yoder: Radical Theologian, ed. J. Denny Weaver (Eugene: Cascade, 2014), 206.   5. Martin Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, LW 31, 344.   6. Ibid., 604.  7. The Schleitheim Confession, trans. and ed. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1977). In the following, I will occasionally refer to The Schleitheim Confession simply as Schleitheim.   8. Ibid., 9.   9. For an attempt to reconstruct the historical referents of this passage, see H. W. Meihuizen, ‘Who Were the “False Brethren” Mentioned in the Schleitheim Articles?’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 41 (1967): 200–2. 10. Schleitheim Confession, 9. 11. Ibid., 13. See Mt. 5.39. 12. Ibid., 15. 13. Ibid., 11. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists, 91. 16. Ibid., 91. This is one of the challenges the pacifist leaders of the early church faced as well (and I use the term ‘pacifist’ loosely in this context, recognizing that the term covers a broad range of perspectives on violence). 17. See, for example, Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Church, 2 vols (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009/10); H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Holt, 1929); H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951); James Gustafson, ‘The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church and the University’, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 40 (1985): 83–94. See also, Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Why the “Sectarian Temptation” is a Misrepresentation: A Response to James Gustafson’, in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 90–110. 18. This aspect of Luther’s thought is captured in his correlative claim that ‘A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’ Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, LW 31, 344. 19. Ibid., 367.



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20. Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 49. 21. It is important to note that, according to Yoder, the Reformation marked the lowest point in the just war tradition for a variety of reasons, including the shift that subjected religious affiliation to the civil order – cujus region, ejus religio. See John Howard Yoder, Nonviolence – A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures, ed. Paul Martens, Matthew Porter and Myles Werntz (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 54–6. 22. In Part I of The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), Hauerwas and Wells trace this form of the corruption of Christian ethics to Kant. 23. Hauerwas’s narrative of decline is sketched in different ways in various places. This version is inferred from his ‘When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference,’ The Christian Century, 13 October 1993, 982–7, but a fuller account, written for a different purpose, can be found in Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, ‘Why Christian Ethics Was Invented’, in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 28–38. 24. Hauerwas, ‘When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference’, 982. 25. Describing Yoder as a ‘lone hero’ is, for Hauerwas, a mischaracterization because Yoder’s ethics is about a community, about the way of a people. Hauerwas writes: ‘The image of the lone gunman facing down the bad guys does not really fit Yoder, however, because his work is meant to defeat the myth of the hero. His work is based on the life of a community. Nonviolence is a way of life for Christians. If that community produces people whose stories it remembers, it calls them martyrs, not heroes.’ Hauerwas, ‘When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference’, 982. 26. Hauerwas, ‘When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference’, 984. For Yoder, the point of The Politics of Jesus is to test (and prove) the hypothesis that ‘the claims of Jesus are best understood as presenting to hearers and readers not the avoidance of political options, but one particular social-political-ethical option’. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 11. 27. Of course, Yoder’s position does not emerge completely de nouveau – even though Yoder often pays little attention to the history of Christian ethics, Albrecht Ritschl, Rauschenbusch and many involved in the social gospel movement (and their heirs) could be seen as at least partial allies because of their attempts to insist that Jesus’ existence is normative beyond merely personal piety. 28. See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004) and With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001). 29. John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2003), 31. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. For a provocative account of how Yoder problematically ontologizes the church in these sorts of descriptions, see Hans-Jürgen Goertz, John Howard Yoder – radikaler Pazifismus im Gespräch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), especially Chapter 6, ‘Kirche und Welt – Differenz und Beziehung’, 196–220. 32. Yoder, Original Revolution, 29. 33. See John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 23. 34. It is worth noting that Yoder himself would have granted the argument, levelled by Peter Leithart and others, that Constantine is by no means a perfect exemplar of this

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position. See, for example, ibid., 135–47; Leithart, Defending Constantine; and John D. Roth, ed., Constantine Revisited: Leithart, Yoder, and the Constantinian Debate (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013). 35. John Howard Yoder, ‘The Ecumenical Movement and the Faithful Church’, in Radical Ecumenicity: Pursuing Unity and Continuity after John Howard Yoder, ed. John C. Nugent (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2010), 216. 36. Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists, 44–55. 37. Briefly, the ‘ban’ is the practice of disciplining members of the church, following the model outlined in Matthew 18 that culminates in the punishment of the offender through exclusion from the church. See Schleitheim Confession, 10–11 and Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists, 56. 38. Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists, 57. 39. Schleitheim Confession, 12. 40. For Yoder, this refers to the process of binding and loosing, of communal moral discernment and forgiveness, rooted in Matthew 18. See John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiastical and Ecumenical, ed. Michael Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 323–58, 361–2; John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2001); John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Public (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 43–4. 41. For Yoder, this refers to the unique social pattern of the community of believers in which each member is given a distinctive role by the Spirit. See John Howard Yoder, The Fullness of Christ: Paul’s Revolutionary Vision of Universal Ministry (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1987); Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, 362–3; Yoder, Body Politics; Yoder, For the Nations, 33. 42. In his later years, Yoder returns to these five ‘marks’ of the church repeatedly. He is clear, however, that there may be others worthy of inclusion that follow the same pattern. See Yoder, For the Nations, 43. 43. See John Howard Yoder, ‘What Are Our Concerns?’, in The Roots of Concern: Writings on Anabaptist Renewal 1952–1957, ed. Virgil Vogt (Eugene: Cascade, 2009), 167. One need not imagine Luther’s retort to the Anabaptists: ‘[It is] just as it happened under the papacy, when we were driven to the sacrament as a work of obedience. For no one went in order to nourish his faith, but everything was finished and the work accomplished when we had received the sacrament. So here again the Anabaptists are urging on to a work, so that when the people are baptized they may have confidence that everything is right and complete … For, as we have already said, were they to be sure beforehand of faith, they would never again baptize anyone.’ Luther, ‘Concerning Rebaptism (1528)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 360–1. 44. Yoder, ‘The Ecumenical Movement and the Faithful Church’, 221. 45. Ibid., 221. 46. Yoder, Body Politics, vii. I suspect that this is one example of what Yoder learned from Hauerwas, though credit is not given in this context. 47. Yoder, The Royal Priesthood, 108. 48. John Howard Yoder, The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, ed. Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 105. 49. Yoder, Body Politics, 78. One ought to note that Yoder’s vision of Anabaptism both affirms Schleitheim’s refusal of Luther’s body/soul distinction while also innovatively defusing Schleitheim’s absolute dualism between the kingdom of heaven and the



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kingdom of the devil. In Body Politics, the organic unity of the world is expressed as follows: ‘The believing body is the image that the new world – which in the light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way – casts ahead of itself … For the people of God to be over against the world at those points where “the world” is defined by its rebellion against God and for us to be in, with, and for the world, as anticipation of the shape of redemption, are not alternative strategies.’ Yoder, Body Politics, 78. 50. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 109. 51. Ibid., 123. 52. Yoder, Body Politics, 132. The criterion employed here, in sum, is this: ‘progress in history is borne by the underdog’. See ibid., 137. 53. Ibid., 136. 54. Ibid., 137. 55. John Howard Yoder, Revolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures, ed. Paul Martens, et al. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 101. 56. For original reporting of Yoder’s actions, see Tom Price’s five-part Elkhart Truth report from June 29 to July 6, 1992, http://peacetheology.net/john-h-yoder/john-howardyoder’s-sexual-misconduct – part-five-2/. For more recent analysis of Yoder’s actions, see Ruth Elizabeth Krall, The Elephant in God’s Living Room, Volume Three: The Mennonite Church and John Howard Yoder; Collected Essays (no place: Enduring Space, 2013), http://ruthkrall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Elephants-inGod’s-Living-Room-Vol-3-©.pdf; David Cramer, et al., ‘Theology and Misconduct: The Case of John Howard Yoder’, The Christian Century, 20 August 2014, 20–2; David Cramer, et al., ‘Scandalizing John Howard Yoder’, The Other Journal, 7 July 2014, http://theotherjournal.com/2014/07/07/scandalizing-john-howard-yoder/ [accessed January 2015]; and the January 2015 volume of The Mennonite Quarterly Review, especially Rachel Waltner Goossen, ‘“Defanging the Beast”: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review 89:1 (2015): 7–80. 57. Goossen, ‘Defanging the Beast’, 10. 58. Ibid., 7. 59. See Paul Martens and David Cramer, ‘By What Criteria Does a “Grand, Noble Experiment” Fail? What the Case of John Howard Yoder Reveals about the Mennonite Church’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 89:1 (2015): 171–93. The phrase ‘grand, noble experiment’ was, according to Carolyn Holderread Heggen (‘Tina’), a phrase used by Yoder to invite participation in his radical sexuality. See Tom Price, ‘Yoder’s actions framed in writings’, The Elkhart Truth, 15 July 1992. 60. John Howard Yoder, ‘Memorandum to whom it may concern’, 18 March 1974. 61. Calvin, Treastises Against the Anabaptists, 107. 62. See Goossen, ‘Defanging the Beast’, 14. 63. Ibid., 79. 64. Theories about Yoder’s psychological health abound. Perhaps the most measured judgement is that of mental health physician and pastoral theologian, Ruth Krall, who writes: ‘While I do not (and indeed cannot), know the exact taproots of Yoder’s rude and anti-social behaviors, I do believe they are significant ones. The only hypothesis that makes sense to me is that his addictive and well-rationalized sexualized and abusive behavior, in one way or another, was rooted in intense personal suffering and that his behavior became an obscured manifestation of the angry rages he, himself, did not understand’ (Elephant in God’s Living Room, Volume Three, 158–9).

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65. See John Howard Yoder, ‘Anabaptist Vision and Mennonite Reality’, in Consultation on Anabaptist-Mennonite Theology: Papers Read at the 1969 Aspen Conference, ed. A. J. Klassen (Fresno, CA: Council of Mennonite Seminaries, 1970), 6. This is developed in more detail in Martens and Cramer, ‘By What Criteria’, 179–86. 66. Among many other actions taken or planned, AMBS held a ‘Service of Lament, Confession and Commitment’ for the survivors of Yoder’s abuse on 22 March 2015; MC USA likewise has planned a service of lament to be held at their national convention on July 3, 2015, in Kansas City, Missouri. 67. Schleitheim Confession, 14. 68. See Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists, 61–5. 69. Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1995), 55. 70. Goossen, ‘Defanging the Beast’, 59. 71. Ibid., 8. 72. Rebecca Slough, ‘Congregational Responses to Abuse and Trauma: The Persistent Hope of Shalom’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 89:1 (2015): 96. 73. Schleitheim Confession, 14. 74. See, for example, John B. Toews, The Origins and Activities of the Mennonite Selbstschutz in the Ukraine (1918–1919) (Goshen, IN: Mennonite Historical Society, 1972). 75. To begin to grasp the various positions on this question, see the rich discussion in Conrad Grebel Review 26:2 (2008). 76. Certainly, many of Yoder’s offensive actions occurred in situations where he was not explicitly functioning as a church officer. There are also many examples in the tradition where sexual violence was committed by Mennonite ministers, acting in precisely that capacity. The case of Yoder has, for better or worse, brought these other acts of violence out of the shadows. My presumption in the following is that the logic of the ‘reasonableness’ and ‘necessity’ of calling the police and pressing charges applies equally to those who commit violence officially and unofficially in the service of the church. 77. Confession of Faith, 85. 78. Ibid., 86. 79. Ibid., 81–2. 80. Carolyn Holderread Heggen, ‘Sexual Abuse by Church Leaders and Healing for Victims’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 89:1 (2015): 82. I would also suggest that this deeply imbedded logic in the tradition has, at least in part, limited the effect of texts such as Peace Theology and Violence Against Women within the tradition. See Elizabeth G. Yoder, ed., Peace Theology and Violence Against Women (Elkhart: Institute for Mennonite Studies, 1992). 81. Schleitheim Confession, 14. 82. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 11.

Chapter 7 T H E P O L I T IC S O F J E SU S A N D T H E E T H IC S O F C H R I ST : W H Y T H E D I F F E R E N C E S B E T W E E N Y O D E R A N D B O N HO E F F E R M AT T E R Michael Mawson

My presentation emphasizes what was denied before: Jesus as teacher and example, not only as sacrifice. – John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus1 Jesus calls to discipleship, not as a teacher and a role model, but as Christ, the Son of God. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship2 In recent decades theologians and Christian ethicists have given significant attention to the role and importance of community and discipleship for Christian ethics. There has been a renewed emphasis on the concrete church as the place through which Christians witness to and engage the world. In particular, many theologians have pursued and developed this emphasis through rich and detailed accounts of the formative practices, virtues, character, habits and narrative that sustain and are sustained by the church as a community. Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon, Mark Thiessen Nation, Glen Stassen and others have variously demonstrated the ways these are integral to the identity of this community in its distinctive witness.3 One of the most important and widely acknowledged influences behind these thinkers and their vision is the Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder. Many of those who have been influenced by Yoder, however, have also drawn upon and appealed to the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The latter is seen to provide a precedent and resources for this same theological vision. Hauerwas, for example, writes that, ‘I am sure that Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship, which I read as a student many times in seminary, was the reason some years later John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus had such a profound influence on me’.4 More recently Mark Thiessen Nation has provided a more comprehensive reading of Bonhoeffer’s theology along these lines.5 Bringing Yoder and Bonhoeffer together in this way seems to make sense. Bonhoeffer certainly makes claims that resonate with themes and concerns in

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Yoder’s theology, especially in his 1937 Discipleship. Like Yoder, he places the concrete Christian community at the centre of his theology. Both theologians maintain a clear distinction between the church and the world, and see the cross as central to their accounts of community and discipleship. The most obvious convergence, however, is the deep commitment to peace and non-violence that Yoder and Bonhoeffer share. In Bonhoeffer’s words, Christ’s disciples are to ‘renounce violence’ and remain ‘silent in the face of hatred and injustice’.6 Nonetheless, my interest in this essay is in tracing some real and deep theological differences between Yoder and Bonhoeffer and in exploring what is at stake with these. I proceed as follows. First, I outline what I take to be Yoder’s understanding of discipleship and community in his 1972 classic, The Politics of Jesus. Second, I briefly review Yoder’s direct engagement with Bonhoeffer in his 1987 lecture ‘The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship’.7 In this lecture, Yoder himself insists on some differences between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his own. Third, I turn to Bonhoeffer, focusing on his account of Christian formation and community in Discipleship,8 and drawing attention to the differences to Yoder. In light of these differences, I conclude with some broader reflections upon the challenge of Bonhoeffer’s theology for Christian ethics today.

I. Yoder and the Politics of Jesus In The Politics of Jesus, one of Yoder’s central claims is that the actions and teachings of Jesus, as presented by the synoptic gospels, provide a basis for the political form of the contemporary Christian church. He insists that Jesus provided a ‘model of radical political action’, one adopted by the early Christian church and similarly available to be adopted by Christians today.9 Yoder begins, then, by outlining some ways in which contemporary theologians and Christians have often failed to understand the Jesus of the gospels as politically and ethically relevant. He identifies this in Catholic appeals to the natural law, for example, and in liberal Protestant understandings of the Gospels as about spiritual values or as displaying an interim ethic.10 In these ways ‘Jesus himself … is not finally normative for ethics’ and ‘some kind of a bridge or transition into another realm or mode of thought’ is pursued (8).* Yoder identifies a similar evasion in dogmatic understandings of Jesus: the view that Jesus came to earth ‘to give his life for the sins of humankind’ (7). His concern is that this too draws attention away from the deeply political nature of Jesus’ ministry. It provides a way of thinking about Christ and the Christian life that is not directly grounded in Jesus’ earthly ministry and teachings.11 In developing an alternative, Yoder insists that Jesus directly displays a viable political agenda in the gospels: ‘His deeds show a coherent, conscious social– political character and direction, and his words are inseparable therefrom’ (112). Furthermore, Yoder insists that the gospels are only properly understood when *  All page numbers in parentheses refer to Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus until noted below.



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read along these lines. In Chapter 2 of The Politics of Jesus, he illustrates this through a systematic treatment of the gospel of Luke.12 Moving from the annunciation to the temptation in the desert, from Jesus’ ministry in Galilee to his crucifixion, Yoder draws out the social and political aspects of all that Jesus said and did. He summarizes: ‘Jesus was … the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which his disciples are called to share’ (52). At this point it is worth noting Yoder’s reliance on developments in modern New Testament studies.13 Yoder draws out Jesus’ significance by locating him in his first-century context.14 Accordingly, Jesus presents a ‘particular social– political–ethical option’ in this first-century world (11).15 He came to demonstrate a distinct way of being and acting in the world, one which is historically and visibly different to other contemporary options.16 On this basis he frequently contrasts the particular political option of Jesus with other first-century political options: the quietistic ‘withdrawal into the dessert’ of the Essenes, the establishment responsibility of the Sadducees and the violent revolutionary action advocated by the Zealots (36). Yoder further draws out and develops the distinctive political option of Jesus throughout The Politics of Jesus. He identifies this historical–political option, for example, in Jesus’ declaration of the year of Jubilee and economic retribution (Chapter 3); in his willingness to abandon earthly security (Chapter 4); in his opposition to oppressive and exclusionary social practices; and finally in his consistent embrace of suffering or renunciation of violence (Chapter 8). In all these ways Jesus announced and inaugurated ‘a new social reality … an alternative to the structures that were there before’ (33). For Yoder, the distinctiveness of Jesus’ option, as it appears in his life and ministry, culminates in and is summarized by the cross. At one level, the fact of the crucifixion confirms the political nature of this ministry: ‘Jewish and Roman authorities were defending themselves against a real threat. That the threat was not one of armed, violent revolt [i.e. the Zealots], and that it nonetheless bothered them to the point of their resorting to irregular procedures to counter it, is a proof of the political relevance of nonviolent tactics’ (49).17 If Jesus’ ministry had simply been spiritual or religious (i.e. apolitical), then there is no historically coherent reason why he would have been crucified. At a deeper level, the cross expresses what is particular about Jesus’ politics. That Jesus was willing to submit to this crucifixion, rather than resorting to violent revolt, discloses the nature of his ministry as one of servanthood, forgiveness and love. In other words, the cross symbolizes ‘the political alternative to both insurrection and quietism’ (36) and shows that ‘the alternative to how the kings of the earth rule is … servanthood’ (39). In addition, for Yoder the cross provides the point of continuity between the ministry of Jesus and the early church.18 Throughout his ministry, Jesus ‘calls into being a community of voluntary commitment, willing for the sake of its calling to take upon itself the hostility of the given society’ (37). Jesus’

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teachings and actions open up a space for others actively to adopt his politics, thereby embracing the suffering that this inevitably entails. The result is that, ‘the New Testament church sees … participation in the suffering of Christ … as guiding and explaining her attitude to the world’ (95). For the early Christian community, the experience of the option of Jesus is represented by the symbol of the cross: ‘His people will encounter in ways analogous to his own the hostility of the old order’ (96). This means that the early Christian community is necessarily distinct within the world and a visible witness to Jesus’ distinctive politics. On the one hand, the early Christians’ embrace of Jesus’ option provides the basis for a new commonality. A common vision and identity results from the shared embrace of this option and all that it entails. On the other hand, the fact that this is a particular historical–political option implies that the common vision and identity of the disciples will again be a distinctive one. It will be distinctive and visible in that this community actively embodies one particular option over against others. This leads to the issue of how the early Christian disciples – and by implication Christians today – are to go about taking up Jesus’ option and forming this visible community. Yoder describes this process using the language of participation, imitation and discipleship (i.e. nachfolgen as ‘to follow after’). The Christian is actively and willingly to take up the option of Jesus by imitating him, or at least those actions and activities that led to the cross.19 The early Christians participated in the option of Jesus by taking up a particular concrete, political stance: ‘If we may posit … that the apostles had and taught at least a core memory of their Lord’s earthly ministry in its blunt historicity, then this centering of the apostolic ethic upon the disciple’s cross evidences a substantial, binding, and sometimes costly social stance’ (127). The early Christians came together to adopt such a costly stance, one which set them at odds with the world, to ensure the visibility of their witness. It is worth noting the predominance of active language in Yoder’s conception of discipleship and community. For instance, he stresses ‘imitation’ in ways that imply a human capacity to imitate.20 If Jesus is indeed the bearer of a ‘new possibility of human, social, and political relationships’ (52), then the task of the disciples is to actualize or realize this new possibility as a new community.21 Human beings are faced with the decision of whether or not to follow Jesus by actively taking up this possibility (a decision which is already implied in the language of a ‘political option’). Yoder’s language thus implies that human beings have an independent standpoint from which to consider and respond to Jesus and his option.22 This anthropology is elsewhere apparent in his characterization of Jesus as foremost a ‘teacher and example’ (226).23 On this basis, Yoder appears to reject any forensic conception of justification, whereby ‘God declares, on the ground of the work of Christ which no person could have accomplished for himself or herself, that he or she shall henceforth be considered a new person, forgiven and restored to fellowship’ (213). In contrast, he insists justification is primarily ‘a social phenomenon centering in the reconciliation of different kinds of people’ (226). Justification involves the active and



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visible recognition and overcoming of social differences and exclusions within the new community.24 Put differently, it involves actively realizing the social and political option that Jesus made possible. Following from this, Yoder also seems to reject any conception of sin as original or inherited. He positions sin as primarily a failure to recognize and realize this option offered in Jesus.25 He writes: What then was Paul’s understanding of sin? When he does speak of himself as a serious sinner at all, this is not because of his existential anguish under the righteousness of God in general, but very specifically because, not having recognized that the Messiah had come in Jesus, he had persecuted the church and fought the opening of God’s covenant to the gentiles. (217)

In other words, Paul’s sin consists of his initial failure to recognize Jesus and his significance, and of his subsequent failure to enact the inclusivity that Jesus’ example requires. This conception of sin also appears in some of Yoder’s comments on the Sermon on the Mount, where he rejects the view that the Sermon presents an unattainable standard: ‘The “perfection” to which Jesus calls his hearers … is not flawlessness nor impeccability, but precisely the refusal to discriminate between friend and enemy’ (225).26 Yoder’s position appears to be that human beings, on their own terms, are able to follow these teachings and attain the standard that Jesus sets. There is nothing that inherently prevents the disciples from achieving Jesus’ perfection for themselves. Yoder concludes The Politics of Jesus with a brief discussion of the apocalyptic material in scripture. He claims this material provides a ‘resource’ for the ‘perception of the meaning and course of history’ (231). The apocalypses, he continues, ‘are about how the crucified Jesus is a more adequate key to understanding what God is about in the real world of empires and armies and markets than is the ruler in Rome, with all his supporting military, commercial and sacerdotal networks’ (246). Attending to this vision therefore frees Christians from needing to manage society on God’s behalf (240) and allows them to embrace the non-violent option of Jesus. It is worth noting that the stress is upon the apocalyptic as realized through the option of Jesus: ‘The gap between the present and the promise was not fundamental’ (241).27 For Yoder, there is a basic continuity between the present visible Christian community and the future kingdom of God.28

II. Yoder’s Reading of Bonhoeffer Before turning to Bonhoeffer’s theology, it will be helpful to examine how Yoder explicitly positions himself with respect to Bonhoeffer. In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder makes only two passing references to him. First, in a footnote in his chapter on discipleship, he asserts that ‘when Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses the term “discipleship” it carries a different shade of meaning. The accent falls less on sharing

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the Master’s way or nature, and more on unquestioning willingness to obey’ (113). Second, in a later chapter, Yoder distinguishes his own theology of the cross from Bonhoeffer’s language of ‘breaking through to the cross’ in confession, and related claim that sharing in Christ’s death involves the ‘shameful death of the sinner in confession’ (130). By Yoder’s reckoning, such language displays a dangerous, existential or inward turn that again obfuscates the more material and political nature of the crucifixion. In a 1987 lecture (first published in 2010), Yoder engages Bonhoeffer’s theology more extensively, focusing particularly on his account of discipleship.29 Yoder’s constant refrain in this lecture is that Bonhoeffer’s Christology and related account of discipleship lack concrete, historical content: ‘How does the Christ of Bonhoeffer’s call to discipleship relate to the lifestyle of the man named Jesus?’30 He elsewhere complains that Bonhoeffer ‘makes no effort to illuminate what discipleship means for the disciple by reference to any events in the pre-passion ministry of Jesus.’31 For Yoder, the problem is that Bonhoeffer fails to take the concrete, historical humanity of Jesus seriously. He thus reiterates his own position as ‘an ethic for which the concrete humanity of Jesus, in his social decisions, provides the model.’32 The primary way that Yoder frames this difference between Bonhoeffer and himself is in terms of differing accounts of the incarnation, which he respectively labels ‘Jesulogical’ and ‘logological’.33 On the one hand, Yoder designates his own approach Jesulogical in that it stresses that God became incarnate as a particular man, the first-century Jew named Jesus, who at that time and place made a series of particular decisions. On the other, he designates Bonhoeffer’s Christology logological in that it focuses on the fact of the son of God becoming human.34 What is implied in such a Christology, in Yoder’s judgement, is that the disciple needs to believe in, and be encountered by, this Christ, but need not overly concern himself or herself with the historical particularities of who Jesus actually was. Yoder’s concern is that Bonhoeffer’s Christ is not based on ‘the words or the earthly works of Jesus’, and that these words and works do not therefore ‘contribute the ethical substance’ of discipleship.35 Although Yoder clearly recognizes some fundamental differences between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his own, he nevertheless concludes his lecture by suggesting a remedy. First, he suggests that a more Jesulogical or Anabaptist approach to Christ and discipleship may not even have occurred to Bonhoeffer: ‘It probably never came into his mind.’36 Second, he proposes that Bonhoeffer’s theology might be redeemed and deepened by moving it in this direction: ‘To move in this direction would not be to despise the logological questions, but only to subordinate speculation about the incarnation to the fact of the incarnation.’37 In other words, Yoder holds that some of Bonhoeffer’s insights and questions might be taken up and reworked on the basis of a more robustly Jesulogical approach. In broad terms I would suggest that this is what followers of Yoder such as Hauerwas, McClendon, Nation, Stassen and others have sought to do. They have sought to read Bonhoeffer’s theology on the basis of broadly Yoderian or



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Anabaptist commitments, thereby emphasizing select aspects of his theology while downplaying others. While there is value in such an approach and what it draws from Bonhoeffer, this strategy neglects a number of crucial aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology. It is to these that I now turn.

III. Bonhoeffer and the Ethics of Christ** Whereas for Yoder discipleship involves human beings actively taking up a political option presented by the historical person of Jesus, in his 1937 Discipleship [Nachfolge] the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer gives a very different account of how Christ calls his disciples and of what this call entails.38 Furthermore, Bonhoeffer provides a different account of the relationship between Christ’s call and concrete Christian community. One of Bonhoeffer’s central claims in Discipleship is that the present or living Christ calls and gathers his disciples to himself directly. He had already developed this emphasis in his 1933 lectures on Christology: ‘As the Crucified and Risen One, Jesus is at the same time the Christ who is present now … He is to be understood as present in time and space. Nunc et hic … ’39 In other words, we can know Christ only because he is present and living, and thus able to encounter us today.40 In Discipleship, he again insists that, ‘Jesus Christ is not dead but alive and still speaking to us today through the testimony of scripture’ (201). Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the living Christ affects how we are to approach and interpret Scripture. In Yoder’s theology, as we have seen, Scripture’s role is primarily to present the life and teachings of the historical person of Jesus. The gospels and letters of Paul present a particular historical–political option of Jesus and the early church. In contrast, Bonhoeffer holds that the ‘living Christ in judgment and grace encounters us in scripture and is himself the key to interpreting it’ (82). Bonhoeffer’s interest is not so much in how human beings should properly read Scripture, or find Jesus in Scripture, but rather in how the living Christ comes to us through Scripture, opening and interpreting it for us. In another essay from this period, Bonhoeffer writes that ‘the only method of contemporization is thus the substantive [sachliche] textual exposition [of the Holy Scriptures] as the witness of Christ, and such exegesis has the promise of the presence of Christ’.41 Accordingly, for Bonhoeffer we should not try to ‘identify ourselves directly with those called by Jesus’ in the gospels (82). We should not try to put ourselves in the place of the first disciples, or follow Jesus in the same way that they did. Bonhoeffer insists that the first disciples do not provide a direct model for our own discipleship: ‘It is never a question of our having or taking on the same identity as the disciples or other people in the New Testament’ (203). Rather, he continues, ‘the only issue is that Jesus Christ and his call are the same, then and ** For the remainder or the chapter all page numbers in parentheses refer to Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship.

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now’ (203). The biblical disciples do not provide a model for discipleship. Rather, the living Christ calls us to himself through the witness of these disciples.42 This suggests that discipleship cannot be adequately understood through the language of option or possibility. For Bonhoeffer, following Christ is not an option that we somehow adopt or realize as human beings. In an earlier essay, he insists that ‘the concept of possibility has no place in theology and no place in theological anthropology’.43 He elaborates on why this is the case: The concept of possibility rationalizes reality. It determines every reality according to the manner of a logically existing thing. That is, it fixes it, makes it universally accessible. (In this way, it is possible to place the point of unity of self-understanding into one’s own ego through rationalization). For theological anthropology, this means that the human being is conceived with certain possibilities in relation to God, to which he can withdraw at any given time.44

The language of possibility is problematic inasmuch as it requires a kind of human being that exists prior to and apart from its relationship to God. It assumes a human being who is able to adequately position himself or herself with respect to God’s call. In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer thus insists that true discipleship can only involve an ‘immediate response’ or ‘simple obedience’ on the part of the Christian: ‘The call goes out, and without any further ado the obedient deed of the one called follows … ’ (57).45 If discipleship cannot be understood as a human possibility or option, then it cannot be something that disciples actively choose for themselves: ‘In simple obedience disciples do the will of the Lord who bids them do something extraordinary, and they know in everything only that they can do nothing else, that they are, therefore, doing what is simply a matter of course’ (150). Put differently, Bonhoeffer maintains the priority of Christ’s call over against any human ability to respond to or interpret this call. Indeed, as Bernd Wannenwetsch summarizes, ‘Christ’s calling is authoritative in that it generates the need, wish, and will to follow the command – while at times explicitly rejecting the human need, wish, and will to follow him as insufficient.’46 This further means that discipleship cannot be adequately understood as an active imitation or emulation of Christ. It cannot be understood primarily through the language of virtue, performance or habituation. ‘To be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ’, Bonhoeffer writes, ‘is not an ideal of realizing some similarity with Christ which we are asked to attain. It is not we who change ourselves into the image of God’ (284). ‘Rather’, he continues, ‘it is the image of God, the form of Christ, which seeks to take shape within us’ (284).47 Discipleship does not involve disciples actively imitating Christ, but rather passively receiving Christ and being formed by Christ. Bonhoeffer elaborates on this point in a later manuscript from his Ethics: ‘Formation occurs by being drawn into the form of Jesus Christ … This does not happen as we strive to become like Jesus … but as the form of Jesus Christ himself so works on us that it molds us, conforming our form to Christ’s own.’48



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Bonhoeffer does clearly admit in Discipleship that those wishing to become disciples should take a ‘first step towards Christ, one which ‘puts the follower into the situation of being able to believe’ (62). This first step is integral to Bonhoeffer’s famous distinction between cheap and costly grace, and it has received significant attention in the secondary literature.49 As Bonhoeffer puts it, such a step of human obedience is necessary in order that ‘faith does not become pious self-deception, cheap grace’ (64). What has received less attention, however, is Bonhoeffer’s careful stipulation that this step by itself ‘remains a dead work of the law, which can by itself never lead to Christ’ (65).50 He is clear that it is only in light of Christ’s call that we can even recognize whether this was even a step in the right direction: ‘There is nothing in the situation as such to indicate which kind it is’ (63). Christ calls and claims the disciple in a way that attends to this first human step, but Christ’s call in no way requires or depends on this step.51 The reason why all genuine Christian discipleship depends on Christ alone, and remains independent of all human striving, is of course sin. Following Luther, Bonhoeffer holds that all attempts to interpret and negotiate Christ’s call are implicated in a kind of self-assertion that emerged with the Fall: ‘Even in their most pious ways and deeds, persons cannot stand before God, because they are always basically seeking themselves’ (49). In other words, the problem of sin and its effects goes all the way down. In contrast to Yoder, sin is not something that human beings are in any sense able to move beyond or negotiate through their own efforts: ‘The sinner’s very life is enmeshed in sin to such an extent that deliverance from sin can be brought about for the sinners only through their death’ (255).52 This also means that justification depends entirely on God’s work in Christ, and that any righteousness resulting from Christ’s work (ultimately at least) remains with Christ. Bonhoeffer insists that, ‘the justification of sinners consists in God alone being righteous and sinners being totally and utterly unrighteous, rather than in granting sinners their own righteousness alongside that of God’ (256). It is only Christ’s righteousness that allows for reconciliation with God. Christ overcomes the problem of human sin only by standing in the place of human beings.53 For this reason justification cannot initially be understood in social and political terms, or as the active overcoming of social discrimination. For Bonhoeffer, Christ does not indicate the way out of sin, or exemplify and present a new possibility for humanity. Rather, Christ himself is the way; it is only in Christ that we stand reconciled before God. This indicates why everything that is entailed in genuine discipleship proceeds from Christ alone. In contrast to Yoder, Bonhoeffer maintains that true discipleship has no identifiable material or social content in itself: ‘What is said about the content of discipleship? Follow me, walk behind me! That is all … It is truly not a program for one’s life’ (58). Following the call of Christ is always and necessarily a leap of faith or a step into the unknown. In contrast to Yoder, it does not involve adopting or taking up a visible social or political programme. Discipleship involves being drawn away from all such worldly programmes and into Christ.

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The specific way that Christ calls his disciples away from worldly programmes and claims them is through suffering: ‘Just as Christ is only Christ as one who suffers and is rejected, so a disciple is a disciple only in suffering and being rejected, therefore participating in crucifixion’ (85). Here Bonhoeffer’s position appears to be close to Yoder’s, in that both insist that genuine Christian discipleship involves suffering and the cross. However, Bonhoeffer goes on to stipulate that even this suffering does not provide material content for discipleship. There is no general form of suffering that the disciples enter into or embrace. Rather, the living Christ gives to each disciple his or her own suffering: ‘How should disciples know what their cross is? They will receive it when they begin to follow the suffering Lord. They will recognize their cross in communion with Christ’ (89). In other words, for Bonhoeffer suffering and the cross do not exemplify the political and social nature of Jesus’ ministry. Rather, they designate what happens as Christ frees us from our material and worldly attachments and binds us to himself.54 However, Bonhoeffer is also clear that Christ’s call to discipleship, through suffering and by way of the cross, provides the basis for a new Christian community. This call not only leads to a break from existing, worldly community and relationality, it provides a foundation for a community of a qualitatively different kind.55 In the second half of Discipleship, he provides a detailed account of this new community. As Hauerwas, McClendon, Nation, Stassen and others have rightly noted, in this account Bonhoeffer emphasizes the visibility and distinctive witness of this new community. In an oft-quoted phrase, he writes that ‘the body of Christ takes up physical space here on earth’ and that ‘anything that takes up space is visible’ (225).56 Moreover, he insists that Christ’s call results in ‘a clear separation’ between this new community and the world (261). In other words, Bonhoeffer emphasizes both the church’s visibility and its distinctive identity. There are some deep and obvious resonances here with Yoder’s understanding of the church. Less attention, however, has been given to the important ways in which Bonhoeffer subsequently develops and qualifies this initial position.57 First, Bonhoeffer again insists that Christ’s call alone secures the visibility and witness of the church: ‘It is not the faith community which separates itself from others, yet this separation necessarily takes place in the call by the Word’ (175). Accordingly, genuine visibility is not a function of human beings adopting one historical–political option among others. True visibility proceeds from Christ’s call alone. On this point Bonhoeffer explicitly distances his own position from an Anabaptist (i.e. enthusiast) one: The danger is great that in enthusiasts’ indifference [schwärmerischer Gleichgültigkeit] to this age they will think it their duty now to achieve and make visible the extraordinariness of this new world, separating themselves from the world radically and with no willingness to compromise, in order to force into being what is Christian, what is appropriate to discipleship, what is extraordinary. (146)



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Following Bonhoeffer, we are not called on to actively separate ourselves from the world and to create extraordinary communities of witness. Rather, Christ calls us to a more ordinary kind of faithfulness: ‘Not the extraordinary, but rather the completely ordinary, everyday, regular, unobtrusive behavior is the sign of genuine obedience and genuine humility’ (147). Second, Bonhoeffer insists that the disciples cannot themselves see the distinctive visibility of this new community: ‘As a visible church–community, their own identity remains completely invisible to them. They look only to their Lord. He is in heaven, and their life for which they are waiting is in him!’ (251). Correlatively, he insists that when those who have been called by Christ look to the Christian community directly, all that they see is ‘strife, hardness, weakness and sin’ (267). For Bonhoeffer, the goodness of the church is never directly visible or available to the Christian disciples themselves. This goodness of the church is not for the disciples, but rather for those who are beyond the community: ‘they are to see the light of Jesus’ disciples shining’ (149). Third, and in a related way, Bonhoeffer claims that the Christian community on its own terms remains a ‘visible community of justified sinners’ (262).58 The church is visible, then, only as a sinful human body, not in terms of its holiness or good works more directly.59 Bonhoeffer thus explicitly rejects the ‘enthusiasts’ perfectionism’ whereby ‘those who are in God do not sin’ (206). Any righteousness and goodness of the Christian community is in Christ. (Thus, when Hauerwas claims that ‘Bonhoeffer and Yoder unapologetically maintain that we are called to be perfect’ – which he glosses as to ‘learn to be part of a people who take the time to live without resort to violence’ – he misses this emphasis on the continuing presence of sin in the church.)60 Finally, Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on sin in the church requires a different eschatology. I have suggested that Yoder tends to stress continuity between ‘the present and the promise’.61 Accordingly, the new Christian community already significantly embodies and anticipates the coming kingdom. While Bonhoeffer agrees that Christ establishes a new community, he is clear that it is only with the final judgement that ‘Christ himself will reveal to us the good works of which we have been unaware’ (279). In particular, it is only on this final day that Christ will make clear how he was already present in and visible through the church. Christ will make clear how he was present often in spite of – not due to – our human strivings and efforts: ‘On that day we will be greatly astonished, and we will recognize that it is not our works which endure here but only the work which God, in God’s own time, accomplished through us without our intention and effort’ (280).

IV. Conclusion What is the broader significance of these differences between Yoder and Bonhoeffer for how we understand and approach Christian ethics? When we recognize these differences – and attend to the aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology that are

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obfuscated when he is drawn into close proximity with Yoder – what challenges does his theology present for Christian ethics today? First, Bonhoeffer’s claim that the living Christ calls his disciples directly challenges Christian thinking and action to be oriented to and by this call. This means that genuinely Christian thinking and action remains continually open and attentive to the living Christ, to how Christ calls us and takes form among us in ways we can neither anticipate nor clearly comprehend. There is no Christian ethical thinking or action apart from the call of Christ and human obedience. Second, Bonhoeffer’s theology on this basis resituates how we understand the role of human agency and activity in ethics. In particular, his theology challenges any assumption – as in Yoder’s language of a Christian option or possibility – that we are responsible for making Christ present in the world or forming Christian community. Bonhoeffer makes it clear that it is Christ who is the primary agent in the Christian community.62 Christian ethics as a discipline should therefore be more clearly orientated to and by how Christ is directly present and at work – even when hidden – in our living with God and one another. Third, this presents a challenge to the language and kinds of concepts that we use in Christian ethics. In particular, Bonhoeffer’s theology challenges the use of the language of formative practices, virtues, character, habits and narrative – again, language that is central for Yoder and his followers. For Bonhoeffer, the problem with such language is that it focuses on human agency and activity too directly, rather than keeping the emphasis upon Christ’s call and work. It obfuscates the fact that as Christians we are simply to follow after or serve Christ. Fourth, in a related way, the danger of such language is that it downplays the sheer radicality of Christ’s call. As we have seen, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a sharp discontinuity or rupture between our lives before and after Christ. In contrast, language of practice or emulation suggests that on some level we are able to direct ourselves towards Christ, or that we have resources for negotiating Christ’s call. This potentially mitigates the extent of sin and its effects, on the one hand, and God’s work in Christ, on the other. Finally, Bonhoeffer’s theology challenges an understanding of Christian ethics as a particular kind of ethics, the kind done by Christians. As we have seen, Yoder presents Christianity in precisely this way, as a distinctive or particular ethos or politics. For Yoder, the significance of Jesus is that he presents a new sociopolitical option that is visibly distinct from other options. This calls for a kind of Christian thinking and action that is visibly distinct within the world. In contrast, Bonhoeffer’s theology implies a kind of Christian thinking and action that is both more and less distinct. It is more distinct, in that the living Christ provides the sole foundation for all Christian thinking and action. Christian thinking and action continually depends upon a Christ who stands distinct from and in the world.63 But Christian thinking and action is less distinct, following Bonhoeffer, precisely in that it is Christ alone – not our own striving or efforts – who secures any visible Christian witness. We ultimately know our thinking and action to be distinctly Christian only in Christ and by means of faith.



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In sum: recognizing the deep theological differences between Yoder and Bonhoeffer, and more clearly separating the latter from the former, challenges many contemporary patterns of thinking in contemporary Christian ethics, and reaffirms the priority and centrality of Christ’s own agency and presence for a genuinely Christian approach.

Endnotes   1. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 226.  2. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, DBWE 4, 57.   3. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-Violence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004); James McClendon, Systematic Theology: Ethics, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002); Mark Thiessen Nation, ‘Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Polyphonic Pacifism as Social Ethics’, in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Nation, ‘The First Word Christians Have to Say About Violence is “Church”: On Bonhoeffer, Baptists and Becoming a Peace Church’, in Faithfulness & Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, ed. Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); Nation et al., Bonhoeffer the Assassin: Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). Other examples of this kind of theological approach include Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live? (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008); Glen Stassen, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012).   4. Hauerwas writes, ‘It is not accidental that my account of Bonhoeffer as a political theologian makes him an ally of John Howard Yoder. Bonhoeffer, like Yoder, sought to recover the visibility of the church amid the ruins of Christendom from the beginnings to the end of his life.’ Performing the Faith, 55.   5. Nation et al., Bonhoeffer the Assassin?  6. DBWE 4, 108. In addition, Bonhoeffer appears to come close to Yoder when he makes the Sermon on the Mount the centre of his account of Christian discipleship. He similarly resists a Weberian construal of the sermon as an ‘absolute ethic’ that cannot be incorporated into a responsible political existence. See Max Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation’, in Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 217–18.   7. Yoder, ‘The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship’, in Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought, ed. Jens Zimmermann and Brian Gregor (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010).   8. Bonhoeffer is typically considered to be closest to Yoder’s theology in Discipleship.  9. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2. 10. That is, the liberal claim that Jesus’ early followers did not need a coherent politics or ethics because they erroneously believed in his imminent return. 11. Yoder summarizes: ‘Jesus knew he had to die, for reasons unrelated to his social humanity. Therefore, the social humanity of how that necessity came to be carried out is unimportant.’ Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 99.

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12. Yoder self-consciously selects Luke on the basis that it is usually considered the least political among the gospels. Ibid., 54. 13. He writes, ‘If we may be freed by self-critical scholarly objectivity no longer to have to assume that the authority of the Bible resides in its saying things that we agree with, we may be free as well to hear more clearly what it really says.’ Ibid., 214. 14. To be clear, Yoder’s interest is not in recovering a historical Jesus who stands behind or apart from the gospels (see ibid., 54). His move to contextualization comes closer to the third quest of the historical Jesus. See N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), 78–82. 15. Emphasis added. 16. Yoder provides a more detailed treatment of the various first-century political options in The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Waterloo: Herald Press, 1971), 18–27. 17. As Yoder elsewhere puts it, ‘Herod cannot be seeking to kill Jesus for heresy or prophecy; sedition would be the only possible charge.’ The Politics of Jesus, 37. On the political nature of the crucifixion see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985), 294–318. 18. Yoder emphasizes this continuity over against attempts to separate the politics of Jesus from Paul and the early church. See especially Chapter 9 of The Politics of Jesus. 19. Yoder stipulates that Christians are not to imitate every aspect of the historical person of Jesus, a mistake he identifies with the mendicant tradition, which ‘centred its attention upon the outward form of Jesus’ life; his forsaking domicile and property, his celibacy or his barefoot literacy.’ Ibid., 130. Rather, Christians are to embrace only that kind of politics that leads to the cross. 20. See ibid., 132–3. 21. Emphasis added. This idea that Jesus initiated something within his lifetime which the community then takes over following his death has broadly Hegelian overtones. See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 464–70. 22. Yoder writes, ‘the disciple chooses not to exercise certain types of power’ (emphasis added). Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 154. 23. Yoder explicitly contrasts his own position with traditional notions of ‘Jesus as sacrifice.’ Ibid., 226. 24. According to Yoder, ‘the word “justification” … should be thought of in its root meaning, as a verbal noun, an action, “setting things rights”’. Ibid., 224. 25. In an earlier essay, Yoder writes that, ‘The Gospel does not say anything about sin as an unavoidable phenomenon in human existence; it says “Repent!” which, being interpreted, does not mean “continue to sin, but sorrowfully”, but “STOP IT”. The Church’s not being the Church cannot be discussed in the indicative; “Repent and be the Church” is the only thing to say.’ Yoder, ‘Light to the Nations’, Concerns 9 (1961): 18. 26. Yoder rejects the view that the ‘Sermon’s intent is … to prepare people for grace by crushing them under the demand of an unattainable Godlikeness.’ Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 116. 27. This emphasis on a realized eschatology is elsewhere apparent in The Politics of Jesus: ‘The jubilee which Jesus proclaims is not the end of time, pure event without duration, unconnected to either yesterday or tomorrow. The jubilee is precisely an institution whose functioning within history will have a precise, practical, limited impact.’ Ibid., 104.



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28. It is not the case that ‘that to which we look forward is a radically different kind of world from the world in which we now live, but rather that it lies further in the same direction in which we are being led’. Ibid., 241. Hauerwas and others sometimes display a similar approach to the apocalyptic material. See Hauerwas, ‘On Being a Church Capable of Addressing a World at War: A Pacifist Response to the United Bishops’ Pastoral In Defense of Creation (1988)’, in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 436–48. 29. Yoder, ‘The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship’. 30. Ibid., 134. Yoder continues: ‘Is it some serious sense of a sharing in the sober social reality of the Messiah’s cross through that instrumentality of his body, i.e. of a community projecting into its present the meaning of his past servanthood?’ 31. Ibid., 140. 32. Ibid., 134. 33. Ibid., 144. 34. Yoder’s ‘logological’ reading of Bonhoeffer’s Christology misses the latter’s sharp rejection of theoretical approaches to the incarnation and emphasis on Christ’s promeity. For example, in his earlier Christology lectures, Bonhoeffer insists, ‘it is impossible to ask how God can enter into time – as if such an isolated God could exist! The only question that makes sense is who is present, who is with us here and now?’ Bonhoeffer, ‘Christology Lectures’, DBWE 12, 313. 35. Ibid., 143. 36. Yoder, ‘The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship’, 150. Yoder writes: ‘Bonhoeffer does not focus upon these issues and reject the Anabaptist response to them; they simply have not yet come to a head in his thinking.’ Ibid., 141. 37. Ibid., 151. 38. Ernst Feil has drawn attention to the centrality of Christology for Discipleship. Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Martin Rusmscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985), 78. 39. DBWE 12, 310. 40. Further, in these lectures Bonhoeffer insists that only this living Christ provides access to the Jesus of history (and not the reverse): ‘It is the Risen One who himself creates faith and makes possible our access to the historicity of Jesus … Through faith, history is recognized by eternity, not by itself or from within itself.’ Ibid., 330. 41. Bonhoeffer, ‘Contemporizing New Testament Texts’, DBWE 14, 421–2. Earlier in this same essay, Bonhoeffer writes that ‘the movement is not from the word of Scripture to the present but rather from the present to the word of Scripture, where it then abides! … Those who find this incomprehensible have not yet grasped the presupposition that the present can be found only where Christ and the Holy Spirit speak.’ Ibid., 418–19. 42. Bonhoeffer writes, ‘those who are called in scripture themselves belong to the word of God and to the proclamation of the word’. DBWE 4, 82. 43. DBWE 10, 403. 44. Ibid. 45. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer is critical in Discipleship of independent attempts to understand or mediate this call through reason: ‘How is this direct relation between call and obedience possible? It is quite offensive to natural reason. Reason is impelled to reject the abruptness of the response. It seeks something to mediate it; it seeks an explanation.’ DBWE 4, 57.

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46. See Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Christians and Pagans: Towards a Trans-Religious Second Naïveté or How to Be a Christological Creature’, in Who Am I? Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry, ed. Bernd Wannenwetsch (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 184. 47. Bonhoeffer writes, ‘You are the salt’ – not you should be the salt. The disciples are given no choice whether they want to be salt or not. DBWE 4, 111. 48. Bonhoeffer, ‘Ethics as Formation’, DBWE 6, 93. Later in this same essay Bonhoeffer describes the church as the place ‘where Jesus Christ’s taking form is proclaimed and where it happens’. Ibid., 102. 49. In discussing this ‘first step’, Paul Spanring, for example, describes Bonhoeffer’s position as involving ‘a volitional commitment to following Jesus’. Spanring, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Arnold Köster: Two Distinct Voices in the Midst of Germany’s Third Reich Turmoil (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013), 215. 50. Bonhoeffer is clear that such a step, while required, is in no way foundational for faith: ‘If we take the first step with the intention of putting ourselves into the situation of being able to believe, then even this ability to believe is itself nothing but works. It is but a new possibility for living within our old existence and thereby a complete misunderstanding. We remain in unbelief.’ DBWE 4, 65. 51. This first step has the status of the ‘penultimate’ with respect to Christ. See Bonhoeffer’s essay ‘Ultimate and Penultimate Things’, in DBWE 6, 146–70. 52. In the essay ‘The Anthropological Question in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology’, Bonhoeffer writes: ‘If sin and faith are among the possibilities of human beings, then the complete incomprehensibility, inexcusability, and infinity of the fall is rationalized into a comprehensible action of immanent possibilities. Here sin loses the weight of infinity, the result being that forgiveness and the wiping out of sins can be understood only as the actualization – albeit from God – of human possibilities.’ DBWE 10, 404. 53. This means that right standing before God is bestowed on human beings entirely ‘as a free gift’. DBWE 4 257. Bonhoeffer continues, ‘Jesus gave them [his disciples] the gift of justification… and forgiveness of sins.’ Ibid., 209. This differs significantly from Yoder’s understanding of justification in terms of an active pursuit of social reconciliation. To be clear, however, this is not to deny how, for Bonhoeffer, this reconciliation then flows from the work of Christ into his community. 54. Luther writes that ‘the only reason they [Christians] must suffer is that they steadfastly adhere to Christ and God’s word, enduring this for the sake of Christ’. Luther, ‘On the Councils and the Church’, LW 41, 165–7. 55. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘There are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples.’ DBWE 4, 95. After the call to discipleship, all such relationships are mediated in Christ. 56. See Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 45; Nation, Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, 157. 57. For example, in a recent article Craig Nessan draws on Bonhoeffer to emphasize the holiness of the visible church as the body of Christ. Nessan fails to mention any of Bonhoeffer’s careful qualifications of what this visibility entails. Nessan, ‘What if the Church Really is the Body of Christ?’, Dialog 51 (2012): 43–52. 58. Emphasis added. 59. For a recent constructive development of this insight see Jennifer McBride, The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 60. Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, 217. 61. Quoted above. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 341.



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62. Bonhoeffer more clearly distinguishes between Christ and the church than Yoder and his followers. 63. To be clear, following Bonhoeffer Christians should be open and attentive to all kinds of human thinking and action. For these to be available to theology and theological ethics, however, they must be (continually) disrupted and interrogated in light of Christ’s call. I explore how Bonhoeffer himself does this in more detail elsewhere. See Michael Mawson, ‘Theology and Social Theory: Reevaluating Bonhoeffer’s Approach’, Theology Today 71:1 (2014): 69–80.

Chapter 8 ‘ W E , A S T O OU R OW N P A RT IC U L A R S …’ C O N S C I E N C E A N D V O C AT IO N  I N Q UA K E R T R A D I T IO N Rachel Muers

What does Quaker tradition have to say about the freedom of a Protestant ethicist? On the face of it there are some obvious tensions between Quakerism and other strands of Protestant ethical tradition precisely around this theme of freedom. The polemical debates surrounding early Quakerism frequently centred around, on the one hand, the Quaker claim that their contemporaries ‘preached up sin’ at the expense of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit; and, on the other hand, the claim made against Quakers that they were making presumptuous claims to ‘perfection’. More specifically, Quaker claims about and demands for ‘freedom of conscience’ or for religious freedom have typically and fairly consistently pulled the conscience into the political – never mind the ethical – sphere and related it closely to a set of communally distinctive practices. Before long, this approach starts to look like a new kind of law and rather unlike the freedom of a Protestant ethicist. Moreover, the primacy of practice – and not mainly identifiably liturgical practice – in Quaker identity-formation and religious life makes it paradoxically difficult to do theological ethics.1 A consideration of Quaker tradition does not reveal straightforwardly ‘readable’ practices that clearly cohere with a theology, soteriology and anthropology and with a scriptural hermeneutic all made explicit. Rather, it reveals intergenerational and storied traditions of everyday practice – often referred to as ‘testimonies’ – that generate theological reflection, but are not understood to be tied to specific theological claims.2 Non-violence, to pick the most obvious example, has been the focus of much Quaker theological reflection over the centuries; but an examination of the literature suggests that the theological ‘arguments for’ non-violence are varied, and that Quaker theological work on the subject is – as it were – as much about putting practice into belief as about putting belief into practice. In other words, there seems to be more ‘freedom’ about the theology than about the ethics; and this might sit uneasily with reflections on the ‘freedom of a Christian ethicist’ derived from the Magisterial Reformers, even if it has more obvious family resemblances to Anabaptist and baptist traditions.3 I believe nonetheless that it is possible to articulate a coherent, and distinctive although not necessarily unique, Quaker contribution to theological ethics that

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relates directly to the question of freedom. In this chapter, I focus on the interconnected issues around conscience and communal ‘particularity’ or, as Quakers might put it in terms of their own tradition, peculiarity.4

I. Context: Arguing Freedom of Conscience/Freedom of Religion Although the main focus of this chapter is historical, it is worth drawing attention at this point to the contemporary relevance of questions around freedom in relation to conscience and to religion. First, I note a succession of relatively wellpublicized cases at both the national and European levels in which a claimed right to freedom of religion, by an individual, is set over against some claimed public good. Such cases force courts to make judgements about the complex – and, we might think, probably tradition-specific – relationships between individual judgements, a ‘religion’ as something larger than the individual, and the state or some supposedly non-religious public. These cases, at least insofar as they relate to Christianity, often embed assumptions about theological ethics that theological ethicists might well want to debate – such as that there’s a meaningful distinction between what is required by ‘a religion’ and what is required in the conscientious judgement of an individual believer. Having said that, the legal processes themselves, especially in Europe – and contrary to their occasional portrayal in the media – require attention to individual, communal and national particularity.5 The negotiation of ‘freedom of religion’ and ‘freedom of conscience’ proceeds step by step. Second, at the time of writing we are at the beginning of four years’ intensive national and international commemoration of the First World War. In this context there has been (what strikes me as) a notably high level of interest in the stories of war resisters and conscientious objectors – partly, I suspect, as a way of negotiating present generations’ ambivalence about the claims, particularly the ‘patriotic’ claims, put forward at the time in support of the war. Conscientious objectors are sometimes portrayed as lone heroes holding out for the freedom of individual choice over against the state military machine; but they are also liable to be seen as ‘cranks’ who set private interest above public good, or the religious ideal against the worldly real. Both of these contemporary phenomena in the presentation and interpretation of ‘conscience’ suggest something of a deficit in public understanding of religious ethics. In particular, there is a temptation to treat religious conviction, located in the individual conscience, as a kind of ‘black box’, producing unpredictable and irrational ethical imperatives that can only be accommodated or forcibly suppressed, but cannot enter the space of public reason (so you can either admire the hero or condemn the crank, but the one thing you cannot do is make sense of their specific ethical or political stance). The question is whether the ‘freedom of a Christian ethicist’, the freedom that I take to be at the heart of a distinctively Protestant theological ethics, inevitably risks such a restricted account of freedom of conscience.



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In this paper, I do not claim to provide a comprehensive answer to that question; quite apart from anything else, this would require a much more extensive interand intra-traditional dialogue. Rather, I attempt to locate Quaker approaches to questions of conscience and individual and collective freedom from ‘peculiarity’ in relation to wider debates in theological ethics, and to draw out some of the possible implications for future theological ethics, Protestant and otherwise.

II. Quaker Peace Testimony: Particularity and Peculiarity I turn first to a minor crisis (not the first and not the last) in the Quaker movement, and a creative theological response. In 1660, a group of Quaker men known as leaders in the movement issued the ‘Declaration of the Harmless and Innocent People of God’ which has since become better known (I think somewhat problematically) as the ‘Peace Testimony’. The Declaration followed the emergence and rapid growth of Quakerism in the period of the commonwealth, which despite considerable localized opposition (as well as, for example, the major national and public spectacle of a blasphemy trial) had established Quakers as a feature – albeit a controversial feature – of the British religious and political landscape.6 The restoration of the monarchy brought, inter alia, considerable (and not unfounded) official fear of plots and sedition, and the beginnings of state persecution of Quakers and other nonconformist and/or marginal religious groups. The 1660 Declaration was thus a political intervention, as well as a reflection of, and an influence on, developing Quaker approaches to theological ethics. It is now read as a foundational statement of Quaker pacifism, or commitment to non-violence. What interests me for the purpose of this paper is the theological reasoning it reflects. The opening of the ‘Declaration of the Harmless and Innocent People’ reads in part: All bloody principles and practices, we, as to our own particulars, do utterly deny, with all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever … the Spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it; and we certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the Spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ nor for the kingdoms of this world.7

We should note, first, that the 1660 Declaration speaks for and about a whole ‘people’ and refers to numerous specific examples of their experiences and behaviour. Even with a relatively short history to draw on, it is descriptive and reflective rather than simply prescriptive or promissory. It is rather striking, in fact, that only a decade or so into the history of Quakers non-violence is already treated as something that is communally held, storied and traditioned – and

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indeed a core feature of communal identity. To this extent the Declaration fits very comfortably with those contemporary accounts of the ethics of the ‘radical reformation’ that emphasize habitual formation and the primacy of communal practice. Beyond this, however, the Declaration offers a clear and rather distinctive theological account of the basis of this collective ethical statement. As the quotation above suggests, it is at root pneumatological – with a pneumatology shaped mainly by the Johannine literature (the Spirit ‘guid[ing] … into all truth’, quoting John 16.13) and that has as its practical implication a commitment to seeking and testing guidance. Christology is not, however, ignored. There is in the Declaration a back-andforth movement, at no point presented as a tension, between scriptural witness to the words and life of Christ and the contemporary leading of the Spirit. A central underlying claim concerns the identity and continuity of ‘the truth’ that is obeyed, witnessed and lived in Christian communities. In the extract given above, the ellipsis marked a striking exchange with an imagined ‘objector’. Note, incidentally, that this is all in the first few paragraphs of the document; the objection, with the riposte, is taken to be key to the discussion that follows: ‘But although you now say that you cannot fight nor take up arms at all, yet if the spirit do move you, then you will change your principle, and then you will sell your coat and buy a sword and fight for the kingdom of Christ.’ Answer: As for this we say to you that Christ said to Peter, ‘Put up thy sword in his place’; though he had said before that he that had no sword might sell his coat and buy one (to the fulfilling of the scripture), yet after, when he had bid him put it up, he said, ‘He that taketh the sword shall perish with the sword.’8

This exchange is striking partly because the response does not at first glance appear to answer the objection. The objection is ‘if you say the Spirit leads you to non-violence now, might the Spirit not lead you to violent rebellion in future?’; and the response answers, instead, the question as to whether Jesus changes his mind about violence. The response only makes sense in the light of the later affirmation that ‘the Spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable’ – which serves both as a hermeneutical key in reading the Bible and a ‘hermeneutic’ for Quaker practice. This consistency – past and future, scriptural and practical – is, however, grounded in the ‘consistency’ of God rather than in the consistency of a group’s adherence to a rule. The point is not so much that this group can be trusted to maintain non-violence (although clearly, for political reasons, that was a very important message to convey). Any collective self-commitment to maintain a particular ‘ethical’ position is, from the perspective of this text, at root a theological claim – a claim about the character of the ‘Spirit of Christ by which we are guided’. Before placing that claim in a wider context, I should briefly draw attention to two key features of Quaker non-violence as reflected in this text. One is that it is often, as here, characterized negatively – ‘the Spirit of Christ will never move



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us to fight and war…’ Another, as already mentioned, is that it is imagined as sustained – even within a very new and, in many ways, quite ill-defined ‘people’, it is projected backward and forward. These two features – being negatively formulated and being understood as ongoing commitments – when put together, produce striking results within Quaker theological ethics. I read the sustained negative of Quaker ethics – as, here, sustained non-violence – as a double negative.9 It is a negation of the ‘no’, a refusal of destruction. It sets itself in opposition to some power or structure of thought that claims to shape and uphold the world but in fact destroys it. It says ‘no’ to the claim or the practice or the structure that itself says ‘no’ to life. This is perhaps easiest to see in the case of non-violence; the non-violent response – as indeed numerous commentaries and reflections on Matthew 5.38-42 have suggested – breaks the destructive cycle of violence rather than perpetuating it. Now, a double negative, a ‘negation of negation’, is not just the same as an affirmation. This is obvious enough in real life, but occasionally becomes less obvious in print. With negative ethics we are not working with two equivalent and known alternatives, the one of which is the negation of the other. On one side we have something we do not fully know or understand yet – the reality of God and of the world reconciled to God; and on the other side we have something that is only too familiar (in the seventeenth-century Quaker case, the prevalence of state and non-state violence). The confrontation – between the familiar pattern of thought and action that is being rejected under the guidance of the Spirit, and the as-yet-unknown alternative course of action or way of life – does not, in fact, have a fully predictable outcome. Refusing the familiar evil is not the same as making a specific positive claim, or committing oneself indefinitely to a specific course of action. To this extent, in fact, nervousness from contemporaries about the actual implications, at the time or in the future, of Quaker declarations of non-violent intention might appear to be justified. There is no way to know, in advance, what the denial or refusal ‘means’ or what it brings about, because the act of refusal marks the transition from what we already know (destructive and death-dealing patterns of life and behaviour) to what is not yet known, even to those whose obedience to the ‘Spirit of Christ’ leads them to venture the refusal. So what does that affirmation of the ‘double negative’ do for the ‘freedom’ of a Protestant ethicist, freedom of religion or freedom of conscience? I think it puts a few key issues on the table. One is that even if freedom appears first as negative freedom, as dissent – as resistance either to the direct force of compulsion or the indirect force of social norms –it does not stop with negative freedom. An enacted refusal, in each particular situation, necessitates some new and as yet unspecified course of action. The theological underpinning of the ethics of the ‘double negative’, of Quaker non-violence and negative testimony, is it seems to me set out in the very dense claim that we ‘certainly know’ that the Spirit of Christ by which we are guided will ‘never move us to fight and war’. Grounding negative testimony primarily in the guidance of the Holy Spirit connects it with the freedom of the Spirit to blow

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where s/he will – but also expresses the confidence that this freedom is not ‘action at random’. The work of the Holy Spirit in ‘guiding into all truth’ encompasses the negation of the negative (‘will never move us to fight and war’) – but it also, by implication in this text and explicitly in other Quaker writings, means the emergence through time of changed ways of living. Implicit in the pneumatologically grounded move to negative testimony is the trust that new – and surprising – possibilities for human flourishing will emerge on the other side of the negation. Grounding of non-violence in the guidance of the Spirit does not, of course, license any attempt to instrumentalize it towards social or political ends. Even if Christian non-violence goes ‘with the grain of the universe’, it is not a strategic move. That said, there is a distinctive emphasis in Quaker non-violence and similar negatively defined ethical stances within Quakerism, over against their near-equivalents in the Anabaptist traditions. Focusing mainly on pneumatology rather than mainly on Christology – on present, future-oriented guidance rather than on obedience to a given dominical command – means that the effectiveness is more clearly in view. This non-indifference – to put it no more strongly, at least for the moment – to the visible outcomes of ethical action has, as we shall see, wider theological ramifications. Some of these ramifications emerge when we explore the interplay in the 1660 Declaration between specificity of vocation, on the one hand, and public or universal appeal, on the other. The statement is public, an example of publicly available reason – and it is presented as a commitment from ‘our own particulars’. It does not directly place a demand or an expectation on anyone else. It is linked to a specific shared experience and sense of communal vocation – but at the same time it makes a claim about the Spirit of Christ guiding into all truth, and enters a shared space of scriptural interpretation and debate, as well as a space of political and historical commentary. There is an assumption, then, that the theological and ethical reasoning that relates most nearly to ‘our own particulars’ will also make sense in and for a wider context. The concluding paragraphs of the document make this interplay between specific communal vocation and wider public appeal – what we might call the ‘missionary’ character of the document – more apparent: So, we whom the Lord hath called into the obedience of his Truth have denied wars and fightings and cannot again any more learn it. This is a certain testimony unto all the world of the truth of our hearts in this particular, that as God persuadeth every man’s heart to believe, so they may receive it.10

A relationship is established between ‘the truth of our hearts’ and the way in which God ‘persuadeth every man’s heart’. The work of the Holy Spirit is ‘persuasive’, as is the theological and ethical discourse that conforms to it. An underlying assumption of the statement, and of other pieces of Quaker theological/ethical discourse – indeed, of the whole form of Quaker mission and witness broadly understood – is the belief that God persuadeth every man’s heart. All are recipients of the gracious call of God that is primarily addressed to ‘the heart’ and directed



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towards holiness. Trust that it is possible to effect change in the ethical and political sphere is not, from this position, grounded in optimism or pragmatism; it is grounded in trust in God’s gracious presence for and to each person.11 It is important to note, moreover, that with all the talk of public reason and of being persuaded, this is still a practical, political and ethical text. Persuading the ‘heart’ entails and implies not simply changed conviction, but practical self-commitment, and coherence of profession and action – changed behaviour. Again, it might be argued that this starts to drift away from the freedom of a Protestant ethicist. It does, however, leave the emphasis squarely on freedom – freedom individual and collective from the structures of power that rely on fear and issue in violence, which issues in a real but unpredictable freedom for community and for broader social change. Moreover, it grounds that double freedom theologically in the affirmation that the Holy Spirit convinces (with the double meaning of ‘convicting’ and ‘making certain’) and guides into holiness.12 But what in this context are the ethical and theological implications of the expression ‘we, as to our own particulars’? At first glance, it appears to establish a clear boundary around a community and its distinctive ethic – to say ‘we will do this, regardless of what anyone else does’. It resonates with the later and frequent claim to be a ‘peculiar people’, and the specified ‘peculiarities’ of Quaker dress and speech that for many generations enacted that claim.13 It resonates, also, with the theologies of individual and collective holiness recently identified by Carole Dale Spencer as core to Quakerism.14 I want to suggest, however, that the subtle emphasis in Quaker ethics on the operation of love ‘in the particular’ – which as far as I have been able to establish is a distinctive, if not unique, characteristic of Quaker writings of the period – has broader and deeper implications, more clearly consonant with the pneumatological focus for theological ethics that I have been outlining here. To see this point more clearly, we can look a few years on from the 1660 Declaration to the work of the intriguing – and more or less entirely neglected – Scottish Quaker theologian John Swinton.15 His pamphlets, both apologetic and instructional, repeatedly emphasize that love is ‘particular’, and connect this both specifically to the practice of non-violence and, more generally, to the pneumatological ground of ethics. Consider, for example, the short 1663 pamphlet Words in Season, in which after an exhortation to patience and forbearance he advises his readers: to be exercised … in the manifestation of tenderness towards all, even towards all and every one … with all tenderness and compassion towards the particular, or particulars … for the good and edification, and not for the destruction of the creation nor any part of it… And this is … the Path of Love, the unerring and safe Path … such as mind the Life, the Justification, the Leading, the Acceptation, the motion of the Life, and that only in their own particular, to be led by the Spirit of Love, to follow him in his motion wherever he leads.16

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Swinton’s emphasis on concern for the ‘particular’ relates both to the ‘particular’ other – the object of ‘tenderness and compassion’ – and to one’s own ‘particular’ calling and circumstances; that the two are intimately connected becomes clear when he describes this practice as the ‘Path of Love’, led by the ‘Spirit of Love’ and formed according to the ‘motion’ of the Spirit. The Spirit is both entirely trustworthy in working ‘for the good … and not for the destruction of the creation nor any part of it’ – and unpredictable in the specific direction in which ‘his motion’ leads. Those ‘such as mind the Life … to be led by the Spirit’ follow a path that is safe and unerring – but also open-ended and, as far as its future course is concerned, obscure. Both the trustworthiness and the unpredictability of the Spirit’s outworking in history arise from the ineradicable particularity of love – manifested as ‘tenderness towards … every one’. Love, thus understood, is extended without being generalized. The work of the Spirit is, Swinton argues in the rest of the pamphlet, a universal ‘dispensation’ that can be understood as it were only from below and only in practice – only from the exercise of tenderness and compassion ‘in [our] own particular’ and ‘towards the particular, or particulars’. Again, it is important to stress that this emphasis on love is neither simply the promulgation of a new rule nor a pragmatic recommendation with foreseeable consequences. It is outward directed and missional, so not simply about the maintenance of a pure dissenting religious identity; but it is not premised on the certainty or even the likely prospect of bringing the world into conformity with one’s own convictions. But where does this understanding of ‘particularity’ leave religious freedom or freedom of conscience? Is it not likely that following the leading of the Holy Spirit ‘only in [one’s] own particular’ will end up in any case indistinguishable from religious peculiarity – the ‘crankiness’, or the lone heroism, of the conscientious objector? How do we negotiate the relationship between sustained dissenting practice and wider patterns of state and church order? Does the ethic grounded (as I have suggested) in the pneumatological ‘double negative’ collapse back into simple oppositions – freedom inside a private/religious/irrational space, the space of conscience that proves incomprehensible when it irrupts into the public sphere?

III. Seeking the Conscience of a Protestant Ethicist One helpful, if initially counterintuitive, way to gain a perspective on this is to take a step away from non-violence and look at the origins of conscientious objection in English and also, I think, in Scots law – which is in the recognition of the right of certain specified religious groups to refuse to swear religious oaths, either oaths of office or assertory oaths in a court of law. The history of religious oaths in the early modern period is – as Ephraim Radner has recently explored – a key context for the emergence of modern political and religious accounts of conscience.17 The paradigmatic early modern case is the oath of allegiance to a monarch and/or to a particular state-backed confession or church order, backed up by a reference to God. It has very long pre-modern roots of course; but in the modern context



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it becomes a useful technology for securing the allegiance of individuals to a particular social and religious order. It is a peacekeeping technology – and it also works, as is fairly clear from the seventeenth-century literature onwards, as a kind of weaponization of the conscience. The oath uses the fear of divine retribution (which can be everywhere) as a substitute for the fear of the monarch’s armed retribution (which cannot).18 There has been relative – and I think puzzling – neglect of the considerable literature in (what we would now describe as) theological ethics that arose in relation to oaths after the Reformation. Radner’s work is the exception – and, given its context, it should be of at least passing interest to anyone studying Protestant ethics. He defends Hobbes’ account of the foundation of modern society in the context of a dense and important argument about Christian culpability in modern political violence. Radner contends, in opposition to those (such as William Cavanaugh) who seek to minimize the ‘religious’ dimension in the Wars of Religion, that Christian division is a significant source of violence. He observes, further, that to ignore this fact risks failing to take sufficiently seriously the reality and consequences of church division. He is concerned about how the images and rhetorics – ideological constructions – of a unified and peaceful church, set over against a divided and violent world, pile wrong upon wrong by objectifying, externalizing and othering the sources of conflict, and particularly by obscuring the constitutive role that Christianity can play within a violent nationalist or tribal rhetoric. Now, one target for Radner’s critique is the erroneous identification of the sinless church with a given historical community, but another and more stereotypically ‘Protestant’ target is the valorization of individual conscience as a source of unimpeachable and unshakeable religious conviction, conviction that can then form the basis of a defended and oppositionally defined religious identity – a blind adherence, we might say, to one’s ‘own particulars’. The hero of Radner’s Reformation piece is Henry of Navarre, whose ‘sacrifice of conscience’ for the sake of communal peace is held up as a model of Christian charity. Radner’s deliberately, though not unduly, provocative account also dwells at some length on the theological and ethical problem of state oaths in post-Reformation England. He provides an alternative narrative (alternative, that is, to one shaped by predominant modern assumptions about ‘sincerity’ and the inviolability of conscience) in which various cases or practices of swearing state oaths that did not fully accord with one’s beliefs or conscience are praised as necessary ‘sacrifices’ made for the common good. If we take the Hobbesian narrative seriously in Hobbes’ own context, what it describes – rightly in Radner’s view – is the sacrifice of the particular dictates of individual conscience that is required in order to secure the common good. The people who refused to swear oaths of fealty to monarchs whose right to rule they doubted, or who refused to swear oaths with theological or political content with which they disagreed, or who on conscientious grounds refused to swear oaths at all, emerge from Radner’s account looking rather like selfindulgent cranks. Moreover, in the wider context of his narrative Radner raises

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the stakes from nation to church. The refusal to ‘sacrifice conscience’, for the sake of living together, keeps the body of Christ divided. As an evaluative account of a highly contested period of Christian history, Radner’s argument is, on the face of it, ethically very dubious. At its most basic, it ignores the power differentials at play in the situation in which conformity is requested or demanded; it assumes that ‘negotiations’ between dissenters and the confessionalized state or the state church occur on a level playing field. In a situation in which a person faced being executed or imprisoned for refusing an oath or refusing to change confession, it seems perverse to pin blame on him or her for failing to make the required sacrifice of conscience. Moreover, in the historical context under discussion, among the most consistent ‘dissenting’ groups, who made the consistent appeals to the inviolability of conscience particularly in relation to oaths, were those that also consistently eschewed the use of violence to attain political or religious ends: the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century, the Quakers in the seventeenth. It is simply not true to say that in the wars of religion (if that is what they were) all sides killed all sides. There was at least some collectively formed and theologically grounded conscientious resistance, not just to specific religious impositions, but to the whole process of the weaponiszation of conscience. To sacrifice that objection – to allow conscience to be weaponized – would not, in theory or in practice, make for peace. In order to see how this particular exercise of religious freedom works – and how it both affirms freedom of conscience and destabilizes any attempt to turn the individual conscience into an irrational and inaccessible space – I turn to some examples of early Quaker ‘conscientious objection’. Margaret Fell, one of the most prominent leaders of the Quaker movement, was put on trial in 1664 for refusing to take the oath of obedience to the king and for holding meetings for worship in her house. She turned to the jury and said, Friends … you profess yourselves to be Christians, and you own the Scripture to be true, and for obedience to the plain words of the Scripture and for the testimony of my conscience am I here; so I now appeal to the witness of God in all your consciences to judge me … I own allegiance and obedience to the king at his just and lawful commands; and I do also owe justice and obedience to the king of kings, Christ Jesus, who hath commanded me not to swear at all … I own allegiance to the king, as he is king of England, but Christ Jesus is king of my conscience … Then they asked her if she would hear the oath read. She answered, I do not care if I never hear an oath read; for the land mourns, because of oaths [cf. Jeremiah 23.10].19

The Fell trial brings out the complexity of the issues around freedom of conscience remarkably well. It illustrates what we might call the classic (Ana)baptist opposition between conditioned obedience to the King of England and to Christ,



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the unassailable king of the conscience, to whom the believer offers free obedience – in relation to what might reasonably be interpreted as a state-imposed religious observance (taking a religious oath). To some extent, it depoliticizes the refusal of oaths in the insistent demarcation of territory between the ‘King of England’ and the king of the conscience. At the same time, however, it contains a wider appeal to a shared space of reasoning that also provokes a systemic analysis of the social and political context in which the oath becomes necessary. Fell’s use of Jeremiah – ‘The land mourns because of oaths’ – is not particularly about ‘obedience to the plain words of the Scripture’; it’s not necessary in order to make her case. It makes sense in context, however, because the insistence on an oath becomes metonymic for the past and present troubles of ‘the land’ in which oath and counter-oath contribute to military and religious struggles. Moreover, the appeal to the ‘witness of God in all your consciences’ is an appeal to her audience to reread the scriptural and political contexts they all share – and also an affirmation that their rereading, and the action they take as a result, is a sign and an effect of the operation of divine grace. Christian ‘profession’ and obedience to the ‘plain words of Scripture’ – a shared and public framework for ethical judgement – is on the one hand held separate from the ‘testimony of conscience’ and the ‘witness of God in all your consciences’ – just because the presenting issue is an apparent gap between the Christian ‘profession’ of the nation and the imposition of the oath. But at the same time Fell expresses and assumes coherence between the ‘plain words of Scripture’ and the ‘witness of God in all your consciences’ – or, more to the point, she expects the ‘witness of God in the conscience’ to issue in a judgement that closes the gap between profession of faith and its practice, in this individual case and in the wider political context. Ironically, of course, the fact that Quakers were not opposed to ‘the king’ in particular, but rather to oaths in general, could be, and was, used from the earliest decades to argue for toleration – that is, for any given government to accommodate the refusal to swear oaths. Quakers could not be accused of giving allegiance to any ‘worldly’ power, established or revolutionary; they could in good conscience affirm (but not swear) that they had no intention of conspiring to overthrow the monarch. Conscientious objection is now strongly associated with refusal of military service, but the first mention of conscientious objection in British law – in 1838 – refers to the objection to swearing oaths.20 The conscience which was used in the state oath to bind the subject to the monarch and the office holder to his/her post – so the location of loyalty – becomes first the source of troublesome dissent and then the location of permitted dissent that’s contained within safe limits. Before we make too fast a move in that direction, though, we should note that conscientious objection to oaths was still – until the late nineteenth century for the most part – linked to public and declared allegiance to a particular ‘religious’ community. The privilege of conscientious objection to oaths was given to groups, not to individuals.21 We do have to allow that there is a direct line from this to broader and more individualized accounts of the free conscience, and to the generalization of various rights associated with freedom of conscience, variously

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entangled (or not) with assumptions about religious identity – and from this to the various legal tangles to which I alluded at the beginning of this paper. From my discussion here, however, I want to suggest that this ‘direct line’ is not inevitable – and that at least in this case the ‘freedom of a Protestant ethicist’ both is genuine freedom and resists reduction to self-founding individualism. The conscience in general and conscientious objection in particular – at least in the context of Quaker tradition in which I have discussed it – retains the structure of the double negative, and retains its socially directed dynamic. It is oriented to public visibility and to individual and social transformation. This orientation, I have suggested, is linked to a pneumatological focus in theological ethics. The ‘witness of God in the conscience’ and the ‘persuasion of the heart’ to the convicting and guiding work of the Holy Spirit lead to an open-ended, but not ‘whimsical’, commitment to being formed into holiness, collectively and individually. Conscience is linked to what we might call the open-ended ‘particularizing’ of the universal love of God – acting and witnessing against destruction, both because this is what is required ‘as to our own particulars’ and because of the Spirit’s movement of love towards all particulars.

Endnotes   1. There are very few examples of Quaker theological ethics. Meta-ethical issues are considered from various perspectives in Jackie Leach Scully and Pink Dandelion, eds, Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).   2. For further discussion of this, as of several of the wider issues treated briefly in this paper, see Rachel Muers, Testimony: Quakerism and Theological Ethics (London: SCM, 2015), introduction.   3. I use ‘baptist’ here as James McClendon does – James W. McClendon, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002). Quakers’ own early history is closely intertwined with that of the English Baptists, with leading theologians from both groups engaging in extended and often bitter debates in person and in print; the intensity of Quaker–Baptist debates is in itself suggestive of the considerable overlap of interests, concerns and assumptions (as well as the ‘two-way traffic’ of proselytization that meant each group had considerable inside knowledge of the other’s practices, development and internal debates). For more on this see T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War: Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I am grateful to Stephen Holmes for ongoing conversations about this under-researched area, and also to several participants in the conference at which this paper was originally presented for drawing my attention to further links to Baptist thought.   4. Besides being presented at the conference on which this book is based, some of the ideas in this paper were first presented at the conference ‘(Post)Liberalism, Individualism and Society’ at the University of Manchester, July 2014. I am grateful to those present on that occasion for their comments, and to Benjamin Wood for the conference invitation.   5. On this and related matters, I have learned a great deal from Frank Cranmer’s work on law and religion; see the various case notes and discussions on the academic blog Law and Religion UK, http://www.lawandreligionuk.com/ [accessed January 2015].



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  6. Most of my discussion here relates specifically to England, but the specific contribution of Scottish Quakers will be noted in due course.   7. George Fox, Richard Hubberthorn, et al., A Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God… (London: 1684, originally published 1660).  8. Ibid.   9. I discuss the ‘double negative’ and its implications at much more length in Muers, Testimony; what follows is a brief summary, probably too brief, of part of the argument made in Chapter 2 of that book. 10. Fox et al., Declaration. 11. Belief in the universal convicting and sanctifying presence of Christ – the ‘Light that enlightens everyone’ to quote the early Quaker appropriation of John 1.9 – is a good candidate for the principal distinctive theological claim made and maintained by Quakers. 12. For a historical overview of Quaker uses of the term ‘convincement’ – which draws together conviction of sin, justification and sanctification – see Nikki Coffey Tousley, ‘Sin, Convincement, Purity and Perfection’, in Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, ed. Stephen Angell and Pink Dandelion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 172–86. 13. These are the peculiarities that produced the instantly recognizable image of the Quaker man in a broad-brimmed hat, and indirectly gave rise to the widespread and mistaken belief that Quakers have something to do with porridge oats. The distinctive bonnet worn by Quaker women at a similar period appears, thanks to Elizabeth Fry, on the English five-pound note at the time of writing. 14. Carole Dale Spencer, Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism: A Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007). 15. Better known as Sir John Swinton of Swinton, one of Cromwell’s former principal supporters in Scotland, who escaped conviction on a treason charge after publicly repudiating his earlier actions; and as an ancestor of Walter Scott. See George B. Burnet and William H. Marwick, The Story of Quakerism in Scotland, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1952), 98–9. 16. John Swinton, Words in Season (London, 1663), 5. The emphases are as in the original; my ellipses, in the interests of brevity, disguise Swinton’s curiously ‘incantatory’ and repetitive style – on which see Jackson I. Cope, ‘SeventeenthCentury Quaker Style’, PMLA 71:4 (September 1956): 734–5. 17. Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2012), 311–403. 18. Here I disagree somewhat with Craig Hovey, ‘Narrative Proclamation and Gospel Truthfulness: Why Christian Testimony Needs Speakers’, in The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation, ed. Chris K. Huebner and Tripp York (Winnipeg, Manitoba: CMU Press, 2010), 87–103. Hovey, analysing oaths from an Anabaptist perspective, argues that the oath gains its power from the magistrate’s ‘sword’ – the threat of punishment for perjury – that lies behind it (91). I agree with him that the imposition of the oath reflects the subordination of truthfulness to coercive power, but suggest that the coercion is located in the more subtle ‘weaponization’ of the fear of divine judgement (which is what makes the religious content of the oath relevant). 19. Trial of Margaret Fell as recorded in William Cobbett et al., Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 6 (London: Hansard, 1809), 633–4. 20. For the legal history of the idea of conscientious objection, see Constance Braithwaite, Conscientious Objection to Compulsions Under the Law (York: Ebor Press,

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1995). For an account of shifts in the underlying understanding of conscience and conscientious objection, see Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, ‘The Secularisation of Conscience’, in The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance, ed. Moskos and Chambers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–21. 21. Indeed, in a further ironic twist, the religious association was what made this dissent safe; the whole thing still operated under the Lockean assumption, alive and well in the late nineteenth-century debates over the Bradlaugh case, that the ruler or indeed the fellow citizen can’t trust the word of an atheist whether given under oath or not.

Chapter 9 S L E E P E R S W A K E ! E U DA I M O N I SM , O B L IG AT IO N A N D T H E C A L L T O R E SP O N SI B I L I T Y Jennifer A. Herdt

In his commentary on Genesis, Calvin writes that while still in the Garden of Eden, a law was imposed on Adam ‘in token of his subjection’.1 ‘This is to be kept in mind as God’s general design,’ he goes on, ‘that he would have men subject to his authority.’ The point of the prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree in the centre of the garden is its very existence. As one commentator remarks, we are for Calvin ‘by our very nature subjects under subjection to a sovereign Creator.’2 It is the subjection itself that glorifies God, not the accomplishing of God’s purposes by way of this subjection. This emphasis on subjection is integrally related to the theme of order in Calvin’s thought; order is secured through a proper order of subordination.3 ‘God, from the beginning, imposed a law upon man, for the purpose of maintaining the right due to himself.’4 Developing this theme, Calvin in the Institutes emphasizes that ‘we are not our own’; ‘we are God’s’.5 ‘How can the thought of God penetrate your mind,’ he asks, ‘without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him.’6 Our task is to commit ourselves fully to God’s service, to making God’s will the law by which we live. We must dismiss our own counsels and those of all men and be attentive to the will of God alone, practicing self-denial and seeking ‘after those things which the Lord requires of you, and to seek them only because they are pleasing to him’.7 As Troeltsch remarked, ‘to Calvin the chief point is not the self-centred personal salvation of the creature, and the universality of the Divine Will of Love, but it is the Glory of God, which is equally exalted in the holy activity of the elect and in the futile rage of the reprobate’.8 Now, at some point early in my formation as a scholar, I came to identify this sort of emphasis on obedience, on the good of subjection for its own sake, as Kantian and Stoic and to be rejected in favour of the recovery of a more authentic theological stance, one that insisted we can only be transformed through our desires, not against or in defiance of them, that virtue involved arriving at a harmony between one’s desires and reason’s grasp of the good, that the virtuous life is the happy life and that this is, too, the life of loving God. So, my primary

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theological conversation partners were Augustine and Aquinas, with Aristotle always hovering in the background, together with contemporary retrievers of the tradition of the virtues. I was a Protestant engaged in theological–ethical reflection, but I never understood my identity as a ‘Protestant ethicist’. Truth be told, I now recognize that the ground had been prepared by a youthful infatuation with first the fiction, and then the non-fiction, of C. S. Lewis, which disposed me to find in his eudaimonism a blissful release from the emphasis on self-denial inculcated in me by innumerable Protestant hymns. I can’t resist reading at some length from the outset of his sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’: If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.9

I’ve elsewhere called the rejection of self-love and the valorization of self-denial hyper-Augustinian. I have certainly not suggested that it is a peculiarly Protestant phenomenon. However, an emphasis on obedience as a good in itself, rather than for the sake of any good to follow, and an accompanying suspicion of self-love, does seem a common feature of Protestant thought and of the Reformed tradition in particular. To be sure, Protestant suspicions of eudaimonism were heightened by Anders Nygren’s attack on caritas.10 But Nygren exaggerated a critique of eudaimonism that is genuinely present in the tradition. Despite my track record on this issue, I want to take this occasion as an opportunity to sketch what I now see as the genuine contribution made by strands of Christian reflection that critique eudaimonism and emphasize obedience to God’s will. I have a bit more scene-setting to do, but then the trajectory of my discussion will move from Calvin to Barth, via Aquinas, with extended engagements with



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two contemporary philosophers: the contractualist Stephen Darwall and the German Jesuit Robert Spaemann.

I. The Irreducible Grammar of Obligation As Robert Merrihew Adams has argued, the grammar of obligation has its own distinctive shape; it involves the notion of ‘an agent owing it to someone else to act or not act in a certain way’, and this ‘does not flow in any obvious way from a general concept of excellent personal character’.11 Of course, good character requires that one develop the virtue of justice. On Aristotle’s account, our appetitive desires must listen and respond to reason, which they can do in a reliable way only when perfected by a habit such that they come to desire justice; the agent becomes a lover of justice.12 So C. S. Lewis’s point about desire is preserved. However, this does not tell against Adams’ point: that we must acquire the virtues in order to recognize and fulfil our obligations toward others does not change the fact that obligation has its own grammar. Nor is this merely a technical point: the language of obligation decentres the agent, focuses our attention on others and the claims they make on us, rather than on the quality of our own character; it is inherently interpersonal. Nicholas Wolterstorff, making a related argument, takes exception to a description John Bowlin offers of the actions of Danish gentiles who rescued Jews during World War II. He writes that ‘the truly courageous Danes participated in the rescue precisely because they believed their chances of leading a noble and honourable life, one qualitatively better in kind than other possibilities, would be forever sacrificed by refusing to assist a group of fellow citizens in need’.13 No, says Wolterstorff: if ‘you have a right against me to the good of my treating you in a certain way’ (and I thus have an obligation to you to do so), ‘whether or not performing that action would make for greater happiness on my part is simply irrelevant to what I should do’.14 It is the wrong kind of reason. Now, I think an adequate response to this point requires that we unpack the Danish rescuers’ concern for leading a noble and honourable life in terms of their own responsibility for the quality of their own agency, a responsibility to which they are bound. It is indeed irrelevant in any ordinary sense whether responding to you would make for greater happiness on my part, for my life being better, more perfect. However, while I am answerable to you for the demand you place on me, I am also answerable for myself. I am not, for instance, justified in rescuing you by perpetrating an injustice on someone else. There are thus bounds set to the lengths I may go in responding to your claims on me. We can add to this that in responding well, the agency of the Danish rescuers was perfected. Eudaimonia, in the sense of living a noble and honourable life, supervenes on responding well to the situations and people one encounters in life; it arrives without being directly sought. My hunch is that Protestant traditions, and in particular the Reformed tradition, played a crucial role in allowing us to grasp the ethical – and theological – significance of responsibility, both to others and for oneself. Ultimately, I think

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this insight can be incorporated into an agent–perfective Christian eudaimonism, although not into a standard reason–source eudaimonism. I will not be able fully to develop that argument here, although I will hint at it. My primary focus here will be on clarifying why Calvin’s insistence on the good of obedience ought to be captured, as it is by Barth, as an insistence on the good of responsibility. And while Aquinas grasps the significance of the fact that human beings as made in God’s image are moral agents, the principle of their own actions, he does not grasp this fundamentally as a point about answerability to God and one another, as a point about second–personal relations of agency, as being fundamentally about responsibility.15 The Reformed tradition’s emphasis on the second–personal relation of obedience to God makes this insight possible. Or so I shall argue.

II. Eudaimonism and Self-Love First, a few words about eudaimonism itself – and Christian eudaimonism, in particular. Eudaimonism is generally understood as the view that happiness or flourishing is humankind’s last end, our ultimate and comprehensive goal. It is that which, following Aristotle, we find desirable or choiceworthy for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire all else that we desire.16 Contemporary philosophers often translate the claim about the last end into a statement concerning reasons for acting: the eudaimonist holds that an agent’s own good is the source of his or her normative reasons for acting.17 The ancient eudaimonists went on to argue that happiness, properly understood as being and doing well, is partly or wholly constituted by virtue. Since virtue requires proper concern for others, eudaimonism does not amount to selfishness or egoism. The eudaimonist can sacrifice herself for a friend, when failing to do so would render her own life less well-lived, less choiceworthy. Christian eudaimonism is generally understood to add onto this another layer: it is God, the love of God and/or communion with God, which is most fundamentally identified as happiness and the ultimate final end of humankind. This cannot simply be, though, an additional layer that leaves the structure of ancient eudaimonism intact. For starters, happiness is no longer seen as fundamentally up to the agent, a matter of his or her own activity, his or her way of responding to the circumstances of life. Augustine makes fun of pagan thinkers who believe that they can achieve happiness by their own efforts. Further, Augustine emphasizes that this is not simply a project of training one’s non-rational desires to conform to reason’s direction; we must undergo the often painful transformation of our skewed loves, and only grace makes this possible. The only self-love genuinely worthy of the name is love of God, the Common Good, and this is a love in which the self is surrendered and only refound in being given up. Aquinas develops this point by way of a contrast between the distinct ways in which non-rational and rational creatures are capable of seeking God as the common good. Non-rational creatures seek the common good naturally and instinctively, by seeking their own particular good. They do not conceive of



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anything as good or as an end. Rational creatures, in contrast, can grasp particular goods precisely as good, and by doing so they are capable of making goodness as such, rather than merely their own goodness, an object of intentional pursuit.18 So such creatures are capable of loving both themselves and others as that for which good is desired; there is no principled difference, even if there are many good practical reasons why we often need to focus our energies on self-care, and even if we often sinfully distort these into rationalizations for privileging our own good.19 Hence, Aquinas is best understood as articulating an agent–perfective rather than a reason–source eudaimonism. My own good is not necessarily that for the sake of which I desire all else that I desire; I can come, through grace, to desire my good for the sake of God, the common good. My happiness then supervenes on the perfecting of my agency through this love of God. The residual sense in which every good sought by the virtuous is sought precisely as good for or perfective of the one seeking is simply that there are limits to the ways in which I am permitted to seek even the common good: ‘A man ought not to give way to any evil of sin,’ Aquinas tells us, ‘not even that he may free his neighbor from sin.’20 In this sense, I am to privilege my own perfection.

III. Calvin on the Good of Obedience Returning to Calvin, in whose company we set out, it is crucial to see his rejection of eudaimonism, and his emphasis on self-denial and obedience, in the context of his understanding of the Fall. Since both reason and will are corrupted, what these dictate by way of self-love cannot be trusted. Paul, therefore, notes Calvin, ‘commands us to put off our own nature and to deny whatever our reason and will dictate’.21 We are unable to follow God’s commandments, he goes on, unless ‘our mind be previously emptied of its natural feeling’.22 Between sinful self-love and obedient love of God and neighbour lies a gulf – not merely ascesis and gradual transformation, but the ‘putting off ’ and ‘death’ of one’s inherited, corrupt nature.23 ‘Surely, as we are naturally turned away from God, unless self-denial precedes, we shall never approach that which is right.’24 Aquinas and Calvin both understand Christ as revealing to us human nature as God intended it to be; but Calvin, when he speaks of our ‘natural’ dispositions, always means our fallen dispositions unless he explicitly specifies otherwise. Aquinas, in contrast, more often speaks primarily of created nature, then noting its defects and thus its standing need for grace. Calvin and Aquinas can agree that all creatures naturally seek their own good. But Calvin stresses that this is a mere instinct, something that human beings have in common with non-rational animals.25 He does so in order to emphasize a sharp distinction between this impulse and right reason: ‘man does not choose by reason and pursue with zeal what is truly good for himself according to the excellence of his immortal nature; nor does he use his reason in deliberation or bend his mind to it. Rather, like an animal he follows the inclination of his nature, without reason, without deliberation.’26 He stresses further that ‘appetite’ and ‘good’ here must also be sharply qualified: ‘for “appetite” here signifies not an

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impulse of the will itself but rather an inclination of nature; and “good” refers not to virtue or justice but to condition, as when things go well with man’.27 Aquinas, meanwhile, does not set up this kind of contrast between instinct and reason, or between goodness of condition and goodness of justice or virtue. Rather, as we have seen, Aquinas stresses that non-rational creatures seek the common good in and through pursuing their own good, while rational creatures naturally seek the good as such, not merely their own good. When Aquinas says that this is something that rational creatures do naturally, he certainly does not mean that it is something that all rational creatures actually do, nor that this is a statistical norm. Rather, this is how rational agency was created to function, participating in a limited way in God’s providential care for creation. And through Christ, this has become a renewed possibility for humankind. Calvin, in contrast, stresses that right reason is obedient reason. The moral order of creation has become opaque to us, and reason is incapable of grasping what is good in itself. We can know and will the goodness of justice or virtue only by way of obedience to God’s commands. But Calvin goes further. It is not just because of the fall that obedience to God’s will assumes such centrality. Even in Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil existed only so that there might be a test of Adam’s obedience. Will he seek to assert his independent agency, or will he subordinate his own will to that of God? If even Adam, whose reason and will were sound, is not invited to participate in the Providential direction of creation to its end in God, then fallen humanity, with obscured vision and twisted wills, ought surely to confine itself to obeying clearly revealed divine commands. H. R. Niebuhr saw the contrast between medieval Catholicism and Calvin in terms of a contrast between a Christianity that emphasized the vision of God’s perfection and one that emphasized God’s active sovereignty and power: To call the vision man’s greatest good is to make contemplation, however prepared for by activity and however issuing in action, the final end of life; to put the sovereignty of God in the first place is to make obedient activity superior to contemplation, however much theoria is necessary to action. The principle of vision suggests that the perfection of the object seen is loved above all else; the principle of the kingdom indicates that the reality and power of the being commanding obedience are primarily regarded.’28

There is something to this, although ultimately I do not think that the contemplation/action contrast limns it best. Certainly, Aquinas emphasizes the beatific vision. But contemplation is itself a form of activity, and it is part and parcel of fulfilling the human vocation, of playing a very special role in the reditus of all of creation to God. Calvin, in contrast, in a fundamental sense sharply restricts the playing field for human activity; human beings glorify God not by ordering their own activity so as to relate all things well to God, but by discounting their own reason and will, putting on blinders, as it were, so as to be obedient to the only thing they grasp with clarity, God’s commands. To be sure, Christians are active in the world, bringing it into conformity with God’s will. But they do this not



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as independent agents, on their own initiative, but rather in obedience to God. Aquinas, meanwhile, emphasizes that human beings partake ‘of a share of providence.’29 We do not simply behave in accordance with the eternal law by virtue of inclinations inscribed in our natures. Rather, we act intentionally for ends; we are not simply ruled and measured, but we rule and measure, directing action to the end that is the common good, just as God does. Our partaking of a share of providence is not to be denounced or repudiated.

IV. Barth as Eudaimonist? Karl Barth, of course, like Calvin, is suspicious of anything that hints at an encouragement to independent human agency. For Barth, like Calvin, divine command is the central ethical category. Yet it is a striking feature of some contemporary commentary on Barth that it seeks to narrow the divide between Barth’s ethics of divine command and eudaimonism, as part and parcel of a Thomistic appropriation of Barth. I am in deep sympathy with such a project. In the end, though, Barth cannot persuasively be made out to be a eudaimonist if that means – as it standardly does – reason–source eudaimonism. But neither does Barth simply repeat Calvin’s emphasis on obedience to divine command for its own sake. Rather, divine command is to be understood in light of God’s self-determination to be God-with-us in covenant partnership, and, hence, in light of a divine summons to response, to answer the divine call to relationship. This emphasis on responsibility positions Barth to articulate features of a defensible, agent–perfective Christian eudaimonism that are not articulated by Thomas. As I have argued, while Aquinas insists that rational agents are capable of seeking the good as such, not merely their own good, they must not sin even in order to free a neighbour from sin. In this respect they do privilege their own good, the perfection of their own agency. Aquinas justifies this privileging in terms of the significance of the agent’s own share in friendship with God. He should, though, have justified it in terms of the special responsibility that each person has for the exercise of his or her own agency. Rational creatures are responsible for their own agency in ways that they are not responsible for anyone else’s agency. While Thomas grasps the significance of what it means to be an agent, the principle of one’s own actions, he does not understand how agency is derivative of responsibility, of second–personal relations, and ultimately, as Barth sees more clear-sightedly than secular theorists of accountability relations, on being called into personhood. Several recent interpreters of Barth have argued that, far from instantiating a heteronomous deontology, Barth’s thought is essentially a form of eudaimonism. Nigel Biggar, for instance, writes that ‘in the light of Christ it becomes clear that the ultimate point of the Law is the gospel. At this point the Kantian character of Barth’s ethic recedes even further, and reveals something basically eudaimonist: we should obey God’s command, not out of spineless deference to the capricious wishes of an almighty despot but out of regard for our own best good, which this gracious God alone truly understands and which he intends with all his heart.’30

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Matthew Rose argues, similarly, that ‘it is appropriate to obey God’s law because we know it promotes our good, our flourishing and our final perfection’.31 Now, if Barth argues that we ought to obey God out of regard for our own good, then he indeed fits standard definitions of eudaimonism. But in fact, as I’ll unpack a bit more fully in a moment, Barth echoes Calvin – if admittedly through a Kantian lens – arguing that one’s own fulfilment does not generate a real imperative.

V. Barth on Divine Command But first, a quick rehearsal of Barth’s emphasis on divine command.32 Like Calvin, Barth emphasizes the command of God confronting humankind. God does not simply invite human beings along the path of their self-realization; we are summoned to obedience. Christian ethics as such falls under the doctrine of the command of God. And Barth offers ample grounds for concluding that his ethics is essentially voluntarist, as has been amply discussed in the literature. ‘The man who obediently hears the command of God is not in any position to consider why he must obey it,’ he tells us. ‘He knows that the command of God is not founded on any other command, and cannot therefore be derived from any others, or measured by any other, or have its validity tested by any other.’33 Such statements are misleading on their own, however, for Barth is certainly also concerned to establish the validity and authority of God’s command, the basis of the divine claim. God’s command is not simply that of power positivism.34 For to buckle under absolute power is not to be obedient: it is not obedience because it is not free, and it does not signify ‘the recognition of a claim made upon him’.35 But neither, argues Barth, is it adequate to say, with Augustine, that we are obliged to obey God because God is our supreme good, that which satisfies all our restless desire. That this is indeed true does not properly identify the basis of the divine claim on us. For the Augustinian formulation, Barth tells us, ‘has the character only of an invitation. It is certainly not a claim which is grounded in itself. We hold to God because and to the extent that finally we want to uphold ourselves.’36 Barth understands God’s claim on us as deriving from God’s prior gift to us, God’s gift of Godself: ‘his claim confronts us in the loftiness and dignity of the obligation which derives automatically from the gift that he has made us, a gift as incomprehensible as it is unfathomable’.37 We do not obey God because we buckle under superior power. We do not obey God in order to find satisfaction, to realize our own good. While it is absolutely true that ‘for me the good is to cleave to God’, it is not in order to realize my good that I cleave to God, for Barth.38 Rather, God has freely made Godself for us, freely made Godself ours. And this gift becomes the basis for an absolute claim on us: ‘man must acknowledge and confess that a demand is made on him because a gift has been conferred upon him, and that he always owed what is demanded’.39 It is not, though, just that we are bound because we are infinitely indebted – that we have somehow to pay God back for grace received. For then we would be obliged prior to being commanded, simply reproducing the vicious circle that has always haunted theological voluntarism.40



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While divine self-gift is crucial, the heart of Barth’s understanding of the basis of the divine command has to do not with debt as such, but with responsibility. In electing humankind for covenant partnership with Godself, God has determined humankind for responsibility, that is, to be persons who determine themselves in correspondence with God’s self-determination in the covenant – not just creatures who bask in God’s glory. God wills to draw us to Godself, but Barth tells us: ‘God cannot draw him to Himself without involving him in responsibility.’41 We must be active, responsible agents, or we cannot be partners, true counterparts.42 Yet, Barth is still insistent that this is a question that arises within the doctrine of God: ‘it is in and with man’s determination by God as this takes place in predestination that the question arises of man’s self-determination, his responsibility and decision, his obedience and action’.43 But if the question about human responsibility and obedience to God is bound up in the doctrine of God, then ultimately it is a matter not just of how God has constituted humankind but how God has acted in relation to humankind: ‘It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.’44 Gospel precedes and envelops law. In election, ‘a prior decision [has been made] concerning man’s self-determination’.45 That God makes Godself responsible for humankind means that God makes Godself responsible not just for the authority of the command but also for its fulfilment.46 This fulfilment, this obedience, has been performed by Jesus Christ. We are called only to confirm it.47 As Gerald McKenny puts it, ‘the command of God is simply the summons directing human beings to a selfdetermination corresponding along these lines to their determination by God’.48 Or, as Barth says, ‘The truth of the evangelical indicative means that the full stop with which it concludes becomes an exclamation mark. It becomes itself an imperative.’49

VI. Darwall on Moral Obligation Moral obligation is, as philosopher Stephen Darwall has argued, inherently second–personal. Looking at his account helps us to understand more fully why responsibility is so crucial to Barth’s account. Darwall himself thinks that while Christian understandings of obligation to God played an indispensable historical role in giving rise to modern understandings of the moral ought, divine obligation is a ladder that could eventually be pushed away. Barth – and a quick detour through Robert Spaemann on persons – helps us to see that this may not work quite the way Darwall thinks. Conceptually, notes Darwall, moral obligation involves a reason that someone has for acting by virtue of a demand addressed to him or her. The Danish rescuers might have had a host of other reasons for helping the Jews: in order to be generous, or courageous, or to relieve or prevent suffering. But these would be what Darwall calls state-of-the-world-regarding reasons. To say that they were morally obliged to help is to say something quite specific: that it would be blameworthy not to help, and that someone has the authority to hold them responsible

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in this way. Moral obligations are thus social requirements. Now we might debate whether what the Danish rescuers did was to fulfil a moral obligation, or whether they did something that was superogatory. Either way, we could affirm that what they did was to respond well to the situation in which they found themselves. In some sense, we can say that the way things are makes demands on me because I can respond well or poorly to the worth of all that I encounter, persons and things alike.50 But only sometimes is it the case that I would be blameworthy for failing to act in a particular way. We can also debate whether particular instances of human blame are proper or improper: to say that moral obligations are social requirements is not to say that every demand that one human agent makes of another is justified, any more than it is to say that everything that is humanly blamed is indeed blameworthy. Darwall stresses the reciprocal character of second–personal reasons: in issuing a moral demand, you must assume that I can understand this demand, and grasp its justified character. To make a moral demand involves the implicit recognition that both parties possess reciprocal authority; both share a normative point of view. This means that there are implicit limits on what we can justifiably demand of others; whatever we demand must be consistent with the dignity of both parties, their capacity and responsibility to assess whether any given demand is justifiable. To issue a moral demand, then, to seek to obligate another, is to open oneself up to moral assessment by the one addressed. I grasp myself as potentially blameworthy, and not simply as one who may do a better or worse job of responding to all of the various goods I encounter, insofar as I grasp myself as one person among others, together inhabiting the space of reasons. Darwall argues that Christian reflections on moral obligation – in which obligation by divine command held centre stage – played an important historical role in our ability to map the distinctive conceptual terrain of moral obligation.51 In the seventeenth century, moral theorists argued over whether moral obligations could be said to be built somehow into the nature of reality, eternal and immutable truths, or whether, as voluntarists argued, they had to be traced back to divine commands. It was the Lutheran natural law thinker Samuel Pufendorf, argues Darwall, who first recognized that power alone cannot obligate: that God can obligate human beings only if they are addressed as capable of acknowledging the justice of a demand placed on them. Threatening punishment or promising reward is insufficient or, rather, ungrammatical – it may provide an incentive for conformity, but not grounds for obedience. Darwall rightly notes weaknesses on both sides of the seventeenth-century voluntarist–rationalist debate. Voluntarists like Pufendorf, grasping the distinctive grammar of moral obligation, insisted that obligation can only result from a decree by which a superior obligates a subject. Contra rationalist claims, moral obligations cannot simply be state-of-the-world-regarding and agent–neutral. Against this, Rationalists such as Leibniz and Ralph Cudworth rightly insisted that God’s commands can obligate us to perform certain actions only if it is already true that we are obligated to obey God’s commands; God’s authority to command cannot be founded in mere divine fiat.52 In response to this critique, Pufendorf is forced to



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acknowledge that God’s authority to obligate must be recognized as such by God’s subjects. Authority rests on recognition, and hence, argues Darwall, on equal second–personal authority.53 To take one moral hierarchy for granted and then derive ‘the rest of morality (by fiat) from that’ is, he argues, an unstable position.54 Really, it works the other way around: God’s authority to obligate can be recognized only if equal second–personal authority is already in place. Darwall thus concludes that theological voluntarism as an account of the constitution of moral obligation can be dismissed; it is parasitic on second–personal relations among equals. Equality precedes and can be used to critique hierarchy. However, what does it mean to affirm that equal second–personal authority is already in place, is presupposed? Here Darwall confesses discomfort. With children, he suggests, we move on two tracks simultaneously in order to induct them into responsible agency: ‘sometimes treating them proleptically as though they were apt for second–personal address as a way of developing moral competence while nonetheless realizing (“objectively”) that this is an illusion that must also be recognized’, for sometimes children’s preferences are to be ignored, and sometimes the hurts they inflict are not appropriately taken as injuries. Darwall also seems to think that it is possible in the case of certain forms of mental impairment to work along ‘perhaps a fully, at least putatively, second–personal track in relatively limited areas along with continuous negotiation about the limits’.55 And then, third, there may be cases in which we hold a person responsible in the face of evidence that they really ‘couldn’t have been expected to determine himself by the demands we make in holding him responsible’, for instance those under the sway of overwhelming emotion, or psychopaths. While confessing discomfort, Darwall does not acknowledge the ways in which these borderline cases fall afoul of his core insistence on equal second personal authority, and his claim that personal recognition presupposes, rather than creating, normative standing.56 It is true, as he argues, that withholding recognition from a rational being ‘is not just forbearing to make a voluntary commitment one is free not to make’.57 And yet, it is in fact personal recognition that in an everyday way creates moral competency, precisely by offering personal recognition where what Darwall identifies as the necessary presuppositions of doing so are not fulfilled. Is it then up to us, after all, to decide to whom to grant recognition? In insisting that we recognize rather than create normative standing, Darwall resists any such conclusion. But he is committed to a bootstrapping operation, not able to grant that it is God’s creative recognition of persons that our acts of recognition are summoned to track. To be sure, we do, as Darwall points out, work simultaneously along two tracks in relating to children, sometimes caring for and sometimes respecting them. What he misses, though, is that we are all children, very often failing to fulfil the necessary presuppositions of being held accountable, failing to amount to a ‘central second–personal case’.58 God’s recognition creates normative standing; we strive to recognize it, strive through our finite acts of recognition to develop moral competence in those in whom we cannot yet glimpse it. This is the heart of what it means to affirm that while we possess reciprocal authority with finite persons, and are equally responsible to one another, we owe unlimited

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obedience only to God; we are called to affirm, through our own acts of recognition, the summons by which God calls both ourselves and others into personal being.59

VII. Spaemann on Personal Encounter The Jesuit philosopher Robert Spaemann sounds at times as though he is rehearsing much of the same conceptual field as Darwall, only in a phenomenological dialect. He grasps, though, in a way Darwall does not, that personhood always comes as gift. To be a person is to be capable of recognizing oneself as a person among other persons, as ‘the occupant of a unique position in the relational field of persons’.60 And to recognize another person is to be obligated to that other: ‘obligation follows from noticing the person, which is one and the same as recognizing another as “like myself ”.’61 Persons have the capacity not simply to seek their own good, but to become decentred, seeking the good itself, not their own good. They are capable of taking up a standpoint in which, as Spaemann puts it, ‘the other – as other, not merely as a feature in my world – is as real and important to me as I am to myself ’.62 There is no natural necessity about this; for persons can also turn in on themselves, seeking their own good in a deliberate way, refusing the call to recognize the reality of the other. But it is only in being objects of recognition by others that we first become capable of this distance on ourselves that then allows us to grasp the reality of others. We experience this as gift. Hence, freedom is the opposite of autonomy, if autonomy is understood as independence from others; our freedom is rather to transcend our self-centring in recognition of others.63 Freedom is, thus, found by way of participation in a community of mutual recognition and obligation. Moreover, having received this personal recognition as gift, we also extend it as gift. ‘Recognizing a person is not merely a response to the presence of specific personal properties, because these properties emerge only where a child experiences the attention that is paid to persons.’64 The parent ‘treats the child from the start as a subject of personal encounter rather than an object to manipulate, or a living organism to condition’.65 No one thus at the start earns recognition, or demonstrates their personhood; it is received as gift. Spaemann reaches for the notion of personal recognition in order to move beyond both Aristotle and Kant, happiness and duty, to a fully relational conception of the ethical. His realization that recognition is first a gift that elicits personhood reveals how close he is to Barth. Both Barth and Spaemann speak of awakening to personhood. This is an awakening that is at the same time a birth, and it is a being awakened. As Barth says, ‘to be summoned means to have heard, to have been awakened, to have to arouse oneself, to be claimed’.66 Spaemann, though, regards himself as doing the kind of philosophical anthropology, preparatory to theology, of the sort that Barth would reject. Where Spaemann merely hints at a divine summons that brings persons into being, Barth is forthright: ‘there is nothing prior to [the summons] to contribute to what it is, to underlie,



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condition or prepare what it is, engaging it to gratitude, or subjecting it to its law’.67 It is not that as responsible persons we receive God’s command, God’s summons to covenant partnership, and obey out of gratitude68 for what God has done for us. In such a case, as Darwall rightly argues, there would be an obligation relation present prior to the command. Rather, God’s summons addresses us into personhood, such that command/summons has absolute priority, while itself being gift.

VIII. Awakening: A Conclusion Spaemann stresses our need for forgiveness, even what he calls ‘ontological forgiveness’, for our failure to be fully awake, fully capable of recognizing the reality of others as being as fully real as our own: ‘no one is perfectly awake. Naturalness is unconsciousness.’69 But Barth goes farther: it is not simply that ‘awakening’ to responsibility confronts us with a task, one that we can never completely fulfil and, thus, that requires ongoing forgiveness. Rather, the summons, the command, has already been perfectly fulfilled by Christ; grace completely envelops law. So what we are summoned to do is really ‘to accept it as right that God is our righteousness’, to accept that the summons has been fulfilled, so that we have been freed from the burden of having to be our own righteousness.70 God ‘has summoned man by Himself becoming man and as such not only demanding obedience but rendering it’.71 The divine determination of human obedience at the same time determines, requires and enables active human response. Only in this way can the burden and task of responsibility become freedom, can law be enveloped in Gospel.72 Darwall is not wrong to think that asymmetrical relations can be critiqued by virtue of the fact that second–personal address presupposes moral standing, that I can intelligibly call you to account for your actions only if you can call yourself to account for your actions, and thus only if you are, like me, a responsible agent who can assess and potentially reject any unjustifiable demands I make on you. What he misses is that it is only insofar as we are first spoken to and spoken for that we become able to answer for ourselves, to hold ourselves and others responsible. Moreover, even when we are awakened as responsible persons it is only in Christ that we are fully awake, properly responsive to others. We are not our own, but God’s, insists Calvin. But with Barth we may say we are our own, answerable for ourselves, but only insofar as we are God’s. It is not merely, as C. S. Lewis would have it, that infinite joy is offered to us, for which our desires are too weak. The joy that is offered to us is, as Aquinas rightly has it, the joy of friendship with God, and, as Barth rightly has it, the joy of obedience; it is the joy of being addressed and of responding to that address, of being addressed into responsibility to God and to one another.

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Endnotes   1. John Calvin, Comm. Gen. 2.16, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, vol. 1, trans. John King (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 125.   2. William Klempa, ‘John Calvin on Natural Law’, in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform, ed. Timothy George (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 78.   3. Susan E. Schreiner, ‘Calvin’s Use of Natural Law’, in A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 65–7.  4. Calvin, Comm. Gen. 2.16, 126.   5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles from the 1559 edn (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960; orig. pub. 1559), bk III, ch. vii, sect. 1, 690. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given in this format, abbreviated.  6. Inst. I.ii.2, 42.  7. Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 12.2, trans. from Calvin’s Commentaries: The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, trans. Ross MacKenzie, ed. David and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961); Inst. III.vii.3, 692. At the same time, Calvin then goes on to affirm that God will ‘bring all things to a happy and favorable outcome for us’, 699. He is not above noting that ‘every means toward a prosperous and desirable outcome rests upon the blessing of God’. The way in which eternal blessing slips back in as a hidden motivator is one important reason for favoring Barth’s account over Calvin’s.   8. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 583. Quoted in John H. Leith, ‘The Ethos of the Reformed Tradition’, in Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition, ed. Donald K. McKim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 6.   9. C. S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’, in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 1–2. 10. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (London: SPCK, 1953). 11. Robert M. Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 7. 12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1099a10, 1129a9. 13. John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206. Quoted in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 177. 14. Ibid., 177. 15. See, in particular, Summa Theologica I–II, prologue. Citations will be from Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). Hereafter ST. 16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a, 18–24. 17. Terence Irwin makes a similar point in The Development of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), vol. 1, 666. 18. ST I.59.1. 19. ST I–II.7.ad 2. 20. ST II–II.26.4. 21. Inst. III.vii.3, 692 22. Inst. III.vii.4, 693.



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23. Inst. III.iii.8, 600. 24. Inst. III.iii.8, 600. 25. See my fuller discussion in Jennifer A. Herdt, ‘Calvin’s Legacy for Contemporary Reformed Natural Law’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67:4 (2014): 414–35. 26. Inst. II.ii.26, 286. 27. Inst. II.ii.26, 286. 28. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1937; Harper Torchbook, 1959), 20–1. 29. ST I–II.91.2. 30. Nigel Biggar, ‘Barth’s Trinitarian Ethic’, in Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215. 31. Matthew Rose, Ethics With Barth: God, Metaphysics, and Morals (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 116. 32. I rely throughout my discussion of Barth on Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 33. Barth, CD II/2, 522. 34. CD II/2, 552–4/613–15. See also McKenny, Analogy of Grace, 183. 35. CD II/2, 553. 36. CD II/2, 556. 37. CD II/2, 557. 38. CD II/2, 552. 39. CD II/2, 541–2. Moreover, Barth does not hesitate to articulate that human obedience is good because it corresponds to the goodness of the address of a good God. CD II/2, 546. Like Robert Merrihew Adams, Barth could be said to presuppose a theory of the good – except that he would surely resist what sounds here as though an affirmation that any philosophical theory could precede recognition of the goodness of God. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 250. 40. If God’s commands are the sole source of moral obligation, it is unclear how God’s authority to command is itself to be articulated. Does God command that God’s commands are to be obeyed? But why would that initial command be obligatory? Either circularity or infinite regress threatens. 41. CD II/2, 511. 42. CD III/2, 184. 43. CD II/2, 511. 44. CD II/2, 511. 45. CD II/2, 511. 46. CD II/2, 543. 47. God brings into being a natural kind the members of which are individual centres of identity and agency, that have the capacity for second–personal relationship, for responsibility, precisely for the sake of the Incarnation, in order that Jesus Christ can be the responsible human, the one who responds perfectly to God’s call to covenant partnership. This means that to be human is, on the one hand, to be one of those called to confirm what has already been accomplished for all of humankind in Christ. On the other hand, it is to be oneself responsible, to be oneself the kind of creature capable of hearing and responding to its own call. And this is to be an individual, to enter into a relationship of call and response in which each partner is unsubstitutable. Each is called to his or her own response to God. 48. McKenny, Analogy of Grace, 5.

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49. CD II/2, 512. 50. For example, John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist lxii (1979): 331–50; reprinted in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 87–109. 51. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), 22–24. 52. Ibid., 109. 53. Ibid., 115. 54. Ibid., 114. 55. Ibid., 88. 56. Ibid., 265, fn.26. 57. Ibid., 263. 58. Ibid., 88. 59. At the same time, the divine command/summons is not transparent to us. As McKenny points out, this means that we are in some sense to fall back on mutual moral accountability: ‘The present is the time of the secret. This secrecy itself has ethical implications … The divine secrecy entails that everyone is subject to being held morally accountable by his or her neighbor. … The divine secrecy – the hiddenness of our lives in Christ – is thus the ground of a moral solidarity in which the inability of anyone to guarantee his or her own moral approval is the occasion for mutual moral accountability.’ McKenny, Analogy of Grace, 285. McKenny here is discussing the divine verdict on our conduct, but this includes the divine verdict on our efforts to distinguish persons. 60. Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 184–5. 61. Ibid., 184. 62. Ibid., 201. 63. Ibid., 216. 64. Ibid., 240. 65. Ibid., 241. 66. CD III/2, 150. 67. CD III/2, 152. 68. Calvin often slips into this appeal to the obligation of gratitude (i.e. Comm. Romans 11.34), despite at other points insisting on the absolute character of God’s commands: ‘When, therefore, one asks why God has so done, we must reply: because he has willed it. But if you proceed further to ask why he has so willed, you are seeking something greater and higher than God’s will, which cannot be found.’ Inst. III.xxiii.2, 949. 69. Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 188. 70. CD II/2, 582. 71. CD II/2, 564. 72. CD II/2, 586.

Chapter 10 O N W HAT W E L O ST W H E N ( O R I F ) W E L O S T THE SAINTS Michael Banner

Why would one offer a paper on the saints to a volume devoted to the significance of the legacy of Protestantism for ethics? Well, when the conference on which this volume is based was itself mooted, I was finishing a book entitled The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human.1 Among other concerns the book presses the case for, and begins to outline, an ethics of everyday life – that is, an ethics from before the cradle to after the grave, which tries to imagine human life lived Christianly as we pass through the regular stages on life’s way. It is concerned, in other words, with the quotidian structuring of our lives, not with the hard cases which sometimes occur within them – not with whether a mother’s life is or is not to be saved at the expense of the child’s in certain tragic prenatal cases, or whether life can licitly be ended by the elderly in circumstances of great suffering, but with the more routine and regular questions of why we might want children, how we might live well in old age, how we might understand and respond to the claims of kinship, and so on. So how will we begin to construct an ethics of everyday life? How will we construe and narrate the life course? The fact that Christ lived a human life might be taken to be a matter of some importance for such a project – Christ, so the creeds tells us, was conceived, born, suffered, died and buried, thereby himself passing through those stages on life’s way. And the intense and extensive Christian reflection within the Christian tradition on Christ’s life is a resource of prime importance for Christian moral theology – around those credal moments, Christ’s human life has been imagined, represented, enacted, expounded and interrogated, not only through the drama of the liturgy and the liturgical year, but also through sermons, prayers, through biblical commentary, exegesis and meditation, in doctrinal, moral and philosophical theology, in art of all kinds, in devotional writings, mystery plays, poems and other forms of literature, in hymns, oratorios, cantatas, spirituals and every other type of musical work – and so on. Through these highly diverse and virtually countless engagements with the life of Christ, that life has been brought to an imaginative realization and in that realization a particular architecture of the human and human subjectivity has been

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explored, staged, elaborated and commended. (We would do well, then, to get over the prejudice of the academic mind that the imagination of the human went on most importantly and creatively, or even exclusively, in those tomes which belong to the very limited canon of works which are traditionally deemed works of moral theology. The perplexity of certain colleagues when I suggested placing The Rule of St Benedict on a reading list for a course on Christian ethics is perhaps an especially egregious example of an extraordinary narrowness regarding what does and what doesn’t belong to the canon; but one might provoke more general perplexity and resistance by insisting, as one nonetheless surely should, that Caravaggio, let us say, was as important an exponent of the significance of Christ’s life for human being as many of the authors who make it onto even some of the less dreary reading lists in the subject.) So here’s the thought that brings us to the saints – a thought that the reader may already have anticipated. If Christianity construed human being in relation to the life of Christ, lived through those credal and human moments, so, too, it reflected upon human life through its telling and retelling of the lives of the saints, those lives themselves often conceived as meditations and commentaries on the life of Christ. In his recent magisterial survey of the history of the saints, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, Robert Bartlett notes a fact that might in general go without saying, but shouldn’t, namely that saints were human beings. He notes this point to contrast the saints with objects of pagan devotion, either the immortals of Greece and Rome, or the trees, springs and mountains of the cults of other pre-Christian religions. Being human, ‘every saint had a life story here on earth, with parents, family, a local community and all the incidents that a purely secular biography also offers’.2 I note what generally goes without saying to draw attention to the resources that one might expect to find in saints’ lives if one is trying, as a moral theologian should, to consider the Christian construal of human being. Echoing the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Simon Ditchfield comments (in an article on saints in the early modern period) that saints were found good to think with – consequently, he says, ‘we need … to pay attention to the way in which saints and sanctity were constructed, imagined, represented and used’.3 It is a good maxim – and one which the moral theologian applies by asking how saints’ lives have been used within the sphere of Christian ethical thought and practice. But then, our title poses itself and presses a question upon us. What did we lose, morally speaking, when we lost the saints? Of course, this question presupposes, at least for now, that the saints really did retire at the Reformation. But something of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the saints, post Reformation, is nicely represented in one of the oddities of the Calendar of Book of Common Prayer, in its editions of 1549, 1559 and 1662. In 1549, the Calendar introduced a distinction between red letter and black letter days – that is, between 25 major festivals (including Christmas, Easter, the commemoration of apostles, evangelists and other major New Testament figures, and so on) and the lesser festivals (of lesser figures, including the non-biblical saints who had not made it into the



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premier league of commemorations). This was, one might think, a reasonable and workable distinction, but one aspect of this ranking of the saints is curious. Whereas the red letter days were provided with ‘individualized Collects, Epistles, and Gospels’, no such provision was made for the black letter days. These days were thus, as Brian Cummings puts it, ‘of rather ambiguous significance’,4 since without provision for readings or prayers, provision for the remembrance of the saints consisted solely in their being on the list – so black letter days look remarkably like dead letter days. But there was a further oddity about the ‘slightly arbitrary selection of saints [which] was left in place’. Even though featuring on this list seemed to guarantee no commemoration above and beyond being on the list itself (and thus no commemoration worth speaking of compared with the commemoration which was provided for with a set of readings, biblical or otherwise), the list of black letter (or dead letter) saints was nonetheless subject to amendment from time to time. To cite Cummings again: ‘Enurchus (an obscure saint, probably in reality called Evurtius) [was] added in 1606, and St Alban and the Venerable Bede in 1662. The logic of this was often wanting: while St George was revived as a national figure in the sixteenth century, nobody knows why St Cuthbert was suppressed but St Blaise left in. St Clement was introduced in 1552 and then dropped in 1559; St Barnabas was dropped in 1552 and restored in 1559.’5 It is indeed rather difficult to know what to make of this saintly musical chairs; it seems to resemble cabinet reshuffles for a government in exile, where the question of who gets the defence or foreign affairs portfolio is nonetheless treated as matter of great moment. Perhaps it was the case that even mere possession of a black letter day did ensure some sort of commemoration – at least from those who might recognize the name and turn their thoughts saintwards, maybe even relying on pre-Reformation lections. But it seems unlikely that in general the commemoration of the black letter saints was anything other than rather thin; the lack of provision of readings surely consigned these lesser saints to virtual anonymity, and thus to something of a commemorative no-man’s land. It is surely unlikely, that is to say, that the peaceful life of the church of All Saints on the Green was touched by any of these black letter saints, let alone by all of them. Interestingly, this relegation of recollection of the saints was not required by the teachings of the Reformers. There is no space here to consider the question of whether the Book of Common Prayer’s creation of a commemorative no-man’s land for certain of the saints is typical of Protestant practice after the Reformation. There was doubtless diversity of practice. But I do need to notice that the neglect of recollection of the saints was not necessarily what the Reformers proposed or intended. Again, space does not allow a review of the teachings of the different Reformers and Protestant churches on the saints, but I take the Augsburg Confession as providing an indication of a characteristic Protestant position in regard to the saints, which, as I shall explain presently, very specifically proposed a settlement of saintly affairs which did not involve their neglect. Controversy in the Reformation related, of course, to certain particular uses of the saints, or – as they were seen by Protestants – abuses. But the Reformers

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were at the same time sensitive to the existence of ends and purposes different from those to which they specifically objected. What is characteristic of the Reformers’ attitude, I take it, is a rejection of the saints in their vicarious roles. In his study Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination, Aviad Kleinberg suggests that saints were, in effect, invented just for such vicarious responsibilities: During the fourth century the feeling arose in Christian society that the credits column in the divine books have become dangerously short. It had become profitable to be a Christian in the Christian empire, and worldly gain necessarily meant heavenly loss … What was one to do, then? One solution was to resurrect the martyrs through the cult of relics; another was to find new sufferers to protect the community from its own laxness. In both cases the solution depended on a symbolic division of labor. In exchange for veneration by lukewarm Christians, the righteous, still burning with original zeal, allowed their brethren to share the spiritual warmth.6

This is perhaps a rather crude genealogy – and one which quite possibly reflects some Protestant perspectives on the late mediaeval cult of the saints. But however that may be, Kleinberg’s view that the early martyrs and ‘the new sufferers’ (that is, the ascetics) held their prominent positions in the Christian world just on account of their supposed contribution of moral credit to the wider community definitely identifies one significant ground of later complaint. The Augsburg Confession, for example, is clear (in Article 21) in decrying the role of saints as intermediaries or intercessors, and prohibits prayer to them: ‘Scripture does not teach calling on the saints or pleading for help from them. For it sets before us Christ alone as mediator, atoning sacrifice, high priest, and intercessor.’7 Yet, it equally insists that, ‘it should be taught among us that saints should be kept in remembrance so that our faith may be strengthened when we see what grace they received and how they were sustained in faith. Moreover, their good works are to be an example for us, each of us in his own calling.’ The remembrance of the saints Augsburg intended or envisaged seems, however, as we have noted, not to have been sustained in the Church of England – except perhaps in the case of the Apostles, who (with St Michael), made it on to the list of red letter days. (At this point it is worth noting something, the importance of which will become clear – the Apostles pretty much lacked the biographies, so to speak, which the tradition of hagiography had provided.) So to return to the central question – what did we lose when we lost the saints? What was lost when the commemoration, which Augsburg commends rather than condemns, ceased? And to be more specific still, what was lost morally speaking? One obvious answer is that what was lost was a vast resource for moral teaching – for it is, as Bartlett notes, ‘an absolute commonplace of hagiographic literature’, going back to the earliest period, ‘that saints provided examples to be followed’. Thus, ‘The Martyrdom of Polycarp’ – though more belonging to the genre of acts of martyrs than a life as such – is written ‘both as a memorial for



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those who have already fought the contest and for the training and preparation of those who will do so one day’.8 Yet, though the notion that the saints are an example is a commonplace, I think it is a notion which requires some reflection and commentary – and I will identify two questions here for what can be merely a preliminary discussion. Only when we have considered these two questions will we be in a position to say whether the loss of the saints was, morally speaking, a significant loss. And the two questions, one theoretical, one practical, are easily posed. First, are examples in theory morally important? And second, in practice, are saintly examples themselves important? If the answer to either question is no, then the loss of the saints is no real loss, morally speaking. The first question is about the nature and significance of moral examples in general, and their significance and importance are contested most notably and influentially from a theoretical point of view by Kant. In effect, Kant allows no fundamental significance to the example. Now if examples don’t matter much, then their loss can’t matter much either. But is he right about the moral insignificance of examples? The second question is not theoretical, but practical. Suppose we allow moral significance to the example, in principle; what shall we say of the function or role of saintly examples, in practice, within the moral economy? Moral examples may in principle be significant; in practice however, saintly examples may not be so – and, as we shall see, there is a perhaps ill-defined but, nonetheless, identifiable sense that the saints did not in the generality of cases provide significant moral examples. ‘Only the saints took the saints as models’ might be the slogan for this discounting of the loss of the saints. Addressing this set of doubts about the significance of saints will require us to consider how the saintly example works in practice, and to resist the rather limited notion of the function of examples which, so I suspect, the minimizing of the significance of the saintly example seems to presuppose. It will be helpful here to look at the actual role of saints (or more accurately perhaps, saint-like figures), as described in two recent works of social anthropology. These provide two different perspectives on the role that saints play in certain contemporary moral worlds – and provide us, so I suggest, with a better way to think about the workings of the saintly example than seems to be presupposed by those who discount the significance of the saints. So, to take the first matter first: are examples, as such, of fundamental moral significance? The most important philosophical voice in eighteenth-century thought famously allowed no fundamental place for the morally exemplary with his magisterial pronouncement that ‘Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognised’ as a model or example.9 Since the ideal of moral perfection was to be formulated, of course, a priori by the moral reason, the exemplary has no foundational significance at all – the example is straightforwardly a mere instance of the principle which it exemplifies, and from which it derives its authority. As Kant puts it: ‘one could not give morality worse counsel than by seeking to borrow it from examples. For every example of it which is presented to me must itself be judged

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according to principles of morality, whether it is actually worthy to serve as an original example, i.e. as a model; but by no means could it furnish the concept of it at the outset …Imitation has no place at all in moral matters, and examples serve for encouragement only.’10 As Max Scheler and more recently Allessandro Ferrara have argued, this is a poor account of the exemplary (and one which Kant himself effectively repudiates in The Critique of Judgment, as Ferrara, following Arendt, notices). In The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment,11 Ferrara maintains against Kant (or at least, the Kant of the Groundwork not of the Critique of Judgment), that we need to distinguish three forces that constrain and govern our action in the world. The first is the force of what exists – the force of things. The second is the force of what ought to be the case – the force of ideas (including moral ideas, for this includes the ‘normativity of what we think should be the case. This normativity may take diverse forms, and … we experience it as the force of principles: the force of moral commands, of the moral point of view in general, of conscience, of the law, of faith, of cultural values as conceptions of the desirable, the force of the best argument, the force of justice, the appeal of the good life’12). We must, however, in addition, recognize a third force, so he says, the ‘force of what is as it should be or the force of the example’.13 Ferrara in turn allows for two kinds of exemplarity, one of which can be reduced in Kantian fashion to the exemplarity of a moral principle, but one of which cannot. Sometimes what is exemplary embeds and reflects a normativity of which we are fully aware: we already know of what the example is an example. Examples of virtuous conduct, of best practices in the professions, of statesmanship in politics, of courage in combat or of parental care are often of this kind.

But: At other times, however, the exemplariness of the example is so pure and innovative that we first vaguely sense it by drawing on the analogy with past experiences and only subsequently do we succeed in identifying the normative moment so forcefully reflected in the object or the action at hand. Fully grasping exemplarity in this case requires that we formulate ad hoc the principle of which it constitutes an instantiation. Political revolutions, the founding of new religions, groundbreaking works of art are often of this kind: with one and the same gesture they disclose new vistas on what exists and new dimensions of normativity. The appeal and force with which they inspire everybody to follow their teaching rest on pure exemplarity: neither the necessity of a reality that could be otherwise nor the implications of a norm as yet unrecognized can account for their capacity to shape our world.14

Joel Robbins (in his exegesis of this, on which I have relied)15 relates Ferrara’s argument here to Max Scheler’s claim that ‘what has a forming and grafting effect



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on our souls is not an abstract, universal moral rule but always, and only, a clear and intuitive grasp of the exemplarity of the person’. For Scheler, what exerts a pull here, drawing us in and soliciting a response, is love. Against Kant then, we need a better theory of the example and the exemplary. Specifically we need a theory that allows the example to have moral authority and a claim on our love, prior to and even apart from the authority and claims of principle. And more specifically still, for our purposes, we need to allow just that saints can indeed have a significant role in our moral economies, either as examples which compellingly instantiate principles we have not fully recognized, or as pointing us beyond any such principles. But if, in principle, the example can be morally significant in the fundamental way just mentioned, in practice, in the case of the saints, is it so? Just because it could be so, it doesn’t follow that it is. And there are, as it turns out, some much less highfalutin reasons than Kant’s for being indifferent to the twilight of the saints in Protestant life and thought. Saints in general, it might be said, just do not provide important examples – for one or other of a number of reasons. First, it might be alleged that the saints simply do not function chiefly in this capacity. They are patrons, not models, and it is not as moral examples that they gain their prominence, but as agents capable of securing protection and succour in an uncertain world. Second, even if they are understood as morally exemplary in a certain sense, still the saints are not really conceived, it might be said, as examples for us. That is, they function vicariously; what they do, morally speaking, they do on our behalf in some sense, but not that we might do it too. And if this is so, their loss may still be a matter of indifference, Protestantly speaking – or even to be welcomed! Third, even supposing that these last two points somewhat overstate the case for discounting the significance of the saints in their roles as moral exemplary, still it might be said that of whatever the saints are exemplary, it is not everyday life. Maybe the saints are not only powerful patrons and helpful agents; maybe their moral work is not construed as solely of vicarious significance; nonetheless, it might be suggested that they provide examples only of extraordinary moral actions. Their moral sphere is not the sphere of the everyday. So, from yet another perspective, their loss need not be regretted or mourned. I have tried to separate these points, but in fact I think they often work not separately but together to create a sense that the saints are really somewhat morally marginal or superfluous. Bartlett notes that the thought that saints ‘provided examples to be followed’ was ‘an absolute commonplace of hagiographic literature’.16 Yet, he continues, ‘despite this ever-repeated invocation of the exemplary function of hagiography, in practice saints were more often seen as powerful patrons to be prayed to rather than models to be emulated, as wonderworkers rather than as examples. There is a big difference between the awestruck approach to a mighty source of supernatural aid and the attempt to model oneself on a virtuous man or woman.’17 Of course, a patron could also be a model. But Bartlett immediately follows up with the thought that only the saints took the saints as models – or as he puts it: ‘there is one class or person who really did

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take saints as a model: the saints themselves’.18 In his study already mentioned, Flesh Made Word: Saints Stories and the Western Imagination, Kleinberg makes this point by stressing the distance of the saints from the everyday, relating this to the concept of their being holy – ‘the etymology of the word indicates that before anything else, the holy place, the holy object and the holy man stand out, are an exception in the profane world. Conceptually, the idea of exceptionality precedes the notion of moral excellence that we now tend to associate with sanctity … Sanctity … is intrinsically “irregular”.’19 Whatever we say of the etymology, the notion that Kleinberg uses it to suggest – that the saintly example is exceptional – is suggested by others. Thus, Eamon Duffy remarks on the seeming oddity of the popularity of devotion to various and numerous virgin martyrs in late mediaeval England: ‘the fundamental values implicit in the stories, with their emphasis on sexual purity, their scornful rejection of marriage, and their defiant resistance to the wishes and commands of parents and secular governors seem strange features of a cult whose surviving remains, such as … images on painted screens, were paid for by the solid and prosperous laity of East Anglia or Devon. What was their appeal to these sober and not unworldly men and women of pre-Reformation England?’20 His answer is that while chastity was a widely valued virtue, what these and other virgin saints provided ‘to the ordinary Christian man and woman was not so much a model to imitate, something most of them never dreamt of doing, but rather a source of power to be tapped’.21 Their exceptional behaviour is indeed the basis of their capacity to assist their clients, but makes them unlikely role models: There were saints popular with late medieval men and women whose appeal probably lay in their suitability as patterns for imitation; St Zita of Lucca, the model domestic servant and pattern of woman in the kitchen, is a case in point. But I suspect that only a handful of men and women actually perceived these holy maidens as exemplars, just as very few can have thought of St George, St Sebastian, St Roche or St Michael the Archangel as exemplars.22

Separately or together, the three thoughts I have mentioned conspire to push us towards the conclusion that whatever significance the saints may have had, they were not significant as moral exemplary for anyone but other saints. So, to revert to the overall conclusion to which these points may direct us, their loss can surely matter very little. There is some sorting out to do here – not all of which can be accomplished in a short paper. Lying behind some of the doubts there seems to be mistaken or impoverished notions of how examples function. On the one hand, one senses hints of the thought that the only examples that are really examples are ones which invite us to copy or imitate them very closely. (Of course, copying is not what examples are about at all – when I say ‘I’ll show you how to make a martini’, certainly you might be very well advised just to copy me, but then I wouldn’t be said to be setting an example, just showing you how it is done.) On the other hand, there seems to be a failure to realize that depicting the extraordinary may not



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serve simply to set it apart from the ordinary, but to bring ordinary and extraordinary into a sharper and dialectical relationship. We need, then, some wider account of the example and the exemplary to save us from such misconceptions. But rather than trying to set out a theory of the example, so to speak, I will try to sort out some of the issues in a more ad hoc way by taking some examples of examples. And I take the examples from the work of two prominent and important social anthropologists (Joel Robbins and Juliet du Boulay), whose saints (albeit not saints in the strict sense) don’t simply invite others to copy them. In both cases, however, the contribution of the saints to the particular moral economies they inhabit allows us to see beyond the confines of a rather limited notion of how examples work. What is interesting in both cases is just how extraordinary lives, without being simply models for the ordinary, nonetheless bear on those lives in important ways. And it suits my purposes that these are not historical examples, but in effect current examples of the importance of saints in two quite different cultural contexts. Take Robbins’ saints first of all. Robbins is a leading figure in the founding of two newly vital fields, the anthropology of morality and the anthropology of Christianity.23 His principal ethnographic work (reported most fully in Becoming Sinners24) has been amongst the Urapmin, a community in Papua New Guinea’s West Sepik Province, who in 1977 converted themselves, without the aid of missionaries, to a ‘vigorous version of charismatic Christianity’. In a recent paper, ‘Where in the World are Values? Exemplarity, Morality and Social Process’, Robbins considers a particular aspect of the Urapmin’s moral life – the role of certain people who have a special place in the conversation and dream life of the community he studies. And these special figures, so I suggest, may be deemed analogous to saints and so provide a worked example of how saints contribute to a community’s moral ecology. To understand the nature of the role of these figures we need to note very briefly something of the values and value hierarchy which structure Urapmin life. At the top of this hierarchy, says Robbins, is relationality, which demands the creation and maintenance of relationships. Below that there are two values that support the realization of relationality, and Robbins terms them ‘willfulness’ and ‘lawfulness’. The will is the desiring part of the person, and it is willfulness that causes a person to bring relationships into being. Lawfulness, on the other hand, involves honouring the demands of existing relationships. Now ‘in order to fully serve the value of relationalism, people have to temper the full realization of the values of willfulness and lawfulness’. I cite Robbins in full here: Developed to its furthest extent, the value of willfulness constantly creates new relationships, letting older ones flame out as neglect and dispute take their toll. Lawfulness, for its part, when expressed most fully, meets only the demands of existing relationships and produces nothing new – an outcome that is equally untenable in a cognatic world where no relations can be assumed and none of necessity will last, and thus all have to be made willfully in the first instance.

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Given that an excess of either willfulness or lawfulness is ultimately counterproductive in relation to the paramount value of relationalism, the trick for most Urapmin is to learn to temper the full expression of either of these two subordinate values, balancing the exercise of will in creating relationships with a commitment to lawfulness in maintaining them.25

Yet, for all this, Robbins’ claim is that amongst those who most occupy the talk and dreams of the community are those who exemplify these values ‘in fully developed form’ – ‘exemplars’ in his terms. Thus, one Semis is ‘a paragon of robustly lived lawfulness – a kind of fully realized lawfulness that does not lead to social marginalization’,26 whereas a certain Kinimnok provides an exemplification of willfulness (though I must simply refer the reader to Robbins’ account rather than reproducing it here). Now Robbins says of Semis that ‘Virtually no other Upramin person can live like this, for they generally have to temper their realization of the value of lawfulness by putting their wills into play.’ Yet, ‘many of them admire Semis greatly. They go to him for advice, talk warmly about him in his absence, and fairly often they have dreams where they see Jesus take him to heaven.’27 And the same could be said of Kinimnok. So what are we to make of these two figures, who, in virtue of their place in Upramin conversation and imagination, certainly resemble the saints of traditional western Christian life? They are plainly objects of interest, affection and admiration to their fellows – and yet, as Robbins’ account makes clear, no one sets out to be them. In what sense, then, are they exemplary? According to Robbins, moral ‘sensibilities are most importantly formed … by means of people’s encounters with the values they find actually existing and experientially available in the exemplary figures and institutions of their social surroundings. Through the attention such exemplar-embedded values elicit, and the reflection they set in train, what Scheler calls the ‘“moral tenor” of people’s lives finds it shape, preparing them for the moments of decision with which life will present them.’28 The exemplary figures are exemplary, that is to say, whether or not anyone sets out to be them. The fully worked example of a particular value holds that value in play even for those who do not themselves pursue that value fully or exclusively. (It might be worth thinking a little bit more about the role of the mediaeval virgin saints with this point in mind.) Let me turn to the work of the second anthropologist. Du Boulay’s most recent study is entitled Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Mountain Village, and in Chapter 10, entitled ‘The God-bearers’, she says something of the general significance of saints, gives an account of the role of those on the way to being saints and considers in particular the significance of the Virgin Mary as exemplar for both women and men. She provides a striking picture of the subtle and interesting role of saints in an actual moral economy. According to du Boulay, the regular saints ‘act as guides and exemplars’, and are ‘not an exceptional but a normal part of people’s lives … [T]he people keep their icons in their houses, pray to them, see them in dreams, celebrate their feast days, venerate their relics and visit their holy places as a regular part of daily life.’29 But though she claims that these saints function as ‘guides and exemplars’, her



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discussion is first of all focused elsewhere, not on regular saints, but on saints in the making, so to speak – and here there seems to be a case for saying that they do not function as exemplars for those who nonetheless revere them. As du Boulay sees it, the saint is ‘by no means confined to a historical or medieval past’, but ‘is a fully contemporary phenomenon, and there are always a number of elders … in monasteries and hermitages scattered throughout the Orthodox world becoming imperceptibly more and more known as holy men and women, of whom some may well in the end be recognised as saints’.30 Now the stuff of saintliness, so to speak, is human life – ‘life itself provides the testing ground by which the human spirit is refined and purged’, and it is ‘because of this [that] the saints of the Orthodox tradition may be found in any walk of life. … Nevertheless, the typical route to sanctity is the ascetic way of the monastery or the hermitage.’31 And the reason for this is crucial for our understanding of the significance of saints-in-the-making for everyday life. According to du Boulay, that this is the typical route ‘is well understood by the village people to whom, in the context of social life and the competitive nature of social relations … the temptation to sin is virtually irresistible. The unredeemed desires of the fallen human being, which life in society exacerbates rather than controls, can in village eyes be best, if not uniquely, brought under control by removal from the comings and goings of village life.’32 Villagers are ‘drawn to a society which exists in order to put into practice the values whose deficiencies in their own lives they so deplore’: The villagers’ inevitably partial living of the precepts of the Gospels, their inevitable proneness to gossip and to quarrels, the necessary inflation of an egoistic and combative stance in men and of competitiveness and tendency to gossip in women, means that the villagers come to the monastery with a particular awareness of these burdens and a longing to be released from them. In the monastic life they see the enactment of all the virtues which the sin of the world prevents them from emulating in their own lives.33

Here then, the saints – or saints-in-the-making – function as examples only of what cannot be achieved outside the monastery, and thus not as examples for imitation by those who are nonetheless ‘drawn’ to them. But if the account thus far seems to reveal the marginality of the saints to everyday life in this particular moral economy, we must immediately notice du Boulay’s account of the ‘sense in which the Mother of God is the archetype for all humanity, for men as well as women’34 – for here we find a countermovement, so to speak, which brings saints and saintly exemplars back into ordinary life, just when the account of the saints in the monastery seemed to leave ordinary life to its own devices. According to du Boulay, Mary is ‘the feminine archetype for women, and from this archetype are derived those ideas of motherhood, chastity, honour, diligence, obedience, compassion and fidelity, which lie at the basis of the woman’s ideal role as married wife and mother of children, and which are, therefore, at the basis also of the possibility for man’s ideal role as the loyal protector and support of his family as well’.35

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There is not the space here to follow du Boulay’s exposition of the subtle pattern of women’s identification with Mary, through which is brought into being the household in which men too find their meaning. But it is important to note the significance of this aspect of the role of Mary, since it serves to unsettle the dichotomy between the lives of the saints and the lives of the rest, which the role of the saints-in-the-making in the monastery seems to encourage. As du Boulay notes in her account of the shaping of men and women’s lives through the ideal of the Mother of God, ‘there is more than an echo … of the pattern which inspires the ascetic endeavours of the monastics’, such that ‘it casts further light on the relationship between the villages and the monasteries’.36 As du Boulay comments: the element of contrast highlighted earlier is less than might appear, for it is not only in the strict dedication of the monastery but in the households of the village that Orthodox culture seeks to attain a transfiguration of human nature. Monastics choose the path of uncompromising espousal of spiritual values in their purest form, but the institution of marriage is the bedrock by which the villagers also work towards their redemption. The role of woman in the house and the role of man in the fields is, even within the tormented world of unregenerate humanity, infused with a life as sacred in its way as the life of the monastics in the monastery.37

‘In the end’, then, ‘the apparent opposition between life in the monastery and life in the world is not one of opposition but of complementarity’ – and that, specifically in virtue of villagers’, ‘sense of kinship, relationship, and even identification with their holy figures’38 as they construe and construct their daily lives. Is the morally exemplary important in theory? Yes, we say in reply to Kant. And do saints not only provide examples (that they do is the commonplace which Bartlett reported), but examples that matter for everyday life? Robbins and du Boulay provide us with two cases where they do. In the case Robbins describes, although the regular villager does not seek to live out fully one or other of the two values exemplified by the individuals who hold such a special place in the community’s imagination, the exemplification of these values in fully worked examples serves to hold those competing values in play: it is ‘through such exemplary figures as Semis and Kimimnok that Urapmin encounter these values and learn to think about their own lives in terms of them’.39 For du Boulay, whereas the saintsin-the-making are revered, it might seem, for living out values which cannot be lived out outside the monastery, nonetheless Mary, in particular, is taken as an archetype which shapes the daily life of women and men and brings the saintly example into everyday life. These examples, drawn from two different contexts, are more than enough to establish that the question of the nature, value and significance of the saintly example is worthy of careful attention. And a treatise (rather than a short paper) on the saints might attempt some wider review of saints’ lives, since this body of literature is the most obvious and important source and starting point for understanding something of the exemplary function of the saints in Christian thought



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and practice. The significance of this literature as a resource for moral theology, though it has been largely neglected by moral theology, is surely considerable – but it is a vast resource. Bartlett’s bibliography of printed primary sources runs to 44 pages, in smallish print. One aspect of this literature must be noted immediately. When Augustine preaches on the saints, as he does very regularly (two volumes in the ten categorized volumes of sermons in the recent English translation, and some sermons in volume 11, are on saints, biblical and non-biblical), the saints are first of all martyrs. Of course, as Augustine says, ‘these are times of peace’,40 and yet – ‘although there is peace in one period, persecution in another, is there any period that lacks hidden persecution?’41 Or, as he puts it otherwise, the sickbed can be a site for martyrdom.42 The sickbed is a place of temptation, as is the world in general, and from the martyrs we must learn to scorn the allurements of the world. The saints, scorning these allurements unto death, provide us with relevant and imitable (because human) examples. The path we are asked to follow, he assures his congregations, has been smoothed by many feet.43 So: let us celebrate their feasts … with the utmost devotion, soberly cheerful, gathered in a holy assembly, thinking faithful thoughts, confidently proclaiming their sanctity. It is no small part of imitation, to rejoice together in the virtues of those who are better than we are. They are great, we are little, but the Lord has blessed the little with the great. (Ps. 115.13) They have gone ahead of us; they tower over us like giants. If we are not capable of following them in action, let us follow them in affection; if not in glory, then certainly in joy and gladness; if not in merit, then in desire; if not in suffering, then in fellow feeling; if not in excellence, then in our close relationship with them.44

Now there are plainly themes here which will be important for subsequent Christian life and thought. But Augustine’s saints are mostly martyrs, and thus represent but a narrow sample of those who would make up the full number of saints. Scorning the world’s temptations may be the martyrs’ particular forte, but many other roles would be performed by the very many and different types of saints added to the early cohort. Bartlett charts this variety by reference to categories which the church itself came to deploy – thus, besides Mary, the Apostles and martyrs, there were also most importantly confessors and virgins. These categories may or may not serve the purposes of the moral theologian, but it is at least worth wondering whether a classificatory scheme governed by chronology and location might be more useful, noting, that is, that with changing times, saints came to occupy different spaces. Perpetua, Polycarp and Cyprian are, we might say, proto-saints in a manner of speaking, forerunners of the fully conceived saints, for in ‘acts of martyrs’ they are depicted in death, not in life, and live to die in the arena. The influential ‘Life of Anthony’ takes place in the desert – to where the battles of the arena are now transferred, as the ascetics confront the devil and their desires. Gregory’s ‘Life of Benedict’ moves the battle to the monastery, where it takes a regular and

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institutionalized form. With the life of St Martin of Tours, the saint’s life moves out of the monastery, and locates itself on the urban fringe. With the Celtic lives of Brigit and Columba, there is another change of venue – to territories altogether outside the sphere of Roman urban life. With Francis, the life comes to the new mercantile cities of the high middle ages. With Becket, the saint’s life is played out in the court. In later centuries it would be played out in mission fields, in hospitals and in death camps. Whether or not such an approach to organizing a survey would prove useful remains to be seen. But it at least promises to reflect something of the vast diversity of saints and saints’ lives that were lost at the Reformation and, thus, something of the significance of this loss. I have been asking – what did we lose, morally speaking, when we lost the saints? And I have answered that we lost something of the power of the example of the achieved life, played out in many different forms, across many different contexts. But of course, we have already anticipated the thought that we really didn’t lose the saints at all. At the end of the catalogue of a recent exhibition on relics, in an essay on ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, the author refers to the secular relic collecting of later years as a restaging of ‘the protocols of relic worship’.45 Even the Reformers were in fact caught up in this restaging, creating what Rublick refers to as ‘grapho-relics’, there being a lively trade in Reformers’ autographs.46 If relics made a quick comeback, even in what might have been considered inhospitable circumstances, so too did the saints. And the martyrs, as they had been first amongst the saints at the beginning, were in the vanguard of their reestablishment in Protestant life and thought, notwithstanding any theological scruples. In that curious Anglican list of black letter (or dead letter) saints you will find Perpetua Martyr for 7 March. She is historically indubitable – and has even left us the only piece of autobiographical writing by a classical woman to have survived to the modern period in the form of her prison journal. And she died bravely for the faith in the arena. It was presumably these impeccable credentials which ensured that she made it into the list, even if she didn’t qualify for a red letter day. Certainly she suffered none of the opprobrium heaped on the likes of St Francis by various of the more splenetic Reformers. True martyrs could hardly be faulted, even if the unmartyred who nonetheless acquired stigmata might be thought very dubious. And it was such martyrs who opened a door which had only ever been partially closed – through which came the company of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (the most popular book of post-Reformation England), rehabilitating saints of old and adding to their number the new and unofficial ‘saints’ of persecuted Protestantism. But even then, the creation of Protestant saints did not stop, and resembled, of course, the creation of saints before Rome took over and regularized the process – Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, that is to say, like Cranmer and Latimer before them, owe their status to popular and sustained acclaim. If Protestantism has been unwilling to do without saints, so too has secular modernity. According to one commentator, ‘celebrity is a crucial dimension of the



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theatrical structure of humanitarianism, insofar as it introduces into its imaginary a new communicative figure – a figure who commands the necessary symbolic capital to articulate personal dispositions of acting and feeling as exemplary public dispositions at given historical moments’.47 Princess Diana, Angelina Jolie and others have once again connected sainthood with the theatre, the stage, or the arena, where the saints began. The saints, it seems, have been so good to think with that they have never really gone away. In moral theology, however, the lives of the saints have largely been neglected, when they surely comprise a vast and rich meditation on human life, one of the key sites at which the Christian imagination of what it is to be human has been crafted and expounded. That the saints are exemplary is a commonplace. But a Protestant moral theology which overcame its ignorance of or ambivalence towards the saints might reckon with the fact that the nature, form and content of that exemplarity surely bears further elucidation – and promises not only a better understanding of the work of saints, but a better understanding of morality and human life.

Endnotes   1. Michael Banner, The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).   2. Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 609.   3. Simon Ditchfield, ‘Thinking With Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 552–84.   4. Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 752.  5. Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, 752.   6. Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 97.   7. Available in several editions.  8. Bartlett, Why Can the Dead, 510.   9. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor and J. Timmermann, rev. J. Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 23. 10. Ibid. 11. Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 12. Ibid., 2. 13. Ibid., 2–3. 14. Ibid., 3. 15. Joel Robbins, ‘Where in the World are Values? Exemplarity, Morality and Social Process’. Keynote lecture presented at the conference Freedom, Creativity, and Decision: Towards an Anthropology of the Human Subject, Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge University, 2012.

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16. Bartlett, Why Can the Dead, 510. 17. Ibid., 511. 18. Ibid., 511. 19. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word, 2. 20. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 174. 21. Ibid., 175. 22. Ibid., 174. 23. For more details and references, see Banner, Ethics of Everyday Life, 25–7. 24. Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 25. Robbins, ‘Where in the World’. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Juliet du Boulay, Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Mountain Village (Limni: Denise Harvey, 2009), 304. 30. Ibid., 304. This pattern of provisional recognition of saintliness prior to death is itself perfectly traditional: thus, for example, Sulpicius Severus’s ‘Life of Martin of Tours’ was written before Martin’s death. 31. Ibid., 305. 32. Ibid., 305. 33. Ibid., 310. 34. Ibid., 328. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 336. 37. Ibid., 337. 38. Ibid., 335. 39. Robbins, ‘Where in the World’. 40. Augustine, ‘Sermon 306B’, in Sermons, vol. 9, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. E. Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994), 33. 41. Augustine, ‘Sermon 305A’, Sermons, vol. 8, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. E. Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994), 325 42. Augustine, ‘Sermon 286’, Sermons, vol. 8, 105. 43. Augustine, ‘Sermon 306’, Sermons, vol. 9, 23. 44. Augustine, ‘Sermon 280’, Sermons, vol. 8, 75. 45. Alexander Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Bagnoli. H. A. Klein, C. G. Mann and J. Robinson (London: Walters Art Museum, 2011), 215. 46. Ditchfield, ‘Thinking With Saints’: 561, fn.24, which cites Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe: New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 193. 47. Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 80.

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202 Bibliography Yoder, John Howard. Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World. Scottsdale: Herald, 2001. Yoder, John Howard. The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, edited by Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Yoder, John Howard. The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Scottsdale: Herald, 2003. Yoder, John Howard. ‘What are Our Concerns?’. In The Roots of Concern: Writings on Anabaptist Renewal 1952–1957, edited by Virgil Vogt, 164–76. Eugene: Cascade, 2009. Yoder, John Howard. ‘The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship’. In Being Human, Becoming Human, edited by Jens Zimmerman and Brian Gregor, 127–51. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Yoder, John Howard. ‘The Ecumenical Movement and the Faithful Church’. In Radical Ecumenicity: Pursuing Unity and Continuity after John Howard Yoder, edited by John C. Nugent, 193–222. Abiline, TX: Abiline Christian University Press, 2010. Yoder, John Howard. Nonviolence – A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures, edited by Paul Martens, Matthew Porter and Myles Werntz. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010. Yoder, John Howard. Revolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures, edited by Paul Martens, Mark Thiessen Nation, Matthew Porter and Myles Werntz. Eugene: Cascade, 2011.

INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES Old Testament Genesis 1 69 2.16 160, 172 2.17 71 3.1 84 3.7 74 15.6 11 50 60

Deuteronomy 6.20-5 60 8.3 86 Psalm 2 69 34.8 86 111 84 115.13 187

Isaiah 41.20 90 Jeremiah 23.10 154 Amos 8.11 86

New Testament Matthew 4.4 86 5.38-42 149 6.10 60 9 84 18 99 18.27 86 20.34 86 Mark 1.41 86 7.34-35 84 9.22 86 Luke 1.48-49 69 13.3 83

John 1.9 157 16.13 148

Galatians 3.6 12 5.1 4, 41

Romans 3.28 12 4.23 12 6.23 70 8.2 61 12.2 172 12.17 88

Ephesians 2.8-10 56 2.10 65

I Corinthians 2.9-10 48 2.13 73 II Corinthians 5.17-20 44, 61

I Thessalonians 5.23 86 Hebrews 3.13-15 62

INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS Abraham 11–14 Adams, Robert M. 161, 172–3 Agamben, Giorgio 14, 49–51, 57, 61–3 agency 18–23, 27–34, 46–7, 66–7, 72–5, 78, 82, 161–9, 181 Anabaptists 93–104, 107–21, 127–33, 136, 141, 145, 150, 154, 157 Mennonite Church, USA 116 Anglican 94, 100, 188 apocalyptic 39, 41, 43–51, 54–63, 131, 141 Aquinas, Thomas 20, 34–5, 95, 100–2, 105, 160, 162–5, 171–2 Arendt, Hannah 59, 63, 88–9, 180 Aristotle 95, 160–2, 170, 172 atonement 104 Augsburg confession 177–8 Augustine 70, 83, 160, 162, 166, 187, 190 autonomy 89, 170 baptism 14, 46, 53, 61, 72, 98, 112–13, 124, 129 Barmen Declaration 3, 8, 39–41, 48, 52–3, 55, 60–3 Barth, Karl 3–9, 20–37, 42–6, 50–5, 58, 60–7, 77–92, 95, 100–2, 105, 111, 160, 162, 165–7, 170–3 Bartlett, Robert 176, 178, 181, 186–7, 189–90 Beatific vision 164 Bender, Harold 104 Biggar, Nigel 7, 34, 165, 173 biopolitics 57 body of Christ 14, 56, 77, 98, 117, 136, 142, 154 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 3–4, 45–7, 54, 57, 67, 72, 85, 111, 127–43, 188 Ethics 4, 45, 47, 57, 134 Book of Common Prayer 176–7 Bowlin, John 105, 161 Buber, Martin 60, 63 Calhoun, Robert 80 Calvin, John 18–20, 23–5, 32, 35, 80, 107–8, 110–18, 159–66, 171–4 Institutes 159, 172 Caravaggio, Michelangelo 176 Catholic 1–2, 5, 8, 17, 82, 85, 93–100, 104, 128, 164

Christendom 11, 96, 99–100, 102, 114, 116, 118, 139 Christology 22, 28, 35, 70, 97, 99, 101, 132–3, 141, 148, 150 Christ’s lordship 3, 41, 52–3, 55–7, 62, 100, 117 Church 5, 13, 17–18, 33–4, 53–5, 68, 73, 78–80, 93–104, 108–9, 111–31, 136–7, 142, 152–4 Commandment 60 divine command 4, 47, 81, 163 Ten Commandments 55–6 community 4, 6, 40–1, 44, 46, 50–7, 76–7, 98–104, 114, 123–33, 136–8, 140–2, 151, 153, 155, 170, 176, 178, 183–4, 186 conformation (to Christ) see formation conscience 6, 72, 83, 85–7, 145–7, 149, 152–6, 158, 180 Constantinianism 97, 100, 102, 107, 112, 114, 121–4 contemplation 89–90, 164 creation 21–2, 25, 33, 50, 53, 58, 61, 70–1, 79, 84, 152, 159, 164 ex nihilo 70 cross 12–14, 59, 128–32, 136, 140–1, 160 Cummings, Brian 177 Darwall, Stephen 167–71 deliverance 3, 39–49, 54–60, 67, 135 discipleship 51, 73, 98, 104, 116, 127–40, 142 Ditchfield, Simon 176 doxology 52, 54–5, 62, 70, 73, 75–6, 83, 85–6, 110, 114 Du Boulay, Juliet 6, 183–6 Duffy, Eamon 96, 182 Ecclesiology see Church Ecumenism 1, 93, 95, 103 Eden 84, 159, 164 election 21–7, 33, 35, 43–4, 58, 105, 167 encounter 30–1, 39, 43–4, 59, 65, 67, 79, 82, 85, 90, 130, 132–3, 161, 168, 170, 184, 186 Episcopalian 94, 100 Eschatology 40, 44–6, 50, 87, 99–100, 112, 137, 140



Index of Names and Subjects

ethicist freedom of 40–1, 48, 102, 108, 111–12, 116, 121, 145–6, 149, 151, 156 role of 67, 78, 82 ethos 5, 39, 41–2, 45, 47–59, 68, 138 Eucharist see Lord’s Supper example 14, 75, 84, 127, 130–1, 178–89 Feil, Ernst 141 Fell, Margaret 154 Ferrara, Allessandro 180 formation 23, 25, 27, 40, 57–8, 66, 74, 77, 87, 127–8, 130, 134, 138, 148, 152, 156, 162, 164, 180, 184 Fox’s Book of Martyrs 188 Genesis 11–14, 70–1, 85, 159 Goossen, Rachel Waltner 115 gratitude 3, 40, 34, 71, 75, 110, 171, 174 Green-McCreight, Kathryn 82 Gustafson, James 80, 95, 111 habit 55, 74–5, 87, 97, 128, 134, 138, 148, 161 Hauerwas, Stanley 2, 4–5, 51, 54, 56, 78, 80, 87, 91, 99–100, 108–11, 116, 123, 128, 132, 136, 137, 141 Hegel, W. G. F. 46 Herdt, Jennifer 2, 6, 35–7 Hobbes, Thomas 153 Holiness 5, 6, 23, 86, 98, 100–1, 120, 137, 142, 151, 156 Honneth, Axel 58 Humility 74–8, 88, 137 imitation 6, 14, 130, 134, 140, 180, 182, 185, 187 Iwand, Hans Joachim 51, 54 Jews 12–14, 59, 129, 161, 167 justice 42–3, 52, 58, 111, 161, 164, 180 justification by faith 2, 4, 12–13, 18–25, 31–5, 70, 97, 103, 130–1, 135 Just War tradition 123 Kant, Emmanuel 95, 97, 104, 160, 170, 179–81, 186 Kantian 159, 165–6, 180 Neo-Kantian 85–6 Käsemann, Ernst 41, 48–9, 56, 62 Kierkegaard, Søren 110–11 Kingdom of God 40, 42, 44, 46, 52–3, 55, 62, 84, 99, 109–10, 113, 124, 131, 137, 147–8, 164

205

Kleinberg, Aviad 178, 182 Krall, Ruth Elizabeth 125 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 168 Leithart, Peter 104, 123 Lewis, C. S. 160–1, 171 love 3, 13, 24, 30–1, 37, 40, 43, 56, 70, 76, 97, 104, 109–10, 120, 129, 151–2, 156, 160, 164, 181 agape 30–2, 36–7 Eros 30–2, 36–7 Eudaimonism 6, 159–74 self-love 162–3 Lord’s Prayer 42, 62 Lord’s Supper 53, 70, 84, 98–9, 113 Löwith, Karl 45, 61 Luther, Martin 2–5, 8, 11–14, 18–20, 23–5, 32, 34–5, 43, 53–5, 59, 65–91, 93, 97, 103–4, 108–11, 118, 122, 124, 135, 142 ‘Freedom of a Christian, The’ 3, 34, 108, 110, 122 ‘On Temporal Authority’ 43 Lutheran 2–3, 12, 18–20, 23–4, 35, 68, 72, 81, 93, 96–7, 133, 168 Magisterial Reformers 3–4, 66–7, 97–8, 145 magnificat 5, 59–76 Marion, Jean-Luc 60 Martyn, J. Louis 48–9 Martyr, Perpetua 187–8 martyrs 123, 178, 182, 187–8 Mary 5, 66–76, 82–7, 184–7 McClendon, James 127, 132, 136, 156 mediation 41, 45–8, 53–5, 65, 72–3, 83, 85, 90–1, 141–2, 178 mercy 31, 42–3, 58–60, 70, 88–9, 120 Messiah 4–5, 39–63, 131, 141 Methodism 93–4, 98, 100, 103 monastics 185–8 Nation, Mark Thiessen 127 Natural Law 1–2, 69, 128, 168 nature created 19, 25–36 of freedom 3 of God 72, 90, 132 human 19–20, 22, 37, 57, 71, 87, 102, 108, 110, 159, 163–5, 171, 186 Niebuhr, H. Richard 95, 111, 164 Niebuhr, Reinhold 79–80, 95, 111 Nimmo, Paul 5, 81, 90 nonviolence 101, 104, 109, 113, 115, 120–3, 128, 145, 147–52 Nygren, Anders 160

206

Index of Names and Subjects

obedience 6, 23, 40, 55–7, 62, 71, 82–3, 91, 109–12, 117, 124, 132, 134–8, 141, 148–50, 154–5, 159–73, 185 obligation 14, 58, 105, 161–74 O’Donovan, Oliver 85 Orthodoxy 104, 185–6 peace 62, 69, 82–8, 99, 103, 114, 120, 128, 147, 153–4, 187 perseverance 91, 142 pneumatology 6, 70, 73, 148–52, 156 political theology 76, 139 praise see doxology prayer 42–5, 52–4, 57–9, 67–8, 78, 82, 86, 102–3, 117, 120, 175–8, 181, 184 preaching 13, 53–4, 62–3, 91, 101, 145, 187 ‘Protestant Thomism’ 2, 20 Pufendorf, Samuel 168 Quaker 6, 145–58 -Baptist debates 156 Radner, Ephraim 152–4 Rauschenbusch, Walter 95, 111, 123 reality 39, 43–61, 85–6, 114, 116, 129, 141, 149, 168, 170–1 reconciliation 21–5, 33, 40–4, 51, 53, 61, 99, 116, 130, 135, 142, 149 Reformation 1–7, 11–14, 20, 66–7, 70, 78, 95–104, 110–11, 123, 148, 153, 176–7, 188 relics 178, 184, 188 repentance 78, 83, 116, 140 responsibility 6, 22, 28, 33, 59, 65–8, 71–2, 76, 81, 88, 138–9, 161–2, 165–73 Ritschl, Albrecht 123 Robbins, Joel 180, 183–6 Rogers, Eugene 85 Rosenzweig, Franz 46, 49 Rule of St Benedict, The 176 Saints 6, 59, 66–70, 77, 175–90 sanctification 4, 8, 18–25, 32–5, 40, 43, 70, 74, 86, 88, 91, 103, 145, 157 Sattler, Michael 98 Schleitheim Confession 5, 98, 108–14, 116, 118–20, 124 Scheler, Max 180–4 Schmitt, Carl 62 Schlabach, Gerald 99–100

Scripture 5, 11, 42, 46, 54, 66–75, 81–2, 90, 99, 131, 133, 140–1, 148, 154–5, 178 Sermon on the Mount 91, 131, 139 sexual abuse 118–20 Simons, Meno 99 sin 5, 23–5, 28–32, 37, 40, 55, 70, 91, 100, 108, 110, 116–20, 128, 131, 135, 137–42, 145, 153, 157, 163, 165, 185 Slough, Rebecca 119–20 Snyder, C. Arnold 98 Spaemann, Robert 167, 170–1 Spencer, Carole Dale 151 Stassen, Glen 116, 127, 132, 136 Stoicism 159–60 suffering 47, 55, 58, 86, 88, 125, 129–30, 136, 142, 167, 176, 178, 187–8 of Jesus 3, 130, 136 Swinton, John 151–2, 157 time 2, 11, 22–3, 26–7, 43–63, 67, 100, 102, 114, 132–3, 137, 140–1, 150, 174, 187 Troeltsch, Ernst 97, 111, 159 truth 12–14, 40, 45, 47, 52, 76, 80–1, 83, 85, 98, 101, 103, 114, 147–50, 157, 168 Turner, Denys 101–2 virtue 1–2, 13, 37, 65, 74–6, 87, 104, 127, 134, 138, 159–64, 180–2, 185, 187 visibility 5, 49, 56, 86, 99, 114, 130–1, 135–9, 142, 156 Wannenwetsch, Bernd 82, 87, 134 Ward, Pete 7 Weber, Max 139 Webster, John 5 Willis, Robert 80 wisdom 40, 68 witness 5–8, 17, 41–59, 82, 87, 101, 127, 130, 133–8, 148, 150, 154–6 Wolf, Ernst 41 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 161 word of God 19, 47, 53–5, 60–3, 67, 69, 71–5, 84–6, 99, 102, 109, 136, 141–2 world 3–6, 12–14, 33, 39–61, 66–74, 78, 84, 88–91, 95, 98–104, 109–21, 125, 127–31, 136–41, 147–53, 164, 170, 180–7 worship 13, 44, 51–4, 57, 71, 76, 154, 188 Yoder, John Howard 5–6, 56, 95, 97, 104, 107–26, 127–43