The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics 9780567660725

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Preface

The ongm of this volume was a conference on 'The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics' which took place in April 1997 under the auspices of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology in King's College London. The conference itself resulted from the remarkable theological dynamism which characterized the Research Institute's weekly seminars in King's College London. These brought together Colin Gunton, Brian Horne, Paul Helm, Douglas Farrow, Francis Watson, Murray Rae, the editors of this volume and a remarkable number of doctoral supervisees in lively and constructive discussions which invariably continued beyond the two-hour seminar and through lunch, and often well into the afternoon. It would be hard to overstate the significance of these events for those of us privileged to be involved, and to that end it is appropriate to pay tribute to the late Professor Colin Gunton who, together with Professor Christoph Schwoebel, founded the Institute and initiated this tradition. The above conference was one of the two-yearly international conferences associated with the seminars and whose topics were chosen in the light of the discussions which took place. When it transpired that Professor Alasdair MacIntyre was to give the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in Christian Ethics in May 1998, under the auspices of the University of London's School of Advanced Study and on a topic so well-suited to this volume, the editors asked him if he would be willing to allow his lecture to be included. He kindly agreed. A number of further changes ensued including the addition of essays which Professor John Hare and Dr Murray Rae graciously agreed to contribute. Unfortunately, the editing of the volume has been delayed by a number of extraneous factors. One of the consequences of this is that some of the papers presented at the original conference have, in the meantime, appeared in print either in journals or in monographs. Stanley Hauerwas's essay appeared in his book, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), pp. 37-60, John Webster's appeared in his book, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 233-62 and Miroslav VoWs essay was published in Modern Theology 14.3 (July 1998), pp. 403-23. Finally, the editors would like to record their gratitude to the following who Vll

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Introduction Alan J. Torrance and Michael Banner

To ask about ethics and the doctrine of God is to ask about the relationship, if any, between moral convictions and the Christian understanding of God. The nature of this relationship is one which an observer of the contemporary cultural scene could by no means readily fathom. This scene is highly varied, of course, but one regular scenario played out within it finds the secularist protesting that certain moral beliefs and attitudes are 'religious', whilst certain adherents of Christianity are at pains to deny that their moral convictions are determined by their faith. In this cameo it can seem that it is those who are most concerned to discount Christian ethics, rather than its defenders, who are keenest to stress that the adjective really does qualify the noun! Whatever assumptions (or confusions) about the relationship between ethics and the doctrine of God may be discerned through observation of the social scene, theoretical reflection suggests four principal construals of that relationship. In the first place, it might be that ethics is in some sense prior to, and exercises control over, dogma. In the second place, that relationship might be reversed, so that dogma is thought to determine and control ethics. A third position might be that ethics and doctrine are not to be understood as standing in a relationship of super- and sub-ordination, with whichever one in the higher rank, but rather as standing alongside one another, perhaps as equals and partners, or simply as having quite different spheres or concerns. And then, in the fourth place, it might be supposed that the relationship does not admit of categorization in terms of one of the options mentioned, but is in reality a more complex affair weaving together strands of two or three of these options in a more nuanced whole. The best maps are only heuristic devices, and if they help us find our way about the real world they are not to be confused with it - a warning appropriate in the case of the highly schematized intellectual map just offered. Nonetheless, it serves to help us locate some prominent and important landmarks. Among these there is perhaps none quite as celebrated as Kant's stark and dramatic insistence on the priority of ethics over doctrine encapsulated in his much quoted dictum that 'Even the holy one of the Gospel must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection, before he is recognized as such.'! No less stark is Kant's

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What Has Christianity to Say to the Moral Philosopher? Alasdair MacIntyre

The discipline of moral philosophy is a craft. Excellence in this discipline, like that in other crafts, does not depend on one's religious point of view, although it does depend on willingness to participate in extended argumentative conversation with exponents of a variety of standpoints, religious and non-religious. It is therefore significantly different from the theological discipline, invented in the United States in the twentieth century, that has claimed for itself the title of 'Christian ethics'. 'Christian ethics' has named the project of expounding the moral implications of Christianity from a distinctively Christian standpoint that is not tied closely, either intellectually or confessionally, to the theology of some particular welldefined tradition, as were and are the older moral theologies of the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Its roots were in liberal Protestantism, although its greatest names - I think of both Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr - have often been critics of this or that aspect of liberalism. But its moral standpoint has been that of a non-sectarian Protestantism. When therefore I was invited to deliver this Coffin Lecture on some subject that fell under the rubric 'Christian ethics', as directed by the generous benefactor who endowed these lectures, I had a problem as to whether I could in good faith accept that invitation. I am by trade a moral philosopher, not at all a theologian, and certainly not an exponent of Christian ethics. But it then occurred to me that I could be faithful to the benefactor's intention, if I enquired what, if anything, moral philosophy might be able to learn from the ethics of Christianity. Christianity has after all a good deal to say about the nature and form of the moral life. And much of what it has to say concerns human beings and human nature as such, quite apart from any particular religious belief that those human beings may possess. Moreover a number of the greatest moral philosophers - philosophers as various as Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant - have been profoundly influenced in their philosophy by particular Christian doctrines. It therefore seems a worthwhile enterprise to ask about a number of Christian theses and arguments what moral philosophy might be able to learn from them, on its own secular terms. In each case what Christianity presents as a theologically grounded thesis, with supporting theological arguments, becomes for the

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What Can Ethics Know about God? Oliver O'Donovan

1. Introduction

I want to explore an aspect of the cooperation within theology; that is to say, the way in which one sphere of enquiry with certain disciplines and assumptions of its own interacts with another in a common search for theological wisdom. All Christian thought must prove itself as theology, and Christian thought about ethics must prove itself as 'moral theology' - not restricting that term to the way in which it was conceived within Tridentine Catholicism. Yet at the same time theology is a complex of intellectual undertakings. Ethical questions are not the same as doctrinal questions; the old slogan that 'ethics is dogmatics' was intolerably high-handed. But since doctrine has a central place in theology, moral theology is bound to acknowledge and define its relation to the questions of dogmatics, and especially to the central doctrines of God and Christ. This relation may be illustrated light-heartedly by the situation of a provincial visitor -let us say, from Oxfordshire - wandering the streets of London. The visitor is not at home and needs a guide, yet claims a stake in the city as the capital, acknowledges certain obligations to it, and is beholden to it for a political identity, since without London, or more particularly without Westminster, Oxfordshire could not be British. The theological moralist is in a similar position in relation to discussions of the being and work of God. They are someone else's special task; yet without them the moral task would lose its coherence and integrity. From time to time it has seemed temptingly possible for ethics to bid for independence. For Protestant Christians this temptation was especially strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it has seemed to be strong for some Catholic Christians in the twentieth, a generalization which we ought, however, to qualify by noting how seriously a figure such as Germain Grisez has taken the task of reintegrating moral theology with dogma. There has, however, been another temptation, characteristic of nineteenthand early twentieth-century idealism: to imagine that ethics can lay down its terms to doctrine as an equal or even senior partner. The Ritschlian school comes specially to mind, and in Britain the figure of P. T. Forsyth, for whom 'the Christian religion involves the primacy of the ethical'.l Behind this claim lies the

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Morality, Ethics and God Wolfhart Pannenberg

1

When the subject of a volume on the doctrine of God and ethics is looked upon from the point of view of modernity, the doctrine of God might appear as a rather esoteric, if not sectarian concern of theologians, while the issues of morality and ethics were considered to be of public significance. Even in the present situation this emphasis on moral values continues, though more in the form of a search for a moral consensus that is no longer self-evident. In the history of modern society the belief in a moral consensus based upon the human nature we all have in common, replaced the social function of religious belief which hitherto had been regarded as indispensable to the foundation of social peace. Unity of religious faith had been considered the basis of the unity of social life and of public culture. But the experience of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe demonstrated that, to the contrary, religious differences had to be disregarded, if social peace was to be restored. Instead, concepts of human nature became fundamental in the theories of society and public culture, though in historical reality established religion continued for some time to be a determinative factor in most European societies. Among German writers it was Wilhelm Dilthey who toward the end of the nineteenth century emphasized the significance of the turn from traditional religion to human nature that occurred in European thought around the middle of the seventeenth century and thereafter. In addition to a reformulation of the doctrine of natural law since Hugo Grotius, and the development of social contract theories since Thomas Hobbes, conceptions of a natural morality and of natural religion became fashionable in contrast to traditional or revealed religion and to a morality based upon revealed religion. Nevertheless, for some time concepts of morality continued to be closely related to a belief in God as origin of moral norms and as a remunerator of human deeds. In the thought of Herbert of Cherbury and John Locke this connection between God and morality was preserved. In the case of Anthony Shaftesbury, however, the moral sense was treated as autonomous with regard to religion, though his ideal of harmony finally required harmony with God and the order of the universe.

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God's Commands and Moral Realism John Hare

1. What it is natural to think We have moral precepts that we should tell the truth, that we should respect human life, that we should honour our parents. In this chapter I want to explore some difficulties in seeing how precepts of this kind relate to two Christian doctrines, the doctrine of human sinfulness and the doctrine of God's sovereignty. The second part of the chapter relates directly to sinfulness and the third to sovereignty. I am going to proceed by identifying something a Christian believer will tend to affirm and something she will tend to deny about the moral precepts, and then two extensions of these which, I will claim, are seriously misleading. It is natural for a believer to say that God created the world to be a certain way. This infinitive 'to be' is significant. It is, we might say, a teleological infinitive. It implies that the world we experience is supposed to be a certain way, and we can then take the moral precepts as judgements about how the world is supposed to be, together with judgements about how it is supposed to get there. So far I do not want to raise any objection. It is fatally easy, however, to slip into an analogy with a human artefact like a car, and I want to argue that while this is natural, it leads to error. We know that a car and its parts are made to be a certain way. To know what they are is to know what they are for. If we observe that the wipers are leaving semicircular arcs of obscurity on the windscreen, we know that we need to replace the blades. The wipers are made to be windscreenclarifiers. That we observe their malfunction in this way is itself evidence that we judge them functionally, which is to say teleologically. Similarly, the thought goes, we see humans who are lying, killing, and bad-mouthing their parents, and we perceive this as a malfunction. It is not in the design plan.! This analogy is natural; but, as I shall try to show, it leads to a problem. It suggests that with a human life, as with a car, we can deduce conclusions about what good it serves from premises about what it is in fact headed towards. It is natural, secondly, for someone who believes in creation to oppose a view which I will call 'projectivism'.2 Again, on this initial point, I want to agree. The projectivist holds that the moral law is a projection of our own desires and

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Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics according to Thomas Aquinas 1 Fergus Kerr

I

A division of labour within Christian theology has meant, among other things, that some theologians specialize in moral theology (Christian ethics) while others focus on doctrine of God (dogmatic or systematic theology). In many theology faculties these are separate departments. Outside the academy, Christians who care deeply about issues of social justice sometimes sit lightly to what they regard as arcane questions about the Trinity Of the church. Others take it for granted that what seem new moral questions to some, particularly about sexuality, that urgently demand exploration and settlement, are already foreclosed in Scripture Of by unrevisable church tradition. These are not the only ways in which doctrine of God and Christian ethics may bypass one another. One of the many challenges thrown out by Karl Barth was to question the very idea of dividing Christian ethics from Christian doctrine. Indeed, even asking what the relationship hetween ethics and doctrine is, or should be, is already to have gone wrong. 2 For Barth, a Christian dogmatics organized around the covenantal relationship of God and humanity in Christ cannot hut include ethics. The one thing that is clear ahout the Summa The%giae, the most widely studied and certainly best known of the works of Thomas Aquinas, is that the consideration of 'the journey to God of the creature with reason', motus rationa/is creaturae in Deum, is placed firmly between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Christ, 'who, as man, is our way to God'.' That is to say, each of the three parts of the Summa is planned to be related in one way or another to God: the prima pars to God as principium, the secunda pars to God as finis, and the tertia pars to God incarnate in Christ, as via veritatis, per quem ad beatitudinem immortalis vitae resurgendo pervenire possumus. 4 In other words, structurally, Thomas Aquinas's most original exposition of Christian doctrine is theocentric, with the focus of God as beginning and end of all things, and access to everlasting life. However, the parts were customarily treated separately, ignoring the whole. Even in institutions dedicated to teaching Catholic Christian doctrine in the light of the theology of Thomas Aquinas a division of lahour was - is - to be found,

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The Truth about God: The Decalogue as Condition for Truthful Speech Stanley Hauerwas

1. God and Morality I found God in England. I immediately recoil from such a claim. I am, after all, a Barthian. So it would be more accurate for me to say, God discovered me in England. To be discovered by God usually makes one feel odd, but when it happens in England you cannot help but feel particularly weird. It happened, of all places, at Oxford. Even stranger still, it occurred during a meeting of the English Society of Christian Ethics, which is surely the last place most of us would expect God to show up. So perhaps an explanation is in order. I had come to England to do a paper at the Society for Christian Ethics. Immediately following the Society's meeting a conference was convened on Karl Barth, for which I had also prepared a paper.! God's discovery of me happened during the transition between these conferences. I was walking - to supper, I think - with that able expositor of Barth's theology, Nigel Biggar. As we were walking together Nigel observed, rather astutely, that for all my insistence that Christian ethics be Christian, in spite of my repeated and tiresome emphasis on the unavoidable reality of the church for how we think about the nature of the moral life, God was nonetheless curiously missing from my work. 2 My response to Nigel's remark was, of course, defensive and I proceeded to show why he had to be wrong. But afterwards, the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that he might be right. In spite of everything I was trying to do to sustain the integrity of Christian speech, despite my repeated attempts to reclaim the Christian qualifier for how we think about the character of the Christian life, when all is said and done I may have done nothing more than reproduce Durkheim, albeit with an ecclesiological twist. 3 Even if I have shown the difference that Christian convictions mayor should make for how our lives are shaped, such a project does not in itself entail that the god in view be the God we worship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That failure, however, may not be peculiar to me alone but may be the fate of theology in modernity. I have always hoped that my work might exhibit Cardinal Suhard's claim: 'To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's

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'The Trinity is Our Social Programme': The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement Miroslav Volf

Can We Copy God? It was Nicholas Fedorov, an erudite friend of such great Russian intellectuals as Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who, first formulated the startling phrase, 'The dogma of the Trinity is our social programme.' What he had in mind is daring to think, but not difficult to formulate. Through his incarnation, the Son of God became consubstantial with humanity and hence his resurrection was the resurrection of the whole of humanity into a new ontological state marked by participation in the divine life. Paul Evdokimov, on whose account of Fedorov's thought in Le Christ dans fa pensee Russe I lean, puts it this way: through Christ the whole of humanity 'enters into God as its ontological place'. 1 Though bold, the thought of 'entering into God' is not unusual; it is but a variation on a familiar Orthodox soteriological theme of divinization. What was novel were the social implications Fedorov drew from it. Inscribed in the new ontology of resurrection with Christ is an ethical 'must', he believed. More than just the Good News of what God has done, the Gospel is a social project humanity needs to accomplish. Because the resurrection of Christ is immanent to all human beings, the participation in the triune life of God is not just an eschatological promise, but a present reality and therefore also a historical programme. 2 No arguments need to be wasted on showing that Fedorov's proposal is specious and his vision chimerical. It is one thing to espouse the belief that in the resurrection of Christ power is at work 'capable of transfiguring nature' (p. 83). But the claim that 'God has placed in our hands all the means for regulating cosmic disorders' (p. 84) because we participate in the divine life, is the stuff of which dreams are made. Do Fedorov's airy and potentially dangerous dreams invalidate his basic idea, however? Judging from what Ted Peters has to say in God as Trinity about the attempts to see the Trinity as a model for human society, he would argue that Fedorov's proposal is mistaken at its core. The basic flaw of all attempts like Fedorov's is that they 'operate conjunctively rather than disjunctively', Peters maintains. By insisting that social relations should reflect Trinitarian relations, such proposals disregard the simple fact that 'God alone is God' and that 'we

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The Doctrine of God and the Ultimate Meaning of Human Life Germain Grisez

1. Introduction This chapter is a sketch that could well be a tentative plan for research toward a book. Others' views, I realize, would turn out to be more complex and nuanced than they now seem to me; the theological ideas I propose also would require much working out. I would especially try to remedy my ignorance of theologies outside my own ecclesial tradition. So, those who read this sketch are likely to notice inadequacies. I trust they nevertheless will consider open-mindedly what I propose and pray that their doing so will lead to mutually beneficial dialogue. Insofar as I criticize the views of others, my concern will not be with them but with their ideas. I work theologically in a monotheistic perspective, according to which God revealed himself by words and miraculous events to Abraham, Moses and others; and in a Christian perspective according to which he revealed himself definitively by and in Jesus' words and deeds. Like all monotheists to around 1800 and many even now, I hold that God inspired certain writers to record revelation, so that their books contain it. How? Being a Catholic, I hold that the books the Catholic Church recognizes as canonical contain revelation in the sense that all the propositions unqualifiedly asserted by the sacred writers also are asserted by the Holy Spirit, with the result that those propositions are certainly true.' By doctrine of God I mean, not the creeds and teachings that all faithful church members believe, but theological teachings that the faithful need not and, I think, should not believe but only consider on their merits. One intends a good in making a choice when it is the reason or one of the reasons for choosing as one does. For example, if John chooses fruit, bran and skimmed milk for breakfast rather than bacon and eggs so as to reduce the likelihood of a heart attack, he intends the good of staying alive and healthy. Perhaps John has no ulterior reason for being interested in staying alive and healthy; if so, that is what - or, more likely, part of what - gives ultimate meaning to his life. But perhaps John would not care about staying alive and healthy if his children were grown and he were retired but wishes to stay alive and healthy so as

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A Doctrine of Human Being Michael Banner

A Christian doctrine of human being speaks of what it is to be human. Specifically, it asserts that to be human is to be with and for the other, thus taking exception to those anthropologies which reckon that to be human is to be without or against the other. In the second place, however, a Christian doctrine of human being asserts that to be human is, so to speak, an achievement and not a present or an easily attained reality, and thus it takes exception to those anthropologies which, while not at odds with it on the first point, don't reckon with the difficulties of the achievement of human being. In the third place, in addition, it does indeed assert the possibility of this humanity, though it reckons this to be a divine, not a human possibility. Thus, it repudiates those who doubt the real possibility of the form of human being which it deems properly and characteristically human. It speaks of our created humanity, of its present fallen state, and of its future redemption. And not only speaks. For human being is obviously and importantly a practice as well as a theory; and if Christianity propounds a theory of what it is to be human, so also and primarily it instantiates that theory in those forms of life which are characteristic to it. I

The Christian assertion that to be human is to be with and for the other, not without or against, is not, in a straightforward sense, a descriptive claim - that is to say, it is not a description of human being as we find it. Rather, Christian anthropology asserts that knowledge of true human being is a matter of theological knowledge. More specifically, it can be said that knowledge of true human being is knowledge of ourselves as commanded to love God and our neighbours, and of the fulfilment of these commands in Christ as the fulfilment of our created natures. In Christ we know human being as, to use Augustine's phrase, ordered to the love of God and to the love of one another in God. To put it another way, human being is known in a dual determination, both vertical and horizontal, which in both directions will be experienced with the gladness and joy of love. Doubtless this determination could be characterized in a number of ways, but Barth, drawing on the work of Martin Buber, offers four 'marks and criteria'

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God and Conscience John Webster

Paul Lehmann once suggested that the tortuous history of the notion of conscience forces theologians to choose between two simple alternatives: '[E]ither "do the conscience over" or "do the conscience in,,!,j Though there are good reasons for taking the latter option and abandoning conscience as part of the anthropological captivity of the church and its moral theology, I want to explore the first option. What kind of repair work is needed to accomplish the theological renovation of conscience? The suggestion upon which I want to reflect, both formally and materially, is that we best articulate a Christian theology of conscience when we refuse to isolate it and treat it as a phenomenon in itself. Instead, we need to expound it as one feature within a larger moral landscape. The kinds of things which the notion of conscience is after can best be appreciated when it is handled in the course of a more extensive depiction of moral reality. Conscience is not a foundational moral notion or an axiom from which we can proceed to positive moral doctrine, but a derivative notion whose force depends upon the functions which it is called to perform in a particular vision of the moral life. Because of this, one of the important tasks of moral theology in this regard is dogmatic depiction of the moral field. By 'moral field', I refer to the space or arena within which human moral action and reflection on that action take place. Christian moral theology is in part the depiction of the moral field of the gospel. The gospel sets out the order within which human moral reasoning and action occur, an order which is properly understood as the history of the encounter between the God who graciously creates, saves and perfects, and the creatures who receive these graces and respond to them with grateful action. Theological reflection on that order will be resolutely dogmatic as it tries to give an account of the moral field of the gospel. It will therefore (1) talk of God and God's actions as the determining environment of human moral agency. For the gospel and its theology, 'God' is not to be construed as anonymous absolute value or inert criterion. Rather, God is self-manifesting agent, who through his acts names himself as Father, Son and Spirit. The moral field is thus defined as the arena of God's activity as creator, reconciler and perfecter, the one who brings all things into being, upholds them against all threats and enables them to attain their proper end. A Christian theology of the moral field will also (2) talk of the human person 147

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On Deriving 'Ought' from 'Is': Christology, Covenant and Koinonia Alan J. Torrance

In 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously insisted that theology should give primacy to the 'Who question' over the 'How question'.! The implication was that it is only as we know who God is that we know how we ought to live. Ethical obligation requires to be understood in the light of God's engagement with humanity in Christ. The purpose of this chapter is to seek to articulate the nature of the interrelationship between these. To this end it is divided into two parts. In the first part, I consider the essential shape of the Christian 'knowing' that is presupposed by Christian ethics. This, I argue, requires to be understood as a form of human participation within the divine purpose which, in turn, cannot be understood aright without clarity as to the interrelationship between three key, tightly interwoven motifs, namely, 'torah', 'covenant' and 'worship'. In exploring how these shape the ground and grammar of an ethic that can be appropriately described as 'Christian', I question the impact of certain influential categories deeply ingrained within the Western theological/ethical tradition: most notably, those of contract, Stoic interpretations of the divine will and natural law and, finally, the associated individualistic renderings of the imago dei, moral conscience and human rights. In the second part, I consider how the 'ecclesial facts', identified in Part 1 as constituting the ground and grammar of Christian ethics, offer theological warrant for the derivation of 'ought' from 'is' - how the imperatives of obligation not only repose upon but may be argued to derive from the indicatives of grace. Christian doctrine, I shall suggest, may be interpreted as furnishing 'institutional facts' (Anscombe) which, as Searle sought to articulate, sustain social obligation and the 'derivation' of 'ought' from 'is'. This serves to obviate the profound social and political dangers associated with the naturalistic tendencies in the tradition of Christian ethics evident in recent history.

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The Poverty of Christ and Non-Proprietary Community Joan Lockwood O'Donovan

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed the finest flowering of the medieval Augustinian tradition of Trinitarian and Christological moral realism. This tradition was Platonist in the sense of having absorbed Platonist orientations to mysticism, contemplation, asceticism, illuminationism and universalism (in the Schoolmen's use of the term, as opposed to nominalism). In both centuries the most accomplished exponents of the tradition were embroiled in controversy over the practice of 'evangelical poverty', the issue of which was whether the path of Christian moral and spiritual perfection entailed the absolute renunciation of property, i.e. of both individual and communal ownership of earthly goods, as well as the 'poor use' of goods, the use only of goods necessary for subsistence. In the 1260s the Franciscan theologian and Minister General, Bonaventure, defended the mendicant practice of 'evangelical' or 'absolute' poverty against vehement assaults from within and without his own order. A little more than a century later the English theologian John Wyclif, although himself a secular cleric, advocated that the whole clergy of the church conform to the discipline of evangelical poverty by living 'exproprietarily'. For both thinkers the matter of evangelical poverty engaged Trinitarian theology at the level of fundamental understandings of theological method, of the person and work of Christ, of Adamic nature, ecclesial community, and the ethics of ordered love. It is this engagement that I wish to explore. Two aspirations guide my exploration. The first is to show the enduring interest for theological ethics of the medieval theology of poverty.! The second is to bring the Franciscan and Wycliffite tradition of Christological realism to bear critically on a particular widespread development in contemporary Christian social ethics: namely, its incorporation of the concept of subjective natural rights - i.e. of natural moral rights attributable to persons (e.g. rights to life, liberty, property, equality, political participation, etc.). Elsewhere 2 I have argued that the proclivity of contemporary theologians of all denominations for moving theologically from the creation of humankind in God's image to the unique dignity of persons in community to their universal possession of fundamental rights is lamentably naive and misled, given the inescapable association of the concept of rights with the modern philosophical perspective of 'possessive individualism' 191

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To Render Praise: Humanity in God's World 1 Murray Rae

At the conclusion of the February 1999 consultation on 'A Christian Approach to the Environment' sponsored by the John Ray Initiative, a number of themes were identified for further discussion. In his summing-up of these themes, Sir John Houghton wrote: Some thought that the word 'stewardship' tended to be too anthropocentric and to create a misleading impression regarding our relationship to the environment - although most seemed to agree that it was the best word available. More specific questions relating to stewardship are: what human activity is carried out for the sake of Creation; what did God intend when he instructed humans to care for Creation; is it not possible to argue that the rest of Creation would be better off without humans? Further, how is the 'image of God' apparent in the relationship of humans to Creation? Can we formulate God's purposes for Creation which are at the basis of our stewardship?2 In seeking to explore these themes further in the present chapter I propose first to make some preliminary remarks about the concept of stewardship; second, to offer a necessarily brief outline of the Christian doctrine of creation; third, to elaborate in a little more detail the particular purposes of God in creation and redemption; in the light of which, finally, I shall attempt to consider how we may conceive the relation between humankind and the created order of which we are a part. In this final section, we shall revisit the concept of stewardship and consider some of the other models for that relation which have sometimes been put forward. I Preliminary Remarks on the Notion of Stewardship Although the concept of stewardship has been subjected to quite harsh criticism in some quarters,3 recognition ought to be given to the worthy intentions which have sought expression through this concept. In the first place, we should have no hesitation in approving as a model for humanity's relation to the created order the preference for stewardship over exploitation and domination. While Lynn White's influential allegation that Christian theology must bear the primary responsibility for the modern ecological crisis has been shown to be superficial in several important respects, his claim is nevertheless salutary insofar as it draws

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