Virtues & Practices in Christian Tradition - Christian Ethics after MacIntyre 1563382156

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Nancey Murphy Brad J. Kallenberg & Mark Thiessen Nation

Christian Ethics after MacIntyre

EDITED

BY

Nancey Murphy Brad J. Kallenberg & Mark Thiessen Nation

TRINITY PRESS INTERNATIONAL Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Copyright © 1997 by Trinity Press International All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys­ tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. Trinity Press International, P.O. Box 851, Valley Forge, PA 19482-0851 Trinity Press International is part of the Morehouse Publishing Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Virtues & practices in the Christian tradition : Christian ethics after MacIntyre I edited by Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg & Mark Thiessen Nation. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56338-215-6 (alk. paper) 1. Christian ethics. 2. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. I. Murphy, Nancey C. II. Kallenberg, Brad J. III. Nation, Mark. BJ1251.V57 1997 241-dc21 97-41500 CIP Printed in the United States of America 97

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For our children Andre Daniel, Philip, and Stephen Christina and Michael with our prayers that they will grow up to embody the Christian virtues

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Nancey Murphy

1

Part I APPROPRIATION OF MACINTYREAN CONCEPTS FOR CHRISTIAN ETHICS CHAPTER

1

The Master Argument of Maclntyre's After Virtue Brad J Kallenberg CHAPTER

2

Using Maclntyre's Method in Christian Ethics Nancey Murphy CHAPTER 3 Positioning MacIntyre within Christian Ethics Brad J Kallenberg

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Part II VIRTUES AND PRACTICES OF THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION CHAPTER 4 The Practice of Community Formation James Wm. McClendon, Jr. CHAPTER

5

Scripture, Exegesis, and Discernment in Christian Ethics Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones

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Contents

viii CHAPTER 6 Practicing the Rule of Christ John Howard Yoder CHAPTER

7

Reconceiving Practice in Theological Inquiry and Education Craig Dykstra

132

161

Part III PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY ISSUES CHAPTER 8 From Family Values to Family V irtues Rodney Clapp CHAPTER

9

Character and Conversation in the Homosexuality Debate

185

202

Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies Richard B. Hays

206

Debate and Discernment, Scripture and the Spirit Luke Timothy ]ohnson

215

CHAPTER 10

Abortion Theologically Understood Stanley Hauerwas

221

11 Pacifism as a Vocation Grady Scott Davis

239

CHAPTER

CHAPTER 12 After Racism Tammy Williams

13 Feminism, Political Philosophy, and the Narrative Ethics of Jean Bethke Elshtain Mark Thiessen Nation

262

CHAPTER

289

Contents

ix

CHAPTER 14 Business Ethics: Kindred Spirit or Idolatry? Michael Goldberg

306

CHAPTER 15 Images of the Healer William F. May

324

CHAPTER

16

Christian Economy D. Stephen Long RETROSPECT

343

On Cultivating Moral Taste Brad J Kallenberg

361

A Selected Bibliography of the Works of Alasdair MacIntyre

367

Contributors Scripture Index General Index

370 373 376

Preface and Acknowledgments Long before salad bars became chic on the west coast, quaint towns in the nordic Midwest (towns with names like Upsala) had "smorgasbord" restaurants (with names like "The Sweden House") whose proprietors (with names like Torvald and Lena) offered a staggering cornucopia of sumptuous fare. Of course, you couldn't trust the children. Children are notoriously ill-equipped to be discerning when given their druthers between Lutefisk (a "savory" dish of cod aged in lye water) and Krumkaka (a Christmas dessert). Habits of taste have to be properly formed before children could be trusted to serve themselves - by which time, incidentally, the children will have children of their own. In many ways this book expresses our deep misgivings about the "smorgas­ bord" approach taken by so many introductory courses in ethics: bewildered students are forced to decide whether a single welfare mother pregnant with her ninth, possibly retarded, child "ought" to abort, or whether a terminal can­ cer patient, whose treatment has exceeded insurance benefits, has the "right" to die. One reason we are suspicious of the casebook pedagogy is the fact that novices must become apprentices before they can become masters. This present book was occasioned by the problem we faced as instructors: who are the master practitioners of Christian ethics under whose tutelage we can be apprenticed? Influenced by our teacher James Wm. McClendon, Jr., we each taught ethics persuaded that Christian convictions make a difference: Christians do ethics in a Christianly way. In the process of sorting out just what this Christianly way was we stumbled upon the conceptual resources that Alasdair MacIntyre pro­ vided in his book After Virtue. We were initially attracted to Maclntyre's work not primarily because of his role in the renaissance of virtue ethics but, more significantly, for his nuanced exegesis of our post-critical philosophical situation. We admit rather sheepishly that our enthusiasm for Maclntyre's thinking origi­ nally bewitched us to see a theory of Christian ethics lurking in his writings as if Christian ethics needed yet another philosophical theory! Simply put (and therein lay the danger), MacIntyre seemed to be saying that moral oughts can be deduced in a straightforward manner from the ans'wer(s) historical traditions give to the question "What is human life for?" However, this way of putting it overlooked Maclntyre's deeper insight, namely, that each member of any (and all) traditions required lifelong training in order to see rightly just what the given tradition maintained to be the telos of human life. Because ethics necessarily involves the cultivation of moral vision, this present book has evolved into something of a training manual aiming to make ap­ prentices out of novices. Maclntyre's work proved to be particularly useful as xi

xii

Preface and Acknowledgments

it provided the vocabulary for getting a handle on the family resemblance shared by the ethicists we have collected in this volume. The �rst few ch�pters pr�­ vide an overview of Maclntyre's seminal work, After Virtue, and discusses his "fit" in the conversation within Christian ethics. Part II offers a collection of essays highlighting some of the practices and virtues that are constitutive of the Christian church. These chapters aim at helping us remember who is the "we" who claim to be doing Christian ethics. Part III swims against the com­ plaint that an ethics which is blatantly "Christian" threatens to be too tribalistic, too fideistic, and too ethnocentric. On the contrary, we have found Christian ethicists have much to say about contemporary moral conundrums both to the church (in which case their words are a form of discipleship) and to the world (in which case their words are an instance of witness). However, since hearing them rightly presumes the sorts of skills that Parts I and II aim at cultivating, we have placed this collection of essays at the end. Part III is capped by a short essay that describes, in retrospect, why Christian ethics is more like aesthetics than calculus. As authors we owe much to many. We are thankful for the many bright theo­ logical students who, as our guinea pigs, waded through insufferable volumes of sometimes obscure readings and without whose encouragement this book would have likely been longer than it already is! We are particularly indebted for con­ versations with Alasdair MacIntyre, which clarified his thinking to us. Along the way James McClendon has been an unfailing model of both the practice and the preaching of Christian ethics. Terry Larm's fluency in the grammar of the English language as well as in the grammar of computers proved indispensable for the final version of this text. In addition, we offer thanks to Trinity Press for publishing this book and especially to Laura Barrett, Barbara Hofmaier, and John Eagleson for their patient work on our behalf. Finally, we are grateful to the following publishers both for their wisdom in publishing these essays in the first place and for permission to reproduce them here. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Several chapters of the present work appeared in slightly different versions in earlier publications and are reprinted here with permission: Chapter 4: James Wm. McClendon, Jr., chap. 8 of Ethics: Systematic Theology, Volume I (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 209-39 . Chapte: 5: Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, "Reading in the Commu­ . �ion of Dis�iples: �earning to Become Wise Readers of Scripture," in Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 29-55.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

Chapter 6: John Howard Yoder, "Binding and Loosing," in The Royal Priest­ hood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand

Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 325-58. Chapter 7: Craig Dykstra, "Reconceiving Practice," in Shifting Boundaries, ed. Barbara G. W heeler and Edward Farley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 35 - 66. Chapter 9: Richard B. Hays, "Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bod­ ie5," Sojourners 20, no. 6 (1991): 17-21; Luke Timothy Johnson, "Debate and Discernment, Scripture and the Spirit," Commonweal, 29 January 1994, 11-13. Chapter 10: Stanley Hauerwas, "Abortion Theologically Understood," in The Church and Abortion, ed. Paul T. Stallsworth (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 44-66. Chapter 11: Grady Scott Davis, "Pacifism as a Vocation," in Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue: An Essay in Aristotelian Ethics (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1992), 27-51. Chapter 14: Michael Goldberg, "Corporate Culture and the Corporate Cult," in Against the Grain: New Approaches to Professional Ethics, ed. Michael Goldberg (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 13-36. Chapter 15: William F. May, "Code, Covenant, Contract, or Philanthropy," Hastings Center Report 5 (1975): 29-38.

Introduction Nancey Murphy

The editors of this volume are unabashed fans of Alasdair MacIntyre. He has accomplished three things of great value to Christian ethicists. First, he has revived the virtue tradition of moral inquiry, thus offering to contempo­ rary thinkers a fresh version of a venerable moral language. This is a welcome addition to the resources of modernity, where the focus has been on rights, consequences, and the autonomy of the individual. We believe that this new vocabulary, along with Maclntyre's account of the structure of moral reasoning, is especially helpful for Christian ethicists. It allows us to say the things we need to say about the shape of the Christian moral life, and in a way more intelli­ gible to ourselves and to outsiders than the language of modern philosophical ethics allows. Second, there has recently been a sea change in Christian ethics, due largely but not exclusively to the prolific Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas tends to talk about Christian morality in terms of narratives and community, virtue and char­ acter. Although Hauerwas is not a disciple of MacIntyre, we perceive that Maclntyre's contribution to the understanding of moral discourse in general his revival of the virtue tradition, his critique of Enlightenment theories of ethics-will serve to order and interpret this new movement in Christian ethics. We include essays by a variety of thinkers here: James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, John Howard Yoder, Craig Dykstra, Rodney Clapp, Richard B. Hays, Luke Timothy Johnson, Grady Scott Davis, Stanley Hauerwas, Tammy W illiams, Mark Thiessen Nation, Michael Gold­ berg, William F. May, and D. Stephen Long. This list includes Protestants from a variety of traditions and Catholics; some identifiable as liberal, some conservative; and one Conservative Jew. What all have in common is that their works illustrate and apply Maclntyrean patterns of moral reasoning. Thus, we claim that Maclntyre's theory helps make clear the structure and rationale of each essay. Third, a major controversy in meta-ethics, that is, in thinking about how to think about morality, involves the issue of particularity. It was an assump­ tion of modern philosophy that moral prescriptions or judgments needed to be universal. So the very notion of Christian ethics - ethics especially for Chris­ tians - became oxymoronic. Modern "Christian ethicists" (if we may use the term) tended to accept this assumption and made it their task to show Christian moral teaching to be merely an instance of a universal moral code, or to show

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Nancey Murphy

that Christian moral claims could be justified by means of patterns of moral justification universally accepted, whether this be utilitarian or Kantian or social contractarian. Against the universalists, MacIntyre argues that all ethical thought is indebted to some particular moral tradition -even the Enlightenment tradition of "traditionless reason"! The danger inherent in such a recognition, however, is moral relativism, that is, that there will be no way to justify any community's or tradition's moral reasoning in the (alleged) public forum. MacIntyre has complex and ingenious arguments to show that, despite the tradition-dependence of all specific moral arguments, it is nonetheless possible to make respectable public claims, showing one tradition of moral reasoning to be superior to its rivals. So here is one case where it is possible to have one's cake (one's particularity as a Christian) and eat it too Qustify one's claims in public). It is important to know about this third accomplishment, but our business in this book will not be to review Maclntyre's meta-ethical arguments. 1 Rather, we concentrate here on making available to the reader Maclntyre's contribution to philosophical ethics - his critique of Enlightenment presuppositions and his revival of the virtue tradition - and on illustrating and applying his proposals within the sphere of Christian ethics. The book is divided into three parts. In Part I we describe Maclntyre's ap­ proach to ethics as developed in After Virtue (Chapter 1). Next, we speak in general ways about how Maclntyre's moral vocabulary and his understanding of moral justification apply to Christian morality (Chapter 2). Finally, we pay some attention to how Maclntyre's work relates to and contrasts with other current options in Christian ethics (Chapter 3). In Part II we include essays that reflect the sorts of moral issues that come to the fore when we view the Christian tradition from a Maclntyrean perspec­ tive. Our observation is that the very content of Christian ethics tends to get co-opted by culture. That is, current issues in society at large (abortion, homo­ sexuality, and so on) tend to set the agenda for Christian ethicists. This is not all wrong (and we devote the latter part of the book to such issues). However, we believe that Maclntyre's account of the structure of a tradition, with its prac­ tices, institutions, formative texts, and exemplary life stories, helps us to answer the questions: What are the issues at the heart of Christian moral concerns? How must the Christian community live in order to be the church? The central topic of Part II, which we take to constitute a partial answer to these ques­ tions, is the practice of community formation. Community formation, in turn, is l. See Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), _ especially �haps. 1, 10, 18; and_ Thr�e Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, _ and Tradition (Not�e D�e: Uruversity of N �tre Dame Press, 1989). For a summary, see Nancey Murph�, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Valley �orge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1996), chap. 4; and Nancey Mur­ ph� and G�orge F. R. Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), chap. 1.

Introduction

3

spelled out under the headings of exegesis of Scripture, discernment, theological education, reconciliation, and discipleship. Part III turns to some of the hot issues in contemporary ethical debates. Here we selected essays on the family and sex, homosexuality, abortion, paci­ fism, racism, feminism, business ethics, medical ethics, and economic justice. In each case, we claim, moral description and ethical argument in line with Mac­ lntyre's perspective shed greater light on the issue than do the (more common) treatments in terms of rights, duties, or consequences.

P A R l

I

Appropriation of Maclntyrean Concepts for Christian Ethics

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