Book Reviewed
By Jeph Holloway
Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics, East Texas Baptist University
Choosing the Good
Dennis Hollinger (Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2002)
Remembering Jesus
Allen Verhay (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002)
Many years ago my family attended a church that was looking for a pastor. The theological integrity of one candidate was considered suspect by some in the fellowship. “After all,” said one church member, “his Ph.D. is in Christian Ethics.” Well, if ever the discipline of Christian Ethics was considered the province only of Protestant Liberalism, no more. It is amazing what a little cultural disintegration will do.
Evangelicals got ethics! Two recent works, while different from one another in many respects, share a common concern to advance Christian ethics as a self-consciously evangelical discipline.
Dennis Hollinger in Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World argues that Christian Ethics “is ultimately rooted in the nature and actions of God and in the world-view derived from the biblical story.” God “the creator of the universe and the sovereign over all life” is the foundation for Christian Ethics. As such, “God’s character and actions are the standard before us as we live our lives.” Further, the Triune God’s presence in the life of Christians is the power of God reminding us that the Christian moral life relies on God’s grace and presence through the Holy Spirit to enable us to overcome our natural inability to choose righteousness and goodness.
The Christian worldview provides a narrative understanding of God who is both norm and power for Christian Ethics. This worldview is the biblical story of God’s good creation gone afoul by human sinfulness, yet a creation that God in grace seeks to redeem. God’s redemptive work comes to its apex in the person of Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection is able to reconcile us to God and renew us morally. This renewal, however, will only be complete with the final consummation of God’s kingdom “when Christ shall reign as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
The God revealed in this narrative provides the foundation by which Christians choose the good. But “the application of ethical commitments always occur[s] in … a set of contexts.” Our present contexts, says Hollinger, are the influences of Modernity and Postmodernity. Modernity, while it has offered much scientific and technological progress, “carried within itself seeds of moral and spiritual destruction” as secularization reduced religion to the realm of the private. Postmodernity’s assault on any totalizing narrative has resulted in such social fragmentation that the only virtue left is a flaccid tolerance incapable of challenging evil. Consequently, concern for moral transformation has been replaced by concern for self-actualization, discipline by therapy, and moral constraint by a concern for personal self-esteem.
Features of both Modernity and Postmodernity continue to challenge those who seek to live according to the Christian worldview. Both context and worldview provide the arena for moral decision-making. Hollinger examines and evaluates three motifs for making ethical decisions. The deliberative motif assumes “that reason can be a moral guide because God implanted a natural law within human consciousness that all can comprehend.” While there are some things to be said for this approach, its overestimation of human rational capabilities, its capacity for separating natural law from explicit features of Christian faith, and the persistent disagreement between those who look to nature for ethical norms are serious weaknesses of the deliberative motif.
The prescriptive motif, by contrast, “looks to explicit rules, principles, or moral actions that are derived from divine revelation.” This approach affirms the authority and relevance of the Bible and is accessible to the average Christian, but it does tend toward a legalism that often accentuates rules and principles over a Christian discipleship rooted in the nature and actions of God. Some eschew appeal to either biblical prescriptions or natural law formulations, insisting “the content and direction of moral decisions flow from an immediate relationship with God and relationships with others.”
For the relational motif “the Bible does not offer specific direction but a general orientation for the moral life.” This approach, though prone to subjectivism and relativism, rightly affirms that “decisions and character should be shaped by a dynamic encounter with God.”
The Bible, of course, carries a unique authority for decision-making in any evangelical ethic. There are, however, questions as to how that authority functions in Christian ethics when Scripture is, for example, silent on many contemporary issues or addresses issues from within contexts different from our own. Still, especially when we appreciate the variety of ways in which Scripture addresses the moral life (commands, principles, paradigms, and narratives), we can find even from these ancient texts “guidance and comfort in the midst of our own moral journey.” Also apparent, however, is the fact that empirical judgments concerning the situation that demands ethical decision play an important role. It is possible, says Hollinger, “for Christians to operate from the same ethical principles or theological commitments but still end up with different approaches [for example] to economic justice and poverty.” A number of factors (e.g., ideologies, vested interests, personal dispositions) can so color interpretation of a situation that cynicism greets any moral stance claiming an objective assessment of circumstances.
Christian confidence in the truthful reality of the Triune God calls for unbiased integrity in any discernment of the empirical situation. Christian humility in the face of our finite and fallen knowledge demands a willingness to bracket our own biases and allow the Christian worldview to check perspectives otherwise formed by our social milieu.
The last several chapters of Hollinger’s book provide helpful overviews of several different approaches to some standard concerns in contemporary Christian ethics. Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture” typology is revisited, qualified, and evaluated in light of Jesus’ demand that his followers be in the world but not of it. Biblical teachings on justice are explored in connection with other values (love and freedom) and with various theories of justice (meritorious, egalitarian, and need justice). While Christians and others will continue to debate what exactly are the demands of justice, “What Christians cannot evade is the biblical mandate to ‘let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amo. 5:24).”
Neither can Christians evade the challenges of our pluralistic environment — the relativization of truth claims and the obvious fact of sociocultural pluralism. Extreme responses to these challenges would be the privatization of faith or the move to theocracy. Others might affirm a bland civil religion, but Hollinger calls for the hard work of a Christian influence within a pluralistic context that does not seek privilege, but to emulate the early Christians who “by commitment to the truth of the gospel, deep convictions, and consistent living, and by commending to others the ‘good life’ that flows from God … turned the world upside down.”
What strategies of influence a Christian might use today will differ depending “on context, the nature of the issue, and one’s Christ-culture stance.” Some strategies are more faithful than others, but Hollinger admits, “The challenge of moving from transcendent realities to the mundane of this world is no easy task.” Yet, we must still “seek to think, live, and apply our Christian moral commitments to a complex world … with both assurance and humility, with both conviction and love, with both transcendent grounding and with ‘worldly’ wisdom.”
This summary does not do justice to the wide engagement Hollinger displays with issues, ideas, movements, and thinkers. He discusses deontological vs. consequentialist ethics, decisionism vs. virtue ethics, just war theory, and bioethical concerns. Readers are introduced to the contributions of many voices in both philosophical and theological ethics — from Aristotle to Yoder. At points he details biblical teachings on certain issues. The result is a fine introduction to the discipline of Christian Ethics from a solidly evangelical orientation that seeks to bring the biblical worldview to bear on the moral task of Christians in the world today.
Allen Verhey’s Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life, is a very different book. I know of no other book that provides as substantive and sustained engagement with Scripture in an attempt to encourage the church to take seriously the task of becoming a community of moral discourse, deliberation, and discernment. Citing Paul (Rom. 15:14), Verhey does not provide specific and final answers to moral quandaries, and instead points to the canon as the necessary resource for moral discourse among those who are “able to instruct one another.”
The early church, frequently faced with moral challenges, struggled with temptations of one sort or another — to treat moral concerns as solely private matters or as already decided upon by the larger community (the Empire!). The task, says Verhey, was to bring to bear, in an act of creative memory, the story of Jesus, transforming “questions of conduct and character into questions of the deeds and dispositions fitting to that gospel.” Faithful creativity for the early church meant remembering Jesus, not simply as an act of historical recollection, but as an act of owning a past as one’s own and “as constitutive of identity and determinative for discernment.” Verhey seeks to illustrate how this remembering Jesus was accomplished in the early church (as witnessed in the NT) and argues that the church today bears the same responsibility.
We too face temptation. A distinctively modern one, especially in our pluralistic age, is to ignore our particular Christian convictions and seek the impartial perspective of a moral Esperanto, “an artificial moral language invented in the (unrealistic) hope that every one will want to speak it.” The moral minimalism achieved by that effort threatens the church’s ability “to form moral community, to form moral character, and to be a community of moral discourse, deliberation, and discernment.” Another temptation is to allow a moral parochialism to subordinate the gospel to some finite good (e.g., social, economic, or national loyalties). The heterogeneity of the body of Christ provides the greatest safeguard against “an abridged perspective” and the diversity of gifts in the body is God’s gift to make possible the joyful yet demanding task of a moral discernment that does not identify our particular but partial good with the reign of God.
Necessary to this task of moral discernment are the Scriptures. Verhey also recognizes that there are “some problems” with turning to Scripture for moral deliberation and discernment. But the church and Scripture have a correlative relationship where one does not exist without the other; so, basic to the identity of the church, and thus its moral deliberation, is the reading of Scripture in community. This reading benefits from the insights of gifted scholars; perhaps more importantly, it requires a community possessed of certain practices and virtues — practices like prayer in humility and gratitude and virtues like fidelity and creativity.
As such a community the church engages in moral deliberation, testing all claims in light of what is fitting and worthy of the story of Christ. Verhey will not be over precise in his description of how the Scripture is useful in this endeavor, for “it is less a puzzle to solve than a mystery to live with.” Yet the church that so reads Scripture will be one that remembers Jesus in creative ways, seeking faithfulness to the gospel by a prayer-formed community in the face of contemporary challenges demanding its moral discernment.
In the bulk of his book Verhey addresses various concerns: sickness and suffering, gender and sexuality, economic justice and generosity, and the theocratic vision of the Bible (politics). Each topic receives similar treatment. An opening chapter engages the reader by highlighting the contemporary significance of the issue discussed. There follows a chapter examining the teachings and ministry of Jesus related to the issue at hand (e.g., Jesus’ healing ministry; his teachings on divorce). Next is a chapter detailing the efforts of the early church to remember Jesus in new and different situations. Here Verhey usually examines redacted material in the Synoptics, passages in the letters of Paul, or significant texts elsewhere in the New Testament. The important thing to note in these chapters is Verhey’s concern to highlight this material as witness, not to an additional set of norms on top of the teaching of Jesus, but to a set of practices in the early church of moral discourse, deliberation, and discernment. The ongoing value of this witness is not that of a final word on the issue of divorce, for example, but a canonical model of fidelity and creativity. A further chapter often illustrates from subsequent church history worthy examples of fidelity and creativity and indicates areas demanding such virtues from today’s church.
It needs to be stressed that Verhey’s examination of Scripture is informed, substantive, and critical yet appreciative of its canonical significance. He offers no cursory appeal to “biblical principles” extracted from this or that verse, but engages in detailed examination of historical, literary, and social dynamics of the biblical materials in an effort to provide a serious engagement with Scripture rather than reliance on conventional readings of it. His reading of Scripture is insightful and repeatedly exposes the reader to the seriousness and surprises of the moral demands of following Jesus.
Hollinger and Verhey have offered two very different textbooks that would serve two very different strategies for introducing Christian Ethics. Hollinger’s is the more conventional approach and addresses very ably many of the standard issues historically associated with the discipline. Verhey offers something rarely found in Christian Ethics textbooks — resources by which the Church can responsibly engage in moral dialogue on critical issues informed by serious engagement with Scripture. I wish I had had Hollinger’s book as I prepared for Ph.D. entry exams in Christian Ethics. I wish every pastor had Verhey’s book to help equip God’s people so that we might be better “able to instruct one another.”
