Christian Ethics: Quo Vadis? A Conversation with Henlee Barnette
Emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky
Q. Dr. Barnette, since you are now 83 years old and, by head and shoulders, the dean of Baptist Christian ethics teachers, let us begin by asking, If you had your life to live over, would you teach Christian ethics again?
A. I am 83 years old; but I am not "dean of Baptist Christian ethics teachers." Maybe Southern Baptists if construed in terms of longevity. Would I teach Christian ethics again? Yes.
Q.Why?
A. Why? Christian ethics is that dimension of the Christian faith that deals with concrete realities such as racial, economic, and social injustice issues which are still rarely seriously challenged by the churches and seminaries.
Q. Which parts of your long career in Christian ethics have been most fruitful?
A. Teaching, writing, and activism in race relations which culminated in having Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in the Christian Ethics classes at Southern Baptist Seminary and marching with him for open housing and open public facilities for all citizens.
Q. Least fruitful?
A. I think my work in the area of economics. Though I counseled with labor and management, and as early as 1947 called for equal pay for equal qualifications for blacks and for women, I discovered the economic order to be a hardened sinner and difficult to bring to the mourner`s bench.
Q. How could you sleep at night when you knew how much trouble you were causing the various administrators and administrations with whom you worked?
A. Easy. I felt that I was doing God`s will: the "good, pleasing, and perfect." When a professor at Southern Baptist Seminary told me with some alarm, that the president had a letter from a "powerful pastor and trustee" that I should be fired, I told him to calm down and explained: "If the president of the Seminary does not get at least one letter per month calling for my dismissal, I don`t think I`m doing my job."
Q. Who contributed most significantly to the formation of your own Christian ethics?
A. Both my parents who practiced the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, hard work, frugality, and a simple lifestyle. Also, my first pastor who was one of the wisest men I have ever known, deeply pious, intellectually honest, and a man of genuine integrity. Academically, I was profoundly influenced in the field of Christian ethics by Professor Olin T. Binkley, who in my junior year at Wake Forest College introduced me to the works of Walter Rauschenbusch. At Southern Seminary Dr. Binkley supervised my doctoral program. Reinhold Niebuhr contributed to my ethical thought. Tension between Rauschenbuschian idealism and Niebuhrian realism became a significant component of my ethical methodology. Others who sensitized me to ethics were Professors J.B. Weatherspoon, WO. Carver, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, Joseph Fletcher, and my sometime colleague in the ghettos of Louisville, Clarence Jordan.
Q. Doctor, what is your prescription for the ethical ailments that have crippled many promising and prominent religious leaders today?
A. They need authentic evangelism. They need genuine encounter with the living Christ. They need to take Jesus Christ seriously. They need to take the word of God seriously. Many of these seem to have embraced a privatized faith in which they seek to maintain a private love affair with Jesus that fails to embrace their total personality and the total community of which they are a part. Lacking a senses of the sacredness of sex and the God-ordained purpose of sexuality, they live their lives at the low level of eros instead of the high level of agape. They need to repent of their sin.
Q. Your medicine is strong and would obviously taste bad; so what is to be done?
A. As things are now going, lots of ministers are doing themselves in and in the process are dragging down all other ministers as well. The minister who has sinned gravely in the ethical arena needs professional help in coming to the understanding that something spiritually and psychologically has gone awry. Only the Holy Spirit can straighten that fellow out. Then professional help can take hold and contribute to the rehabilitation.
Q. Professor, how would you grade the current papers that are being submitted in the public arena related to virtues and values?
A. Well, a lot of what is being written and written about looks good on paper. It is largely rhetoric. To be valid, all of these wonderful values must become incarnate; they must walk around in community. Most of the time these tooters of the horn of values don`t tell you how to do this or how to do that. Christo-praxis is what is needed in which Christians translate their Christian experience into practice in daily living.
Q. Are the initiatives of the radical religious right significantly affecting Christian ethics?
A. Yes and no.
Q. Since you equivocate, will you elaborate?
A. I have read that 90% of the people in America today believe in God but that only 20% of these say it has anything on earth to do with the daily decisions they make. The influence of religion really seems to be minuscule when it comes to impacting behavior. Their small dose of religion does not change their character at all. The great truths of the Sermon on the Mount, and of the Beatitudes in particular, to be effective, must begin with attitudes and then move on out into community and society.
Q. Who have been your major enemies in Christian ethics?
A. Prejudiced pastors, anxious and angry administrators, and denominational ecclesiocrats. My files contain many abusive and threatening letters for my stance on war, amnesty for draft resisters, and racism, not to mention "not a few" angry telephone calls.
Q. Who are the enemies today?
A. Those who tend to divorce Christian faith and Christian ethics. "Spirituality" has become the in-thing in religion. It tends to become a privatized faith, a religion of feeling, ecstasy minus ethics. And there are a growing number of authoritarian religious leaders who declare that the end justifies the means.
Q. Is a Christian ethicist a Christian prophet?
A. All authentic Christian ethicians are prophets, spokespersons for God. Like Amos and other biblical prophets, they attack dehumanizing ideas and institutions in both religious and secular settings. Hence their very lives may be threatened because they do not fit comfortably within the status quo of society. All Christians are called to be prophets. There is a prophethood of the believer as well as a priesthood of the believer.
Q. In the present moral environment, what ought a local church to do in support of Christian ethics?
A. Proclaim and practice, the kerygma and the didache, the saving grace of God in Christ-the scandalon-plus the ethical teaching of the Good News. Paul was a balanced theologian. Romans 1-11 is theological and 12-16 is largely concerned with ethics. Above all teach the Sermon on the Mount (actually the Teachings on the Hill, but I guess it is too late to correct that error). Provide study groups on methods of moral decision-making, literature on Christian ethics concerned with both personal and social ethics. Engage competent theological ethicists and bio-ethicists to lead studies dealing with complicated, perplexing issues growing out of bio-technologies.
Q. Would you suggest a practical formula for progress in Christian ethics?
A. I have set forth a model for moral decision-making in Exploring Medical Ethics (Mercer University Press) called contextual-principled agapism. Agape-love is the central ethical motif and this biblical love means to will and to work for the well-being of all of God`s creatures and creation. The responsible Christian decision-maker looks to the Scriptures for what ought to be and to science for what is in the context of where the action is to take place and then forms a moral judgment in openness to the Holy Spirit as to what is the most loving thing to do. In Exploring Medical Ethics, I attempt to demonstrate that agape love finds universal formulation in the Golden Principle (Matthew 7:12)-it is not a rule: "Do to others what you would have them do to you." (In Introducing Christian Ethics, I show that this injunction must be interpreted in the context of the Sermon on the Mount.) This Principle appears in some form in most of the major religions, political theories, psychologies (Freud being an exception), and philosophies. Hence, the Golden Principle provides a common global ethical norm.
Q. Christian Ethics: Quo Vadis?
A. In our rapidly emerging pluralistic society and global unity Christian ethics will continue to find expression in a variety of methodologies: legalism, situationism, and principlism with the first two being most popular because they are extremes on the ethics spectrum and have elements in common. Fundamentalists sometimes act like situationists and situationists sometimes act like Fundamentalists.
Christians will at times practice existential, impromptu, ad hoc ethics when confronted with issues for which no biblical text can be found.
Emotive ethics will grow in popularity in a society in "pursuit of happiness" and bent on amusing itself to death. An eye-catching bumper sticker puts it: "If it feels good, do it." Hemingway says it this way, "What is moral is what you feel good after."
New emphases and trends in Christian ethics among Evangelicals, especially Fundamentalists, are on family values, abortion, prayer in public schools, free enterprise in the marketplace, and political action for the Republican party.
But in all of these ethical postures there is frequently a selectivism to provide textual support for personal and social causes and a revisionism to make Scripture say what is desired. Homicide is justified when abortion clinic employees are the victims. Of course, moderates and liberals also engage in reinvention of theology to secure sanction for their moral views and actions.
A "kinder, gentler" ethic of sexuality will persist, even among conservatives, toward live-in-lovers, single parents, the divorced, and ministers caught in extramarital sexual alRirs providing such ministers are highly gifted in preaching.
Narrative Christian ethics is a new development which involves the use of story and metaphor as espoused by James McClendon, Stanley Hauerwas, and Sallie McFague.
With the renaminmg of God as Mother by feminist theologians, ethical emphasis will be on individivism, gender equality, and women`s rights.
Approaches to Christian ethics will be affected by the emerging view that the Bible is a "foundational document" and a "dialogue partner" in the moral decision-making process. With the progressive erosion of the Bible as authoritative, dialogue partnership overcomes legalism and opens the way for freedom to search for God`s will.
It is imperative that we move quickly toward a cosmoethic, my nealogism for a universe ethics, an ethic which extends to space which is already being polluted. But we have hardly begun to develop an ethic for the global community. A basic principle for such an ethic is being articulated by Hans Kung and Karl-Joseph Kuschel in their book Global Ethics: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World`s Religions. These authors have opted for the Golden Rule as the core of a global ethic. This principle finds expression in commitment to a culture of nonviolence, of solidarity, a just economic order, of tolerance and truthfulness, equal rights, and partnership.
In my own search for an authentic Christian ethic that is biblically grounded, theologically sound, and socially relevant, I frequently pray:
Lord, deliver me from rigid righteousness
Without mercy and mushy mercy
Without righteousness.
