Christian ethics and “secular” ethics: Nature and Freedom

§1 Ethics

One way of thinking about “ethics” is to say that it is the study of freedom. That is, thinking about ethics means thinking about what it means to be free and to act freely. It is only because we understand humans to be free that we recognise idea of good and bad, right and wrong conduct. If we were not free, we would not need to worry about ethics. Animals do not have ethics, because they are not free. 

 

§2 Freedom

Any conception of freedom must involve at least two aspects: it must mean freedom from things, and it must mean freedom for things. We are familiar with the first aspect. We tend to think about freedom as freedom from external constraint, freedom from imposition. This is the classic modern idea of freedom: freedom as unrestrained choice and uninhibited self-realisation.

But freedom must also involve freedom for something, freedom to do something. There is no actual freedom if there is no realisation of our freedom towards some goal — all there is is potentiality. We know this when we use ideas like freedom to fulfill one’s potential. And what this shows us is that the something we are free for depends on what we are. What freedom means is constrained by what we are, because there is no real freedom in choosing to not be what you are. This is what gives the act of suicide its paradoxical nature. On the one hand it appears to be an act of supreme freedom, in the sense that it is a moment of the will’s utter self-assertion. But on the other hand it is an act of supreme unfreedom, because it removes any possibility of further realisation of freedom by destroying the being that possesses that freedom. Freedom, then, is not just freedom from constraint, it is freedom for something — for life as the being that is free. When I speak about freedom to fulfill my potential or realise my true self, it presumes that there is a me, an I, whose being determines what freedom looks like for me, that there is a goal towards which my freedom heads.

 

§3 Nature

It is for this reason that the category of nature is so important for ethics. Because nature is the way we name what it is about us that determines what freedom looks like, the things about us that we do not choose but which are given to us to be. Ethics, then, is very much a discussion of freedom and nature: what it means to be free given what we are. 

This is why various ethical debates take the form that they do. For example, debates about gender roles are debates over the territory of the natural: what it is that is given to us as a natural constraint upon our freedom. Similarly, debates about the legitimacy of practices like same-sex marriage are (when things are seen clearly) debates about whether male-female marriage is something natural, i.e. given to us in the order of things, that should therefore be protected. Similarly, debates about the legitimacy of practices like genetic modification of food are debates about the extent to which we ought to exercise our freedom to fiddle with naturally occuring forms of life. 

Now, the idea of nature is complex and opens up an enormous range of issues. And I don’t want to go into them now. What I do want to do is to show you how a profound and important difference between Christian ethics and secular ethics opens up at this point, in regards to the idea of nature. 

 

 §4 Secular ethics and nature

For secular ethics, nature must present a profoundly ambiguous face. For this reason: as we have seen, ethics is compelled to recognise what is natural as a necessary constraint upon freedom, a parameter without which the idea of freedom ultimately lacks meaning (because if freedom is only freedom from, it quickly becomes vacuous). Yet while secular ethics is compelled to recognise this, it has no guarantee whatsoever that this is a good thing. It has no guarantee that nature represents a limit upon one’s freedom which is welcome, which is ultimately good for the subject. Nature can just as easily represent an unwelcome constraint upon freedom, an imposition to be resented and rejected. 

And this applies not only to the constraints imposed by what might be regarded as distortions of nature, such as disability, disease, and so on; it applies to the category of nature itself. For secular ethics, there is no reason to suppose what is natural will be good for us. In fact, secular ethics has no justification for an idea like a distortion of nature. Nature is simply what is, and it is not necessarily either good or bad for us. But this introduces an unpleasantly ambiguous element into the exercise of our freedom; because as we have seen, we are not free, really, to reject nature completely.

 

§5 Christian ethics and nature

Christian ethics, by contrast, is able to see nature in a very different way. Because it understands nature first and foremost to be a gift of a generous and good God, a God who created this world and declared it to be very good, and whose character vouches for the meaning of that declaration. And thus, it understands the limits imposed by nature to be not unwelcome and painful impositions, but provisions which are for our benefit, the boundary lines within which we play out our freedom. 

This does not mean, I hasten to say, that Christian ethics has a simplistic attitude to nature in which whatever is, is good. Because Christian ethics is not simply deistic ethics, in which the world is simply good and we just have to live within it. Christian ethics is ethics that follows the story of the Bible, and so has a complex account of nature, in which the world that we experience has been catastrophically corrupted as a result of human rejection of God’s good purposes. Thus Christian ethics is able to recognise a difference, at least in thought, between what is natural and what is a distortion of nature. 

But Christian ethics does not have to give up on nature for this reason; because the story of the Bible is the story of God’s renewal and redemption of his creation through the lfe, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. This story gives nature back to Christian moral thinking, to again reckon with as a gift for the realisation of freedom, rather than an unwelcome limit upon it. 

 

§6 Conclusion

The burden of this brief foray into some of the bigger structures of ethical thinking has been to suggest that Christian ethics is uniquely capable of integrating the idea of nature. My argument has been that the concept of freedom, which is central to ethics, inevitably throws up the question of nature; and that while this can only be a deeply problematic point for secular ethics, it is a very welcome thing for Christian ethics, because for Christian ethics, nature is the good gift of a loving God, a gift which has been reaffirmed and secured beyond its present distortion, through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 

Karl Barth on Freedom

“God does not put man into the situation of Hercules at the crossroads. The opposite is true. God frees man from this false situation. He lifts him from appearance to reality. It is true that man’s God-given freedom is choice, decision, act. but it is genuine choice; it is genuine decision and act in the right direction… Sinful man is not free, he is a captive, a slave. When genuine human freedom is realized, inevitably the door to the ‘right’ opens and the door to the ‘left’ is shut. This inevitability is what makes God’s gift of freedom so marvelous, and yet at the same time so terrifying…

“His (the Christian’s) freedom is the joy of that obedience which is given to him. This is a daring venture whenever it is undertaken. A venture at one’s own risk and peril? Never! It is the venture of responsibility in the presence of the Giver and the fellow receivers of the gift – past, present, and future. It is the venture of obedience whereby man reflects in his own life God’s offer and his own response. This is the life of obedience, allowed for by man’s freedom: to will himself to be that member of God’s household which God has willed him to be.” (Karl Barth, “The Gift of Freedom: Foundation of Evangelical Ethics”, in The Humanity of God, 76–81.)

Richard Bauckham on freedom

Freedom is an enormously potent word – no doubt it has always been powerful, but it is especially so in our contemporary world. I think it is plausible to claim that freedom is the primary value of modernity – and postmodernity, while changing many things, has certainly not changed that. Remember the slogan of the French Revolution, the epitome of the ideals of the European Enlightenment – it had 3 components: liberty, equality and fraternity. Of these, it is liberty that has worn best and come to be most widely valued. But this is not to say that freedom always means the same thing. Big words like that rarely do. Isaiah Berlin said that the meaning of freedom ‘is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.’ A potent – for contemporary people, one might say, a magic – word, but also a protean word, a complex and very culturally variable notion, and one that for that very reason can also be dangerous. A word so suggestive of unlimited good, so hospitable to all sorts of aspirations, can easily conceal the disadvantages of those aspirations, can easily camouflage evils…

One cannot deny that the rejection of given limits in the project of modernity was genuinely liberating in important ways. It rescued people from fatalism – from simply acquiescing in whatever is the case out of a general conviction that nothing can really be changed. It gave huge energy to the project of improving human life and its conditions. But it had a Promethean tendency – a tendency to suppose that all given limits can be transcended and abolished. We have seen the downside of this understanding of freedom in the ecological crisis, which in many ways has been a very hard lesson in learning that there simply are given limits in the nature of things, and that humanity’s too promethean attempts to disregard these have been reckless and ignorant, bringing on disasters that no one predicted. But the rejection of human finiteness, the understanding of freedom as an ability, even a right to break out of all restrictions, to recognize no limits, has also been very damaging I think when adopted as an idea of individual freedom.

These quotations are taken from Bauckham’s unpublished lecture, “God and the Crisis of Freedom in Contemporary Society”, available here.

The New Archbishop and the Coming Storm

Sydney Diocese has to elect a new Archbishop this year. That much is pretty much all I actually know. For what it’s worth, I might add that I am sad to see Peter go. In many ways, Peter inspired me to seek ordination in Sydney. I’m grateful for his ministry, his focus, his prayers.

There are a couple of candidates in the running; but I know neither of them very well and so have nothing whatsoever to add to conversation about them in particular.

But I thought I would add something into the mix, for anyone to chew on who wants to. It is something that, so far, seems to me to be lacking in the discussions.

Which is this: I am more and more convinced that in the next generation or so, we will as a church organisation face some major threats and challenges not from within, but from without. Anyone with eyes can see the clouds gathering on the horizon. The largest and darkest of which now seems to be the issue of religious freedom. The church in England is increasingly facing profoundly damaging incursions into the way it conducts its life and witness, to the extent that many protections previously thought unassailable have completely collapsed. It seems likely that we will face our own versions of some of these issues in Australia, whether in relation to same-sex marriage and family issues, abortion, church discipline, or other matters.

We should not underestimate the potential scope and complexity of these issues, or the difficulty of formulating good responses. We may well be required to radically re-organise some of our key diocesan organisations (Anglicare, for example), as well as learning to prioritise and deploy resources towards areas we have for a long time under-valued. We will need to coördinate theological thinking with legal and pastoral responses to difficult situations. Moreover, we are in many ways theologically unprepared to face the issues coming our way. In particular, we do not, in my limited judgment, have an ecclesiology solid and substantial enough to adequately deal with the complexities of the issues we will face surrounding church discipline. But we are also without resources other denominations have at their disposal: church membership, established processes for discipline and appeal. All of this is within our power (if God wills) to develop; but it will be hard work.

These are the kinds of issues that the Archbishop in Sydney actually has an impact on, in contrast to a whole lot of other stuff. And so it seems to me that these issues should be in the mix in our discussions. They are not the most important issues; but they do matter.

What does all this mean for the question of the New Archbishop? I have no idea. But someone out there might. I just want these kinds of issues to be a factor in our thinking about the future. Unless God spare us, my guess is that we face a coming storm of increasingly determined and well-resourced opposition, which we are not yet well-prepared to meet. May God give us in the next decades faithful, godly, and clever leaders, who are across these issues and attuned to the times we are in, and can help us get ready. For I suspect we will really need them.

Oliver O’Donovan on Psalm 119

In a profound section of Resurrection and Moral Order, in which he is discussing the problem of historical novelty and the place of “wisdom”, Oliver O’Donovan offers this brilliant reflection on Psalm 119. I have spent some time looking at this psalm, and this comment captures for me something I was grasping at yet couldn’t articulate anywhere nearly as well.

“The tone of delight with which the worshippers of the Old Testament spoke of the torah can be understood only if we appreciate the existential which God’s gift of law had met. The law evoked the most moving expressions of gratitude for rescue from the threat of ‘death’. Who could meditate long on Psalm 119, for example, without being struck by the constant association of law (and all its synonyms) with life, health, delight and well-being? For it is nothing else than death to have to confront the future as entirely unknown, knowing only that one is oneself subject to the same insecurity as everything else in the world about one and that one may dissolve with any new constellation of circumstances that may emerge. [The rationale for this thought is found on pages 183–85: our identity as moral agents exists only in relation to the world in which we participate; and so if there is no continuity to this world, there can be no continuity in our moral agency.] But ‘you word, O Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens’ (Psa 119:89 NIV). As the worshipper aligns himself and the world under the scrutiny of that word and that law, he has a stable point of reference and is secure. Can this admiration of the moral law lead to the legalism of which Christianity is properly afraid? Of course it can. It can become a cover for complacency, or it can become a new source of dread, as soon as the soteriological context of the law ceases to be vitally experienced. But in this lyrical outpouring it is precisely the meaning of law as salvation that predominates over every other thought.” (Resurrection and Moral Order, p.190)

Brian Brock on technology and the Bible

If technology is a way of approaching all things that are objects, then the Bible is a counter-artefact that shows we begin to find our true human identity in repentance. We must acknowledge that even our reading has been drawn into the schematising powers of this age. We have become those who, like a miner, seek to find a resource to exploit so that we can end up profiting by extracting an easily packaged idea, a product. When we do so (and we cannot help but desire to do so) we blind ourselves to what the Bible really is and reject our redeemed identity, preferring instead to express the logic of the age – a technological human identity.

If we repent of our fascination with our own powers to make the universe, and God, manageable, God is faithful to give us a glimpse of his working in the world. But we must not do what Lots wife did and glance backwards. Instead, we must wholly renounce the desire to hold on to our former existence where technology (of all things!) held our attention.

In doing so, we will, with time and God’s work within us, become ever stranger as we explore the rich and alien logic of this world remembered in the Bible. No matter how long we wander its labyrinthine pathways, or how well we learn its surfaces and are changed by the journey, God’s promise is that his Word will resist the basic desire of technological humanity. God’s Word is eternally fascinating precisely in this divine refusal to be tamed. We should learn from this and become more fascinated with God’s ability to maintain with undiminished strength Scriptures alien power to subvert all of our doomed attempts to domesticate it. (Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20070622143019/http://www.biblesociety.com/exploratory/articles/brock03.doc )

How readable are you sermons?

I have just discovered and now love/am terrified by this site. You can enter text (e.g. a sermon) and it gets scored on various readability scores. Here are the results for my sermon for this Sunday (which I’m happy with; I dare not enter some others!).

Life of the Word of God: Psalm 119 Series Links

Psalm 119 is an acrostic poem, with one stanza for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Below are links to posts on each stanza. Each one provides a translation of a stanza and a comment about its significance. Enjoy!

1: Verses 1–8
2: Verses 9–16
3: Verses 17–24
4: Verses 25–32
5: Verses 33–40
6: Verses 41–48
7: Verses 49–56
8: Verses 57–64
9: Verses 65–72
10: Verses 73–80
11: Verses 81–88
12: Verses 89–96
13: Verses 97–104
14: Verses 105–12
15: Verses 113–20
16: Verses 121–28
17: Verses 129–36
18: Verses 137–44
19: Verses 145–52
20: Verses 153–60
21: Verses 161–68
22: Verses 169–76

Piero della Francesca’s incarnational art

I don’t actually know that much about art, but I was recently struck by these words from a review of an exhibition in The New Yorker:

Piero was strikingly original in his emphasis on physical weight. His figures stand plunk on the ground… You feel the downward drag. The effect is a bodily identification: the saint and you, both strenuously upright on earth. Piero’s characters are sometimes described as remote, without personality. But he simply combs out the qualities that are incidental to the fact of being a human creature, in solid flesh. I am reminded of the title of Simone Weil’s profound collection of spiritual reflections, “Gravity and Grace.” The central Christian enigma—a God incarnate, as a man who lived, suffered, and died—plays like a bass line beneath every passage of Piero’s art. (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 4, 2013).

Why I am not quite a pacifist

Some years ago, I wrote a series on Byron Smith’s blog on the issue of pacifism. As I have recently had a conversation about it again, I thought I would post the links afresh. I still basically think the same thing as I did then.

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§1 The Shalomite Position

§2 Violence and the Judgment of God

§3 The Cross and the Wrath of God