00:00:08.800 - 00:00:28.240

But it is indeed my pleasure and an honor to introduce to you our E.C. Westervelt lecturer this morning, the very Reverend Philip W. Turner. Philip is an ethicist, scholar, author, and former missionary to Africa.

00:00:29.120 - 00:00:52.440

He has served as a seminary dean both here in Austin at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and at Yale University's Berkeley Divinity School. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Washington and Lee University, Virginia Theological Seminary, and Princeton University. Dr.

00:00:52.440 - 00:01:14.480

Turner's professional achievements are both many and very impressive, and given the short amount of time that I have been allotted to introduce him, you will just have to take my word. Having been told that Dr. Turner is retired, I emailed him to ask him if he could give me a sense of the human side. Just who is Philip Turner?

00:01:15.280 - 00:01:41.760

He graciously shared with me that he is the husband of the Reverend Elizabeth Turner, who is the rector at St. Mark's Episcopal Church here in Austin. They have a teenage daughter, Elisa. His sport of choice is cycling, and that he is currently in training for a ride from Austin, Texas, to Hunt, Texas, in early April, which is approximately 120 miles one way.

00:01:42.880 - 00:01:54.960

He loves poetry, and his favorite poet is Osip Mandelstam. His favorite theologians are St. Augustine and Karl Barth. Favorite contemporary novelist is John Coetzee.

00:01:55.680 - 00:02:10.640

His favorite film is Dr. Zhivago. Just to give you a slice of life of this brilliant scholar and friend of Austin Seminary, I present to you our 2008 E.C. Westervelt lecturer, Dr.

00:02:10.640 - 00:02:23.460

Philip W. Turner. What a gracious introduction. Thank you.

00:02:26.580 - 00:03:08.000

When President Wardlaw asked me to give these two lectures, he did so in response to conversations we were having about the calling to ordained ministry in a time when the social location of America's denominations has entered a period of both change and decline. And he suggested that I might give two lectures on this subject, but quickly added that I was free to choose another subject if I so wished, and I've decided to take advantage of this permission, that is to say, to take another path. because my thoughts on the recruitment, education, and deployment of ordained ministers exist as no more than intuitive flashes.

00:03:08.880 - 00:03:41.600

So I've chosen instead to speak on a matter about which I have been puzzling for a long time, namely the focus of Christian ethics. And by focus, I mean simply the point in a given account of life in Christ at which attention is centered. To have a focus does not mean that one has no peripheral vision. It means only that one's sight is directed to a particular point in a wider field.

00:03:42.800 - 00:04:06.400

I know of no significant figure that is written on Christian ethics that does not give their work a specific focus. Further, a review of the literature shows that there are but three foci that have emerged over the course of Christian history. One I will call the life of the soul.

00:04:07.360 - 00:04:37.200

Here, attention is given to the sanctification of individual believers. A second focus centers on the life of society, and in particular, the reform of the social order. A third focus is the common life of the church, And here, primary attention is given to what might be called the culture of the church, the way in which believers relate one to another within a fellowship.

00:04:39.040 - 00:05:29.960

Now, having placed these three options before you, I hasten to say again that rarely, if ever, does one focus of attention place the other two in total eclipse. A part of what I want to do in these lectures is to provide a way to identify what a given author's focus might be, and I want also to argue that one of them has the support of the Bible that the other two do not. The point of surprise and contention will be my conclusion that a focus on the common life of the church has a degree of biblical support that surpasses that of the other two. Having made this statement, I'm sure that I have the attention of those among you who take their stance with liberation theology.

00:05:31.200 - 00:06:08.000

and those who have found meaning in our current interest in spirituality. And by taking this position, I am, in fact, being deliberately provocative. Nevertheless, as these lectures progress, my hope is that the exercise I'm taking is through will be seen as responsible rather than perverse. So in order to show my bona fides, that is to say my desire to be responsible rather than perverse, allow me to begin with a word about why I believe this exercise is of some importance.

00:06:08.640 - 00:06:40.240

And I think, Dorothy, we're going to see some overlaps. When I decided to deliver two lectures on Christian ethics rather than the vocation to ordain ministry, I was conscious immediately that the most influential book in Christian ethics to have appeared in the second-half of the past century was H.R. Neighbors, Christ and Culture, and that that began its life here as a lecture series sponsored, I believe, by the Alumni Association of APTS.

00:06:41.200 - 00:06:54.480

Those lectures have proven their abiding value. But my attention, in part, is to show that Christian ethics is better served by a different starting point. I told you I was going to be a bit provocative.

00:06:55.040 - 00:07:25.600

Not the relationship between Christ and culture, but the particular focus that in fact lies beneath and gives rise to one or another of Niebuhr's five types. One can easily understand why Niebuhr chose the theme he did. He, in fact, inhabited one nation under God. Hence the title of this first lecture is Our Options in the Last Days of One Nation Under God.

00:07:26.560 - 00:08:04.640

I think it's also easy to understand why our own circumstances raise questions about the adequacy of Niebuhr's starting point. It's no longer clear that we inhabit such a social universe. Niebuhr wrote his book not only to identify five ideal types of the relation between Christ and culture, he wrote also to promote one of those five types, namely Christ the transformer of culture. And in hindsight, it is not difficult to see that Niebuhr's favored position has a close correspondence.

00:08:05.200 - 00:08:41.320

to the self-understanding of the form of mainline Protestantism that was dominant in that era. His was an age, that was the age I was brought up, his was the age in which the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches commanded wide allegiance and respect. His was an age in which Eugene Carson Blake, a Presbyterian, and Bishop James Pike, an Episcopalian, made their proposal for church union within the United States, Koku. Liberal Protestantism was a cultural force to be reckoned with.

00:08:42.200 - 00:09:16.160

And for perfectly understandable reasons, liberal Protestants of that era saw social influence as their primary calling under God. The Blake-Pright proposal seemed a very attractive way to extend and deepen this influence. Given the nature of the times, the theme of Christ and culture must have seemed the obvious place to enter a discussion of Christian living. Niebuhr's age was an age of denominational strength.

00:09:17.120 - 00:09:55.760

It was, in a way, the age of one nation under God. And looking back, it's now apparent that mainline Protestantism owed much of its social strength to an accommodation to American civil religion. Because of this accommodation, one could choose one's denomination in full confidence that the choice would not place one outside the mainstream of American life. It is now apparent, however, that this accommodation exposed liberal Protestantism to what I believe is a fatal flaw.

00:09:57.200 - 00:10:33.200

Civil religion grew from the soil of the Enlightenment, whose advocates promoted a religious settlement that went something like this. It's important, according to the terms of this settlement, for a society to have a religious foundation. But these foundations ought not to be dogmatically restrictive. The moral fiber of a society must be sustained by religion, but the tenets of that religion, or those religions, need not go much further than the love of God and the love of neighbor.

00:10:34.240 - 00:11:58.720

Civil religion must eschew the particularities of belief because they divide. What we now call thick construals of religion and morals are to be carried forward not by an established religion, but by the various denominations, membership in which is a very private affair. it's abundantly clear, I think, that the umbrella of civil religion has not, as it was supposed to do, protected the particularities of denominational belief and practice. Rather, civil religion has sucked up both into a cultural bath that serves to dilute particularities so as to fit them into civil religion's minimalist demands. The result has proved to be theological, and ethical vacuity at all levels of American society and throughout her denominations. Our circumstances are markedly different than those addressed by H.R. Niebuhr, who was a great man. The decline of the social position of the denominations has been accompanied by a decline of thick accounts of Christian believing and living.

00:11:59.760 - 00:13:52.640

The mainline denominations are left with the social and religious bromide of inclusion as a summary of both theology and ethics. In circumstances such as these, Christian moral thought moves in one of two directions, and sometimes in both at the same time. On the one hand, liberation theology, which began as a radical critique of a political and economic system, has become in North America the domesticated servant of a form of constituency politics, the aim of which is inclusion of the excluded groups within a social system whose benefits they have been denied. On the other hand, Christian ethics for many has moved inward toward a form of spirituality that centers on a struggle to find both individual freedom and personal identity. Now all this is to say that I pose the question of the focus of Christian ethics within a context very different than the one addressed by H.R. Niebuhr. Ours is a time in which the elite of our society, that is to say the natural constituency of the mainline Protestant denominations, neither asks for nor wants a discussion with the denominations about their relation to the larger culture. Ours is a time in which the beliefs and practices that define the specifics of Christian existence are unraveling throughout all the denominations at a very rapid rate. And ours is a time in which the denominations have, in large measure, simply become their environment. Now my thesis is that circumstances such of these force us

00:13:53.200 - 00:15:44.320

to ask a question that lies at a more basic level than does Niebuhr's about the relation between Christ and culture. We are being provoked by circumstances to ask about the focus of attention that generates our beliefs about the relation between Christ and culture. Robert Wilkin from the University of Virginia has recently pointed out that Niebuhr's account of Christian ethics is more about an idea than an actual reality. The real issue, he says, is more historical than theoretical. The real question does not concern, in an abstract manner, the relationship between Christ and culture. It concerns the way in which Christianity has actually created a culture. If one asks this question, it becomes apparent that in a real sense, as he says, Christ is a culture. That is to say, Christ is present in His holy, in His body, the Church, in a way that forms a culture, that is distinct and in fact often quite different from that which surrounds it. Now looked at in this way, our question becomes how Christ forms a culture rather than how He is related to a culture. The relation of that culture to the larger society is one that follows on. It is secondary rather than primary. The first question of Christian ethics is, I believe, therefore, not how it is related to a larger society. In respect to Christian ethics, therefore, the first question becomes, what is the proper focus for the ethic of a community that has a culture? Is it the life of the soul?

00:15:45.760 - 00:17:27.520

Is it the reform of the larger society, or is it the common life of the church? Now, clearly, you can't miss the fact that I believe it is the latter. But to establish this point, I must display more fully the various options that lie before us. How do things appear when we opt for one rather than another of these possible foci? And to answer this question, I will present an example of each and display the contours by addressing 3 diagnostic questions. These questions are going to appear and reappear in what I say. And they'll help us identify who this guy is. What is the goal of Christian living? What are we aiming for? What is the basis of Christian living? What foundation does it rest upon? And what is the shape or character of Christian living? What does it look like when you run into these people? Once these questions are answered, the focus of any account of Christian living becomes obvious. as do its strengths and its weaknesses? And I'm going to address these questions to three writers. See, Niebuhr keeps influencing types again. Three writers, the first of which, John Cassian, represents the spirituality option. The second of which, Walter Rauschenbusch, The Reform of Society.

00:17:28.560 - 00:19:16.800

The example I offer of the third option, the common life of the church, is in fact the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians. I could have used the work of John Howard Yoder to illustrate what might be called an ecclesial ethic, but I have chosen an example from the Bible in order to establish the normative character of this particular focus. So focus one, John Cassian and the life of the soul. John Cassian, as you know, was the founder of Western monasticism. It's no accident that John Cassian is now being read by people who live outside the confines of a monastic community. The Desert Fathers, whose lives and teachings he recorded, are now in. And they are in because of a striking similarity between their age and our own. As Pierre Addeau has pointed out, Theirs, like ours, was an age, I love this phrase, was an age of unhappy disquiet, in which people were overwhelmed by anxiety and torn by passions. The gurus of that age, like ours, stood on each street corner, advocating a way of life that would lead from disquiet to eudaimonia. The desert fathers, Like the Stoics and the Epicureans were in the same business, only they were in the desert rather than in the cities. And John Cassian calls through their teachings and practices to find a philosophia that would lead from disquiet to peaceful contentment.

00:19:20.280 - 00:21:09.520

What then is the goal of life in Christ, according to this remarkable man? In the first book of the conferences, Cassian cites Abba Moses, who says, and I quote, All the arts and disciplines have a certain scopas, or goal, and telos, which is the end that is proper to them, on which the lover of any art sets his gaze and for which he calmly and gladly endures every labor and danger and expense. The end, the telos, he says, is the kingdom of God or eternal life. But the goal, the scopas, is purity of heart, apart from which one cannot reach the end. And what he means is that the goal or target at which one aims in life is purity of heart, but the result of reaching that goal is the kingdom of God. The goal, says Cassian, is a state of perfection in which one's heart and mind are focused without interruption upon God. All of life's other activities and virtues are subordinate to theoria. or the contemplation of God, and that includes good works. Clearly, Cassian's prescription for the conquest of unhappy disquiet runs against the grain of all of our sensibilities. According to Cassian, good works, which from time to time, which from the time of Immanuel Kant, have formed the core of liberal Protestant ethics.

00:21:10.160 - 00:22:08.000

are necessary only because of the presence in the world of avarice. And in the kingdom of God, Cassian opines, avarice will be no more. Good works, therefore, have only a penultimate and temporary value. And for this reason, they are not to interrupt our chief activity, the steady contemplation of God's holiness. Thus people bent on the achievement of perfection will, he says, and I quote, pass over the multiform or practical activity to the contemplation of divine things in perpetual purity of heart, unquote. Good works are not the only things that take second place to a univocal focus on the goal of uninterrupted contemplation. So also do personal obligations.

00:22:08.720 - 00:22:46.600

Thus Cassian argues that it is permissible to go back on a solemn promise if such action serves the greater good of growth in purity of heart. I think you will agree that there is a certain ruthless quality about this ethic of personal growth. A quality that rightly upsets those of a more refined social sensibility. I note in passing that it is a quality that appears again and again in accounts of the moral life that focus overmuch on the interior state of the moral agent.

00:22:46.600 - 00:23:16.160

And I think, for example, of Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections as a primary example of this utterly ruthless quality. Nevertheless, Cassian would insist that his prescriptions for a life wisely lived have their basis in the great teacher, Christ Himself. If the goal of life in Christ is purity of heart, the basis of that life is the example of Christ.

00:23:17.280 - 00:23:53.440

Christ's teaching and the pattern of His life both call His disciples to be perfect, and perfection is defined by Christ's life of sacrifice. And his sacrifice required, first of all, this is important, the renunciation of all things. Christ's cross is interpreted as an act of renunciation rather than an act of reconciliation or victory. And it is this act of renunciation that is to be imitated by faithful disciples because it is the way that leads to purity of heart and so perfection.

00:23:54.880 - 00:24:41.280

Cassian puts it in this way. It's a fairly long quote, but it's nice. And just as he who is fixed to the gibbet of the cross no longer contemplates present realities or reflects on his own affections, is not distracted by worry or care for morrow, is not stirred up by the desire for possessions, is not inflamed by pride or wrangling or envy, does not sorrow over present slights, and no longer remembers those of the past, and although he may still be breathing in his body, believes himself dead in every respect and directs on ahead the gaze of his heart to the place where he is sure that he will go, so also it behooves us to have died to all things.

00:24:43.600 - 00:25:08.720

Now I know of no account of the moral life focusing on the interior life that does not root its prescriptions in the life of a teacher, whose wisdom and example provide a pattern for imitation. John Cassian's rendition of the life in Christ is no exception. Christ provides a pattern that leads from unhappy disquiet to eudaimonia.

00:25:09.680 - 00:25:28.880

What then is the character of that life? What does it look like? We've already seen that its chief characteristic is renunciation. Renunciation stems from the fear of the Lord and the desire for perfection.

00:25:29.760 - 00:26:02.160

It requires, however, the sort of training and discipline entered into by athletes preparing for the Olympic Games. The purpose of this training is to become victorious in a battle with one's vices. The first vice to be overcome is gluttony. And to give a flavor, pun intended, of what Cassian asks, I provide the following delicious, pun intended, quote.

00:26:03.440 - 00:26:43.760

This is our first trial in the Olympic Games, the extinguishing of the belly's desire to gormandize. To this end, not only must superfluous appetite for food be trampled upon by the contemplation of virtue, but even what is necessary for nature must be eaten with anxious heart. Only thus is our life's course to be laid out, so that there is no longer any time wherein we may feel that we are being diverted from spiritual pursuits beyond what compels us to descend to the necessary

00:26:44.240 - 00:27:09.840

necessary care of the body on account of its fragility. I don't know whether Weight Watchers would like that or not, but anyway. Discipline of the appetite leads farther to the renunciation of all worldly things, including family, friends, and possessions. These ascetic practices are designed to quell desire.

00:27:11.440 - 00:27:31.440

And as desire begins to wane, incidentally, this sounds weird to us, but don't we have a problem with desire just a little bit? As desire begins to wane, the virtue of humility makes its appearance. One might say that humility gives a positive face to the rigors of renunciation.

00:27:32.240 - 00:28:18.440

It can be recognized by such things as an honest effort to put to death all desires, a refusal to hide anything from one's spiritual director, willingness to defer in one's judgment to the direction of the Abba, a growth in patience, a sense of unworthiness, discretion in speech, and sobriety. Reviewing the above epitome of life in Christ, the following characteristics leap out. Renunciation, humility, obedience, and patience. The fruit of these virtues is apostolic love, understood primarily, I think you'll see this already, primarily as love of God.

00:28:18.520 - 00:28:46.720

It is in marked contradistinction to the views regnant in my own denomination. dominated as it is by the Millennium Development Goals. It is the first rather than the second commandment that shapes entirely this account of life in Christ. Now, I've got another section in here I'm just not going to read because it's probably too long.

00:28:46.800 - 00:29:14.800

But he has another one that's very important called Discretion. You have to learn how to recognize the temptations that assail you. So there's a kind of intellectual component to all this, which focuses finally in the virtue of discretion, which allows you to weigh and balance what's going on up here, because the demons are operating. You've got to sort them out.

00:29:15.280 - 00:29:37.040

But that's an interesting part, but I'm not going to do that. Now, I have in no way done justice to the complexity of Cassian's account of life in Christ. But I've said enough to reveal its focus very clearly. Its basis, goal, and character all place the life of the soul in the center of attention.

00:29:38.520 - 00:30:12.160

And my hope is that this exercise serves the purpose of suggesting both the power and the limitations of such a focus. I hope also that I have provided a useful set of questions that can be used to put on display any given account of Christian living. And I hope I've shown also that our current interest in the Desert Fathers as a source of spiritual wisdom can be sustained only by the most selective of readings. Sorry about that.

00:30:15.200 - 00:30:42.280

Okay, Focus Two, Walter Rauschenbusch and the Reform of Society. The focus given to Christian ethics by Walter Rauschenbusch is as different from that proposed by John Cassian as one can possibly imagine. John Cassian is a thoroughly pre-modern figure. Walter Rauschenbusch, however, is fully a child of the Enlightenment.

00:30:43.120 - 00:31:16.880

His mentors are not Evaguerus Ponticus and the Desert Fathers, as were Cassians, but Kant, Ritschel, Schleiermacher, and most of all, Harnack. His place of residence was not the Egyptian desert, but the slums of New York. His concern was not, first of all, the life of the soul, but the state of society. Like John Cassian, he held that the chief end of both human life and Christian ethics is the kingdom of God.

00:31:17.520 - 00:32:05.040

It's just that his view of the kingdom was as earthly as Cassian's was heavenly. In Christianity and Social Order, Rauschenbusch said this, Our business, our business, Is to make an sorry to make over an antiquated and immoral economic system to get rid of laws, customs, maxims, and philosophies inherited from an evil and despotic past. to create just and brotherly relations between groups and classes of society, and thus to lay a social foundation on which modern men individually can live and work in a fashion that will not outrage all the better elements in them.

00:32:05.840 - 00:32:34.400

Our inherited Christian faith dealt with individuals, our present task deals with society. He went on to say, The Christian church in the past has taught us to do our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life to come. But the business before us is concerned with refashioning the present world, making this earth clean and sweet and habitable.

00:32:36.560 - 00:32:59.960

It becomes Rauschenbusch's life passion to redirect the focus of Christian ethics from a concern for personal holiness to the redemption of a corrupt social order. And one can see this focus clearly by asking how he thought of the goal of Christian living. Rauschenbusch was trained under Harnack as a historian.

00:33:00.240 - 00:33:49.360

And it's not surprising, therefore, that he begins his reconstruction of Christian ethics by a reappraisal of the teaching of the prophets, of Jesus, and of the dominant tendencies in the early church. His conclusion from these studies was that, and I quote, The essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God. And in a major work, A Theology for the Social Gospel, he put the matter in this way. The speculative problem of Christological dogma was how the divine and human natures united in the one person of Christ.

00:33:50.160 - 00:34:21.040

The problem of the social gospel is how the divine life of Christ can get control of human society. The social gospel is concerned about a progressive social incarnation of God. What do things look like when they are reconstituted according to God's will? For John Cassian, such a reconstitution issues in a state in which the individual, having purified the heart, contemplates God without interruption.

00:34:22.000 - 00:35:04.800

Rauschenbusch insists that for the prophets, Jesus, and the early church, the goal of Christian living is not transcendental but quite earthly, a social organism that includes all people and is defined by peace and justice. Speaking of the kingdom of God as the goal of Christian ethics, he says this, again I quote, Such a kingdom would be at once the highest good and the highest duty. Its realization is not like other duties, but it is a duty that the race owes the race, the duty of realizing its divine destiny. It is a duty so vast that it transcends the power of man.

00:35:05.200 - 00:35:45.040

God alone can bring it to reality, but because we feel the duty, we may conclude that the ruler of the moral universe is behind it and is cooperating with us, and each of us must work for it as if all depended upon himself. If the goal of Christian ethics is the kingdom of God on earth, conceived as a kingdom of love, peace, and justice, Its basis is, as in the case of John Cassian, the life and teaching of Jesus. Nevertheless, Rauschenbusch provides us with a very different Jesus.

00:35:46.240 - 00:36:15.360

He believed that the force that would redeem history issued from Jesus' personality. Jesus' personality attracted others and so set loose a new force in history. This new force flowed from a new type of humanity, forged in the image of Christ. The force of his personality lay in his consciousness of God, rather than any metaphysical properties he might possess.

00:36:16.400 - 00:36:45.040

And one of the clearest statements of this belief is to be found in Christianity and Social Order, where he makes the following claim. Jesus had realized the life of God in the soul of man, and the life of man in the love of God. This was the real secret of his life, the wellspring of his purity, his compassion, his unwearied courage, his unquenchable idealism. He knows the Father.

00:36:45.520 - 00:37:35.120

But if he had that greatest of all possessions, the real key to the secret of life, it was the highest social duty to share it and help others to gain what he had. Jesus is the supreme embodiment of what all people are destined to become, a being fully conscious of the life of God in the soul and the life of man in the love of God. This consciousness expresses itself not as in the case of John Cassian in a flight from involvement with penultimate matters, but in a total dedication to bring about the kingdom of God on earth. Anyone who shares Jesus' consciousness of God will imitate his character and follow his teaching.

00:37:36.800 - 00:38:01.040

Both his character and his teaching display a particular form of love. And the form of love seen in Jesus overcomes selfishness, stimulates the dormant human faculty of devotion to the common good. And those who follow Jesus look upon all people as equal before God. If one follows Jesus, they seek both equality and justice.

00:38:01.680 - 00:38:29.960

They have a special concern for the poor, they seek to share wealth, and they struggle to abolish rank and badges of social position. I have, I know, provided an extraordinarily brief sketch of Raus and Busch's depiction of both the goal and the basis of Christian ethics. Brief though it may be, it is sufficient to display a clear focus on the reform of society. And this focus

00:38:30.160 - 00:39:09.600

brought even more graphic relief when one considers what he has to say about the character of Christian ethics. Given his belief that social change begins with a new sort of personality, it seems reasonable to ask what this new personality might look like. In Christianity and Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch wrote this: The greatest contribution any man can make to the social movement is the contribution of a regenerated personality, of a will that sets justice above policy and profit, of an intellectual emancipated from falsehood.

00:39:10.160 - 00:39:36.160

Such a man will in some measure incarnate the principle of a higher social order. And what are the principles to be incarnated in personality? It's not hard to guess. They are summed up in a form of love that expresses itself in certain very specific ways, namely, a dedication to the common good, service, good faith, and devotion to the poor and oppressed.

00:39:37.520 - 00:40:40.480

However, the love demanded by Jesus does not stop with these personal qualities. it must be transformed into what Rauschenbusch calls socialized love. In a very moving passage, he puts the case for socialized love in this way: We can never do without the plain affection of man to man, but what we most need today is not the love that will break its back, drawing water from a growing factory town, from a well that was meant to supply a village, but a love so large and intelligent that it will persuade ignorant people to build a system of waterworks up in the hills, and that well, sorry, and that, I've got a misprint here, and that we'll get after thoughtless farmers who contaminate the brooks with typhoid bacilli, and after the lumber concern that is denuding the watershed of its forests.

00:40:40.800 - 00:41:01.520

We want a new avatar of love. Socialized love thus takes the form of the great ideals of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, and fraternity. And together, these produce justice in society. And now, a conclusion.

00:41:03.120 - 00:41:45.080

Once more, I have provided only a sketch of a far more complex and subtle account of life in Christ. Nevertheless, we now have before us two accounts of such life, each of which in its own way mirrors well a focus of our attention. Like John Cassian, we live in an age whose inhabitants are haunted by unhappy disquiet, and this distress calls people inward in search of peace. It is true that the rigors of Cassian's asceticism have little attraction for people whose spirituality consists largely of long periods of keeping fit and shorter ones of self-reflection through journaling.

00:41:46.080 - 00:42:20.960

Nonetheless, Cassian's call inward is attractive to people in search of a personal, non-institutional spirituality. In like manner, Despite his naive personalism and intemperate optimism, Rauschenbusch's attempt to redirect the focus of moral attention from the individual to society is one that surely has resonance with his descendants in mainline Protestant denominations. I think of my own denomination, which is Episcopal in particular.

00:42:21.760 - 00:42:50.720

In our moral debates, if one can call them that, One finds neither the philosophical underpinning of the major figures of the Enlightenment, nor the critique of capitalism provided by Marx. One does find, however, the same reduction of Christian ethics to a set of inner worldly goals. For example, in the Book of Common Prayer, now used by Episcopalians,

00:42:51.120 - 00:43:49.200

We no longer pray as once we did that we will contend fearlessly against all injustice. We now pray for the elimination of all injustice, implying that there will be a time when such will be the case. If praying indeed shapes believing, it is little wonder that for many in my denomination, the millennial development goals have in fact become the Christian gospel without remainder. Now, I often wonder if the incipient narcissism and atomism of an ethic that focuses on interior states and the naivete of one that strives for full realization of peace and justice on earth do not explain in part the emergence in our time of a third possible option in respect to the focus of Christian ethics, namely the common life of the church.

00:43:50.240 - 00:44:27.040

Whatever the case may be, it is certainly true that the increasing narcissism of our time should make us wonder about the adequacy of spirituality. as a way out of our distress. No matter what the case may be, it is certainly true that the decline of the social position of the Protestant denomination should make us wonder if the social gospel now regnant, even if updated by the addition of social criticism, is as adequate as once we thought. Indeed, we should wonder, even if we haven't,

00:44:27.760 - 00:44:55.600

if the premise of one nation under God is any longer an adequate platform upon which to base the moral calling of the churches. Some of the major theological figures of our time have posed the same sort of question. They have in fact argued that the churches in both America and Europe are on the wrong path. That they need once more to return to their roots in a common life, and by such a return put their own houses in order.

00:44:56.560 - 00:45:29.560

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's focus on life together, and Karl Barth's insistence that ethics is first a matter of witness, both point in such a direction. And in our country, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Horowas have turned ecclesial ethics into a cottage industry. Yoder's attack on Constantinianism is now common coin. And the attack Stanley Horowas is launched on the capture of the more liberal denominations in America by the glitter of democratic pluralism.

00:45:31.520 - 00:46:10.640

If there were world enough in time, I would look at the work of John Howard Yoder and take us through the same exercise I have with John Cassian and Walter Rauschenbisch. I'm going to do a bit of that in my next lecture, but only a bit. There's no need at this point for an extensive discussion of Yoder's ecclesial ethic because we now have in hand the diagnostic tools necessary to identify clearly what a focus of a given account of Christian living in fact is. The question we now face is this, is there reason other than a fit or a lack of fit between a given focus and a set of social circumstances

00:46:10.960 - 00:46:39.200

to accept or reject one or another of the options I have placed before us. It is to this question that I will return in the second of these lectures tomorrow morning. In doing so, I will argue that there is strong support in Holy Scripture for us to turn our attention to the Constitution of the Church and make that the primary focus of our account of life in Christ. I shall also argue, if only briefly,

00:46:39.600 - 00:46:51.280

that this starting point will yield a more adequate account of the life of the soul and a far more effective account of the relation between Christians and their environment and culture. Thank you.