[This is a continuation and conclusion to my last entry, "Toward Missional Ethics". You might want to breeze over that before going through this one. -- BDR]
As stated in my last post, missional ethics is a hybrid of several competing systems of ethics, but which insists that each system is a mixed bag of good and bad, and each needs correction from the others. Missional ethics is therefore teleologically oriented, deontologically honed, narratively embodied, and birthed out of renewed hearts.
More of this heady nonsense under the fold...
Teleological ethics proposes that “the foundation for a principle’s rightness is its ability to produce some nonmoral good.”[1] It tends toward a pragmatism which advocates whatever causes the greatest good for the greatest number of persons is morally right. That is, the end justifies the means. Teleological ethics should be commended for its incorporation of a moral vision in the ethical process. Vision gives drive, mission, vocation, and hope to moral agents; all of these are sorely needed in much of today’s Christian ethical systems. Yet teleological ethics can trend toward a situational relativism in which some circumstances may make morally reprehensible acts tolerable (e.g., nuclear bombing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians in World War II).
Missional ethics thus takes the Bible’s moral vision of the Reign of God as a telos to be reached toward in the church’s common life and in their individual hearts. Having read of God’s works and words through Jesus in the past, and having scriptural glimpses of God’s future Reign, they are to receive and subversively improvise that future in the present. Missional ethics is thus teleologically oriented toward the inbreaking Reign of God. It is in this living out of God’s liberating future among the Body which provides its moral vision and mission, and so helps propel it towards proactively and creatively partnering in the missio dei.
Yet Jesus’ day was full of Israelites passionate about bringing about the liberation of God long prophesied in the Scriptures. But they got it wrong. The Pharisees pursued cultic moral purity in order to produce the Messiah, but they were unloving and did not practice justice. And the zealots tried to achieve God’s peace over Rome through the sword. They were teleological ethicists at their most ludicrous.
In contrast, the Way lived and taught by Jesus was one which claimed this long-anticipated Reign of God, but which accomplished that telos without using means which will not exist in the Eschaton (cf. Isaiah 2:2-5). That is, Jesus taught to live the Eschaton, not to do what it takes to achieve it. For as Hauerwas has written, “the task of the Christian people is not to seek to control history, but to be faithful to the mode of life of the peaceable kingdom.”[2] The means to the end is to incarnate the end: to be the change God will eventually make in the world. “Don’t live in such a way which schemes in man’s wisdom to set the world to rights,” Jesus seemed to say, “But rather live in such a way as to reflect what a world rightside up will look like, and the church will have done her part in partaking in the missio dei, our Father’s work,” (cf. Ex. 14:14, Pro. 3:5, Mat. 5:13-16; Eph. 6:12). That is how Israel was to resume their role as light to the nations and guarantor of global salvation: what God accomplished in Jesus Christ, Eschatological Israel is to implement.[3]
Therefore, as the people of God teleologically improvise God’s inbreaking Reign, it must avoid the fallacies of Jesus’ contemporaries and follow Jesus as His disciples. Their lives must be deontologically (duty- or rules-based ethics)[4] honed by the model and teachings of Jesus. His teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, show how to be God’s eschatological people without letting evil, the present world order, or the current status quo of principalities and powers have any say in what that looks like. Ergo to the Pharisees He teaches humility and justice (Mat. 6:1-18, 23:23-24), and the zealots He corrects with a divinely-inspired enemy-love (Mat. 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-36).
The teachings and life of Jesus for deontological honing of an embodied Reign of God are not given only to individuals, but to particular communities which flesh out that story today by forming people in the Way of Jesus through those teachings. Narrative ethics contributes here by insisting that the relationship between these teachings and the church is therefore not primarily about making the right decisions, but authentically being such a kind of people as this paper has argued the church is called to be, that is, the eschatological community. And as opposed to a virtue-oriented ethic typical of narrative ethicists, missional ethics finds its character-forming and community-forming pegs in the broader story of being God’s people in this chapter of God’s unfolding story of the missio dei in His good creation.
This framing thus de-emphasizes decision-based ethics which use “quandaries” to find which is the most morally right decision. For the example of war and peace, decision-based ethics asks, “Should the Christian join the war effort against terrorism?” Missional ethics instead asks, “Is the eschatological community the kind of community which will use violence to stop terrorism? Do Jesus’ teachings on how to be the eschatological community have anything to say about this kind of situation?” The answer, of course, is that the Christian community is to live as samples of God’s peaceful future (Isaiah 2:4-5). It finds its ethical orientations in its missional identity.
Finally, missional ethics has much affinity with what is being called affective faith ethics, a system advanced by Dr. R.N. Frost (citation unavailable). This system submits that because “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6), all good actions flow from faith in Yahweh, that is, out of rightly-aimed heart affections. When someone loves God above all, from that affective heart orientation comes love for humanity in ways which are in tune with the revealed will of God in scripture. Thus if decision-based ethics asks, “What shall one do?”, and narrative ethics asks, “What kind of person shall one be?”, it is affective faith ethics which asks, “Whither shall the human heart aim?”. A God-attuned heart, says the faith ethicist, makes the right kind of person, who makes the right kind of decisions. All other systems effectively put the proverbial buggy in front of the horse.
This system is beautiful, biblical, innovative, and commanding. Yet it falls short in lacking a sense of mission or grander story to be found in. It lacks an historical moral vision (see the discussion of teleology’s strengths earlier). Many Christians have piously God-ward hearts, but lack any sense of mission or vocation. This leads to Christians that love the King, but do not seek the kingdom. They worship, but do not do justice (cf. Isaiah 58, Mat. 23:23-24). The wrong action with the right intention is still just as void as the right action with the wrong motives. Medieval crusaders and witch-burners who valiantly loved God were no more pleasing to Him (or morally right) than the kingdom-missing rich man and Pharisees in Jesus’ time who loved Yahweh but struggled to humbly partner in the missio dei.
So, God’s gracious renewing of the repentant heart is not the totality of the missio dei, but rather a tributary which feeds into the greater river of salvation history. It is a splendid and glorious means toward enabling humanity to be authentically human, but it is not the end of it all. Christians are to seek first the kingdom (Mat. 6:33), which is done by loving God and loving people. This makes God-ward hearts inseparably central, but subordinate to the bigger story of mission, not vice-versa.
Missional ethics corrects affective faith ethics by embedding the affective primacy of ‘having God-ward hearts which enable agents to be God’s authentic humanity’ as the centerpiece in God’s conforming creation to His dream for it. “The kingdom of God,” says Tricia Gates Brown, “is the motivation and the goal of Jesus’ ethics.”[5] This sense of mission gives historical thrust to the faith community, and so propels it to good works, for as James warns, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).
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[1] David K. Clark and Robert V. Rakestraw, “The Nature of Ethics”, in Reading in Christian Ethics Volume 1: Theory and Method. Edited by David K. Clark and Robert V Rakestraw. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994), 20.
[2] Hauerwas, 106.
[3] N.T. Wright, Lecture: “Understanding and implementing Jesus’ gospel in the present”. The Future of the People of God series. 2004. Available at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks.
[4] Clark and Rakestraw, 20.
[5] Tricia Gates Brown, Free People: A Christian Response to Global Economics. (United States: Xlibris, 2004), 144.
Comments (1)
This is some good stuff, Brandon. On the issue of Frost's ethics (which I take to be largely a dead end), you might be interested in an article in a book called The Nature of Confession. The article is by Henry Knight, I think and it looks at how a spirituality of the affections must be shaped by the narrative of Scripture and the practices of the community. Very good stuff.
Posted by Halden | February 8, 2007 2:07 PM
Posted on February 8, 2007 14:07