1. How ‘‘Christian Ethics’’ Came to Be (1997) This essay provides the fullest account of how Hauerwas understands Christian ethics to have evolved as a discipline in relation to the practices of the Christian faith. After tracing developments from patristic writers Tertullian and Augustine, through the rise of medieval penitential manuals, to Aquinas and Luther, the essay explores how Christian ethics came to be seen as a problem in the context of the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. Hauerwas engages issues that emerged in the work of Kant, were given systematic theological expression in the writings of Schleiermacher, and received their strongest critique in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. For Hauerwas, like Barth, theological ethics proceeds from the first-order discourse (doctrine) of the Christian faith. Therefore, ethics is a part of the theological task, and Christian theology is first and foremost an activity of the church. The notion of Christian ethics is a modern invention. At one time Christian ethics did not exist. That does not mean that Christians did not think about
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1. How ‘‘Christian Ethics’’ Came to Be (1997)
This essay provides the fullest account of how Hauerwas understands Christian
ethics to have evolved as a discipline in relation to the practices of the Christian
faith. After tracing developments from patristic writers Tertullian and Augustine,
through the rise of medieval penitential manuals, to Aquinas and Luther, the
essay explores how Christian ethics came to be seen as a problem in the context of
the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. Hauerwas engages issues that
emerged in the work of Kant, were given systematic theological expression in
the writings of Schleiermacher, and received their strongest critique in Barth’s
Church Dogmatics. For Hauerwas, like Barth, theological ethics proceeds from
the first-order discourse (doctrine) of the Christian faith. Therefore, ethics is a
part of the theological task, and Christian theology is first and foremost an
activity of the church.
The notion of Christian ethics is a modern invention. At one time Christian
ethics did not exist. That does not mean that Christians did not think about
how best to live their lives as Christians. There are obvious examples of such
reflection in the New Testament as well as in the Church Fathers. That may
well put the matter too lamely just to the extent that the New Testament and
the early Christian theologians thought about little else than how Christians
were to live their lives. For the ancients, pagan and Christian, to be schooled in
philosophy or theology meant to submit one’s life to a master in order to gain
the virtues necessary to be a philosopher or a Christian.1 Ethics, in such a
[Originally published as ‘‘On Doctrine and Ethics’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Christian
Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21–40.
Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. This essay was reprinted in stt. It
has been edited for length.]
1. Robert Wilken provides a very helpful account of how such schools worked in his ‘‘Alexandria:
A School for Training in Virtue,’’ in Schools of Thought in the Christian Tradition, ed.
38 reframing theological ethics
context, was not some ‘‘aspect’’ of life, but rather inclusive of all that constituted
a person’s life.2
That we do not find explicit treatises on Christian ethics in Scripture or in
the work of the Patristic writers does not mean they were unconcerned with
giving direction to the church. They simply did not distinguish between theology
and pastoral direction as we now do. Tertullian’s On Patience may well
have been the first treatise by a Christian on what we think of as a specifically
moral topic, but there is no indication that he would have understood this
treatise to be anything substantially di√erent from his other theological and
pastoral work.3 Augustine did the most to shape what would later be thought
of as Christian ethics. In his On the Morals of the Catholic Church, he suggested
that the fourfold division of the virtues familiar to pagan philosophers could
rightly be understood only as forms of love whose object is God. Thus,
‘‘Temperance is love keeping itself entire and incorrupt for God; fortitude is
love bearing everything readily for the sake of God; justice is love serving God
only, and therefore ruling well all else, as subject to man; prudence is love
making a right distinction between what helps it towards God and what might
hinder it.’’4
Augustine’s conflict with the Pelagians resulted in a particularly rich set of
treatises dealing with topics such as grace and free will, but also marriage and
concupiscence.5 Equally important is Augustine’s City of God, in which he
Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 15–30. This understanding of the relation
of theology to moral formation was not peculiar to Christianity but characteristic of all
serious study in the ancient world. For example, Pierre Hadot observes that for the ancients
philosophy, even in its most theoretical and systematic form, was ‘‘written not so much to
inform the reader of a doctrinal content but to form him to make him traverse a certain
itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress. . . . For the Platonist, for
example, even mathematics is used to train the soul to raise itself from the sensible to the
intelligible’’ (Philosophy as a Way of Life [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995], 64).
2. For example, Aristotle thought how a person laughed not unimportant for morality. See his
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1962), 1128a33–35.
3. Tertullian, ‘‘On Patience,’’ in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Scha√ (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1989), 707–17. For a further discussion of Tertullian’s account of patience as well as
that of Cyprian, Augustine, and Aquinas, see my ‘‘Practicing Patience: How Christians Should
Be Sick,’’ essay 18 of this volume. Robert Wilken rightly directs attention to the importance of
the lives of the saints for Christian reflection on the moral life in his Remembering the
Christian Past (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 121–44.
4. Augustine, ‘‘On the Morals of the Catholic Church,’’ in Christian Ethics: Sources of the Living
Tradition, ed. Waldo Beach and H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Ronald Press, 1955), 115.
5. These treatises can be found in Philip Scha√, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the
‘‘christian ethics’’ 39
narrates all of human history as a conflict between the earthly and heavenly
cities.6 The earthly city knows not God and is thus characterized by order
secured only through violence. In contrast, the heavenly city worships the one
true God, making possible the collection of ‘‘a society of aliens, speaking all
languages. She takes no account of any di√erence in customs, laws, and institutions,
by which earthly peace is achieved and preserved—not that she
annuls or abolishes any of those, rather, she maintains them and follows them,
provided that no hindrance is presented thereby to the religion which teaches
that the one supreme and true God is to be worshiped.’’7 How to understand
the relation between the two cities becomes the central issue for the development
of what comes to be called Christian social ethics.
The Church Fathers and Augustine did much to shape the way Christians
think about Christian living, but equally, if not more important, is the development
of the penitential tradition. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul had insisted
that the Corinthians were to ‘‘root out the evil-doer from the community,’’ but
the question remained whether such an evildoer should be received back into
the community after due repentance. This issue was not resolved until the
Council of Nicaea in 325. Nicaea set a policy for the readmission of those
excommunicated after appropriate periods of penance. This was particularly
significant since often the sin they had committed had been apostasy during
times of persecution. Sins involving idolatry, adultery, and/or homicide all
required public penance which was quite onerous and available only once in a
person’s life.8
A major development occurred in this tradition largely by accident. Drawing
on the monastic practice of spiritual direction of one monk by another,
there developed in Ireland the practice of private confession to a priest with
forgiveness of sins o√ered after appropriate penance. This practice resulted in
the development of books called Penitentials that were meant as aids to confessors
so that the appropriate penance would be given for the corresponding
Christian Church: Saint Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works, vol. 5, trans. Benjamin Warfield
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956).
6. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, introduced by David Knowles (New
York: Penguin Books, 1972).
7. Ibid., 877–78.
8. I am indebted to John Mahoney’s The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman
Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), and John A. Gallagher’s Time Past, Time
Future: An Historical Study of Catholic Moral Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), for
their accounts of the penitential tradition.
40 reframing theological ethics
sin. Their organization was quite varied with little or no attempt at theological
rationale. For example, The Penitential of Theodore stipulated the following
with regard to avarice:
1. If any layman carries o√ a monk from the monastery by stealth, he shall
either enter a monastery to serve God or subject himself to human servitude.
2. Money stolen or robbed from churches is to be restored fourfold; from
secular persons, twofold.9
Penitentials di√ered markedly from one another, indicating di√erent Christian
practices at di√erent times and places.
These books were carried by Irish missionaries across Europe and soon
became the rule throughout Christendom. Though they were not explicitly
theological, they depended on the continuing presumption that the church
through baptism was to be a holy community. They were no doubt open to
great misuse, but they also became the way the church grappled with the
complexity of Christian behavior through the development of casuistry, that
is, close attention to particular cases. From these beginnings there developed
as part of the church’s theological mission a special task called moral theology.
Under the guidance of Pope Gregory VII the church’s practice concerning
moral questions was made more uniform through canon law and the development
of Summae Confessorum. The latter were pastoral handbooks that gave
theological order to the Penitentials so that priests might be given guidance in
the administration of what had become the sacrament of penance.
Thus a clear tradition was established in the Penitentials, in canon law, and
in the Summae Confessorum in which ethics was distinguished from theology
and doctrine. There was, moreover, specialist training for each of these tasks,
as canon lawyers, moral theologians, and theologians were given distinctive
training for their di√erent roles. However, these diverse tasks were, in fact, one
insofar as their intelligibility depended on the practices of the church. Ethics
was not something done in distinction from theology, since both theology and
moral theology presumed baptism, penance, preaching, and Eucharist as essential
for the corporate life of the church.
Perhaps nowhere is this inseparable unity between the ethical and the
theological dimensions of Christian living better exemplified than in the great
Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Though often characterized as a defender
of ‘‘natural theology,’’ Aquinas’s Summa is first and foremost a work in
9. Gallagher, Time Past, Time Future, 7.
‘‘christian ethics’’ 41
Christian theology. The structure of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, as well
as the Summa Theologica, draws upon the image of God as artist, such that all
created realities are depicted as exiting and returning to God.10 In other
words, Aquinas’s great works evince a three-part structure. The story of creation
begins in divine freedom; then Aquinas treats how all creation, and in
particular that part of creation called human, returns to God; finally, in the
third part he provides an account of the means of creation’s return to God
through Christ and the sacraments. The Summa, rather than being an argument
for the independence of ethics, as it is sometimes characterized, is
concerned to place the Christian’s journey to God squarely within the doctrine
of God.
Indeed, it has been argued that one of Aquinas’s main purposes in writing
the Summa was for the sake of the second part, which treats moral matters
more specifically and directly. Aquinas thought the manuals far too haphazard
in their presentation of the Christian moral life.11 He therefore sought to
place the discussion of morality in the context of a consideration of human
nature and the virtues appropriate to our nature as creatures whose destiny
was nothing less than to be friends with God. Drawing deeply on Aristotle’s
account of the virtues, Aquinas nonetheless argued that even the so-called
natural virtues must be formed by charity if they are to be capable of directing
us to God.
Aquinas’s intentions, however, were subverted as it was not long before the
secunda pars, the second part, was abstracted from its context in the Summa
and used as if it stood on its own.12 This kind of anthologizing in part accounts
for the presumption by later commentators that law, and in particular
10. As Aquinas says in the Summa Contra Gentiles, ‘‘All creatures are compared to God as
artifact to artist. Whence the whole of nature is like a certain artifact of the divine art. It is not,
however, opposed to the nature of an artifact that the artist should work in a di√erent way on
his product even after he has given it its first form. Nor therefore is it against nature that God
should work otherwise in natural things than the customary course of nature operates’’
(quoted in Thomas Hibbs, Dialect and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa
Contra Gentiles [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 3, 10).
11. Leonard Boyle, op, The Setting of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981).
12. For an extraordinary account of why Aquinas’s Summa Theologica must be read as a whole
as well as evaluated as a whole, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry:
Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1990), 133–37. MacIntyre argues, rightly I think, that integral to Aquinas’s understanding of
becoming a person of virtue, particularly the virtues of faith, hope, and love, is a recognition
of our disobedience (140).
42 reframing theological ethics
natural law, stands at the center of Aquinas’s account. Yet Aquinas’s understanding
of the moral life is one that assumes the primacy of the virtues for the
shape of the Christian life. Aquinas’s work was either misunderstood or ignored
through subsequent centuries, even to the point that he was used to
support positions almost diametrically opposed to his own views.
The developments of the late Middle Ages are not unimportant, but in
many ways they are now lost due to the profound e√ect the Reformation had
for shaping how Protestant and Catholic alike began to think about the Christian
life. It is not as if Luther and Calvin in their own work mark an entirely
new way for thinking about the Christian life, but certainly the forces they
unleashed changed everything. Neither Luther nor Calvin distinguished between
theology and ethics. Certainly Luther stressed the ‘‘external’’ character
of our justification, yet in The Freedom of a Christian he equally maintained
that ‘‘a Christian, like Christ his head, is filled and made rich by faith and
should be content with this form of God which he has obtained by faith; only
he should increase this faith until it is made perfect. For this faith is his life, his
righteousness, and his salvation: it saves him and makes him acceptable, and
bestows upon him all things that are Christ’s.’’13
Yet the polemical terms of the Reformation could not help but reshape how
ethics was conceived in relation to theology. Faith, not works, determines the
Christian’s relationship to God. Moreover works became associated with
‘‘ethics,’’ particularly as ethics was alleged to be the way sinners attempt to
secure their standing before God as a means to avoid complete dependence on
God’s grace. So for Protestants the Christian life is now characterized in such a
way that there always exists a tension between law and grace. The law is
needed, but we can never attain salvation through the law and the works of the
law. A similar tension constitutes the Lutheran understanding of the Christian’s
relation to what is now known as the ‘‘orders of creation,’’ that is,
marriage, the legal order, the state. Christians are called to love their neighbor
through submission to such orders, recognizing that such service is not and
cannot be that promised in the order of redemption.14
13. Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings,
ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 75.
14. Luther maintains that Christians must bear the ‘‘secular’’ sword even though they have no
need for it for their own life, since the sword is ‘‘quite useful and profitable for the whole
world and for your neighbor. Therefore, should you see that there is a lack of hangmen,
beadles, judges, lords, or princes, and find that you are qualified, you should o√er your
services and seek the place, that necessary government may by no means be despised and
‘‘christian ethics’’ 43
Calvin, and in particular later developments in Calvinism, were not as
determined by the polemical context of the Lutheran reformation. However,
justification by faith is no less central for Calvin, who equally insists that
‘‘actual holiness of life is not separated from free imputation of righteousness.’’
15 Accordingly, Calvinists stressed the importance of the sanctification of
the Christian and the Christian community. Christians were expected to examine
their lives daily so they might grow into holiness. This theme was
retained in the Anglican tradition and was given particularly strong emphasis
in the Wesleyan revival in England as well as other forms of Pietism.
Certainly the Protestant Reformation changed the language for how Christians
understood ‘‘ethics,’’ but far more important were changes in the ways
Christians related to their world. In earlier centuries, the Christian understanding
of life could be articulated in the language of natural law, but it was
assumed that natural law was only intelligible as part of divine law as mediated
by the church. What was lost after the Reformation was exactly this understanding
of the church as the indispensable context in which order might be
given to the Christian life. For example, with the loss of the rite of penance in
Protestantism casuistry as an activity of moral theologians was lost. Such a loss
did not seem to be a problem as long as it was assumed that everyone ‘‘knew’’
what it meant to be Christian. However, as it became less and less clear among
Protestants what it ‘‘means’’ to be Christian there have increasingly been
attempts to ‘‘do’’ ethics. The di≈culty is that no consensus about what ethics is
or how it should be done existed. As a result, theologians often turned to
philosophy for resources in their search for an ethic—resources that ironically
helped create the problem of how to relate theology and ethics because now it
was assumed that ‘‘ethics’’ is an autonomous discipline that is no longer
dependent on religious conviction.
How Ethics Became a Problem in Modernity
The birth of modernity is coincident with the beginnings of ‘‘ethics’’ understood
as a distinguishable sphere or realm of human life. Faced with the
become ine≈cient or perish. For the world cannot and dare not dispense with it’’ (Secular
Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings,
374–75). The contrast between Lutheran and Calvinist positions about such matters is frequently
overdrawn. See, for example, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought, II (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 189–238.
15. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John MacNeill, trans. Ford Lewis