We are beggars. That is truth.” With his final words, Martin Luther returned to the fundamentally receptive, even needy, condition of humanity. Oliver O’Donovan commences the first volume of his Ethics as Theology similarly, echoing Paul’s confession that “we are debtors” (Rom. 8:12). From the moment we awake to our moral experience, we find ourselves already caught up in a swirl of obligation and responsibility, having been given, and just so claimed by, ourselves, our world, and our time. Our moral awareness of this very givenness begins our ethical reflection, and it remains our ethical task, so that “wakefulness” names the carriage of those with eyes to see the world around them and their place in time.
We engage in moral reasoning long before it occurs to us that we are doing so, and so ethics needs no introduction. Instead, O’Donovan offers an induction, in hopes of clarifying what it is we are up to when we “think about” and “think toward” a fitting action. This strategy of induction is meant, in part, to pay due respect to the variety and vagaries of practical reasoning. By starting on the ground, and employing common-sense accounts of our moral engagement with the world, he exposes the conceptual poverty of premature abstraction.
Good ethical thinking triangulates, considering who we are as agents given time to act in this world. In his seminal Resurrection and Moral Order, O’Donovan made much of the im plications of the resurrection for the world, insisting that evangelical ethics requires attention to the restoration of the created order as it is and will be in Christ. He worried about the thinness of a Christocentric ethics, which “put Christ at the center without putting him at the center of the created world.” In Self, World, and Time, O’Donovan reckons with the genuine newness of the resurrection and all it promises, focusing on the Pentecostal renewal of human agency. Consider this ethics as life in the Spirit.
But life in the Spirit hardly suggests an ethics of immediacy or spontaneity, despite the resilience of false dichotomies pitting moments of divine guidance versus processes of human deliberation. After all, this genuinely new agency into which the Spirit frees us remains a restored agency; it is a divine fulfillment of rather than a frustrated second try at human agency. We are still us in our renewed agency, people who reason, deliberate, discuss, decide, reflect, and revisit. The Spirit liberates us into these processes, all of which invite and require faithful attendance to the world God has made and the time he has given us in which to partner with him in its cultivation.
Consider two critiques, of moral intuitionism and divine command ethics. The problem with intuitionism is its confidence in the self-evidence of the good, and the very lack of such evidence is “why morality cannot depend on intuition, but always involves thinking.” To move from “is” to “ought” requires deliberation. Practical reason “cannot pocket its ball in one shot” but must “negotiate a way between the two poles of description and resolution, the one determinate and the other indeterminate.” Without discounting moral epiphanies, O’Donovan insists that “these moments are the beginning, not the end, of a train of moral questioning.”
O’Donovan also takes issue with the divine command ethic found in Barth, who aban doned the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope, leaving them “like unemployed pilots sitting with their legs dangling over the harbor wall and gazing out to sea, when they might have been guiding shipping through the straits of moral reason.” (If only more theologians wrote this way!) Noble though his motives might have been, in seeking to keep theology unstained by worldly philosophical ethics, Barth ended up with a “persistently punctiform” description of responsibility leading to a “collapse of the discursive character of moral reason.”
A narrative approach to ethics might seem a natural ally, but O’Donovan demurs. Appeals to narrative have failed to guard themselves against the temptation to justify itself in bad faith (stories wickedly lending credibility and coherence to what is really moral disorder) as well as the temptation to sloth, “to despair of responsibility, to wear one’s story as it were a mourning garment for one’s life, as a way of avoiding living.” Both imprison the self in the past, rather than goad one to future action. History is less a “narrative of origin” than of vocation, bidding us “grasp our freedom.”
The discursive character of moral reason can also be seen in the move from the Bible to ethics. For ethics to be theology, it must be “nourished” on Scripture—all of Scripture, and the reality to which it witnesses, not just the ostensibly ethical parts. And again, such spiritual nourishment does not short-circuit moral reasoning:
There is a necessary indeterminacy in the obedient action required by the faithful reading of the text … . If Scripture totally determined our actions, there would be no obedience, for there would be no deliberation. Deliberation does not simply repeat what it has heard; it pursues the goal of faithful and obedient action by searching out actions, possible within the material conditions that prevail, which will accord with the content of the testimony of Scripture.
Deliberation is present even in spontaneous responses to Scripture, such as Francis’ re sponse to Matthew’s gospel or Augustine’s to Paul’s letter to the Romans, the spontaneity of which belies the lengthy process of moral and spiritual reasoning that bookended these moments. (Recall Augustine’s prayer for chastity—”but not yet.”)
This is why, if ethics is “a pastoral discipline,” it is “a maieutic rather than a prescriptive one.” Even in the Sermon on the Mount, we do not encounter advice, which could be quickly followed, but moral teaching aiming at the formation of a community of disciples in the way of Jesus. The one who has called them to discipleship orients them rightly to and in the world in light of the coming kingdom. They are oriented together to the kingdom, and at the heart of the Lord’s moral teaching comes his prayer, a prayer that forms this people together as they learn and speak the truth of the world and call for the divine resources to act “this day” as moral agents.
In the concluding chapter, O’Donovan sketches faith, love, and hope, which structure a properly theological account of ethics as a “recovered and converted” sense of self, world, and time. Having been established as renewed moral agents by faith—in which we become aware of God having made us “competent moral agents” who are “fit for world and time”—we are given the world to love as God loves, in the hope of the return of Christ. Without this promised hope “we could not deliberate, for nothing could assure us that an exertion of our own could constitute a ‘work’ that might count for good in eternity.” The kingdom of God thus “underwrites the intelligibility of our purposes.”
All that said, perhaps my opening parallel of Luther and O’Donovan could use some work. Luther is hardly known for his ethical cast of mind—he of the “sin boldly” and the doctrine of justification by faith alone apart from works, the article on which the church stands or falls. The man who identified Aristotle’s account of the acquisition of virtue as the antithesis of Paul’s account of our being declared righteous by faith—well, he doesn’t seem a likely confrere to an ethicist intent on making much of our moral agency.
Luther found external constraints in ethics to be superfluous at best, suspect at worst. Put differently, he trusted the sufficiency of the internal witness and guidance of the Spirit in moving believers spontaneously to trust God and love neighbor. He celebrated the gift of new life, of the freedom in which to act as responsible moral agents—precisely because God has taken responsibility for our agency in Christ. Where a dose of O’Donovan might check the twinned tendencies of later Lutherans to veer towards antinomianism or collapse into legalism is in the insistence that the Spirit who dwells in and amongst us leads us to love by leading us through discursive processes of moral reasoning. To acknowledge this is not to immanentize or bureaucratize ethics, but instead to signal the fundamentally Pentecostal shape of theological ethics.
Matt Jenson is a theologian teaching great books in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University and a licensed minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church.
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