Reinstating Natural Morality

Reinstating Natural Morality

The Ground of Christian Ethics, by N. H. G. Robinson (Eerdmans, 1972, 336 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Norman L. Geisler, chairman of the Department of Philosophy of Religion, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

As the author acknowledges, this essay “is not primarily concerned with particular ethical problems.” Rather, it concentrates on the relation of Christian ethics to both theology and ethics in general.

Robinson finds fault with all four of the basic ways Protestants have viewed these relations. First, Calvin, whose method in ethics was “to collect from various places of Scripture a rule for the reformation of life,” is faulted because “not only is this view of the Christian life itself superficial and even mechanical, but it is tied to a whole fundamentalistic theology which is no more profound.”

Secondly, the naturalistic ethic of Kant, Sidgwick, and Rashdall is rejected because it offers “the discussion of morality on the basis not of revelation at all but of reason and conscience … in complete divorce from the beliefs and dogmas of religious faith.” Robinson admits that even though theology cannot be reduced to morality, nevertheless the Bible has “an all-pervasive moral quality.” For “in the Bible the moral and transmoral are inextricably intertwined.” However, the theologian cannot accept the thesis that “morality is wholly self-contained and … totally independent.”

The third view Robinson rejects is that of Bishop Butler, that “Christian morality is morality at its completely natural and at its best” as manifest in the example of Jesus. This view, notes Robinson, “may readily expose itself to theological criticism,” the charge that “it does not take a sufficiently high view of Jesus.” Robinson prefers a higher view of Christ than that of a moral example; he agrees that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

The fourth rejected view is that of Schleiermacher et al., which “affirms in principle the necessary connection between dogmatics and ethics … that is to say, it takes over certain ideas from the Christian faith … and then in the field of Christian ethics it tends to immobilize the revelation upon which it professes to depend.” Thus the relative independence of ethics from theology “has the effect of … fossilizing the insights drawn from the [revelation].”

Robinson also rejects the Catholic natural-law ethic as neglecting the revelatory and redemptive aspects of the Christian faith. Natural law is “autonomous and naturalistic, but … also highly abstract.” Robinson agrees more with the New Reformation direction of Barth and Brunner but wishes to correct their distaste of natural morality. Kant, on the other hand, with his complete autonomy of goodwill failed because such an ethic is completely man-centered (though not necessarily self-centered) rather than God-centered. “Pure autonomy of the Kantian type,” Robinson writes, “is the concept of a law which is completely self-imposed” and “has proved itself … formal, empty and unsatisfactory.” And even Maclagan (The Theological Frontier of Ethics), who argues, differently from Kant, that “the self-imposed law is not invented by the moral agent but is discovered by him,” is rejected because this view “is conceived as static and impersonal [and] it cannot be properly identified with divine revelation.”

Robinson sees the answer to the problem of the relations among general ethics, theology, and Christian ethics in an ethical parallel to Brunner’s “dialogical truth,” that is, in a “bi-polar autonomy” in which “it becomes appropriate to regard Christian ethics as a part of dogmatics,” but also one in which “Christian ethics and general ethics occupy the same ground.” This means that “it is no longer possible to think of general ethics as did Haering or Alexander (Christianity and Ethics), who held that “Christian Ethics is a branch of general Ethics.” “Christian ethics can be and must be a separate study outside, over and above, general ethics,” says Robinson. For while Christian ethics occupies the same ground as general ethics, it “introduces a radically different conception of the moral life,” one of self-surrender of man’s autonomy from an anthropocentric to a Christo- and theocentric basis. So, Christian ethics is distinguishable but not separable from dogmatics and covers the same ground as general ethics but from a radically different, theocentric point of view.

Robinson’s major contribution is in the correction he provides for neo-Reformation theology by insisting that “Christian ethics discloses and demands for its articulation a context, a situation, a sphere, large enough to contain the divine grace” but one that also makes a distinction between “the grace which is constitutive of nature and the grace which is redemptive of the human world.” It is the former grace “which ensures that man the sinner, natural man, remains a moral being.” For “natural man is a sinner, but still is a man.” Of this grace constitutive of human nature it can be said “that there is no good amongst men apart from this grace,” but this natural grace “does not prevent men from turning human life and history into a thoroughly man-centered … enterprise.”

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Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Volume I, 1799–1870, by Claude Welch (Yale, 325 pp., $12.50). A worthwhile survey that includes both Anglo-American and Continental thinkers and varieties of orthodox as well as unorthodox Protestantism.

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However, this “law of man’s being is not his own but God’s, and as law and task is yet a gift of grace constitutive of man’s very nature.” Accordingly, the moral autonomy of a creature is derivative; “it is the autonomy of one whose nature is to stand by grace in the presence of God his Creator.” Hence, “by nature man stands in the presence of, or in relation to, God his Creator, so that for him there is no nature without grace.” And “it is because this grace is shared by Christian and non-Christian alike that there is a common ground for natural and revealed moralities.

Natural morality, however, is in need of God’s reconciling act in Christ, which “corrects, restores and fulfils it, giving its true centre in God.” So “the moral standards of society are not left inviolate by the action of God in Christ. On the contrary, they undergo a two-sided transformation, wherein also their frag-character is overcome” in “that Christ fulfils the law, fulfils and completes natural morality … and that in fulfilling the law Christ centers it once again in God the Creator.”

In my opinion, Robinson’s work makes a significant move in the neo-Reformation movement to correct the lack of a significantly positive relation between natural morality and divine revelation. I only regret that he postulates, following Brunner, an unnecessary opposition between personal and propositional revelation, and that he inconsistently finds minor contradictions in the moral teachings of Scripture. Robinson’s rejection of a Christian ethic “governed by an attempt to be loyal at all cost to the biblical witness” is the chief weakness of his thesis. Little wonder that he concludes “there are no infallible, divinely revealed, not-to-be questioned, solutions to our moral problems.”

Despite these significant shortcomings, Robinson’s book marks a welcomed reinstatement of natural morality in neo-Reformation thought, as opposed to the more radical disjunction made by Barth, from which Brunner never completely extricated himself, either.

A Theological Watchword

Beyond Cynicism: The Practice of Hope, by David O. Woodyard (Westminster, 1972, 112 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Edmon L. Rowell, Jr., minister, Lee Street Baptist Church, Danville, Virginia.

By now the statement “the hope of theology is a theology of hope” is a cliché. It may be, however, that in retrospect this cliché will be seen as the watchword of Christian theology in the seventies. Here is yet another book that attempts a redemptive word in the midst of the pervasive cynicism of our time. Its distinctiveness is that it is, not an attempt to set forth a “theology of hope” per se, but the articulation of the author’s own faith in God (and the Church) as he struggles to live beyond the cynicism to which so many in our age have succumbed.

Woodyard begins with the basic observation that there is always a distinct context from within which we approach the Christian message. For many today, he says, that context is the struggle to live beyond cynicism. He defines cynicism as distrust of man and his institutions, contempt of any good that may come of them, and a general pessimism about the future. Cynicism, he observes, leads inevitably to “futurelessness”—the contention that nothing will ever be appreciably different than it now is. The way out of cynicism and into the joy of God’s future is the Christian Gospel, attended by hope in God, who leads us into his future, within the context of the Church as the people of God who together practice that hope.

In chapter two the author observes that man’s humanness consists in his being the creature who hopes, whose attitude toward life is one of always “leaning forward” in passionate longing for the “not yet.” In chapter three he points out that hope is possible for man only when he overcomes the tendency to live in terms of the past and present and lives instead from the future, that is, when man lives by faith in God, who leads us into his future, which recreates our present.

In chapter four Woodyard contends that God is “partial” and that the Bible is, in fact, the story of the sides God has taken in history: God, he says, takes sides with those who in hope follow him into his future. In chapter five Woodyard interprets the Church as the community that lives from the future; it is, he says, a fellowship that lives in mutual confirmation of God’s future.

Finally, in chapter six, Woodyard suggests that the “suffering” of God in history is the understanding around which we must fashion our life of hope: he who brings the future must bear the tensions and consequences of the present (witness the Cross). The author concludes with the affirmation (following Paul in Romans 8) that the cost of hope (to suffer the tensions and consequences of the present) is as nothing compared to the joy to which we are called.

For me, the distinctive contribution of Woodyard’s book is in chapter one. Here he responds affirmatively to the contention (of Johannes Metz, among others) that the crucial task of Christian theology today is the “deprivatization” of the Gospel. The “privatization” of the Gospel, Woodyard contends, is the cause of our cynicism. He charges that the faith has been wedged into the lives of men at the point of their private struggles with guilt, death, and meaninglessness and that this constricted understanding of the Gospel simply does not sustain men at the intersection of their lives with the sociopolitical realities of life. Christian faith has a “public” context, he points out: the events of the Exodus and the Cross, for example, are decidedly social and political events. Society in general and politics in particular, Woodyard says, as well as the private lives of men, are within the area of God’s activity. If we are to reclaim the Christian hope for our day, then we must discover a “political theology” that applies the Christian faith to the public as well as private areas of life.

Woodyard points out that the “political theology” for which he calls is not a resuscitation of the social gospel. That, he says, degenerated into a synthesis of religion and society, Christianity and social progress, and tended to dissolve the tension between history and the Kingdom. A “political theology,” on the other hand, refuses to reduce the demands of the Kingdom to the historically possible: the future is not an outgrowth of the present but a movement from God. Our hope is in God and not in society or government. Yet the Christian faith is social and political in its implications and not just personal and individual. So, Woodyard suggests, we must “deprivatize” the faith and proclaim the public as well as personal areas of God’s domain if we are to speak a redemptive word to men today.

Some may not be convinced by Woodyard’s call for a “political theology” and may resent his charge that those who persist in relegating God to the private chambers of the soul in effect engender a practical atheism. If so, then his book will offer these readers a better understanding of that which is unconvincing and a better appreciation of their own convictions.

The author’s style is not always as clear as one might wish and sometimes requires a second reading. At those places he seems still to be struggling with the hope he wishes to communicate. Involvement in that struggle to communicate the Christian hope for our day may just be the hope of our theology.

But How?

Science Teaching: A Christian Approach, by Robert J. Ream (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1972, 130 pp., $2.50 pb), is reviewed by Wendell McBurney, coordinator for school science, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Robert J. Ream, a teacher in a Christian academy, here presents an extensive review of the scientific enterprise from a Christian point of view. Without ever establishing an operational definition of science, he evaluates its methods, limitations, and potentials, with assistance from numerous references to Scripture and related literature. Ream is to be commended for abstaining from the prolonged rehash of the creation-vs.-evolution debate too often typical of this type of book. His understanding of science is adequate, though his basic orientation appears to be that of a theologian.

I was disappointed that he did not spend more time presenting the practical application of his basic premise; he attends to the teaching of science very cursorily in the concluding pages of each chapter, seemingly as an afterthought to an otherwise comprehensive review of a Christian philosophy of science. His attempts to relate the discussion to Christian education serve only to reiterate the position that Christ must be central to all education (in this case science); he avoids the elusive specifics of how to do it. Omitting the word “teaching” from the title of the book would have resulted in a more accurate description of the contents.

This book could be of interest to anyone concerned about a Christian view of science, and it would be a suitable addition to the resource shelf of one who prepares students to teach science in a Christian school. But I cannot recommend its use (and perhaps it is not so intended) as a science methods text for the potential teacher; very few undergraduates would have patience with the author’s tendency to make his points somewhat laboriously, and with his heavy writing style. For example:

He thereby knows that that which sees the light, namely the self, cannot itself be the light lest the absurdity arise of the one doing the seeing being what is seen while at the same time he is the one seeing.

IN THE JOURNALS

So far a compiler of a directory of Spanish religious periodicals has found 1,000 of them. If you think he has missed some, send their names and addresses to Robert Joe Lee, 100 Stockton St., Apt. F2, Princeton, N. J. 08540.

The Latin American Theological Fraternity, an evangelical group, has recently begun two periodicals that all theological libraries should receive: Boletím Teológico ($2.50/four issues) and Theological Fraternity Bulletin $3/four issues). Write to Casilla 2475, Cochabamba, Bolivia.

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