Christian Ethics, the Bible, and the Powers of Reading

[Published in Bharat Ranganathan and Derek Woodard-Lehman, Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics: Normative Dimensions (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17–44.] Christian Ethics, the Bible, and the Powers of Reading Jamie Pitts “What do we do with the Bible?” An answer to this question requires an awareness of the context in which it is asked: who is asking, why, who is included in the “we,” and what do they mean by “the Bible”? Is it a couple weighing the fate of an unwieldy family heirloom? A pastor lamenting her flock’s intransigent ignorance of their sacred texts? An evangelist strategizing about a “closed” country? A New Atheist scheming to eliminate Christian influence in American politics? To pause and imagine these different scenarios is to see distinct patterns of involvement with the Bible, triangulations in which the speaker claims a relation to the Bible— taken variously as object, Scripture, or enemy—and a “we.”1 In each case, asking the question betrays a non-neutral stance toward the Bible and others. To ask is to be involved. In this chapter, the question is posed from within a diverse community of religious and Christian ethicists, some of whom, I will show, tend to minimize the fact or form of their involvement with the Bible. When I ask, “What do we do with the Bible?” I am claiming to participate in this community, and so claiming the right to make a claim on this community about its involvement with the Bible. In particular, I am claiming that methodological questions about the normative status of the Bible within Christian ethics are resolved when we, as Christian ethicists, clarify our involvements, including our normative commitments, as readers of the Bible. The process of clarifying our own normative commitments is arguably far more difficult than working out what Kant or Cahill thought about the Bible and ethics. It is part of the process of what Wittgenstein called “working on oneself,” of becoming responsible for the moral texture of our lives.2 This way of putting it is indebted to those philosophers and theologians who have taken up Stanley Cavell’s work, especially The Claim of Reason (1979). See Carnes 2013; Carnes 2014; Dula 2011; Laugier 2013; Laugier 2018; and Tran 2017. 2 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 16e: “Working in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more a working on 1 1 This process of becoming morally responsible can, I suggest, be pictured in terms of a growing awareness of one’s “involvements.” Before saying anything else about minimizing or clarifying involvements, I ought to say what I mean by the term. Above I employed the word “relation” to describe what is claimed by talking about the Bible, suggesting that to be involved is to be related. Reading and talking about the Bible relies on and forges relations between the reader-speaker, text, and community. When speech about the Bible follows or is part of a process of close reading and deep thinking, then the relation might be depicted as a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons,” the horizon of the speaker—shaped by her community’s “prejudices”—encountering the horizon of the text and resulting in a new interpretation (Gadamer 1989). On this model, the careful reader-speaker will attend both to the text before her and to judgments she inherits from her community, becoming cognizant of how each gives form to her reading and to her speaking about her reading. Alternatively, the relation might be conceived, following Bourdieu, as objectively bearing cultural and material attributes corresponding to the reader-speaker’s position in a given social field and to the status of the Bible within that field. Here responsibility requires accepting Bourdieu’s “invitation” to reflexivity, to sociologically-enabled awareness of the social determinants of one’s reading and speech (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). In these two frameworks, the Gadamerian and the Bourdieusian, the reader-speaker is construed as involved complexly with text and community, and a path to ethical reading is opened through as comprehensive awareness as possible of those involvements. Without weighing in on the relative merits of Gadamer and Bourdieu (cf. Roberts 2004), or introducing additional theoretical perspectives, I take it as evident that some of our involvements as humans and as ethicists who read and speak (and write) about the Bible are normative—they include judgments about the identity and status of the Bible and about the moral content of the Bible. These judgments are normative insofar as they posit norming descriptions of the Bible and its content (read it like this, not like that) and proffer evaluations of its truth, goodness, and beauty (order your life like it says here, reject what it says there). Our oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s own way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)” The language of moral “texture” is from Murdoch 1956, 39, who is taken up by Diamond 1991, 374-376. 2 normative judgments of course owe much to our cultural prejudices and to objective, habitusforming social relations—they are bound up with our other involvements—yet they are irreducibly ours and rendering them, putting them into speech, exercises force, potentially transformative force, within our communities.3 To put our judgments into speech requires that we become aware of them, which may be a challenging task even for ethicists whose métier is moral analysis. Even more challenging, however, is the goal of ethical speech, speech voiced by a speaker who is aware of and responsive to her wide and tangled involvements. It is this goal I have in view in this chapter, with specific reference to ethicists’ speech about the Bible. In what follows I will characterize forms of reading and speaking about reading that aim to account for all of the reader-speaker’s various involvements as “comprehensively self-involved” reading and speech. In order to distinguish my conception of self-involved reading and speech, I will first identify four broad approaches to Christian ethics that minimize the character of the ethicist’s involvement with the Bible. These approaches treat ethics largely or exclusively as (1) descriptive of moral practice, (2) as foundationalist normative evaluation, (3) as political critique, or (4) as the remit of one (and only one) tradition of moral inquiry. I suggest that each of these approaches contributes to our understanding of the work of ethics, and of the ethical work of reading the Bible, but each evades the self-involving nature of that work to some degree or another, the ways in which reading and writing about the Bible is already a mode of moral involvement with the self, the text, and the world.4 I then turn to the writings of James McClendon for an example of a more comprehensively self-involving approach to Christian ethics and the Bible. Focusing on McClendon’s reading of the New Testament “principalities and powers” passages, I show McClendon modeling how ethicists might take up a moral stance On the “force” of speech see Austin 1975. This sentence also draws on Bourdieu’s conception of individual habitus as a structure of embodied dispositions structured by social context yet which also structures that context through new practices and cultural productions (Bourdieu 1990). 4 Ranganathan and Clairmont make a similar point with reference to the comparative religious ethicist’s selection of objects for comparison: “Comparative choices are moral choices and, depending on how the scholar understands the meaning of religious ethics and the motivation to undertake that work, those choices will have a complex relation to the scholar’s own academic and religious commitments” (2017, 618). More broadly, Anil Mundra argues that “normativity is an ineliminable…element of humanistic description; insofar as religious studies claims to study human agents, it inevitably has humanistic dimensions” (2017, 1). 3 3 toward the Bible without abandoning the gains of the other approaches. McClendon, in other words, teaches us how to read the Bible as professionals and as human beings, by bringing all of the normative commitments embedded in our moral outlooks and judgments—our sense of how we ought to view the world and live in it—into conversation with those of the Bible. It is not part of my argument that McClendon is an infallible guide to reading the Bible. At the end of the chapter I examine some criticisms of his and related approaches in order to examine the place of “experience” in biblical interpretation. Engaging some recent feminist ordinary language philosophy (Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, Sandra Laugier, and others) and feminist and womanist interpretations of the biblical principalities or “arches” (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Delores Williams), I contend that Christian ethicists need to give special attention to marginalized readers of the Bible. In this way we expand our moral powers as readers and so commit more fully to work on ourselves. Minimizing Involvements So far I have gestured toward an approach to Christian ethics, and to reading the Bible as an ethicist, described as “comprehensively self-involving.” To begin to develop what that approach might look like and how it might shed light on questions about the Bible’s normative status, I identify some common alternatives in which the ethicist’s involvement with the Bible is minimized. Once these alternatives are in view, we will be ready to explore my proposed approach. Ethics as Description The first alternative construes the ethicist’s task as primarily descriptive: ethics is the task of providing thick descriptions of moral outlooks and practices. In recent years this approach has become associated with a so-called third wave of comparative religious ethics. Several thirdwave publications written or edited by Elizabeth Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker advance an approach to ethics centered on comparative descriptions of “incommensurable moral worlds” (Bucar and Stalnaker 2012, 14; Bucar and Stalnaker 2014, 369). According to this literature, third wavers are distinguished by their methodological option for ethnographic and other tools 4 that facilitate thick description of diverse moral logics; their critical attention to the adequacy of standard (Western) moral categories for such description; their decentering of Western, especially Christian, ethics; and their insistence on the importance of comparison for ethics. Third-wave scholarship has come under suspicion for neglecting normative evaluation of the moral communities for which it provides detailed descriptions. While it is true that most third-wave literature downplays or avoids detailed normative evaluation (but see Clairmont 2012, Lewis 2005, Lewis 2012, and discussion in Jung 2017, 644–647), even description-heavy third-wave authors address the status of such evaluation in their writings. Bucar, for instance, outlines her “constructive agenda” as supporting the recognition of women’s agency and contending that her field would benefit from gender studies and a more complex understanding of moral discourse (Bucar 2008, 270–271). Erin Cline, moreover, suggests that comparison itself can contribute to “more humane ways of relating to each other” (2012, 132; see also Cline 2017, 668), and Grace Kao acknowledges that her proximity to her research subjects shapes her normative response to their moral discourse and practice (Kao 2012, 146– 47, 158, 162). Clearly the third wave is not ignorant of the normative dimensions of ethics. So why the suspicion? Bharat Ranganathan and David Clairmont frame their discussion of third-wave scholarship in terms of a contrast between its descriptive, ethnographic approach and alternatives more deeply rooted in moral theory (2017, 614–615). Let us observe the contours of the contrast: an approach to ethics dedicated to describing the features of various moral worlds, and an approach to ethics dedicated to theoretical questions about, e.g., the nature of morality and the best normative framework for evaluating moral action, and to the application of such theories to form concrete moral judgments. If your understanding of ethics follows the latter track, then you are bound to see the former as incomplete and its “constructive agenda” as overly thin. Whether or not a theory-driven approach is preferable to a largely descriptive one, the contrast between the two does point to an important lack in third-wave ethics. From my perspective this lack should not be conceptualized as, in the first place, third-wave ethicists’ failure to perform standard normative analyses of their research objects. Although it is somewhat surprising that the rich heritage of formalized normative discourses finds little 5 purchase in third-wave literature, my complaint is located further back, at the point where third-wave ethicists qua human beings with their own moral outlooks and judgments interact with other moral human beings in the research process. If third-wave scholars recognize their own normative agenda as operative in the research process, then why shy away from this fundamental work of grappling with the normative consonances and dissonances they experience as they study diverse moral communities? Take, for example, third-wave contributor Irene Oh’s judgment that the martyrdom of young Palestinian children is “unjust,” a judgment underwritten by appeals to an “intuition” about the innocence of young life, the protected status of children in just war traditions, and the poverty of the martyrs (2012, 74–75). Oh further observes that the “tragedy” of the martyrdoms can be seen paradoxically in the celebrations of the martyrs’ mothers—they celebrate because they “are frantically hoping that their children’s afterlives are better than their lives on Earth” (76). For Oh, the celebrations present a moral quandary, not about the mothers’ actions (“how can they celebrate?”) but about our implication in the conditions that produce child martyrs (77). She thus offers a normative evaluation of a moral practice (child martyrdom)5 that draws, among other sources, on theoretical traditions (just war), and she states the shape of her own involvement with her judgment (it relies in part on her intuition, and it implicates her and her readers). Although this is an important step toward what I am calling self-involved ethics, I note that Oh’s evaluation takes place in about two pages, at the very end of her manuscript. The question she suggests that we must ask about our own responsibility for child martyrs gets one sentence—surely an ethicist, as a professional and as a human being, ought to tarry longer with this vital inquiry. However valuable Oh’s historical and ethnographic treatment of martyrdom may be, she has seriously minimized the exploration of her own, and our own, moral involvement with her subject matter.6 Ryan Newson points out to me that Oh’s description of this moral practice in terms of “martyrdom” already assumes a normative account of the practice (versus, for instance, describing it as suicide). In addition to Newson, I am grateful to the Bharat Ranganathan, Derek Woodard-Lehman, David Cramer, Janna Hunter-Bowman, and the faculty of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 6 Cf. Ranganathan and Clairmont 2017, 617–618. 5 6 I have not focused my discussion of the descriptive approach to ethics on the Bible because, to my knowledge, third-wave religious ethicists have not studied the Bible’s content or its place in the moral formation of specific religious communities. Two paths forward for such work might be identified. The first is seen in recent studies in the “anthropology of Christianity.” For example, Danilyn Rutherford examines indigenous appropriations of the Bible vis-à-vis traditional “idols” in Biak, Indonesia (2006), and Eva Keller looks at Bible study practices among Seventh Day Adventists in eastern Madagascar (2006). If religious ethicists are to take up these ethnographic models, then they need to ask themselves how religious ethics as a discipline differs from anthropology, and whether developing constructive answers to the classic “how best to live?” question is really their central subject matter (cf. Bucar and Stalnaker 2012, 20).7 If it is, then a second path might be found in the practical theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s book Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (2007). There McClintock Fulkerson draws on her ethnographic study of a single congregation to see how that congregation’s core practices, including its practices of biblical interpretation, form it as an inclusive community for persons of different races and abilities. In McClintock Fulkerson’s project, description of interpretive practices explicitly feeds her moral and theological advocacy for inclusive community. 8 I view McClendon’s approach to ethics as potentially inclusive of and compatible with this second, more thoroughly self-involving way of handling thick descriptions of the Bible’s moral status. Ethics as a Foundationalist Normative Evaluation If ethics is not primarily the task of describing moral worlds, then perhaps it is the theoretical work of defining normativity and the conditions of justification. This is the position advanced by Kevin Jung in his essay, “Normativity in Comparative Religious Ethics” (2017). In his critical response to third-wave ethics, Jung discerns a confusion between the process of moral justification and the possession of justified belief. This confusion, according to Jung, rests on a Ranganathan makes a similar point in his unpublished paper, “The Limits of the Ethnographic Turn.” There are also forms of biblical studies that incorporate research with “ordinary,” often socially marginalized readers of the Bible. See for instance Dube 2000; West 2007; de Wit et al. 2004. 7 8 7 general third-wave reliance on contextualist accounts of justification, in which “a belief [is regarded as] constituting knowledge only if it is inferentially grounded in other beliefs” via a social process of “giving and asking for reasons” (659). For Jung, contextualism fails to see that the process of justifying a belief—of providing evidence for its truth—is not the same as being rationally justified in holding that belief, as possessing satisfying or decisive evidence for that belief. I may, in other words, have “all the reasons in the world” for my belief, but still be wrong. To determine which beliefs we ought to hold, Jung offers a foundationalist “model of an epistemic chain terminating in a non-inferential and basic belief in the structure of justification.” Providing evidence for the rationality of our beliefs in this foundationalist way may go astray, as we may be wrong about what we take as decisive evidence, but in Jung’s view our concept of normativity as such depends on such an understanding of justification and rationality (648n5). Jung’s argument against third-wave contextualism is similar to the one he advances against postmodern ethics in his book Christian Ethics and Commonsense Morality: An Intuitionist Account (2015). There Jung suggests that tradition-dependent construals of Christian ethics miss out on the basis of morality in widely shared (“commonsense”) moral intuitions. A religious tradition such as Christianity might provide powerful motivations for following those intuitions and explanations for why they might be regarded as true, but Christianity as such does not possess distinctive or “exotic” moral concepts (3). When applied to the Bible and its moral content, this approach points in the classic Enlightenment direction set forth by Spinoza: biblical ethics are but a species of universal ethics, and biblical narrative and cosmology a useful but ultimately discardable husk (129; see Spinoza 2007). In both writings, Jung is out to defeat a version of ethics he regards as susceptible to moral relativism (2015, 4; 2017, 658–659).9 The objectivity of commonsense moral intuitions whose justification rests on rationally held basic beliefs is held up against the relativism of descriptions held as valid because of their success in a social process of justification. On one side is foundationalist objectivity; on the other, contextualist relativism. This familiar move has Jung’s conception of justification does little to address the problem of relativism, since everyone is by definition justified in believing their moral intuitions. 9 8 been disputed in recent years by ordinary language philosophers who contend that our concepts of objectivity and rationality must be extended to embrace our involvement in formative social contexts. In other words, these philosophers indicate that rational beliefs and objective perspectives are, in some cases at least, only available through determinate formational processes that give shape to our moral affects and outlooks. Our ability to see the real, including the morally real, rests on “sensibilities” gained only through specific experiences (Crary 2009; Crary 2015; Zerilli 2015). As examples, these philosophers consider moral concepts of fairly recent coinage, such as sexist objectification, sexual harassment, and domestic violence (Crary 2009, chap. 5; Bauer 2015, chap. 3). On a Jung-style analysis of these concepts, we are rationally justified in judging an act as objectifying or harassing if and only if we intuitively regard it as such—our intuitions name non-inferential, basic beliefs formed through a process of rational reflection in which decisive evidence is found for our judgments. But what counts as evidence in these cases? What counts as adequate, justifying rational reflection? As Crary and Bauer show, our rational acceptance of the concepts, of the judgments they enable, and of the evidence we regard as valid bases for those judgments, are the result of an historic political process through which women have leveraged their experience to change how we see the world. In this feminist way of seeing the world, certain actions (representing a woman as a piece of meat, beating one’s wife) are seen as objectively bearing specific moral characteristics (objectification, domestic violence). The claim is not that these moral judgments are rational only within a feminist point of view; the claim is that only a feminist point of view allows for rational comprehension of some moral actions, and so of genuinely objective moral judgments about those actions. Jung’s error is to suppose that normativity is either relativistic or founded on noninferential basic beliefs. Ordinary language philosophy shows, on the contrary, that objective moral knowledge requires the development of one’s moral capacities, that moral knowledge comes about through the cultivation of a moral point of view, which point of view (and only which point of view) is properly “basic.” On this ordinary account of morality, not only actions are susceptible to normative evaluation, but so are moral outlooks, one’s entire way of seeing and being in the world (Crary 2009, esp. chap. 6). What is meant by “normative evaluation” 9 here clearly exceeds Jung’s vision of locating sufficient evidence for rational belief; it has to do, rather, with the far more complicated, far more ordinary—but for that no less objective—task of seeking moral agreement through a wide range of discursive strategies.10 These discursive strategies might include thick descriptions of moral worlds or the moral content of sacred texts, such as the Bible. In each case normative evaluation involves a human being, perhaps an ethicist, involving herself morally with the world, opening herself to hitherto unconsidered moral vistas and, when she deems it appropriate, pushing back on the world on the basis of her own moral point of view. This process of becoming aware of and responsible for the shape of our moral points of view—what we find important and why, what we fail to see and why— through careful attention to the world is the heart of the work of normative evaluation.11 Ethics as Political Critique The final two alternatives can be described and evaluated more briefly, as the terms of my analysis should now be mostly clear. Some ethics of late has almost exclusively emphasized political critique—the third alternative to my own approach I consider here. Political criticism of course is a significant mode of ethical engagement, and political realities continue to demand incisive analysis and intervention from ethicists. Nevertheless, there can be a tendency for ethicists to construe theological and other commitments as instrumentally subordinate to political ones, either by minimizing those other commitments as less important or by depicting them in exclusively political terms and evaluating them insofar, and only insofar, as they advance independently determined political goals. Possibly the most extreme example of this position is represented by Ivan Petrella, an Argentine philosopher, theologian, and now politician who in a series of publications has advocated for the rediscovery of liberation theology’s original commitment to “historical projects”—concrete ethical-political attempts to change the world—and so to cease the superfluous work of developing a biblical or theological basis for such projects (Petrella 2004; 2008a; 2008b). From Petrella’s perspective, what matters 10 On the objectivity of agreement see Laugier 2013, esp. chaps. 7–9, and Tran 2017. On literature as moral discourse see Crary 2009, chap. 4. 11 “Attention” as a fundamental moral activity is developed in Murdoch 1971. 10 is that ethics be applied immediately as political critique in the process of effecting political change. Specific ethical arguments are mere instruments in a political cause, and do not deserve much attention in their own right. A less extreme but similar example is found in a programmatic statement on postcolonial feminist theology by Kwok Pui-Lan. There Kwok outlines a method in which intersecting commitments to postcolonial, gender, and sexual justice serve as an ethical grid or “optic” through which the Bible and Western Christian tradition is filtered (2005, 144; also Kwok 1995, 28–31). She advises theologians not to dismiss that tradition entirely “if they want to speak to a larger audience for theological and institution change” (Kwok 2005, 145), thereby making the instrumentalized character of her theology clear. This method cashes out, for instance, in a reading of the Bible that criticizes its pervasive homophobia and religio-political imperialism (138–140). Presumably other aspects of the Bible could be called upon to promote postcolonial feminist theological ethics, when that rhetorical move would be effective with a given audience (e.g., Kwok 1995, 30, 78–83). My concern with the approach to ethics represented by Petrella and Kwok is not that they develop a strong normative political critique that challenges established theologies or readings of the Bible. As I contended in the section on “ethics as description,” ethicists ought to make their judgments about the Bible an explicit part of their engagement with it as a moral text. My concern, rather, is with the ways Petrella and Kwok subordinate other modes of involvement with the Bible, e.g., as a spiritual or aesthetic resource, to their political aims. They are, understandably, emphasizing the political given the conditions of hegemonic oppression they rightly address. But considering that they are writing, at least implicitly, to mobilize communities whose attachment to the Bible is more than a practical political matter, considering that they are involved as ethicists with communities for whom the Bible is a central moral text,12 should they not also attend to the Bible as moral source and not just moral instrument? The point here is not to separate out the religious and political meanings of the text, or to subordinate the latter to the former, but instead to see that these meanings are, for I say “implicitly” because Kwok at least acknowledges that she is writing to an “imagined community” of likeminded intellectuals (2005, 148). But the mobilization of theological language by Petrella and Kwok makes little sense without the existence of some community of theological language users, that is, the church. 12 11 what has historically been the Bible’s primary audience, complexly interwoven. To become involved with the Bible as an ethicist is to become involved with its historic primary audience, the church, and so to negotiate its claims on text and reader. In this case, it is to acknowledge that the political use of the Bible must grapple with the spiritual authority it exercises in Christian communities around the world. This point can be developed more generally by looking at literary scholar Rita Felski’s recent work advocating for multidimensional engagements of literary texts. In her book Uses of Literature, Felski seeks to break the impasse between politicized and aestheticized treatments of literature. Without denying the importance, on the one hand, of political readings that raise critical objections to a text based on its context of production and/or reception history and, on the other, of aesthetic readings that engage a text’s formal dimensions without regard to “external” matters, she proposes four “modes of textual engagement” that “denote multileveled interactions between texts and readers that are irreducible to their separate parts” (2008, 14). Each of these modes, she thinks, is found in our ordinary experiences of reading: recognition (we see ourselves anew); enchantment (we are absorbed by a text in a way that alters perspective); knowledge (we gain an improved understanding of the world); and shock (our convictions are deeply challenged). When I spoke above of an ethicist “opening herself to hitherto unconsidered moral vistas,” I had in mind this kind of complex interaction with moral sources, including the Bible. Whatever her moral outlook, presumably it is the ethicist’s responsibility to read moral texts with an openness to surprise—and not just to surprising ways the text encodes and perpetuates oppression. As Felski puts it in her more recent book, which focuses on The Limits of Critique, reading ought to be “a coproduction between actors [text and reader] that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meanings or representational failures.”13 With regard to the Bible, some of those “new things” might be discovered by interacting with a third “actor,” the ordinary communities in which the Bible exercises normative moral authority. Here third-wave ethicists provide an invaluable resource Felski 2015, 174. The original is in italics. Felski’s identification of the text as an “actor” is indebted to Actor Network Theory. See Tonstad 2017 for further discussion of Felski and normativity in theology. 13 12 insofar as their approach lends itself to multidimensional descriptions of the moral use of the Bible by religious communities. Drawing on these descriptions could enable a mode of political ethics that honors and works with (though not necessarily accepts) the Bible’s status in those religious communities, rather than minimizing that status as a tool for a predetermined politics.14 Ethics as Traditioned Moral Discourse Finally, the fourth alternative to my preferred approach to ethics acts as if one ethical tradition is the only existing or, at least, valid one. This approach is, perhaps unsurprisingly, rampant within Christian ethics, which has enjoyed hegemonic status within Western ethical discourse for centuries. The complaint here is neither that Christian ethicists fail to verify their claims through a foundationalist justificatory process (Jung); nor is it that Christian ethics ought always to be comparative (the third wave of comparative religious ethics). Instead, the complaint is that Christian ethicists often fail to attend to what the political-critical approach as amply demonstrated: that Christian theology and ethics are deeply called into question on intellectual and ethical grounds, particularly because of their implication in historic systems of oppression. As such, we who are Christian theologians and ethicists do our work under a cloud, as it were. If John Milbank was right—was he?—to upbraid theologians for their “false humility” and if postliberals are right—are they?—to endorse an “unapologetic theology,” then surely there is some proper place for humilitas and apologia in Christian ethical discourse (Milbank 2006, 1; Placher 1989). A complex test case for my criticism of this approach is Brian Brock’s Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (2007). On the one hand, Brock writes passionately about the need for Christians to learn from Jewish readings of the Bible (235–236, 277) and envisions a “postcritical” church in which biblical criticism coexists with practices of “tak[ing] Scripture up in praise” (309). On the other hand, the overall thesis of the book is that Christian ethics emerges from absorption into God’s ethos by immersion in the Bible, by singing 14 Arguably this is precisely how most liberation theologians have read the Bible, from Gutiérrez (2007) to de la Torre (2014), Williams (1993) to West (2006). 13 the Bible as Scripture and so being shaped to see and act in the world as God intends. This thesis is a legitimate one in Christian ethics, and I do not wish to dispute it as such. The problem, as I see it, is twofold. First, other than his mention of Jews there is little acknowledgment or engagement of rival moral traditions. There is little sense in Singing the Ethos of God that Brock lives in a world inhabited not only by Jews and Christians, but also by Muslims, Hindus, atheists, and so on. This point raises important questions about Brock’s involvement with the world, questions that are sharpened by what he says explicitly about the relation between the church and the world. Here is the second aspect of the problem with Brock’s approach to ethics. Commenting on a passage from Francis Watson about the church’s situation vis-à-vis the “wider world” (Watson 1997, 229), Brock notes that “Watson’s use of the term ‘wider world’ is a telltale sign that the center of gravity of his hermeneutics is not as deep in theology as the previous paragraphs of his analysis suggest. In Christian theology the church is the widest possible human reality, the world its dark and ephemeral margin” (2007, 58n23). This astonishing claim would seem to explain why Brock’s involvement only extends to the church and its close relation, the Jews. Brock has radicalized the postliberal claim that Christians see the world through the Bible (cf. 248–249) to suggest that Christians, for the most part, only see themselves. Beyond, for instance, John Howard Yoder’s critique of theological appeals to a “wider world” outside of the church that purportedly provides justificatory standards for Christian ethics (Yoder 1984, chap. 2), Brock contends for a church that is only dimly aware of the presence of alternative justificatory standards.15 By my lights, Brock’s approach represents a seriously restricted form of moral involvement.16 To this point I have traced four alternatives to my conception of a “comprehensively self-involving” understanding of Christian ethics and its relation to the Bible. A largely I mention Yoder not only because he explicitly deals with “wider world” language, but also because Brock aligns his approach to ethics with Yoder’s. See Brock 2007, chap. 3. 16 One way of conceptualizing the kind of theological writing I am after is what Jonathan Tran’s calls an “atheist sense,” which he perhaps counterintuitively finds operative in Stanley Hauerwas. For Tran, Hauerwas’s “atheist sense” is found in his refusal to predicate theological judgment on divine action, which refusal is appropriate— theologically “non-Constantinian”—in our secular age. See Tran 2015. We will see similar sensitivities in McClendon’s work. 15 14 descriptive approach, such as that trumpeted by third-wave comparative religious ethicists, evades much of the task of normative evaluation that falls on the ethicist (and on human beings more generally). We are involved with our research as moral beings, and it is imperative that we explore in depth our normative commitments with relation to the texts and communities we study. But such evaluation cannot, as in Jung’s foundationalist approach, be reduced to the identification of chains of evidence grounded in non-inferential basic beliefs. This approach misses how normative evaluation is an ordinary practical activity dependent on moral formation and the ways of seeing it engenders. Normative evaluation concerns all of life, not just discrete actions, and is best construed in terms of the ordinary work of seeking agreement in conversation, conversation that grapples with how things have and can go wrong.17 Political ethicists get this right, or at least they display the ethicist’s involvement as political commitment and advocacy; but this involvement can come across as reductive and instrumentalizing, and so as a restricted form of engagement with multidimensional moral resources such as the Bible. A tradition-centered approach such as Brock’s also wears its involvements on its sleeve; but something is missing when these involvements entail ignorance of our diverse neighbors. In order to get in view a more comprehensively self-involved approach to ethics and the Bible, I now turn to the work of James McClendon. McClendon: Reading the Bible as a baptist Christian Ethicist McClendon approaches Christian ethics as a self-identified “baptist,” an adherent of a broad style of Christianity indebted to sixteenth-century Anabaptism’s “mystical” hermeneutical claim that the present-day church is the community of Jesus followers it reads about in the Bible and, at the same time, is the eschatological community pictured by the same Bible (McClendon 1994, 44–46; 2002, 26–34; 2014:1, chap. 9; Newson 2018, chap. 7). Thus situated, McClendon’s ethics arises from his involvement with a specific moral community and its involvement with the Bible. The Bible is normative for this ethics, not primarily as a source of moral principles or values, but as the source of the community-constituting narrative: the narrative that shapes the community’s sense of its identity, context, and moral vocation (McClendon 2002, chap. 12). 17 See Laugier 2017 for an account of normativity in these terms, which are rooted in J. L. Austin’s work. 15 The self-involving narrative character of McClendon’s ethics might suggest an approach similar to Brock’s. But McClendon conceives of ethics as part of a larger endeavor he calls “theology.” By theology McClendon means, not the intellectual legacy of a single religious tradition, but a “science of convictions,” of sets of person- and community-constituting beliefs and their essential narrative background (McClendon and Smith 2002; Newson 2018, 31–39).18 Any theology qua science of convictions involves “the discovery, understanding or interpretation, and transformation of the convictions of a convictional community, including the discovery and critical revision of their relation to one another and to whatever else there is” (McClendon 2002, 23). This definition assigns theology descriptive and normative tasks as well as contextual, narrative, and rational dimensions (35–38). It also means theology, all theology, is “self-involving”: “in convictional work, self-involvement is natural and appropriate, while disengagement requires to be explained case by case” (39). Ethics, too, is self-involving, insofar as it is theology turned toward the question of how a convictional community must live (cf. 46). McClendon identifies his theology as baptist rather than generically Christian because, he thinks, every theologian works in relation to a specific “community of reference”—and Christianity is divided into multiple such communities (18–19). As we have seen, a baptist Christianity is defined by its prophetic hermeneutical style or “vision,” which McClendon glosses with the phrases “this is that” (this present community is that which we read about in the Bible) and “then is now” (we are experiencing God’s future in our present community life). This definition is gleaned from close attention to historic baptist forms of life, i.e., from McClendon’s efforts to “discover” and “interpret” the convictions of his own community of reference.19 Yet it is also a normative (“transformational”) claim on that community, a claim 18 McClendon and Smith 2002, 5: “A conviction…means a persistent belief such that if X (a person or a community) has a conviction, it will not easily be relinquished and it cannot be relinquished without making X a significantly different person or community than before.” It is worth noting that McClendon’s account of convictions was developed with atheist philosopher James M. Smith (xi). McClendon’s own convictions were formed through rigorous engagement with someone whose religious convictions differed substantially from his own. 19 In addition to the first citations in this section, see McClendon’s many biographical studies of baptist Christians in McClendon 1974 (Dag Hammarskjöld, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jordan, and Charles Ives) and McClendon 2002 (Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Bonhoeffer, and Dorothy Day). McClendon 1994 contains shorter studies of the early Anabaptist leader Hans Hut (94–97) and Baptist Roger Williams (482–488). 16 about how it ought to read and, through reading, order its life and witness.20 McClendon’s involvement with his theology emerges in the first place as a moral claim on his community and, through that community, on the world. The scope of his project comes into focus as we explore his reading of the New Testament “principalities and powers” passages. McClendon picks up on a trend in twentiethcentury theology to see these passages as revealing “the structured world of power and authority that stood over and against the kingdom of Christ”; although Christ’s death and resurrection defeated the powers, they persist as antagonizing forces (168).21 On this interpretation, the biblical language of “powers” amounts to a “Christian social theory” that enables a morally complex understanding of “the church” and “the world”— social structures distinguished by their orientations (or lack thereof) to Christ’s kingdom. For McClendon, any adequate theological social theory will acknowledge the presence of the world in Christian hearts, minds, and communities, and at the same time refuse an overly pessimistic construal of the world that sanctions social withdrawal, which he regards as a failure to love the world as God loves it (163–164, 168–169). In order to counter the (baptist) tendency to seek “an unworldly purity,” McClendon focuses on the powers’ status as creatures intended by God for beneficent social ordering. At this point he develops an account of “practices” in dialogue with game theory, virtue ethics, and his own narrative conception of convictions. Practices, according to McClendon, are constituted by rules, require intentional involvement, are inherently social, and are oriented toward internal goals. Participation in practices inculcates virtues, moral skills or capacities otherwise unavailable to the practitioner, and takes place against a narrative background: “If practices are cooperative human activities that are internally linked to certain virtues, and if practices require of participants characteristic intentions…, then the lives of those who engage in these practices must have at least enough continuity and coherence to permit the formation 20 There is unsurprisingly consonance between how McClendon thinks Christians today should read the Bible and how he thinks biblical authors read their own sacred texts: he follows Hans Frei in seeing typology as the Bible’s internal hermeneutical strategy. See McClendon 1994, 37, 45, and Frei 1974. 21 McClendon names Yoder, Ellul, and Wink. Other contributors include Barth, Berkhof, Caird, Cullmann, and Stringfellow. See Pitts 2013, 6–13, for a summary focused on Yoder’s work. Key passages include Rom 13:1–3; 1 Cor 15:24–27; Eph 1–2, 6; Col 1–2. For biblical overview see Wink 1984. 17 of those virtues and sustaining of those intentions—in a word, their lives must take narrative form” (176–177). By extension, any social grouping relies for its coherence on “a narrative tradition whose function is to provide a setting for the several practices of that society, one that unites them in a single web of meaning” (177). Practices, contends McClendon, are essential for our organic life as developing social creatures, and as such have intrinsic value. “Our own Maker,” he writes, “seems to have underlined our intuitive sense that…the enduring practices of human life, by their participation in the ongoing creation of a provisional and still untidy world, are valuable in and of themselves” (174–175). McClendon’s journey through practice philosophy may seem to be a detour, or even to set up a “correlation” akin to a Tillichian theological method.22 But he is clear that this “attention to practices will be validated (if at all) just by the better sense we can thereby make of law and gospel, of Israel and the church” (173). In other words, McClendon engages moral philosophy as a self-involved baptist theologian, and so from the vantage afforded by the baptist vision. This vantage allows for a critical rejoinder to the “generally optimistic and progressive ring of [Alasdair] MacIntyre’s overall account of practices” (178). Contesting MacIntyre’s contrast between corrupting institutions and virtue-forming practices, McClendon observes that “some practices…are institutionalized; they are given by law or custom a formal status that fixes their place in the social structure” (179, emphasis original). Lowering the barrier between practices and institutions means the former can be regarded as potentially corrupting and the latter as potentially virtue forming. As Ryan Newson puts it, for McClendon powerful practices are always “double edged” (2018, 42).23 With this theoretical apparatus in place, McClendon turns back to the biblical language of the principalities and powers. Consistent with his baptist hermeneutic, he draws connections between the Pauline terms, the central narratives of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and the life of the church. The powers’ nature becomes clear in the light of ancient Israel’s battle with idols within and without and Jesus’ strife with demonic forces (179–180). Although Jesus has decisively defeated them, the powers “remain in an ambiguous state” between Christ’s 22 23 See McClendon 2000: 36–40 on Tillich. Cf. Winner (2018) for an account of “the dangers of Christian practice.” 18 resurrection and final coming, “and in that state they delimit and define the moral task of Jesus’ followers.” McClendon defines this task in terms of Christian witness to “the reversal of power achieved in Christ’s resurrection,” and so to the possibility of redeeming and renewing all of life, including the powers (181). Given the diversity and complexity of the powers themselves, “the task of Christian community confronting a world of powerful practices...requires almost infinite adjustments, distinctions, and gradations…. Christian engagement of the powerful practices must respond to their endless variety” (181, emphasis original). Christian social ethics therefore emerges as a communal practice of moral attention to the church’s own structured life24 and to the structures it encounters; these are viewed as variably consonant or dissonant with the example given in Christ’s story, understood in its canonical setting and from a baptist perspective. McClendon makes extensive use of his “powerful practices” concept throughout the remainder of his Ethics. Immediately after outlining the concept, he tests it through a discussion of the Ten Commandments and biblical law (2002: 182–189). “To issue any Commandment,” he avers, “is both to presuppose a practice [kinship, religious feasts, etc.] and to show a way of conduct with regard to that practice” (185). This claim suggests that the Commandments are intended for a specific community constituted by a specific set of practices. The practices are rooted in organic life and so have intrinsic value, but they can go wrong—they are powerful— and so require moral guidelines. A narrative is also presupposed, as the Commandments look back to God’s work in creation and the exodus—as justification for Sabbath observance—and forward to the flourishing of future generations, indicated by the command to children to honor their parents. Here McClendon discerns “a primal form of what [he calls] the prophetic (or later, the ‘baptist’) vision” (184). For a baptist Christian reader such as McClendon, who seeks to make that vision his own, the biblical Commandments continue to speak to his own community, though they are now heard in light of the “new that comes in Christ” (189). Subsequent chapters in Ethics on Bonhoeffer and “the politics of forgiveness” further flesh out an understanding of social ethics in terms of powerful shared practices unified and made Newson contrasts McClendon’s and Hauerwas’s ethics by drawing out the implications of the former’s central claims that social bodies are constituted by practices (they don’t just “have” practices) and that the church is no exception to this (2018, 93–85). 24 19 intelligible by narratives. That understanding is also developed in the second and third volume of McClendon’s Systematic Theology: in Doctrine to offer practical accounts of doctrine itself, divine presence, and discernment (1994:28–41, 241–244, 478–481); and in Witness to offer a practical and cultural account of religion (2000: chap. 2, 287–303; see also McClendon 1994, 420–424; McClendon 2014:2, chap. 42) he uses to assess indigenous and colonial religions in America, the natural sciences, art, philosophy, and forms of Christian theology. In summary, McClendon reads the New Testament principalities and powers in dialogue with recent practice theory in order to draw out some of the primary normative dimensions of Christian ethics: its ineradicably social character, its basis in (good) creation, its focus on fallible but potentially virtue-forming practices, its narrative orientation to Christ— whose narrative within the overarching biblical narrative read by the Christian community as it awaits Christ’s coming in the presence of the Spirit serves as its normative center. This reading, and the conclusions about ethics it warrants, are clear expressions of McClendon’s own involvement with the Bible as a baptist Christian. Although he engages other reading strategies (Catholic and Protestant) and moral traditions (e.g., the traditions discussed in Witness), he is explicit about his identity and how it shapes his own reading as an ethicist and theologian. In relation to the other approaches described above, McClendon describes a historical (baptist) community of reading, but also contributes his own extensive normative reflection on that community’s history and its key text; he discusses theoretical issues in normative ethics without positing a reductive, foundationalist account of justification; he reads for power and politics without subordinating the text to a predetermined political agenda; and he elaborates a substantive baptist Christian ethics without losing sight of competing and overlapping traditions of theological and moral inquiry. As such, McClendon moves much further than the alternatives toward a comprehensively self-involving approach to the Bible and ethics. The normative dimensions of his ethics emerge from and are consistent with the specific shape of his baptist involvement with the Bible (and everything else), yet he construes his normative ethics, his convictions, as a viable option for others. For McClendon, to read as a baptist is to gain an adequate, accurate view of the real. 20 Reading from the Margins I offer McClendon’s hermeneutical practice as a model to other ethicists, whether or not they (you) find all of his convictions compelling. What is particularly valuable about McClendon’s approach for current discussions in religious ethics is the way it prioritizes self-aware moral involvement with moral texts, traditions, and communities, requiring ethicists to read and write in a way that is transparent about their own convictions and how their convictions interact with what they are reading or otherwise studying. McClendon’s approach requires that ethicists make moral claims on their subject(s) and so on one another, and acknowledge and respond to the claims their subject(s) and other ethicists make on them. This approach is not a recipe for relativism, for a mere cacophony of claims, but for rational persuasion that attends to different moral visions and the views of the world they offer.25 Naming McClendon’s hermeneutics as a “practice” suggests that, in his own terms, reading and speaking about the Bible and other moral sources is itself a powerful practice. If powerful practices are double edged, then perhaps one of the primary ways ethicists’ reading and speaking about their reading can go wrong is by minimizing their own moral involvement with their sources, for instance in one of the ways discussed above. McClendon is involved in these ways, but a limitation in his own work points to an additional form of minimized involvement that must be acknowledged. McClendon wrote prolifically and profoundly on various political topics, giving special attention through his career to the subject of race relations in the United States. He wrote biographical treatments of Martin Luther King, Jr., and pastor-farmer-activist Clarence Jordan, viewing them as exemplars (one black, one white) of baptist life and thought who concretely opposed white supremacy and fostered racial reconciliation in church and society (1974, chaps. 3 and 5). He wrote a moving confession about his own racial formation at the end of his For McClendon, this work of persuasion or justification may take the form of discussion of shared “loci,” concepts such as love or justice or peace contested by competing visions in particular times and places (McClendon and Smith 2002, 154–162; see Newson 2018, 110–116). The purpose of such discussion is not, as Jung fears (2014, 51), to generate objectivity out of inter-tradition comparison, but to pursue justified—true— convictions (McClendon and Smith 2002, 155–157; cf. McClendon 1994, 47–48). For the baptist McClendon, God is the source of authoritative or normative convictions, and God is encountered as gracious love who unites humans in community (chap. 11). The authority of grace in particular is mediated through communal study of Scripture (463–477). 25 21 Systematic Theology (2000, 371–373), and in his final writing contended for the centrality of theologians of color, theologians from outside North America, and women theologians for the future of his baptist tradition (2014:1, 302). Yet as Newson indicates (2018, 133), McClendon’s treatment of race is uneven, sometimes disappearing from conversations where exploring it seems essential (e.g., in his treatment of sin). Moreover, McClendon could dismiss writings by specific women and people of color as “wavering between pure ideology and authentic Christian theology”: he says this, for instance, at the beginning of Doctrine (1994, 53) about James Cone and Mary Daly. While he may be right to criticize these specific figures, McClendon’s own conception of narrative experience means instead of rejecting their views out of hand, he might receive and engage them as disciples’ testimonies different from his own. He might still criticize their conclusions about method in Christian theology, but practice a close reading of (and speaking about) their texts in order to ascertain where exactly their viewpoints contrast with his own, and how their claims impinge upon him. The feminist ordinary language philosophers I referenced in the first section of this essay depict a mode of moral philosophy centered on the development of moral capacities through ethicists’ close attention to their own point of view and those of others. Crucially, they claim that this approach to ethics makes sense of feminism as the project of attending to women’s experiences—to engage women’s experience on their own terms is to adopt a specific moral perspective in which women are full participants in human moral life. This perspective has been far from the common sense of most communities throughout history, and requires a transformation in one’s overall moral orientation, not merely discovery of a new basic belief. Conversion to feminism requires sustained exposure and attention to feminist lives and outlooks, not the generation of chains of evidence leading to a foundational feminist truth. If similar claims can be made about race,26 then perhaps countering white supremacy and advancing toward racial justice and reconciliation require close attention to those voices we are most tempted to dismiss as “ideological.” The point is not that those voices are inherently and in every way correct because they are perceived as a dismissable challenge; rather, the point is that only by attending closely to those voices are we able to reflect on the full scope of our 26 For a compatible Wittgensteinian approach to race, see Jones 2013. 22 involvement with them: why we are inclined to dismiss them, how their claims might ask further transformation of us. Returning to the question of the Bible and ethics, we might say that a more comprehensively self-involved moral hermeneutics requires receptive listening (cf. Newson 2018) to voices at the margins of our discipline and societies, the voices we—especially those of us whose racial, gender, sexual, and professional identities grant us relative power—are most tempted to dismiss. This hermeneutical practice will, for instance, become responsive to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s claim that “kyriarchy,” or the complex configurations of (male) domination, is a major oppressive power (2001, 118–124), and womanist theologian Delores Williams’s similar claim about “demonarchy,” or the systematic subordination of black women (1986, 52–58). If we listen to these voices then we begin to see more clearly than McClendon did how our reading and speaking as ethicists are powerful practices that can go wrong by dismissing the very voices whose normative dimensions most deeply call into question our own. 23 Works Cited Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words, 2d ed. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. 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