We really have to get past the idea that the life of the church is accurately and realistically mirrored by social media. We could all do with a little more trust. Ethicists can help with that.

I.

I read with great interest Carl Trueman’s recent post on the need for protestant ethicists to assist the church in its confrontation with contemporary moral challenges.  I myself have been involved in this work since about 2011. I taught Christian ethics first at a seminary and then a liberal arts college for the better part of eleven years. I’ve published books and articles on a wide range of moral questions. For several years I chaired the Christian ethics unit of the Evangelical Theological Society. I have skin in the game, as they say.

To begin with, let me simply affirm the great majority of what Trueman argues in the post.

Trueman is correct that moral sensibilities have profoundly shifted both within the church and without in recent decades. The church is generally ill-equipped even to begin formulating rationale to address the complex ethical questions it is confronted with. He refers to IVF as an example and is, again, largely right. I wrote a book nearly 10 years ago on this very subject, warning about the inherent moral problems of these reproductive technologies. The reception of that book was very, shall we say, mixed. It took me a few years to understand why.

Trueman is also right about the evangelical penchant for proof-texting and its casual utilitarianism. Proof texting offers little theological support for Christians seeking to live faithfully in an increasingly complex world. It is entirely possible that the utilitarianism he rightly criticizes was itself latent within much evangelical ethics from the outset. When proof texting proved inadequate to the task, utilitarian reasonings were easiest to invoke. By consequence, too many Christians struggle to distinguish prudence from the utility principle.

Given all of that, Trueman is absolutely right about the need for protestant ethics. I’ve spent most of my life devoted to that work. What I’d like to do here is expand in greater detail upon why he’s right about this need and also shed some light on how, perhaps subtly and in a limited way, that need is being at least partially satisfied. This isn’t so much of a rebuttal as it is an effort to widen and clarify the scope of the challenges we face.

I want to focus primarily on Trueman’s emphasis on developing new pedagogical strategies. He is, again, correct that too little differentiates the Christian community from the wider society in which it finds itself. A great many books have been written on why that is and why it should change; we needn’t rehearse them here. Professor that he is, Trueman’s thinking about this problem naturally gravitates toward the promise inherent to Christian instruction and the holistic formation of students. Mine does too. Thinking theologically about pedagogy and formation opens still other constructive lines of thought. More on that later.

The final paragraph of his post might raise a few eyebrows but is in truth simply a logical extension of what he’s already said to point. We do need good protestant Christian ethicists. We especially need good theological ethicists.

For my part, I think we have more than a few good ones. Perhaps some may one day equal Meilaender or O’Donovan, whom Trueman praises for their depth and theological rigor. I think the deeper problem, however, is not that protestant ethicists are too few, but that protestants either cannot or will not hear what their theological ethicists have to say, and the ethicists either cannot or will not say it.

II.

All of this leads me to pose two related questions: the first, why is the field “not strong”? And second, why has communication between protestants and their ethicists become so muted? I can’t answer these questions with anything remotely comprehensive here, but would like to situate Trueman’s concerns within a wider context on the hope that in doing so the scale of the challenge before us comes into sharper relief.

I’ll restrict myself to three general comments, which run as follows:

The discipline of Christian ethics has itself fragmented.

There is a story to be told about what happened to the modern discipline known as “Christian ethics.” We could begin with Schleiermacher, perhaps, proceed step-by-German-step to the American reception of Barth, highlight a few of the prophetic American free churchmen, labor through Niebuhr, puzzle over the existentialists and post-structuralists, wonder aloud at how Catholics and protestants could come together and form a professional society of Christian ethics, and muse over the post-liberals. That would account for only a very partial narrative, of course; all how-we-got-here stories are. But without a basic grasp of a few characters, settings, dialogues, and plot points it will be difficult to understand which moral questions make the most forceful impression on contemporary ethicists, and why.

I mention the formation of the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) primarily because it is so illustrative of the disciplinary fragmentation. The fogs of Catholic-protestant antagonism had so lifted and the socio-cultural state of affairs so transformed that a unitary project seemed feasible and worthwhile. And it was theologically focused. You have but to skim past issues of the society’s journal to see what I mean. Over ensuing decades, but particularly since the turn of the century and the rapid ascent of social sciences, the disciplinary aims are now far more fragmentary. Perhaps that is inevitable for academic disciplines; it needn’t be for theological disciplines, in my opinion.

Oliver O’Donovan outlines the problems confronting the discipline similarly in his introduction to Self, World, and Time: “too much a creature of fashion to be trustworthy as a science, too much a creature of ideas to be pastorally helpful to the church, too ‘soft’ for the university, too ‘abstract’ for the theological seminary, Christian ethics finds itself a despised outcast in the world, always hunting round for protective allegiances.” Does it come as any surprise that the most neglected source for doing theological ethics today is holy scripture?

There is deep distrust within protestantism.

Any distrust between protestants and their ethicists goes both ways. Ethicists worry that what they offer fellow protestants might be misinterpreted or misrepresented, and protestants worry that any ethicist’s deviation from the prevailing view on some moral question will lead people astray and impede the church’s mission. This ‘soft-suspicion,’ let’s call it, has a natural restraining effect, as each is concerned not to take anything further than the other can bear, but also has a quieting effect, as each elects to forego communication altogether. The distrust needs to be brought to conclusion.

It often seems that protestants do not really understand what Christian ethics is, as a theological discipline or reasoning practice. I’ve heard all manner of definitions. The most common equate ethics with personal piety, which is unquestionably part but by no means the whole of Christian ethics. Just how far this unfamiliarity reaches is an open question but it has gotten to where it has because ethicists have been reticent to adopt a public voice, because ethics is a specialized discipline that can be difficult to make accessible, and because of some strange features in theological education, which I’ll mention later.

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