96 - Faith and Virtue

Faith and Virtue
By David Baily Harned
Philadelphia, Pilgrim Press, 1973. 190 pp. $6.95.

David Harned's new book, Faith and Virtue, is an excellent reconsideration of the virtues, as well as sin and the church, and the way he relates such different concepts is illuminating. The book is a sequel to Grace and Common Life, and these, with a third to come, form a three-volume exploration in natural theology. The author

97 - Faith and Virtue

understands the term "natural theology" in an exciting and extremely helpful way. It is

a discipline that accepts the truth of revelation in Jesus Christ and then examines the texture of our ordinary experience for its witness to the holy (P. 9).

It is in this manner that Harned examines the virtues and their opposites, and what he says makes sense; it is what we experience, insofar as we do experience the humane as well as the inhumane aspects of human life.

There are many points in his book that are particularly illuminating. For instance, Harnied contends rightly that the distinction between "theological" and "natural" virtues is unfortunate as well as is the distinction between "common" and "saving" grace. All virtues are both gift and achievement, and the theological virtues, rather than something "added" by God, are basic to our natural existence.

These are the commonest of all human phenomena, families as laughter or hunger or sleep, and they inform every significant relationship whatsoever with other selves, communities, institutions, and with the earth itself (p. 35).

Further, Harned understands the virtues dialectically. That is, the virtues both affirm and deny. Thus, for instance, love unites; it also separates. Love is a drive toward unity; at the same time it cares for the "discrete and particular" identity of what the self confronts. Similarly hope creates; it also depends. Hope discovers potential, aspires to the actualization of what does not yet exist; it also depends on things external to the self-on forgiveness, on community.

At this point Harned relates the treatment of virtue to the uses of the imagination. Conduct, he writes, is based finally on vision rather than principle, and visions depend on the images we utilize in seeing. An appropriate image for responding virtuously, Harned suggests, is that of man the player. It enables one to continue to play fair, to hope and love, when one's experience suggests despair, cynicism, or even naiveté.

In light of this understanding of virtue, Harned then discusses sin. Having rejected the connection between rationality and virtue and appetites and vice, Harned is free to explore our fallenness as the collapse of the dialectical character of the virtues themselves. Again, his analysis is illuminating. Thus, in our hoping,

we come to depend on other selves and powers, not simply for provision of the resources that are necessary for our creativeness but so that we need not face the burden of creation (p. 76).

A consistent motif throughout the book is the social character of reality. Virtue itself is a social phenomenon, a response to an inter-

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nalization of what we have been given by others. So also is sin, or the fallenness of the virtues, a social phenomenon.

The dialectical nature of the virtues is lost not only because of the disordering within ourselves, not only because of the weight of our selfishness and the deficiencies of our perspectives, but even more because of the pretensions of the powers that structure the world in which we live. Every community and institution counsels us to understand ourselves in terms of nothing but certain roles and functions that it affords, and to find our surest defense and greatest comfort precisely in this "nothing but."

In the context of this social character and its fallenness, Harned discusses the church. In a realistic assessment of this society, he describes the perils as well as possibilities of the church.

This is a valuable book. Its weaknesses stem primarily from a lack of concrete illustration and occasional verbosity.

Eleanor H. Haney
Concordia College
Moorhead, Minnesota