563 - Theological Ethics

Theological Ethics
By James Sellers
210 pp. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1966. $5.95.

For anyone remotely familiar with the confused and ad hoc character of so much of present reflection in theological ethics, this book can only be an agreeable exception. It addresses itself to a responsibly wide spectrum of perennial questions and makes its own proposals with laudable temerity. There is also an openness in many praiseworthy directions, such as toward the behavioral sciences. It turns out, however, that the work (by its own admission) is more comprehensive than thorough. Sellers seeks "to lay a basis for thinking about morality in our generation by outlining a new theological ethics" but he has not attempted "to work out the details of a new morality." He is self-consciously contemporary, "action-oriented," and American without thereby ceasing to take seriously his Reformation and "neo-orthodox" forebears. This will not altogether please either the doctrinaire right or left, but it does entail the possibility of writing a work of systematic significance.

Sellers believes that a present "Christian-ethical system" should involve four "loci" (a term professedly equivalent to Melanchthion's use of it) which constitute the minimal criteria for any currently viable theological ethics. The first locus is "stance." This is the unique ground on which theological ethics must rest, its "origin in some expectation for the life and conduct of man under God distinctive in the Judaeo-Ghristian tradition." "Faith" as the final referent for characterizing such distinctive life and conduct (in the manner of, say, Luther, Calvin, and Brunner) is examined by Sellers and finally rejected. His reasons for rejection are roughly two in number: (1) "faith" assumes an archaic anthropological model giving primacy to passivity (at any rate for the "natural or secular man") and this cannot be made acceptable to the "twentieth century" with its stress on activity and initiative; (2) "faith" invariably is bifurcated from culture and society, especially in Luther's teaching on the two realms, and this needs to be corrected in the Catholic direction where "natural" man is at least capable of partial, if not saving, fulfillment. Sellers also rejects "love" (in e.g., Augustine, Edwards, and Ramsey) as the final referent, contending that it is the "qualitatively highest mode" of reaching the "ultimate goal of human life" but is not itself that goal.

His own proposal for the finally determinative stance is "promise and

564 - Theological Ethics

fulfillment." This stance can be called "redemption" or "salvation," but its most appropriate contemporary designation is "wholeness." Wholeness involves "the restoration of openness to God, nature, and man."

The second locus is "wisdom." This is a conflation of "revelation" and "secular knowledge" in which the former delineates broad controlling criteria of perspective and vision and the latter modifies, supplements, and corrects such criteria (sometimes even supplanting obsolescent "versions"). Community and personal judgment are collateral sources of wisdom alongside Scripture, and only in the most extreme cases of conflict (such as the German situation in 1934) is Scripture to have the deciding vote. Normally there must be positive incorporation of all three sources.

The third locus is "action." Action, illuminated by mediating wisdom, "implements" and "demonstrates" the fundamental stance. In this part of the book Sellers' profound sympathy with the pragmatism exemplified particularly by Dewey is very apparent and affects his assessment of transcendence in the early Barth, the Social Gospel, natural law, contextualism, and "middle axioms." He finally proposes certain "operating concepts" in relation to personal, social-political, and eschatological action. Three of these are "space-oriented" (corresponding to the traditional doctrines of vocation or calling, the state and other orders of creation, and the kingdom of God) and three are "time-oriented" (corresponding to compromise, kairos, and the "Day of the Lord").

The fourth locus is "fulfillment." This involves the question of realization and therefore corresponds to sanctification and eschatology. After a brief consideration of human finitude, "under-achievement", and sin, Sellers proceeds to argue that both sanctification and eschatology are not so much futuristic as presently operative. Here the necessary conjunction of divine and human action is unqualifiedly affirmed: "Not even the decisive, final act of God is on any different basis from the acts of God we have already been considering, and these come to us in the form of human agency."

Sellers sustains a certain level of generality with notable consistency. Yet confinement to this level has attendant difficulties from which the book does not always escape. To call, as he does, the four loci a simple "checklist" is accurately modest. Assertions without careful demonstration necessarily abound. Something so multifarious as the "twentieth century" is simplistically regarded as speaking with a single voice. The characterization of many important thinkers is too often perfunctory and dubiously selective (this is most conspicuously the case, it seems to me, in the treatment of the Reformers). Similarly, the explication of central affirmations is sometimes regrettably cursory. Great importance is at-

565 - Theological Ethics

tached to "wholeness," for instance, without much careful statement of what it signifies. References to it are usually so cryptic as to be truistic. Notwithstanding such difficulties, we can be grateful to Sellers for what he has accomplished. He has probed with genuine acuity into many of the questions contemporary theological ethics must confront. The result is a constructive undertaking of appreciable importance. Both for what the book does and does not do, it deserves widespread and careful scrutiny. The "outline" is impressive and we can justifiably look forward to its further elucidation.

Gene H. Outka
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey