494 - A Survey of Recent Christian Ethics

A Survey of Recent Christian Ethics
By Edward LeRoy Long, Jr.
New York, Oxford University Press, 1982. 215 pp. $15.95.

Once in a while, a book appears which has the promise for pastors, teachers, and interested lay readers of serving as a compendium for the next decade or more. John MacQuarrie produced such a volume when he wrote Twentieth Century Religious Thought. It classified in an orderly fashion the frontiers of religious and philosophical inquiry for the first sixty years of this century. Another one has now appeared. Edward Long's book takes us through the significant developments in Christian ethics since his Survey of Christian Ethics was published in 1967. A contributor to the field himself, Long is Professor of Christian Ethics and Theology of Culture at Drew University.

In the earlier volume, Long had used a motif pattern for classification and discussion of ideas and authors. He does so again in the first two sections of the new volume, telling us what has become of some of these

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same thinkers and thoughts during the past decade and a half. The newer works of familiar writers--Charles Curran, Arthur Dyck, John MacQuarrie, etc.--are discussed in context. He reminds us of the status of the arguments about deeds and rules, about situational and relational thinking in ethics, a useful, accurate and coherent summary of what most of us had ingested piecemeal.

The first of his sections, entitled "Norms," is devoted to a review of the thinking that has been done in recent years about the fundamental guidelines for ethical reflection. One of the valuable things about his book appears here, and elsewhere, as an evenhanded treatment of the scholars, whatever part of the family tree they may represent. Authors from Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Christian traditions are all represented in his summaries, with the effect that some of their interrelationships and mutual dependencies become clear for the first time. Long himself comes from a mainline Protestant tradition in ethics, but he has been extraordinarily faithful to the ecumenical obligation of the scholar. The net result to the reader is a built-in requirement to take account of positions and perspectives arising from traditions not one's own.

In his second section, "Implementation," the author moves from theological and philosophical underpinnings to institutional and political expressions of ethics. Here again, his inclusive approach is most helpful, for he touches on approaches as divergent as Helmut Thielicke, Carl Henry, and Jacques Ellul, in discussing the social critique inherent in a world-affirming faith.

Every age of the Christian era has experienced its struggles about the proper relationship between church and state, between faith and power. Our own time has seen many versions of that struggle, especially since the wide-reaching influence of Reinhold Niebuhr was felt in the communities both of theologians and of political scientists. Since Niebuhr's day, the field has altered and broadened, so that names like Paul Lehmann, James Gustafson, William Stringfellow, and Johannes Metz all conjure up different images of the relationship between faith and power, none of them towering alone, as did Niebuhr in his prime, but each one contributing significantly to the dialogue. If there is now a plurality of convincing voices speaking to this relationship, it may be because of the inordinate complexity of the political structures by which nations are now trying to express their cultures and reach toward justice. This is one place where the shrinking planet is powerfully present for all of us. Again, Long's summaries do much to equip proper thinking about the mutual obligations of prophet, priest, and king.

A third section, captioned "Moral Agencies," reviews one of the most important developments in ethics in the period under discussion. When Paul Tillich published a set of essays entitled The New Being, his reflections were classified by most of us as philosophical theology rather than ethics. But newness of life is once again being discussed as a proper and productive focus for ethics, as Long points out here. Attention to

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virtue, character, and moral formation has once again begun to claim a place in the discussions of Protestant ethicists, due to the work of writers like James Gustafson and Stanley Hauerwas. As Long points out, these themes were never as neglected in the Catholic community as in the Protestant, so that the work of Bernard Haring, Robert Johann, and Romano Guardini can be understood as the continuation of a tradition rather than a corrective.

Analyses of conscience, as well as some of the recent moral development literature are given attention in this same section, reflecting the influence in ethics dialogue of post-Freudian psychologists, notably Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget. Another kind of catholicity, by the way, permits Long to move outside the circle of professional theologians to include Karl Menninger's worthy study of a decade ago, Whatever Became of Sin?

It is rather a shame that Long's book was published in the same year as Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, for it would have been very interesting to see how he would have woven her fundamental insights into the discussion of moral agencies. That important study of the fundamental differences between characteristically male and female approaches to moral dilemmas is bound to have a decisive impact on future discussions of moral development in the community of Christian ethicists.

The final section of Long's compendium is titled "New Frameworks," an accurate subtitle for the potpourri of special settings in which some of the most interesting ethical reflections are being done these days. "Professional Ethics" has come to be the term describing one of these settings: ethics, that is, which reflects on vocational activity and obligation, whether in law, medicine, education, business, or public policy. Interestingly, it is only in the footnotes to this chapter that the Hastings Institute is mentioned. Long's format depends upon authors, but there have been conclaves and institutions which have changed the course of ethical discussions as well. Certainly, the Hastings Institute has been one of these. Perhaps a survey such as Long's should have included some treatment of the colloquies which have sparked new departures in the field.

Long's chapter on Liberation Theology must have been a hard one to write, since it brings together the disparate ethical interests that have been voiced under the common rubric of Liberation Theology. But Black, Third World, and Feminist writers are given very clarifying treatment, and their agendas are properly represented as related but distinct.

The final chapter deals with the emerging interest in comparative religious ethics that has been seeded by David Little, Sumner Twiss, and James Smurl, among others. These writers have set a difficult task for themselves: the discovery of those ethical threads that weave a fabric of common human concern across divergent cultures. Christian ethics has been so much a matter of reflecting on the specific obligations and

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motives that arise, in the final analysis, from specific encounters with the sacred as Christianly understood, that comparative ethics is driven to question and define the most basic terms in the dialogue. The book ends, thus, with Christianity's outward reach toward other faith perspectives in its struggle to understand what God invites and requires of us who work out our human vocation in the most perilous of times.

Richard P. Unsworth
Northfield Mount Hermon School
Northfield, Massachusetts