469 - Christian Ethics in the Protestant Tradition

Christian Ethics in the Protestant Tradition
By Waldo Beach
Atlanta, John Knox, 1988, 149 pp. $9.95.

Beach's text is admittedly a cursory survey of the field, theology, and issues of Christian ethics. The brevity combined

470 - Christian Ethics in the Protestant Tradition

with the survey nature suggests its usefulness for some church study groups or as one of several texts for a college course. It probably is not suitable as a text book for a seminary course as the issues are not probed very deeply. Beach's conclusions are wise, but there is insufficient treatment of the issues for the reader to know the alternatives or how Beach arrived at his own fair judgments.

The book is informed by the historical sources of Christian ethics presented so well by himself and his teacher H. Richard Niebuhr in Christian Ethics. But the Protestant tradition from which his ethics derives is not examined rigorously. On reading the book one wonders: What are the strengths or problems of the "Protestant Tradition?" The constructive theological part of the book is informed by H. Richard Niebuhr's response ethics in many places and by Reinhold Niebuhr in the discussion of love and justice.

Professor Beach emphasizes in the opening chapter the secular meaning of American culture. He finds it dominated by capitalism, scientism, and Americanism which all, in some cases, take over the roles traditionally associated with religion. Christian ethics which supposedly stands between theology and social analysis is dependent, in his view, on the theological affirmations. The book moves from secular culture, to the field of Christian ethics, theological affirmations, love and justice, and then to applied ethics. Authentic Christianity is in Beach's perspective a minority movement and applied ethics seems to be the development of that minority's preferred perspective on the issues surveyed from sex, through economy, to nuclear weapons.

Ethics professors are looking for an acceptable text. They do not agree how one should be written. This one may have come from the professor's notes for a survey course. The survey has a use, but it needs to be supplemented by books, or articles, or case studies which allow for further exploration. How could the book have achieved more? Perhaps a Protestant critique of American culture rather than a survey of the dominance of secularism could have set the stage for a more protesting ethic than the applied ethics which characterize the book. If the book is attempting, by beginning with secularism, to set the stage for Christian ethics as a response, then the secularism itself needs to be addressed by a theological-ethical critique. Otherwise, the Americanism so dominates the method that the applied ethics do not get beyond reporting on dilemmas and asking for liberal reforms. This is to suggest that for Protestant ethics to be strongly protesting it must utilize more of the biblical sense of people in community and a sense of what God has done for them. If the Ten Commandments start with a proclamation that God liberates a people from bondage in Egypt, it would seem that applied Protestant ethics need to start with the signs of God's liberating action in our world even as these threaten North American secularism.

Ronald H. Stone
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Pittsburgh, Pa.