Theology Today - Vol 25, No. 3 - October 1968 - ARTICLE

366 - Critique: I

I REJOICE in Charles West's saying: "The claim to have either a universal system of morality and truth, or to have the only method whereby truth may be discovered and powers balanced in the interest of greater justice, is not only mistaken, it is hypocritical." This is the accent of the new theology and the new morality. But does West really mean it? Do we agree with him? I do. A Christian situationist or contextualist sees no point in embracing either gradualism or revolution in a doctrinaire way. We can follow either method, as called for: sometimes forgiveness and reconciliation, sometimes death and resurrection.

West suggests that "life" has two orientations-freedom and hope for development, or frustration and hope for revolution. Surely we can accept his opinion that the first, the liberal or gradualist view of social action, is by now chastened as to its earlier notions of automaticity and inevitability, as well as his suggestion that the radical or revolutionary view is no longer naive about its ability to preserve such human values as personal freedom and creativity. The latter was dramatized in Czechoslovakia's recent metanoia. But granted that these two strategies are in conflict in theological ethics, can we cite any evidence that theology "has made its contribution to both of them"? It has been affected by them, but has it affected them? I think it would come as a surprise to most technological humanists to be told that their outlook is "in no small measure due to the interaction" of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Does West want a theological social-ethics which is not pragmatic? This is the meaning (is it not?) of his complaint that at Geneva we asked theologians for a preamble to our analysis of political and economic and social problems. Is anything else possible? Christians and non-Christians can and do call for the same value alternatives in social policy. David Read was quoted in Time (April 12, 1968) as saying that Bertrand Russell and the Archbishop of Canterbury

Joseph F. Fletcher is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Christian Ethics at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass. He is the author of Situation Ethics (1966) and Moral Responsibility (1967).

367 - Critique: I

could take the same line on housing policy. Their differences would be in motivation and ultimate hopes-that's all.

Like Reinhold Niebuhr, I too have "lost contact with the proletarian revolution." But I see no reason to assign divine grace to either democratic gradualism or revolutionary overthrow. Can we agree that both strategies may be channels of love, which is all that "grace" means as far as I am concerned? Whichever one most meets the need of justice (distributed love) in any time or place is graceful.

I am not sure that West is correct in saying the Bible asserts the hiddenness of God. True, Isaiah 45: 15 does, and let's add 55: 8-9. But as a whole the Bible reveals him-or supposes it does. That's the hermeneutic hang-up. Still, West is right to say that men no longer see God as "an object of which certain attributes can be predicated and verified." That God is as dead as the God of the gaps. God as the answer to the cognitive and ethical problems is gone. But given West's recognition of the absconsum, what can he mean by saying that the "One who acted in biblical history" is God?

Let us be thankful that West reinterprets the law righteousness of Torah as a matter of style or stance and not as an ethical system. He calls legalism idolatrous, and properly so. But does he think the people of the covenant have ever wanted or tried to shun that idol? I don't. Any assertion of situation ethics or situation theology or situation evangelism is at once met with both untutored and sophisticated outcries on behalf of intrinsic and eternal truths and morals.

How can West reject doctrinaire views of social change and still say, with Geneva, that prophetic action "involves the church in ideology formation," calling this the "central task" of Christian ethics? This I would challenge directly. No! No ideology. One cannot abandon the "ontocratic conscience"-as van Leeuwen calls it-ruled by some objective moral order (natural or divine), and yet also embrace a prefabricated social model. I am ready to allow West what Karl Mannheim called a total ideology or worldview (such as the Christian eschatology) but not a particular ideology, i.e., a belief-system about truth and right in human acts and social policy within history (such as capitalism or socialism). And as we know, people holding a given total ideology often endorse contradictory particular ideologies. It's wiser to forget ideology, doctrinaire models, and isms of any kind. Luther's logic was not "ideologe fortiter" but rather to bravely refuse to construct social gospels of

368 - Critique: I

any kind. The rebellion of young people today, with spokesmen like Rudolf Dutschke, recently gunned down in Berlin, is moral-not ideological.

In the end, we are brought closer together when West says, "As there is no absolute structure, so there is no absolute method, neither a pragmatic method . . . nor a revolutionary method . . ." But not close enough. In the first place, on his own terms the antinomy for revolution is liberal or gradualist, not pragmatic. A revolutionary can be pragmatic, i.e., non-ideological and non-doctrinaire. Pragmatism is the correct method or strategy. All structures and plans are, in West's word, paroikia or temporary "fittings" to situations. In American political rhetoric the term "pragmatic" is heard on all hands. However, pragmatism is a method-theory in search of a value-theory (not a system-theory). It says that what works is what is true and what is good. But of itself it cannot answer the question: "Work to what end?" or "Work for the sake of what?" This is where Christian ethics may get or keep its foot in the door.