Ecclesiology and Ethics

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Arne Rasmusson

However, this emphasis on the value of diversity should not be construed as a kind of tolerance rooted in scepticism about moral, religious or other truth claims or in claims about the equal value of all such beliefs. There are moral heresies, and these are found not only outside the church. The church that forms people can also malform them, to use an expression from the WCC report.(21) But while any practice of ecclesial formation is full of risks, from the perspective of this type of ecclesial ethics, the answer to ecclesial malformation is not the liberal language and practice of tolerance, but the Christian understanding and practice of sin and forgiveness, the importance of internal prophetic criticism, and the love that looks for what is best for one's sister and brother.

Ecclesial moral discernment is then more a social process than a theoretical enterprise, although critical reflection is of course a crucial part of the process. Ethical, theological and hermeneutical theories and methods cannot take the place of the social process, nor can they warrant the process afterwards. To put it starkly, Yoder and Hauerwas place "church" where most academics place "theory", "epistemology" or "hermeneutics". This ecclesial process is complex, taking place on many different levels, from the personal, through the local churches and various higher levels, to the universal church.

There is another sense in which discernment is not primarily a theoretical process. The skills of discernment can be described as a virtue. They require moral training. This is why Hauerwas talks about the importance of saints for ethics. We learn more from, say, a Desmond Tutu than from moral theorists. Of course, there is a dialectical relationship, but the theorists are more dependent on the saints than vice versa.

This approach obviously stands in contrast to the normal view of ethics as a sort of decision theory. To be able to make the right moral decision one must learn a method for analyzing ethical dilemmas and applying relevant principles. In principle, this is a method anyone can use: the ethicist is, in this sense, exchangeable. By contrast, in an ecclesial ethical reflection the moral formation of the community and its individual members are part of the discernment process.

A central component of this process is that ethics is first of all a question of learning to see rightly. We live in the world we see; therefore, how we see reality is all important. And learning to see rightly is not only an epistemological but also a moral question. From a Christian perspective one learns to describe Christianity by being initiated into the communal Christian faith-practice, which forms understanding, dispositions and emotions. This happens through participation in worship, through learning the categories and narratives of the Christian faith, through taking part in the common practical life of the community, for example the service of others.

This conflicts with the assumption that ethical issues are out there for everyone to see, that descriptions are more or less neutral facts that have to be related to one's values. Consider the example of a Hamas activist blowing up an Israeli bus. Israelis describe this as terrorism, Hamas as self-defence against an occupying power. The very words "terrorism" and "self-defence" are amalgams of the descriptive and the normative. So are words like "courage", "faithfulness", "treachery", "brutality" -- words that constitute our moral language. Moreover, behind the Israeli and Hamas descriptions lie radically different stories and symbolic worlds. The two sides see political reality in radically different ways, and they therefore live in different worlds. Neither a utilitarian nor a Kantian analysis helps here, nor is the situation clarified by an ethical method that begins with some universal value such as justice or human dignity. Both sides agree that justice should be done, but what justice is depends on which world they see.