Ecclesiology and Ethics

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Arne Rasmusson

Others have taken this further, perhaps further than Yoder would have liked. For example, philosopher Nancey Murphy and scientist George Ellis seek in their ambitious book On the Moral Nature of the Universe to integrate natural science, social theory, ethics and (primarily) Yoder's theology, and demonstrate its empirical meaningfulness and fruitfulness.(24) Similarly, Hauerwas's work may be understood as an example of what happens when one tries to read American liberal society in the light of Christian convictions. "If I am anything, I am a `rationalist'," Hauerwas writes, "just to the extent I have tried to show that Christian convictions do in fact provide the skills necessary to help us see the world as it is."(25)

Milbank and some other theologians have recently named their approach "radical Orthodoxy", and in a programmatic text they say that they are attempting

   to reclaim the world by situating its concerns and activities within a
   theological framework. Not simply returning in nostalgia to the pre-modern,
   it visits sites in which secularism has invested heavily -- aesthetics,
   politics, sex, the body, personhood, visibility, space -- and resituates
   them from a Christian standpoint; that is, in terms of the Trinity,
   Christology, the church and the eucharist.(26)

The most influential example of this is Milbank's Theology and Social Theory, in which he shows how the emergence of a secular domain is closely related to the rise of the absolute state and the new conception of the secular sphere as the space for pure power, pure instrumentality. This is often described not as a specific and contingent cultural development, but as a liberation of the natural -- which means that the secular is understood as the natural. Milbank argues that the secular, far from being "natural", is in fact historically constituted and thus contingent. And it is precisely by imagining politics as a sphere of pure power that the new discipline of political science is given an object to study.

The point is that political science, sociology and economics are not only empirical disciplines but also carriers of political, moral and theological understandings of reality. They represent the self-description of modernity, the theology of modernity and its main actor, the nation-state. If this is correct, then sociology or political science cannot depict "reality" in a neutral way? For theology to build on sociology, understood as dispassionate analysis, is to betray its own task. Theology can of course learn much from sociology, but it cannot give sociology or any other social discipline a privileged position.

Again, this is important, because what is understood as possible, as "realism", depends on how one sees the world, which in turn is related to one's communal practice. An alternative discourse-practice helps the moral imagination and vice versa.(28) This makes ecclesiology so theologically important. Therefore, Milbank can say that "theology has to reconceive itself as a kind of `Christian sociology': that is to say, as the explication of a socio-linguistic practice, or as the constant re-narration of this practice as it has historically developed."(29) An alternative socio-linguistic practice provides possibilities to see the world from another perspective. For Milbank this includes a counter-history that critically rereads history with the help of the perspective and the categories provided by the narrative of Jesus Christ and its continuation in the church. This requires a counter-ethics, which describes the practice of the church in its continuity and discontinuity with its ancient and modern context. Milbank deals, among other things, with the Christian understanding of love and forgiveness, the reconciliation of difference and virtue, and the conviction that peace, not violence, is the first and final reality. Such a rereading of history and such a counter-ethics involves a counter-ontology, a trinitarian ontology or metaphysics of the cross of Christ which makes peace final. This gives Milbank a perspective from which he can deconstruct the agonistic ontologies that permeate both modern and post-modern thought.(30)