Church and Ethical Orientation

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 1999 by Werner Schwartz

Moral Formation in the People of God

Moral formation as a key concept in recent ecumenical texts

When the World Council of Churches was formed in 1948, it brought together two movements whose decades-long efforts for the unity of the churches had had some initial visible results: the Faith and Order movement, devoted to theological study through conversation among the churches, and the Life and Work movement, which arose out of the awareness that the great ethical issues of the day challenged the churches to common action. Both movements have now worked for half a century under the umbrella of the World Council of Churches. Each has maintained its focal points -- doctrine and life, dogmatics and ethics, faith and action -- and from time to time old tensions have resurfaced.

From 1992 to 1996 the WCC carded out a study which brought these two streams into conversation: the study on the relationship of ecclesiology and ethics.(1) The study took up two earlier successful examples of ecumenical endeavour -- the convergence text on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry and the conciliar process for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation -- which had found broad support in the churches of the ecumenical movement. Each represents one of the two streams mentioned above which led to the formation of the WCC.(2)

The Ecclesiology and Ethics study sought to understand the church in its role as a community which passes on moral attitudes and guides moral behaviour -- a "moral community" -- and thus to see doctrine and life, faith and action, as bound together. At the same time it tried to make clear to the churches in the ecumenical movement that the moral imperative of the gospel is directed not only to the acts of individual Christians but also to the common action of the church in the conflictual moral situations of the world today.

In the course of this study, discussion came increasingly to focus on the church's role in "moral formation" -- that is, the question of how in the life of the church and in the life of individual Christians attitudes and conduct are shaped in such a way that one can speak of moral behaviour. A whole cluster of processes is covered by this concept of "moral formation". That makes it somewhat ambiguous, but quite rightly leaves the process of building up a moral orientation open to many individual partial processes of formation and development. The positing of the counter-concept of "moral malformation" -- that is, the shaping of a false, unjust, reprehensible "morality" -- shows how open the concept of "moral formation" is and what relevance it has.

It is clear that what this is about is the orientation and the behaviour of Christians, the members of the churches, and the orientation and ethical engagement of the church and of the churches. Furthermore, it is about the process of cultivating those orientations which lead to and support responsible behaviour. The Christian faith, it is believed, should manifest visible consequences precisely in the realm of moral actions, and only to the extent that it does so is it seriously Christian faith. Here there are echoes of the discourse about "orthopraxis" alongside "orthodoxy" and of the conviction that heresy may consist of false action as well as false belief. And ecclesial communion should be expressed in common witness in word and deed towards the world to which God's salvation is directed. The church owes the world not only a common witness to the word, but also common action against all injustice, strife and destruction of the means of life.

Thus arises the enquiry into the "moral formation" of the church and of all believers -- into a unity, a commitment and an obedience which are costly and invite human effort.

The shaping of moral behaviour

This summary of these ecumenical texts has prompted a closer investigation of the processes in which moral orientations are shaped in young people as they grow up and throughout the course of human life. This will not be pursued primarily along the lines of psychological research into the development of morality in childhood, although that does provide a useful approach to questions of practical moral education in secular and religious contexts. After the "pre-conventional" stage, which involves obedience or avoidance of punishment and advantage to the individual, perhaps in relation to influential persons in his or her environment, and the "conventional" stage, which is oriented to interpersonal expectations and the preservation of the social system, there follows, according to the theory, the stage of "post-conventional" morality, which is related to generally applicable principles and universals of unrestricted application.

The schema of moral development in children is readily accepted in psychology and philosophy (and in practical theology with reference to questions about moral education in religious pedagogy). It accepts a hierarchy of stages of maturity and a development to ever-greater maturity, until reaching the stage of universalizable principles, on which moral philosophy has concentrated from the time of the ancient Greeks up to analytical ethics, with its focus on reconstructing the schemas for grounding ethical judgments and actions.