Book reviews -- Paul Ramsey's Political Ethics by David Attwood / Tragedy, Tradition, Transformation: The Ethics of Paul Ramsey by D. Stephen Long

Theology Today, Oct 1995 by Stackhouse, Max L

Paul Ramsey's Political Ehtics

By David Attwood

Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 1992. 258 pp. $19.95.

Tragedy, Tradition, Transformatism: The Ethics of Paul Ramsey

By D. Stephen Long

Boulder, Westview, 1993. 221 pp. $49.95.

Paul Ramsey was a highly regarded professor of religion at Princeton University for many years. He was known to ethicists first of all for his challenges to certain key directions in the field during the 1960s. A southern Methodist, he was deeply influenced by the Niebuhr brothers and later developed also an affinity both to the Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards and to aspects of traditional Roman Catholic moral philosophy.

He was among the first, and the sharpest, critics of "relationalism" as it developed in the "personalist Methodists" such as Edgar Brightman and Albert Knudsen, of "situationalism" as it appeared among the "liberal Anglicans" such as J. A. T. Robinson and Joseph Fletcher, and of the more radical "contextualism" as it appeared in the "progressive Presbyterians" such as Paul Lehmann and Richard Shaull. Indeed, in the early 1960s, he announced his opposition to a number of ecumenical church statements that, in his view, relied too much on these and related points of view. They were, in his perspective, unbiblical, unrealistic, and antiintellectual--destructive of Christian ethics in the long run.

While these adversarial postures made him less than fully welcome in ecumenical circles, Ramsey's restless mind pressed him in new directions. He turned his attention to the emerging questions of abortion ethics and to a series of issues having to do with questions of "just war" during the debates about Vietnam and the revolutionary movements as many former colonies faced decolonialization. His critiques of certain church views on these issues attracted a number of scholars to him, some from among those frozen out of "liberal" theological circles, but more from those areas of government and professional life who, although often quite "liberal" themselves, thought theology and the church ought to have more to say about moral issues than what they already knew based on the situations, relationships, and contexts where they worked, or were specialists. They were after principles by which to critique and transform these situations, relationships, and contexts.

These two volumes treat many of these themes in Paul Ramsey's life and thought in considerable detail and testify to continued and perhaps increased interest in Ramsey's contributions. Stephen Long, formerly of Duke University Divinity School and now at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, reviews the debates between the ethical conservatives such as Ramsey and the postmodernist "anti-liberals" as already much pursued by Stanley Hauerwas, who arranged to have the Ramsey papers placed at Duke. Long is critically indebted to Hauerwas' view of many matters throughout.

David Attwood, of Trinity College, Bristol, offers a more complete and systematic analysis, drawing from some of Ramsey's best interpreters-the noted Augustinian scholar of ethics Oliver O'Donovan, the ecumenical theological ethicist James Gustafson, and perhaps a dozen major scholars not mentioned in the Long volume. Attwood's study examines those areas where Ramsey draws on the longer and deeper Christian tradition to engage issues ranging from theology in a post-Barthian era to the morality of the Gulf War to the changing reputation of human selfhood. Attwood's work is of ongoing importance for Ramsey studies and for the discipline of Christian ethics generally.