Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, The

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2006 by Sedgwick, Timothy F

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics. Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells. Oxford and Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. xiii 510 pp. $124.95 (cloth).

"Appropriate" is the word that may best describe the thirty-six essays in this collection. On the one hand, they make for an appropriate companion to Christian ethics. The essays are fitting as they offer theological accounts of Christian practices. On the other hand, the essays as a whole also seek to appropriate Christian ethics, which is to say, they seek to take possession of Christian ethics and make it their own.

As Hauerwas and Wells say in one of the four introductory essays on "Studying Ethics through Worship," "theological ethics is a discipline that reflects on the practices of the Church, seeking to understand how those practices shape the character of Christians" (p. 37). More specifically, the task is "to help Christians remember that their lives are shaped by story-determined practices that make all that they do and do not do intelligible" (p. 46). As Michael Cartwright's concluding essay on witness notes, the underlying concern is that "particular Christian communities produce and sustain the kind of witness to God in which their practices of discipleship can serve as credible signs of God's reconciling work in the world" (p. 483).

The essays themselves are loosely organized around five foci that reflect eucharistie worship: (1) the worship community as gathered, as the ecdesia; (2) reencountering the story of Scripture and the creeds; (3) being embodied as given in prayer, baptism, and eucharist; (4) reenacting the story as matters of offering, worship, remembering, communion, silence, thanksgiving, and washing of feet; and (5) being commissioned as blessing, in having children, and as witness.

Most of the essays move from scriptural, historical, and contemporary accounts to contemporary reflections. Outstanding in this regard are John Berkman on penitence and punishment (chap. 8); Jim Fodor on the public reading of Scripture (chap. 12); Daniel M. Bell on justice (chap. 14); Kelly S. Johnson on corporate prayer (chap. 17); R. R. Reno on work (chap. 24); Gerald W. Schlaback on the use of lethal force and Christian pacifism (chap. 27); Joel James Shuman on homosexuality (chap. 30); Stephen Fowl on blessing (chap. 34); and Joseph L. Mangina on conception, children, and family (chap. 35). Other essays, often personally written, offer refreshing probes, for example, Amy Laura Hall on the need for reconstructing male identity "for the complicated tasks of incarnate grace" that have been women's work (chap. 7); David Matzko McCarthy on the end of marriage as the forming of the "everyday life of household management, common work, companionship, and training in neighborly love" (chap. 21); Hans S. Reinders on parenting the mentally disabled (chap. 32); Mark Thiessen Nation on the washing of feet (chap. 33); and Michael G. Cartwright on Christian witness as a way of life (chap. 36).

While Hauerwas and Wells claim that "worship, especially the Eucharist, offers a lens through which to see life" (p. 9), few essays actually explore the history and practice of liturgical worship or engage those who have sought to assess those practices in terms of cultural assumptions as well as theological claims. In this regard it is noteworthy that the four introductory essays by Hauerwas and Wells make no mention of the work done over the last sixty years focusing on worship and the practices that form a way of life-in liturgical studies and in liturgical theology (from Dom Gregory Dix to Aidan Kavanagh, David Power, and Gordon Lathrop), in sacramental theology (whether Roman Catholic beginning with Edward Schillebeeckx or that of the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann), and in Christian ethics (especially that of Orthodox ethicist Vigen Guroian).

Hauerwas and Wells's response regarding the lack of a critical assessment of their work in relationship to that of others might well be to say that they are primarily concerned to be doing Christian ethics. In this sense these essays are appropriate companions to Christian ethics. (Apart from the price of the volume, selected essays would be most usefully included, for example, in an introductory course on Christian ethics.) But read alone, these essays hide the assumptions that govern their thought and specifically the theology that determines their normative reading of worship and the Christian life. In turn, this obscures whether and in what sense this work should be understood as "a milestone for Christians" as it "represents a new turn not only for Christian ethics, but also for the way Christians learn to live in that time often identified as 'late modernity'" (p. xiii).

In fact, Hauerwas and Wells and most of the authors in this volume begin with theological claims that are read off of a particular construal of Scripture and understood as proclaimed, embodied, and enacted in worship. The underlying biblical theology is assumed. Read alone, the collection appropriates Christian ethics into itself and narrows the scope of Christian ethics by suggesting that the Christian story is one thing, celebrated in worship, from which flows a way of life. Any critical understanding and assessment of the differentiation and difference in the Christian tradition is lost from view. This indicates why this volume is an appropriate companion but not itself a reference or introduction to Christian ethics. For that see the next volume published in the Blackwell series, William Schweiker, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).