Ecclesiology and Ethics

The Difficulties of Ecclesial Moral Reflection

The inter-relation between ecclesiology and ethics has been a central ecumenical concern of recent years. The World Council of Churches' study of this subject during the 1990s had as its background an attempt to heal the long-standing division between two historic streams of the ecumenical movement -- Faith and Order, and Life and Work. In other words, it sought to integrate the questions of justice, peace and care of creation with the quest for visible unity. Two "overarching convictions" guided this study: (1) "that ethical reflection and action ... are intrinsic to the nature and life of the church"; and (2) "that ecclesiology and Christian ethics must stay in close dialogue, each honouring and learning from the distinctive language and thought forms of the other".(1)

The idea of a close relationship between ecclesiology and ethics is related to developments in contemporary theology and ethics. The wider context of the WCC report is formed by historical, political, social and cultural changes which have been important for church and theology in the late 20th century. This article deals with that broader context. I shall begin by discussing the historical and political conditions that created the modern discipline of ethics, including Christian ethics, and gave it a special form which has made the idea of an ecclesial ethics difficult. Much of the recent concern with ecclesiology and ethics is an attempt to liberate Christian ethics from this captivity to the "modern ethical project".(2) In the second part, I will outline some basic characteristics of ecclesial moral reflection, as developed by some of its most influential and controversial proponents, especially John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank. The clear contrast between their work and the "modern ethical project", both in substance and form, has elicited a good deal of criticism; and in the third part I will discuss one example of this critique, in order to clarify some of the difficult issues that an ecclesial ethical reflection encounters.

The emergence of the nation-state and the rise of modern ethics

Modern thought tends to see religion as one sphere of society, alongside politics, economics, science, family, morality and so on. Moreover, the religious sphere is primarily situated in the "private" part of society. This has to do both with the general differentiation process of modern society and the rise of the modern nation-state, although some of its sources can be traced back much further.(3) Here I want only to point to the correlation between the modern privatized understanding of religion and the emergence of the modern state's claim to absolute sovereignty.(4) To make people into Germans or French or Swedes, for whom their own nation-state is sovereign and their own nationality is primary, other particular and traditional identities and loyalties -- for example, to region, kin, estate or church -- had to be made secondary to the state. The centralization of power in the absolutist state, with its struggle against the public power of the church, was a necessary step in the formation of modern nation-states. As Ernst Troeltsch writes:

   Absolutism fused the peoples into nations and imbued them with this feeling
   for the state. But by levelling the old social structure based on states,
   and by radiating a secular and rationalistic spirit, absolutism ended by
   pulverizing the peoples into individuals.(5)

This intimate connection between the supremacy of the nation-state and the autonomy of the individual demonstrates the close relationship between liberal theory and the emergence of the nation-state. By reducing the person to an abstract individual in the name of freedom, liberal philosophy gave legitimacy to the struggle of the state against alternative loyalties and especially the church. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes:

   "Man as such" was, of course, a code name for a human being subordinated
   to, and moved by, one power only -- the legislating power of the state;
   while the emancipation that had to be performed so that "the essence" could
   shine in all its pristine purity stood for the destruction or
   neutralization of all pouvoirs intermediaires -- "particularizing" powers
   sabotaging the job the "universalizing" power of the modern state strove to
   perform.(6)

So if the state is to have supremacy, religion must be privatized. William Cavanaugh has tried to show how the modern concept of religion as a sort of universal human impulse is an outgrowth of this.(7) When religion becomes universal in this way, it also becomes separated from its particular existence in the church and is made into something inner. Its social and institutional forms are increasingly seen as particular external expressions of a universally present inner reality. At the end of the 17th century another change occurs: religion comes increasingly to be seen as a system of beliefs. In this process, Protestantism especially changed its self-understanding from a socio-theological practice that could not be distinguished from its bodily and social manifestation in the church to a set of basically private and subjective convictions and experiences which individuals have.