Ethics in our time

HAUERWAS: Well, Reinhold Niebuhr was so much a creature of ecclesial practices that he didn't have to give attention to the church. Oftentimes you don't give an account of that which is closest to you. And I think his generation could continue to draw on vibrant Protestant practices in a way that ours can't.

We now live in a time without vibrant ecclesial practices. I see this situation as a great opportunity for social and political witness. I tell my students who are preparing for ministry that they can have an extraordinary political witness if they do just three things as pastors: never perform a wedding ceremony for anyone who just comes in off the street, never bury anyone in a funeral home, and never allow the American flag into the sanctuary. If they try to discipline a congregation to follow those simple Christian practices, if they insist on making a distinctive Christian witness in those areas of life, then they will find they have an extraordinary political task on their hands.

LOVIN: I've known pastors who have done those kinds of things, and they have not exactly received an enthusiastic reception. However, I would phrase the challenge this way: We are in a situation in which pastors need to walk a fine line between, on the one hand, a culture that increasingly has no sense of its Christian roots and, on the other hand, a church that is tempted to isolate itself from the culture and become a museum-piece type of Christianity.

TOWNES: Regarding the role of the church in ethics, I have to say that I see more and more seminary students who have not been formed in a religious tradition. Often they have had a profound experience in a religious community and then end up in seminary, but they are still unformed by the church in a lot of ways. That makes walking the fine line Robin is talking about even more difficult, because in four years of seminary you can't get the resources you need to walk that line.

I say this against the backdrop of my own experience growing up in the black church, and of my experience having watched womanist theology unfold in the black church. This theology has not been done by way of pronouncements from on high. Most of our work is done fairly quietly in local churches with women's groups. When an author comes out with a book, it's often the result of talking to groups of women over numbers of years. I may not even use the term womanist when I talk to a church group. Our method is to try to figure out a problem together, and to ask people what the church isn't doing and what it should be doing.

My point is that formation in the black church has been important to the way I use my training in ethics. And one of the things that we've probably not done well enough as Christian ethicists is enter into dialogue with the church.

LOVIN: The disconnection that I see is not so much between the seminary and the church as between the intellectual life of the seminary and the life of the church. It's relatively easy to hire faculty in the practical areas of the seminary curriculum who contribute in an important way to theological reflection in the churches. The harder task is to engage the churches with the fundamental theological questions.