or the moment the battle seems to have been largely won. Mostexponent of Christian ethics today seem to agree that moralityhas a firm communitarian basis. The understanding of Christianethics which was often held a generation ago - that it is a disciplineconcerned primarily with individual moral decision-making - seemsto have been routed. The outrageous individualistic paradigms offeredby ’situation ethicists’ are now a dim memory. Most agree that it isvirtue and character within Christian communities that should be themain concern of Christian ethics. There is even a new confidencewithin Christian ethics. After decades of being patronized by moralphilosophy, Christian ethicists have become distinctly more apologeticand polemical. Christian ethicists also express increasing scepticismabout the ability of moral philosophers to be able to resolve dilemmaswith universally convincing rational arguments. In short, the keycontentions of After Virtue have triumphed.
There is even a symmetry between this triumph and the popularview of the churches. Despite the fact that only one in ten people inBritain are in church on a typical Sunday and that two-thirds of thepopulation never goes to church at all, there still seems to be awidespread popular belief that ’religion’ and perhaps even religiousinstitutions are important for the maintenance of morality. Moralbehaviour in society is thought to be dependent upon an over-spillfrom ’religion’. It is not too important what a person’s religious beliefsactually are, provided she does have some. That alone is sufficient toensure decent, moral behaviour. Whilst few theologians would expressthis link between morality and faith so crudely, they increasinglyargue that moral virtue is a product of moral communities and that atranscendent faith offers a more secure foundation for suchcommunities than does secularism. It is precisely these links -between morality and faith, between morality and communities, and
between communities and faith - that have encouraged the newboldness in Christian ethics. Maclntyre teases his fellow moralphilosophers about their interminable and unresolvable moral conflictsunless they too make such links. Naturally many Christian ethicistshave been delighted. Now it is our turn to taunt secular, atomistic,individualistic liberalism. Without faith and without faith communitiessuch liberalism is morally bankrupt. Once deconstructed this liberalismturns out to be a creed - an undeclared faith - masquerading ascommon sense or even as empiricism and it is a creed which is unableto justify or resolve its own moral claims.
In this paper I intend to show that the picture is actually morecomplicated than all of this might suggest, although a fuller accountwill have to wait for a later study. Whilst I am convinced by the generalthrust of post-MacIntyre Christian ethics, I also believe that it oftenunderestimates some of the theological and sociological problemsinvolved. It tends to produce a theological understanding of churchesas moral communities which underestimates the synchronic anddiachronic plurality of Christian resources. In addition it tends toproduce a picture of churches as moral communities which fits ill theirsocial reality. It can also treat the ’secular’ world as being distinctlymore secular than it actually is. The challenge I believe is to find waysof expressing Christian distinctiveness which do not exaggerate thetheological and sociological distinctiveness of churches as moralcommunities. As yet this is a challenge which has occupied theattention of too few Christian ethicists. Making grand claims is just tooeasy. Making claims which actually fit the ambiguities of churchesand society is much more difficult.There are three levels at which the links between Christian ethics and
moral communities can be explored. In sociological language these arethe levels of legitimation, socialization and institutionalization. In moretheological terms they concern the issues of justification and apologetics,Christian nurture and formation, and ecclesiology. Each of these levelsraises the issue of plurality as a dominant problem and each requires adifferent range of methodological skills. An adequate understanding ofChristian ethics and moral communities requires an inter-disciplinaryapproach. A fundamental weakness of the literature that takes thisapproach to Christian ethics seriously is that it gives inadequate attentionto each of these three levels. Perhaps this can be illustrated by lookingbriefly at George Lindbeck’s understanding of theology and morality.It has been a powerful influence on Stanley Hauerwas and otherswithin Christian ethics.
Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine has rapidly become a seminal textin the United States. What he offers is a very remarkable cultural-
linguistic understanding of the nature of doctrine which he believesis particularly suitable for a post-liberal age. The Nature of Doctrine issimultaneously a theological critique of secularism, a theological
response to Wittgenstein and a radical statement of the distinctivenessof Christian (and indeed religious) faith and morality. All of this is aconsiderable achievement for so short a book.
Lindbeck distinguishes three ’ideal types’ of theological approach.The first he depicts as the cognitive-propositional approach whichsees doctrines as informative propositions to be assessed cognitively.Following the logic of this approach Christian ethics is the disciplinethat derives moral positions from doctrinal propositions. It is thebusiness of the systematic theologian to establish a normative set oforthodox beliefs and it is the business of the moral theologian to workout the ethical consequences of these beliefs once established. Thesecond he depicts as experiential-expressive which, in contrast, seesdoctrines as less to do with cognition and more to do with feelings andinner experience. On this approach theology often takes on a directlymoral function. Within some liberal and existentialist constructionsdoctrines and moral prescriptions are virtually identical. The thirdideal type Lindbeck depicts as cultural-linguistic. According to thistheology, and indeed religion in general, is more like a language anda culture. It belongs essentially to communities which generate theirown rules of discourse and morality. If the first type is characteristicof classical theology and the second of liberal theology, then the thirdis the type that Lindbeck believes is most appropriate for a post-liberalsociety in which the assumptions of a common secular rationality nolonger prevail.Each of these types represents a distinct way of doing theology
’embedded in a conceptual framework so comprehensive that it
shapes its own criteria of adequacy’.
’What propositionalists with their stress on unchanging truth andfalsity regard as faithful, applicable, and intelligible is likely to bedismissed as dead orthodoxy by liberal experiential-expressivists.Conversely, the liberal claim that change and pluralism in religiousexpression are necessary for intelligibility, applicability, and faithfulnessis attacked by the propositionally orthodox as an irrationally relativisticand practically self-defeating betrayal of the faith. A postliberal mightpropose to overcome this polarization between tradition and innovationby a distinction between the abiding doctrinal grammar and variabletheological vocabulary, but this proposal appears from otherperspectives as the worst of two worlds rather than the best of both.&dquo;
This helpful distinction does indeed clarify some of the mutualmisunderstandings that often characterize theology in general andChristian ethics in particular. Seen as ’ideal types’ these three
1 George A. Lmdbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age,Westminster Press, Philadelphia, and SPCK, London, 1984, p. 113.
approaches to theology clearly generate very different agendas andthey do help us to understand better some of the considerable pluralismevident within theology. Those adopting a predominantlypropositional approach are likely to be unimpressed by those adoptinga predominantly experiential approach. And neither of them maymake much sense of those who adopt a predominatly cultural-linguistic approach.That said, I am not sure that Lindbeck really adheres to his own
depiction of these approaches as ’ideal types’. For Weber it wasessential to remind his readers that ’ideal types’ are simply heuristicdevices. They are not to be confused with social reality itself which isalways more messy. Social reality, like biological reality, does notcome packaged into water-tight types with strictly delineatedboundaries. Hence my use of the word ’predominantly’ in relation tothese three theological approaches. Even the most propositionallyoriented theologian does tend at times to make connections withliving experience and few experiential-expressivist theologians adoptthe Cupitt path of thoroughgoing non-realism (a path which, in anycase, always has difficulty with the status of its own claims - since ifthey too are non-realist then presumably we can take them or leavethem according to our particular preference).Although he defends a cultural-linguistic approach to theology in
a suitably modest way, it is clear that Lindbeck believes that it doesoffer an ecumenical way through current theological pluralism whichat the same time takes the challenge of Wittgenstein seriously. ForChristianity it is the canonical scriptures which constitute its distinctivecultural-linguistic resource:
’For those who are steeped in them, no world is more real than the onesthey create. A scriptural world is thus able to absorb the universe. Itsupplies the interpretive framework within which believers seek to livetheir lives and understand reality. This happens quite apart fromformal theories. Augustine did not describe his work in the categorieswe are employing, but the whole of his theological production can beunderstood as a progressive, even if not always successful, struggle toinsert everything from Platonism and the Pelagian problem to the fallof Rome into the world of the Bible. Aquinas tried to do somethingsimilar with Aristotelianism, and Schleiermacher with German romanticidealism. The way they described extrascriptural realities and experience,so it can be argued, was shaped by biblical categories much more thanwas warranted by their formal methodologies. 12
There are some very telling elements in this quotation. Lindbeck isdetermined to insist that it is the canonical scriptures which constitutethe cultural-linguistic resource of theology. Yet he honestly admits
that some of the classical (and of course modem) theologians did notseem to appreciate this for themselves. His argument might just workfor the profoundly scriptural Augustine, but it looks distinctly thinnerin relation to Aquinas and Schleiermacher. What Lindbeck seems tobe saying is that theologians such as Aquinas and Schleiermacherwere more scripturally oriented than they realised themselves. It is atthis point that Lindbeck’s theory ceases to be a descriptive account oftheology based upon ’ideal types’. It now appears as a prescriptivetheory based rather upon real types. Indeed, shortly after this quotationhe claims that ’there is always a danger ... that the extrabiblicalmaterials inserted into the biblical universe will themselves becomethe basic framework of interpretation’.3 3There is an oscillation between description and prescription and
between ideal and actual types in Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrinewhich makes it hard to pin down. Viewed as a prescriptive actual-type book, it seems to offer a clear but contentious path for Christianethics. What it appears to suggest is that in a post-liberal age, whencommon culture and secular rationality have completely brokendown, religious communities still have their own distinctive cultural-linguistic resources. In the major religions these are all derived froman authoritative scripture of one sort or another. For Christians thecanonical resources of the Old and New Testaments constitute theirdistinctive scriptural resource. Christian ethics, in turn, derives entirelyfrom this cultural-linguistic resource. It is the product of communitiesthat have been shaped by canonical scripture. Christian ethics is thuscommunitarian, scriptural, and distinctive.Although this offers a clear path for Christian ethics, it does so only
by cutting corners in terms of my three levels of legitimation,socialization and institutionalization. I think that Lindbeck himself isaware of this and I doubt if he is finally offering such a clear-cutunderstanding of Christian ethics. At most he is probably offering anemphasis. Nevertheless there is some value in setting out some of theproblems that would confront a clear-cut understanding of his theory.
First legitimation. Lindbeck’s subtitle - Religion and Theology in aPostliberal Age - already suggests that something is wrong, or at leastexaggerated. There is of course the huge claim to be talking about’religion’ as well as about theology. It soon becomes evident that hebasically has in mind those ’religions’ which have scriptures, sincethey alone conform to his cultural-linguistic theory of religion. Hedoes refer in passing to Evans-Pritchard’s account of religion amongstthe Nuer, but only because he wishes to show how fragile this form ofreligion is when confronted with scriptural religion. With breath-taking cheek he argues that it ’helps explain why purely customary
religions and cultures readily dissolve under the pressure of historical,social and linguistic change ... it also suggests that canonical texts area condition, not only for the survival of a religion but for the verypossibility of normative theological description’.’ David Ford pointsout that this account of ’religion’ seems to be thoroughly biased infavour of Christianity. Yet having made that criticism he immediatelypoints out that ’this need only be confirmation of Lindbeck’s denial ofany neutral framework: just as motives for interreligious dialoguemay vary, so the ways of conceiving the various religions may befound to be irreducibly related to the categories of one’.5
Exactly. Herein lies the major problem for the most clear-cut versionof Lindbeck’s thesis. According to it we live in an unambiguouslypostliberal or postmodern age (in this context the two terms areprobably indistinguishable). There are no longer any shared bases ofknowledge in this age. The rationalist assumptions of modernity havebroken down and now we can only speak truth’as we see it’ and fromthe perspectives of the communities to which we belong. On thisunderstanding there are no neutral planks: foundationalism has beenabandoned. We exist only in local cultural-linguistic communities.From within these communities we can discover values and truth, butthese are not values and truth which are accessible to others outsidethese communities. In a postliberal age we live in closed hermeneuticalcircles.But we don’t. And if we did rational discourse - presupposed in
our very ability to understand Lindbeck’s argument - would surelycollapse. As David Tracy, Lindbeck’s most prestigious rival in theUnited States, has repeatedly pointed out, we actually live in a societywhich is a confusing mixture of modernism and postmodernism.6 Theconfident secular individualism of the logical positivists is indeed ina state of considerble disrepair. Yet even that has yet to disappear, asRichard Dawkins is fond of reminding us. Lindbeck even remindshimself at times that ’the present psychosocial situation is morefavourable to liberalism than to postliberalism. Sociologists have beentelling us for a hundred years or more that the rationalization,pluralism, and mobility of modern life dissolve the bonds of traditionand community Yet, having made this concession, there is little inhis cultural-linguistic theory which seems to recall it.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to start by recognising the sheerambiguity of culture today. We are surrounded, I believe, bycompeting forces of postmodernity and globalisation. If the first
4 Ibid. p. 116.5 David Ford’s review of The Nature of Doctrine m Journal of Theological Studies, Vol.37,1986, p. 281.6
e.g. David Tracy ’Theology and the Many Faces of Postmodernity’, Theology Today,Vol. 51, No. 1, April 1994, pp. 104-114.7 Lindbeck, op. cit., p. 126.
force tends to fragment knowledge, morality and truth, drivingsome of us back to local communities, the second tends to reinforceatomistic individualism underpinned by a rationalistic, instrumentaland functionalist view of the world. The pressures towards
globalisation - reinforced by international travel, trade,entertainment and communication - tend to relativise localcommunities and marginalise local forms of morality. For examplepressures towards globalisation make it very difficult for youngpeople throughout the world to resist promiscuous sex, drugs andurban crime. AIDS is also an egregious by-product of globalisationas is environmental pollution. The ineluctable nature of globalisationmakes it a force that in practice changes individuals and even wholecommunities - however antagonistic they are to it in theory. Intheory we might wish to opt out of consumerism - deploring FirstWorld waste and despairing of Third World over-population. Inpractice all but a few of us in the West are deeply committed toconsumerism - even arguing at times that increasing consumerismis the solution to Third World over-population. We are all trappedby globalisation, even whilst we feel the counter forces ofpostmodernity. And the most extreme products of both of theseforces are fellow citizens in many parts of the modern world. Thuspostliberal/postmodernist fundamentalists live side by side inAmerica, the Middle East and elsewhere with secularisedindividualists. It is precisely their juxtaposition that has proved soinflammatory in the late 20th century - as Salman Rushdie hasuncomfortably discovered here in Britain.
It is in the context of this deep cultural ambiguity that localcommunities become more important at the level of socializationrather than legitimation. Lindbeck is surprisingly unhelpful aboutthis second level of analysis. His cultural-linguistic theory clearlypresupposes that Christian communities are shaped through scripture.He is well aware that approaches to scripture have varied veryconsiderably both synchronically and diachronically. He has alsobecome increasingly bleak about the ability of churches in present-day America [or Britain] to mediate scripture successfully. Anyoneteaching theology in secular universities in Britain or in America willbe only too aware that the scriptural knowledge of the averagestudent is extremely limited. Even those who still come fromconventional Christian backgrounds may have a very sketchyacquaintance with the Bible. Not only were previous generationsmore familiar with the Bible, but they even had a single version, theAuthorised Version, from which they could quote in common. Today,in contrast, biblical allusions within classical English literature aresimply lost on most students.
Whilst many might lament the cultural poverty resulting from thischange, for Lindbeck it is a catastrophic theological loss. The cultural-
linguistic resource, on which Christianity, Christian doctrine andChristian ethics depend, is increasingly lost for the present generation.The theological and moral truths which derive directly from a culturesoaked in scripture are no longer accessible to those who are unschooledin the Bible. The scriptural community which lies at the heart ofChristian religion is fast being eroded.
I would not wish to underestimate the cultural and religious lossthat results from this general decline in biblical knowledge. HoweverI do not believe it is the only major religious loss in our society. Therehave after all been forms of Christian community, especially beforethe ages of the printed word, which have known very little about thecontents of the Bible. Presumably on Lindbeck’s theory they mustalmost be disallowed as being Christian. In this respect DennisNineham remains an extremely uncomfortable scholar. Previouslyhe was fond of reminding us about the uses and abuses of scripture.Now he points out that there really is not too much in commonbetween Christian communities viewed diachronically.8 Evensynchronically there may be very major problems. The Catholicsociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick discovers quite startling differenceswithin present-day American Catholicism. The Catholicism of theKennedies has precious little in common with the Catholicism ofHispanic illegal immigrants.9 To depict all of these as communitiesshaped basically by canonical scripture appears more than slightlyoptimistic.A better case might be made for regarding worship rather than
canonical scripture as the most distinctive feature of Christianity in anambiguously secular world. Worship is also a feature of other religionstoo and there are many aspects of worship that Jews, Christians andMuslims have in common-but that is not my concern here. Specificallywithin Christianity, worship is a feature that characterises all churchesin all ages. Sometimes it has taken the form of written, corporateliturgies, but sometimes not. Sometimes it has been exclusively biblicalin content (most fully in the Sandemanian sect), but sometimes it hasmade little direct use of the Bible. Sometimes public worship hasinvolved full congregational participation, but sometimes it has beendominated by religious professionals. Considerable variety and indeedplurality is evident in worship, but it is none the less particularlydistinctive in a society in which two-thirds of the population seldomor never takes part in public worship and many of them no longereven pray in private. It can even be argued that it is worship which
8 Dennis Nineham, Christianity Mediaeval and Modern, SCM Press, London, 1993.9 Joseph Fitzpatrick, One Church Many Cultures: The Challenge of Diversity, Sheed &
Ward, New York, 1987 See also Michael Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholicism in England,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, and Roman Catholic Beliefs in England,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
gives substance to religious language and which is a key feature indoctrinal formulation - lex orandi; lex credendi.’oThere do also seem to be important empirical links between worship
and both moral attitudes and moral behaviour. A number of surveys&dquo; Ihave now shown that regular churchgoing is correlated with stanceson moral issues (usually rather conservative stances). The EuropeanValue Systems surveys have instructively suggested that regularchurchgoing is strongly correlated with unpaid voluntary work in thecommunity. For example, the 1990 survey found that 27 per cent ofvoluntary workers claimed to go to church at least once a week - afigure almost three times above the national churchgoing rate. And inthe 1981 survey attendance at religious services at least once a monthwas found to be the most significant variable - for once ahead ofgender, age or social class - predicting whether someone is involvedin voluntary work.But what is it about worship that effects moral attitudes and
behaviour? Is it the cognitive contents of worship - of which oneimportant element is usually (but not always) scripture? Or is it lesscognitive features such as ’belonging’ and the mutual encouragementto look beyond ourselves that collective worship offers? The findingsof the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow on support groups inmodern America are particularly helpful. As he points out, it has forlong been an aphorism that America is a society of determinedindividualists - ranging from the rugged individualism of the pioneersthrough to the atomism of today leading to a steady erosion of familiesand local communities. Yet this vision of American society has tendedto ignore the recent proliferation of support groups - church groups,self-help groups, therapy groups and etc. On the basis of his extensiveresearch Wuthnow estimates that 40 per cent of the American
population now belongs to such groups. Community in the sense offace-to-face support groups is far from dead in this apparently mostindividualistic of societies.Wuthnow’s investigations of members of these support groups
provide some crucial data about religious socialization and about thespecific links between communities and moral attitudes and behaviour.The popular perception of such groups is that they are inward lookingand concerned only with individual self-improvement. Surprisingly,Wuthnow finds that they are actually rather successful in encouraging
10 Cf. Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life:A Systematic Theology, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1980.11 For full details of these see my Moral Communities, Exeter University Press, Exeter,1992, pp.16-20. For the European Value Systems surveys see M. Abrams, D. Gerard andN. Timms (ed), Values and Social Change in Britain: Studies in the Contemporary Values ofModern Soctety, Macmillan, Basmgstoke, 1985, and N. Timms, Family and Citizenship:Values in Contemporary Britain, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1992.
altruistic behaviour and attitudes. Whilst 77 per cent of those surveyeddid work ’with the group to help someone inside the group’, 62 percent also worked ’with the group to help other people in need outsideof the group’. 56 per cent reported that as a result of belonging to thegroup they had become more interested in peace or social justice and43 per cent had become involved in work in the community. 57 percent of those in the groups also donated to other charitable
organizations. Specifically church based group members reportedthat as a result of their membership they now took a more active partin other programs sponsored by their church (62 per cent) and hadincreased their giving to their church (50 per cent). Wuthnow findsthat belonging to a small group in a church is in fact more importantthan any other religious indicator:
’Small group participation... makes more of a difference than any othermeasure of religious commitment. To be precise, participationdistinguishes between volunteers and nonvolunteers better than any ofthe following: how important religion was to people as they weregrowing up, how often they attended religious services while growingup, how important religion is to them now, whether they believe Jesusis God, whether they feel they have committed their lives to Jesus,whether they are a church member, how often they attend religiousservices, whether they pray, and whether they have had a deep religiousexperience. For example, when predicting whether people will dovolunteer work for social service and welfare organizations, being in asmall fellowship group predicts about twice as strongly as any of theseother factors.’’2
From all of this Wuthnow concludes that, ’despite the fact that mostsmall groups ... focus on the emotional needs and interests of theirmembers, they nevertheless nudge the people to become involved inhelping friends and neighbours who are not members of their groupand to play an active role in voluntary agencies.&dquo; Such groupsencourage members to become more active both in their churches andin their local communities. For Wuthnow it is the mutual support,encouragement and sense of belonging that are crucial in these groups- rather than their specifically cognitive contents.
This finding seems to fit well the sort of research being undertakenrecently by Wayne Meeks in his The Origins of Christian Morality. LikeLindbeck (whom he does not cite) Meeks too is interested in Christianculture. Unlike Lindbeck he does not discover in the New Testamenta single distinctive Christian culture. Rather he finds a series ofChristian cultures which overlap considerably within other first and
12 Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest forCommunity, The Free Press, New York, 1994, p. 328.13 Ibid. p. 330.
second century cultures. He acknowledges a strong debt to Maclntyre’sAfter Virtue and takes from it the notion that morality is not embeddedor supported in culture primarily through rational means. Instead themeans of socialization through which morality becomes establishedare various and complex. It is Meeks’ aim to uncover some of thesemeans as they appear in and beyond the New Testament:
’If I am right about the way moral dispositions are shaped and the waythey work in a community, then a description of early Christianmorality cannot be limited to an account of the Christian’s theologicalideas that bear on ethics, or of their moral rules, or of the structures oftheir moral arguments - though these all have a place in the description.Rather we approach them as if we were ethnographers of the past,inquiring about the forms of culture within which the ethical sensibilitiesof the early Christians have meaning.’’4
Accordingly Meeks sets out to analyse texts from a variety ofperspectives - sometimes as the words of communities of newconverts, sometimes in terms of communities alternately loving andhating the world, sometimes as lists of vices (or virtues), sometimes interms of the language of obligation, sometimes in terms of heroicexamples, sometimes in terms of cruciform structure of suffering.What he discloses in the process is a series of moral communities
constituting together what we now term ’early Christianity’. It is apicture considerably more complex and varied than the communitiesshaped by canonical scripture which are fundamental to Lindbeck’stheory. Perhaps the pluriform worlds of local belonging discoveredby Wuthnow and Meeks are not so far apart. Christian socialization isand may always have been local, communal and varied - havinglittle in common other than Christocentric worship and through thata concern beyond ourselves.There is a final level at which all of this can be examined - that of
institutionalization. But here I will be briefer as this level has occupiedmy writings so much in the past. If the primary means of socializationin Christian morality is the worshipping congregation or, even moreintensively, the church group, what implications does this have forchurch bodies which feel impelled to pronounce on moral issues?Already the ambiguous social context within which WesternChristianity is set and the varied and complex networks of localgroups, congregations and communities that make up earliest andpresent-day Christianity should offer a clear writing. It is extremelyunlikely that churches as a whole will be able plausibly to offer singlemoral perspectives. If plurality is characteristic of the levels of both
14 Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality. The First Two Centuries, YaleUniversity Press, New Haven and London, 1993, p. 11.
legitimation and socialization, then plurality might be expected at theinstitutional level too. Ian Markham has argued instructively in hisrecent Plurality and Christian Ethics15 that British churches, unlike theirAmerican counterparts, have been rather too reluctant to come toterms with their evident plurality.However there is an obvious way of eliminating plurality, which
James Mackey analyses starkly in his recent Power and Christian Ethics.It is quite simply coercion. Faced with evident Christian plurality, anychurch that wishes to present an undivided moral or doctrinal messageto the world can do so if it resorts to coercion. Mackey locates poweron a spectrum between force and moral authority. The exercise ofpower which he sees as typical of Jesus as presented in the Gospels ispower as moral authority. However the exercise of power which as aCatholic he sees as endemic within his own church (and for goodmeasure within many Reformed churches too) is power as force. So,faced with a policy on contraception that ’has outlasted any convincingmemory of the cultural circumstances in which it was first borrowedor created’,16 he believes that his church can only resort to coercion touphold its ’unified’ claims on the subject. Papal authority, he argues,is accordingly bolstered through coercive means - such as thesuppression of dissident voices amongst Catholic moral theologiansand the appointment of an increasingly conservative episcopate. Yetin the process it loses any claim to moral authority.
In Moral Communities I outline four alternative paths which recogniseChristian plurality more plausibly: the individual prophet, the uniformsect, the inter-church movement, and the values-in-tension of thechurch. The first three can proclaim unified moral positions, but theymay not expect to represent the whole of Christianity or the whole ofChristian opinion. The individual prophet and the uniform sect can bedeeply at odds with, and even radically opposed to, both society atlarge and the churches. The prophet characteristically believes thather legitimation and message come directly from God. Such a prophetoffers a degree of moral purity not available to other Christians - amoral purity that may be deeply disturbing and, in time, might evenbe considered to be profoundly mistaken. Both the prophet and theexclusivist sect (I am aware of huge variations in sect typologies) canproclaim and denounce and tend to stand apart from society and frommore conventional Christians. The inter-church movement, in contrast,
typically is formed by mainline Christians who are at odds with theirdenominations on a single issue - be it the ordination of women orthe possession of nuclear weapons - and who wish to lobby for
15 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.16 James P. Mackey, Power and Christian Ethics, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1994, p. 210
change or perhaps just gather for comfort and mutual support. Thesingle issue is the raison d’être of the inter-church movement.
Churches, on the other hand, are notoriously (and perhapsinevitably) divided on most moral issues. Philip Wogaman concludeshis recent study of the history of Christian ethics as follows:
’Christians have arrived at opposite conclusions about many things,such as war, slavery, the role of women, wealth, sexual relationships,politics, and even the more commonplace virtues. That fact alonewould be scandalous if one thought of the tradition as a deposit of truth&dquo;once for all delivered to the saints&dquo;. But if one thinks rather of thetradition as a witness to the transcendent reality of the living God, thenis there not room for growth and new insight?’&dquo;
What Wogaman expresses here is a classic church type response toChristian ethics - recognizing frankly the evident divisions that existamongst Christians, but looking to some unity in diversity beyondthem. On this approach (which I finally share myself) the most we canexpect to have in common are biblically consonant values or virtuesheld in tension - tension between peace and justice, between rightsand duties, between grace and law, between the mundane and thesacred, and etc. Yet like Wogaman I believe that such a perspective canindeed lead to maturity and growth.
I am more than conscious that each of these three levels of analysis- legitimation, socialization and institutionalization - requireseparate and lengthy treatment. I hope soon to be able to give themthat.&dquo; All that should be clear by now is that I do not find the clear-cutinterpretation of Lindbeck’s theory adequate for Christian ethics.Despite its influence upon Stanley Hauerwas and others, it seems tome that it considerably underestimates plurality both within Christianethics and within the complex world that the discipline seeks to serve.
17 J. Philip Wogaman, Christian Ethics. A Historical Introduction, Westminster/JohnKnox Press, Louisville, and SPCK, London, 1993, p 270.18 For my series New Studres in Christian Ethics, Cambridge University Press.
