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Overview
Written in a style accessible to non-specialists, this book provides teachers, pastors, counselors, and general readers with an ideal introduction to Christian ethics. It renews the topic of Christian ethics by showing readers that faithful moral living is achieved through the daily practices of grace and godliness.
The author first explores the foundations of Christian ethics as seen by both Catholics and Protestants, and then develops a constructive view of morality as a way of life. Taking into account the central themes of Christian ethics, he shows that effective piety is built on spiritual disciplines that deepen our experience of God: prayer, worship, self-examination, simplicity, and acts of hospitality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596271005 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2008 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Christian Moral Life
Practices of Piety
By Timothy F. Sedgwick
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2008 Timothy F. SedgwickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-100-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Describing the Christian Life
What needs to be done? What do I want to do? Who should I call? Who do I want to call? Our daily lives are given in the responses we make to such questions. We are most often aware of our responses in times of change. Change raises the question, "What is most important to us?" "What do we truly love and desire?"
My students often accuse me of asking "cosmic questions." The cosmic questions, however, are simply asking what is the pattern in the answers we give to the ordinary questions of our daily lives. How often I have heard such questions as these from my two daughters during their teenage years: What should I do today? What should I wear? Do I want to be by myself or go out with friends? Should I buy some new pants? Should I stay up and study some more or go to sleep now and study in the morning? What courses should I take? What am I going to do this summer? Our responses to such questions are much like sentences in the unfolding of a larger story. One sentence leads to the next. As we look back we discern a drama marked by different scenes, characters, and conflicts.
Deep guidance for the moral life cannot be gained by narrowly focusing on the crises of our daily lives. In asking what I should do this day, I can be helped by writing down a list of possibilities and then identifying what I like and dislike about each item. In focusing only on the decisions, however, I cannot understand what values and loves are most important to my life. Deep guidance can come only from an understanding of the stories that express the drama I see myself living. These range from my family stories to the stories given in the different cultures in which I live. In turn, I seek some story that both makes sense of my life's stories and expresses a larger meaning and purpose to which I can give myself. What makes understanding Christian faith and the moral life difficult are the different stories of Christian faith and life that have been offered.
Often I find our situation like living in a city where I encounter fragments of stories but do not know how these fit together. For example, in joining in Christian worship I sing songs that celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. These evoke another world, holy and full of mystery, given in silence and prayer. But making sense of prayer and this ancient language of sacrifice and blessing is something that involves deciphering. I hear in a sermon that I am baptized into a new life, and I feel something new in this community of worship. But I cannot make sense of what that means when I hear the radical demands in the gospel to sell everything and to come follow in Jesus' way. I sense something of the Christian story as a way of life, but I don't know how it fits with the other worlds of meaning and value in which I live — providing for children, making a living, caring for myself, giving to the community, being with others, and being with myself. Understanding the Christian moral life is then first of all a matter of understanding the story of Christian faith as making sense of our life in the world. The challenge of developing such an account is what I will call the problem of piety.
The word "piety" is often understood as devoutness, as religiousness, often with a pejorative sense of being narrow and judgmental. This is suggested by the phrase, "she is certainly a pious person." The word piety, however, has a far broader meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, piety originally referred to persons who habitually acted with "reverence and obedience to God" and "faithfulness in the duties owed to parents and relatives [and] superiors." The Anglican Jeremy Taylor described piety as a way of life more fully in his 1650 book on The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living. He structures the book itself in terms of sobriety, justice, and religion. Sobriety means "our deportment in our personal and private capacities, the fair treating of our bodies and spirits." Justice is a matter of "our duty to all relations to our neighbours." Religion refers to "the offices and direct religion and intercourse with God." Altogether, sobriety, justice, and religion formed a way of life Taylor described as Christian piety. Such piety, he said, was a matter of a life formed in order to "stand before God, acting and speaking, and thinking in His presence."
This understanding of piety as a way of life is what I mean by piety. I will often refer to such piety as practical piety in order to emphasize the practices that are central to piety. The question of an adequate account of the Christian life is then, "What is the character of Christian practical piety given the different pieties that we may encounter?" This challenge may be posed in terms of what I will call modern, postmodern, and traditional pieties.
Changing Understandings
I grew up for the most part in the sprawling suburbs of Chicago following World War II. My world was formed by the promises of education, science, and technology. Polio could be prevented. I went for the series of vaccinations and never again heard speak the fear that I might catch polio by swimming in the public pool. In 1957 the Soviets sent Sputnik into orbit, and the United States entered the space race. Altogether, I was part of a generation educated to conquer new frontiers.
I assumed that life was about successfully meeting challenges and solving problems. The meaning and end of life for me were given in seeking to form a world in which the basic needs of all people would be met, where everyone had an equal opportunity to share in the challenges and the chance to form a better life. This was what writers in Christian ethics spoke of as fellowship, or, to use their patriarchal language, "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." My hope was a form of idealism. I conceived an ideal state of affairs and envisioned life as moving towards that ideal. Christian faith gave expression to the ideals of love and justice. It held the promise that people could change, that there was a grace in acceptance and forgiveness. The church for me was that community of grace; it invited me to participate in a larger purpose that gave dignity and value to life.
My idealism was broken by the failure of the United States in the 1960s and '70s to stop the war in Vietnam and to address the sources of poverty and racial oppression in American society. Martin Luther King's "Poverty March" on Washington, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the demonstration and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the killing of student protesters at Kent State University following the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia: these made impossible the conviction that society would realize an ideal.
My own experience allowed me to hear other voices, from the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust to political refugees to those suffering a slow death from terminal illness. The voice is constantly that of Kurt in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness saying, "The horror, the horror." If there was any purpose that gave meaning to life, I came to believe that it had to be given in the very midst of human suffering and failure. This was for me most powerfully articulated by particular peoples: for example, African-Americans speaking of the "black experience," of spirituals and blues that celebrated life in the midst of violence and oppression. Above all, these voices have meant for me that if there was any meaning that could redeem life, it would have to be simply there, given, the ground and basis for what I did, a matter of grace. Instead of images of a new Jerusalem, of the coming of the kingdom of God, my prayers have become more focused by Job and by Jesus' suffering and death.
The change in my sense of life's meaning is more than my coming of age. Instead, my personal experiences reflect broader changes in the understandings of society and culture. The sense of value and meaning given in achieving a new and better society is what has been central to what is called a modern vision of things. Modern in this sense refers to what is called the legacy of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the developments of science and technology gave confidence that through reason, human ingenuity, and sheer effort, nature could be tamed and the world could be perfected so that all people could live together peaceably. In contrast, my sense of the broken and fragmentary character of life has been called a postmodern vision. Postmodern means after the modern, after the collapse of confidence in reason and progress. Both of these, modern and postmodern, stand in contrast to what may be called a traditional vision.
The traditional understanding of Christian faith and life was reflected in my grandparents. I think especially of my great-grandmother, who was born in 1882 in the newly settled land of southeastern Minnesota. Of all her grandchildren I was among the more inquisitive, always asking her to tell me what it was like before electricity and automobiles. She spoke matter-of-factly of changes and challenges. Homesteading, the final uprising of the Sioux, the move to the city, industrialization, economic depression, the World Wars, and before she died not only jet airplanes but landing on the moon — these were the background to her history. But what appears most basic from her earliest experience was the sense of need for order, discipline, and hard work. Each person was to do his or her duty at home and at work, in the community, and for society. Authority was taken for granted. Christian faith for her made sense of this ordered life in terms of the personal virtues of trust, honesty, industry, and integrity. These virtues were sustained by a sense of the divine as ordering and judging but also as merciful and forgiving. To say God was loving was to say that there was forgiveness for the failure to live up to the divine order.
This traditional piety did not create a narrow sense of the miserable sinner, but was rather a sober assessment of our lives. Sunday worship began with the confession of sin or, when Holy Eucharist was celebrated, with the reading of the Ten Commandments or at least a summary of the law and then the confession of sin. The centrality of the law in worship expressed a clear sense of order and, in turn, a sense of sin, of personal failing to live up to the demands of the law. In a world lacking basic security, people depended on mutual cooperation. Failure, for example, to keep one's word, to offer help as promised, could threaten the livelihood and even physical life of another person or of the community as a whole. The consequences of sin on the common life were visibly imagined, if not directly seen, and for this reason moral failure evoked sorrow and repentance — not narrowly a turning from evil deeds but more broadly a turning from a narrow self-concern. Repentance called forth God's mercy to uphold all people in a holy and righteous life, to grow continually in love and service. In and through Jesus Christ, God's mercy and blessing were assured. This traditional life of faith was not marked narrowly by duty. Instead, for the ordering of life and the means of grace that made it possible, there was a deep sense of gratitude that continued to turn individual lives outward beyond themselves. Duty and obligation were but the other side of love and care, which connected the individual to the larger human community.
These three pieties — traditional, modern, and postmodern — focus on different aspects of Christian faith and life and need not be seen as opposed to each other, as if one were right and another were wrong. The older, traditional piety of my grandmother focuses on a world defined by personal duties, so much so that from our own cultural vantage point they tend to be perceived as moralistic or rigid, focused excessively on individual relations and virtues. Christian faith arises in the experience of judgment regarding our failures. Such judgment, however, is not at its heart moralistic and individualistic. Rather, the judgment is a judgment of failure to participate in a larger order of things necessary for individuals to be a people. God's forgiveness is then an act that restores participation in that order. This is a justification by grace that, in turn, frees a person from self-absorbed individualism.
The modern piety of my young adulthood focused on the future. This emphasis arose in part because traditional piety seemed to have lost sight of the future and instead focused on duty, judgment, and mercy. To look at the future, though, was to see that reconciliation was a new creation, a community of love and justice. The larger sense of reconciliation — as corporate and incarnate, as becoming a people in this world — was restored. The human problem, however, was sometimes too narrowly thought of as human failure to live in God's kingdom, without attention to the actual dynamics that form human life together. The presence of God as a matter of judgment and a gift of grace was too easily lost from view.
Postmodern piety has turned attention back to the present. Born of the experience of God as the experience of sheer grace in the midst of suffering, the sense of the giftedness of life was restored. In turn, the human response to God was brought back into view as a matter of vulnerability and openness, of dependence and trust, of thanksgiving and compassion. The dynamics of turning to God, of conversion, were illumined. This focus on God's epiphany or manifestation in the midst of the breaking apart of life, however, can lose itself in the present. Apart from the roles, relations, and practices that lead to and from the encounter with God, the postmodern focus on experience can become individualistic and pluralistic, fragmentary and relativistic.
While these three pieties may share a common set of convictions, each of these pieties is distinct in its emphasis, because one is reacting to another. Traditional pieties, with their emphasis on duties and obligations, can lose touch with the larger ends of forming communities of love and justice. Modern pieties thus focus on ends and ideals but in doing so tend to de-emphasize duties and obligations. In turn, the idealism of such modern pieties may evoke a traditional reaction or else a postmodern turn back to the experience of grace in the life lived.
This description of three pieties is by no means an adequate account of the pieties that have formed different generations. It is not my intention to depict pieties simply as traditional, modern, and postmodern. My more limited purpose is to suggest the differences and tensions between different generations and different communities. If Christian ethics is to offer a broader understanding of Christian faith and life, the challenge of Christian ethics is to offer an account of Christian faith as a way of life, in spite of the differences among Christians. As a matter of faith, this means a Christian ethic must answer the question, "What is good, right, and holy?" As a matter of a way of life, a Christian ethic must answer a second and third question: "How do we come to know and how do we participate in this life?" Different pieties initially appear to give different answers to these questions. A Christian ethic must find some common answer.
A Life Given in Worship
At the most obvious level, what the different Christian pieties share in common is that each is founded or grounded in Jesus. As the word "Christ" or "Messiah" originally meant, for Christians Jesus is the one who brings in the kingdom of God, the one who brings reconciliation and redemption. As such, Jesus is the divine messenger and agent who brings his followers, his disciples, into a new life. However, understandings of Jesus are as different as the pieties themselves. To those in darkness Christ is the light. To the guilty Christ brings forgiveness. To those in bondage Christ gives freedom. To those divided Christ is the reconciler. To those oppressed Christ liberates. To the broken Christ brings peace. Jesus enlightens, forgives, gives freedom, brings justice. Regardless of the image, Jesus is the Christ because he effects new life. At the same time, however, as the different images suggest, this new life has been described in different ways. The four gospels themselves reflect such differences. Again, the challenge in developing an account of the Christian moral life is to describe the shape and central features of a life that Christians share in common.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Christian Moral Life by Timothy F. Sedgwick. Copyright © 2008 by Timothy F. Sedgwick. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface to the 2008 Edition.................... vii
Introduction.................... ix
1. Describing the Christian Life.................... 1
2. An Anglican Perspective.................... 25
3. Incarnate Love.................... 53
4. Love and Justice.................... 77
5. The Practices of Faith.................... 103
6. The Call of God.................... 127
Appendix.................... 143
Index.................... 159
What People are Saying About This
“A book to enjoy and savour…as gentle and reverent depiction of Anglican moral theology and practice it is splendid.”
—Robin Gill, Universityof Kent at Canterbury, The Anglican Theological Review
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