What's your story?

I

 was recently reading a pleasant essay by Brian Brock on the history of Christian Ethics in America.[1] In this essay, Brock makes the interesting observation that many 20^th century ‘christian’ ethicists attempted to do their work within the bounds of secular reason – thereby losing locution and conclusions that retained much of any ‘christian’ value.  He notes:

The overwhelming impression one receives when reading the founding figures of American Christian ethics, with some marginal exceptions, is that their desire was not to think in doctrinal terms at all. Their interest was in making Christianity respectable before a world that expected it to live by [the] Enlightenment Creed. Only when it played by these rules could “Christian ethics” demonstrate its worth as a civilizing force.[2]

Obviously, there are so many things to be said even about this simple paragraph. Since when did Christianity become a civilizing force? How can self-professing Christians refuse to think doctrinally? Who determined that Christians needed to accept the Enlightenment story and its concomitant creed? Unfortunately, I don’t think I can answer all of these questions in the space of a blog post. I do however want to highlight one thing I took away from Brock’s essay.

            As Brock observed, there is an interesting relationship between the story you tell about the world and the way that story allows you to live. The Enlightenment story (though perhaps not inevitably) set purely rational parameters for Christian ethicists to work in. If ethics was going to be meaningful, then it needed to arise from appeal to universal human reason. I should have access to the same moral conclusions that you do when we reason towards ethical obligations concerning a certain matter. Perhaps the early moral philosophers of the Enlightenment had a place for God, but eventually he became unnecessary ‘left-overs’ from yesterday’s religious sensibilities. If reason can tell us how to live, then why do we need God again?

            This is one reason why I love the church fathers. Their passion for consistency aided their correlation between metaphysics and morality. If they believed something was true about reality, then that imported something to their personal lives. There was no place for doctrinal verbosity without devotional praxis. If you don’t believe me, then read any of the great spiritual writers: Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, etc.  Each of these authors drew heavily from their metaphysical structure as they produced constructive ethical norms.

We are lacking something substantive like this in our 21^st century American milieu of praxis divorced from metaphysic. We kick around terms that used to mean something, but now are relics from an age long gone.  We have Christian terms adjudicating secular concepts and getting us no further than the repetitive reconfiguration of uninspired ideas.  I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Christianity has more impetus than that. Is this as good as it gets? It can’t be.

Perhaps its time we start telling a better story – a story that has some cultural clout. Maybe its time that Christianity once again sets the terms of the discussion instead of acquiescing to the norms of secular culture.  Maybe we can remember that sometimes the best story to tell about the world is the one that not everyone agrees with. Maybe….

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[1] Brian Brock, “Christian Ethics,” in Mapping Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012): 293-317.

[2] Ibid., 297.