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Overview
In volume five, Scott Bader-Saye, Academic Dean and Professor of Christian Ethics and Moral Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, examines the moral life through the lens of the Episcopal Church and its traditions. Beginning with an introduction to ethics in a changing world, Bader-Saye helps the reader move past the idea that we either accept cultural change as a whole or reject it whole, suggesting that we need to make discriminating judgments about where to affirm change and where to resist it.
Part I looks at distinctive aspects of the Episcopal ethos, noting that “ethics” comes from “ethos,” and so has to do with habits and enculturation of a particular people. Topics include creation, incarnation, holiness, sacrament, scripture, and “via media.” Part II looks at big moral questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What are good and evil? What are right and wrong? Part III examines how an Episcopal approach might shape a typical day by examining Morning Prayer and Compline as moral formation, in between discussing work, eating, and playing. Each part begins by analyzing cultural assumptions, asking what should be affirmed and what resisted about contemporary context, setting the stage for discussion in subsequent chapters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819233073 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2016 |
| Series: | Church's Teachings for a Changing World , #5 |
| Edition description: | Volume 5 ed. |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Formed by Love
VOLUME 5 in the Church's Teachings for a Changing World series
By Scott Bader-Saye
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Scott Bader-SayeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3307-3
CHAPTER 1
When All Bets Are Off
The sign said "no smoking" and "no selfie sticks" but no one seemed to care. I was deep into three days at the Austin City Limits music festival when it dawned on me that the posted rules meant very little to the party-minded crowd pressed against the stage. To be honest, the smoking did not bother me nearly as much as the selfie sticks. It's hard enough to see the band with a bank of phones blocking your view; add selfie sticks and all bets are off. Apparently, even performers are fed up with staring at the backs of phones. In recent years Beyoncé, the Lumineers, the Eagles, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have all asked fans to pocket their devices.
Of course, the idea that one can get a pure and undistracted experience of music in a park full of 75,000 people, most of whom have been drinking, is a bit naive. Yet every now and then, even in a setting short on rules and long on self-expression, there arises an implicit expectation that people will behave in a certain way. I watched one concertgoer complain about people cutting in line to enter the venue — not to the people cutting but with pure passive-aggressive bliss to someone else on the other end of their cell phone — "Hey, I'm gonna be a little late meeting you, because some jerks are cutting in line."
Navigating a crowd of people busy doing their own thing is a small problem, but it opens onto larger ones: How do we decide what can be expected of one another? Do we owe each other something and, if so, what? Are there rules that apply to us all? Can we agree on what it means to be a good person, or are we moving into a world in which that very notion is quaint and archaic? If we want to do right by ourselves and others, how do we even know what that looks like?
This is the problem of ethics in a changing world. Many things that earlier generations took for granted as prohibited — gay and lesbian relationships, for instance — are today not only legal but blessed in the Episcopal Church. Other things that earlier generations fought for — like civil rights and a social safety net — appear threatened by sanctioned racial bias and the economic free-forall we call modern capitalism. As prohibitions and expectations change, where do we find our footing? Where is the platform from which we can say this is good and that is bad, this is right and that is wrong, this is worth pursuing and that is ultimately destructive? We will be exploring these questions in the pages that follow.
Christ, Church, and Changing Culture
To say we live in a changing world is almost too obvious to be interesting. The world is always changing, so everyone who has ever lived lived in a changing world. The question is not whether our world is changing (it is) but how it is changing and how Christians might engage these changes for the sake of nurturing the good, the true, and the beautiful.
In 1951 H. Richard Niebuhr wrote an influential book titled Christ and Culture. In it, he suggested that there are five ways Christians might relate to culture: to be for it, against it, above it, transforming it, or in paradox with it. The book shaped a generation of clergy and ethicists but recently has been found dated and wanting. Perhaps in Niebuhr's day it made sense to talk of "culture" as one thing that could be encountered in one way (though even then such a monolithic idea of culture was oversimplified). But certainly today we can all recognize that we live within a multiplicity of cultures and subcultures overlapping and interacting every day. And within each one there are things to affirm, things to resist, things to explore, and things we don't understand. The idea that Christians could simply decide whether we were "for," "against," or "transforming" culture as a whole paints far too simple a picture of the dense web that constitutes our interaction with a multicultured environment.
In addition to simplifying "culture," Niebuhr's book simplified "Christ." He wrote as if Christ were an idea to be applied rather than a person to be followed. Thus he ignored the fact that Christ becomes present in the world through a community of faith already shaped by the language and customs of a particular time and place. Every engagement of Christ and culture, then, is an engagement between cultures — one local form of the pattern of Christ's life encountering another set of local customs and asking how that same pattern might find a home.
The difference for the church today, at least among the North American churches, is that we are not bringing the gospel to a foreign place and asking how Jesus might become present there. Rather, we are watching the language and customs of our own culture change rapidly and asking how our embodiment of Jesus's way needs to change in order for Christ's work to be done in this time and place. This is the task the Episcopal Church has been deeply involved in for many years.
There was a time when the Episcopal Church was described as "the Republican party at prayer," but if that were ever true, it is no longer. That is not to say that we have become the Democratic party at prayer but that the church has expanded its vision both of participation and of social witness such that the caricature of a wealthy, white, Protestant enclave no longer describes who we are or who we want to be.
In the 1960s under the leadership of Bishop John Hines, the Episcopal Church waded deep into the civil rights movement. Hines, long a fighter for justice, insisted in 1963 that "a Bishop's job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world's most desperate needs." This vision signaled the church's willingness to engage with cultural change, to address poverty, war, and injustice, and to let itself be changed in the process. In the 1960s this meant directing the church to racial reconciliation, in the 1970s it meant ordaining women, and in the 2000s it meant ordaining the first openly gay bishop and the decision to marry same-sex couples. Today, under the leadership of the denomination's first African-American presiding bishop, Michael Curry, the church finds itself returning its attention to race and systemic bias as we discover that the work once begun has not yet been completed.
This is not to say that the Episcopal Church is simply jumping on every new progressive bandwagon. It is to say that through prayer and conversation in light of cultural changes, the church has both weighed in on social issues and allowed itself to be changed by the conviction that the Spirit of God is at work both in the church and in the world to bring reconciliation and restoration.
The Episcopal way argues neither that the church must follow the culture nor that the church must reject the culture. Simply opting for relevance or repudiation is a false choice. All faithful living is going to involve some amount of receptivity to cultural change and emerging voices as well as some amount of resistance to aspects of the culture that thwart human and nonhuman well-being. At its best, the Episcopal Church believes Christians must both engage and leaven the culture. This requires close attention to the changes occurring around us and a willingness to prayerfully discern the path of faithfulness.
Connection and Confusion Much of our current cultural struggle involves an engagement with otherness, including race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Our attempts to engage these differences have led to three defining features of the ethical landscape: moral confusion, cultural polarization, and hybrid identities.
Moral confusion is often a byproduct of encountering the stranger, and our increasingly interconnected world means such encounter is inevitable. In previous centuries, global exploration often led to colonialism, perversely justified by the assumption that the stranger (or the "savage") needed to be civilized, brought into conformity with the ethos of the dominant power. If we are to avoid new forms of cultural and religious colonialism, our response to the stranger must allow for mutual learning and respect. This, however, can create a sense of moral dissonance.
If our assumptions about the well-lived life do not match up with those of the others we encounter, who is right? How can we decide? Do we embrace a relativism that leaves all moral questions up to the preferences of individuals or local custom? That may sound fine when I imagine that relativism frees me from moral constraints to pursue my own wishes, but it doesn't sound so good when someone else says their wish is to enslave children or abuse women or steal from the needy. When we encounter these things, I imagine most of us want to say, "No, that's wrong." But if we are committed to relativism, we have little room to deny others their ethical preferences if we claim our own to be purely private or local choices. Moral confusion can lead either to apathy and disengagement or to doubling-down on one's convictions that are perceived to be under threat. Neither response proves constructive for community, solidarity, or the pursuit of common goods.
Moral confusion can easily lead to cultural polarization. In the face of ambiguity and challenge, many retreat into safe enclaves of the like-minded. And, it turns out, our technologies of communication make that easier than ever. Indeed, the escalating political polarization in the United States seems to correlate to the Inter-net's ability to link us far and wide with others who already share our opinions. A recent study out of the University of Minnesota suggests that increased Internet access led to a rise in racial hate crimes in the early 2000s. The authors of the study surmised that Internet access "may have enhanced the efficiency with which extremists could spread hate ideology and spur likeminded individuals to carry out lone-wolf attacks."
Finally, moral confusion and cultural polarization can both be seen as rooted in arguments over identity and difference, or, more precisely, the in-between of identity and difference (mutation, boundary-crossing, hybridity). Wesley Morris, in an article titled "The Year We Obsessed Over Identity," maintains that we are "in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so ... we've been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are." And so we wonder, what is stable? What is constructed? What can change? What should change? The ambiguity of this moment produces stress in some and hopefulness in others. Identity is either asserted all the more forcefully in an attempt to gain cultural power, or identity is decried as mere construction and dissolved into terminal ambiguity. Neither option gives us much hope for creating a shared common life that is mutually upbuilding and generously receptive.
Offense and Outrage
If confusion, polarization, and hybrid identity characterize our moral landscape, then it is no wonder that our conversations are often characterized by offense and outrage. If positions do not or cannot gain currency by virtue of being persuasive, then the alternative is to gain power through appeal to one's pain or anger. One wins an argument by showing that one is the most emotionally wounded, the most morally scandalized, or the most righteously angry. As Julia Turner noted in Slate Magazine:
Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the default mode for politicians, pundits, critics and, with the rise of social media, the rest of us. When something outrageous happens — when a posh London block installs anti-homeless spikes, or when Khloé Kardashian wears a Native American headdress, or, for that matter, when we read the horrifying details in the Senate's torture report — it's easy to anticipate the cycle that follows: anger, sarcasm, recrimination, piling on; defenses and counterattacks; anger at the anger, disdain for the outraged; sometimes, an apology ... and on to the next. Twitter and Facebook make it easier than ever to participate from home. And the same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable. The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect.
The danger is that offense and outrage can, for all of their extremity, actually dull our capacity to respond well to moral problems.
Moral philosopher Jeffrey Stout has argued that what is needed is a democracy in which "variously situated selves" — that is, people with a wide variety of traditions, belief systems, or practices — are able to "tell their own stories on their own terms," while "reflecting critically on their own experience and on the various traditions and sources of evidence their situation makes available to them." In this way, even though we may not see eye to eye on the larger vision that shapes our lives, we might be able to reach some kind of "overlapping consensus" on particular issues.
When all bets are off for a widely shared moral vision, the church is left with a dual calling: first, to articulate the path of life that is distinctly laid out for us as followers of Jesus, and second, to seek overlapping consensus in a wider public conversation in which we cannot assume a shared faith tradition. Doing these two things allows us to avoid adding fuel to the fire of public spectacles in which moral seriousness is displayed through one's willingness to shout down or shut down all opposing voices through the weight of angry denunciation.
The challenge for ethics, and especially Christian ethics, is to find a way to wade through the heated emotional reactivity in order to embody the stability that comes from trusting certain given goods and the flexibility that comes from listening to the witness of those whose lives look strange and even frightening. Finding the balance between identity and openness, form and freedom, truth and hospitality is the moral challenge of our day. The Episcopal Church certainly will not face this challenge flawlessly, but it has inherited rich resources for just such a task.
DISCUSS THIS
• Find a Bible (or go here online: www.biblegateway.com) and read 1 Corinthians 13 (look at different translations such as the NRSV, the NIV, the Message, and the NABRE). Discuss what gifts you have been given and what it would look like to let love give form to all those gifts.
• Share an example of an ethical issue that you think has been addressed in public conversation more through the rhetoric of offence and outrage than through thoughtful listening. What would it take to have a better conversation about this topic in your church or among your friends?
CHAPTER 2An Episcopal Ethos
The Episcopal Church has its roots in the Church of England, itself the result of a settlement between Protestant and Catholic factions in sixteenth-century England. Thus, the Episcopal Church inherited a tendency toward pragmatic compromise in the face of conflict. The basic pattern of unity involved a common book of worship (including prayers, creeds, and sacraments), a shared model of ordained leadership (bishops, priests, and deacons), respect for biblical authority, and latitude for theological difference. Given this latitude, it is not surprising that the Episcopal Church has had a lot of practice at staying together through times of conflict and disagreement.
As a tradition of moral practice, the Episcopal Church has gathered a distinct constellation of resources for discernment. But unlike the Roman Catholic Church, we do not have a set of moral teachings that are binding on every member, and unlike many Protestant churches, we do not believe there is a clear biblical mandate for every ethical question. Having said that, we also do not believe that the moral life is a blank slate filled in with the preferences of the individual. The Episcopal Church broadly affirms that the stories of Scripture and the traditions of the church provide a framework for a Christ-shaped moral life that is both grounded and generous, definable but also able to comprehend disagreements within bonds of affection.
The constellation of resources for moral formation and discernment in the Episcopal Church includes certain emphases of practice, belief, and authority that, while not exclusive to Episcopalians, constitute a pattern distinctive to the Episcopal way of following Christ.
Practice: Prayer and Holiness
When we learn an instrument, a sport, or a craft, we are often told that we need to practice. But unlike the popular saying "practice makes perfect," I was told "practice makes permanent," which was intended to help me remember to practice well (in my case, to keep my fingers in the right positions on the strings as I learned to play the guitar). To practice is to engage in a repeated, structured activity that develops particular skills, habits, and dispositions in order that some kind of excellence can be achieved. Practices can be as complex as accounting or as basic as playing scales. Dribbling a soccer ball or rehearsing a purl stitch are practices that make possible excellence in soccer and knitting, which are, themselves, practices that contribute to the higher excellences of fitness, beauty, and happiness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Formed by Love by Scott Bader-Saye. Copyright © 2017 Scott Bader-Saye. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Formed by Love v
Part I Episcopal Ethics in a Changing World 1
Chapter 1 When All Bets Are Off 2
Chapter 2 An Episcopal Ethos 10
Part II Big Questions 17
Chapter 3 How to Be Happy (and Good) 18
Chapter 4 How to Do What You Want 25
Chapter 5 How Not to Follow the Rules 32
Chapter 6 How to Love Like Jesus 39
Chapter 7 How to Keep Justice Just 46
Chapter 8 How to Find the Good in Others 52
Part III Daily Practice 59
Chapter 9 Morning Prayer 60
Chapter 10 Working 67
Chapter 11 Eating 74
Chapter 12 Playing 81
Chapter 13 Compline 88
Notes 97