“God gives his people everything they need to follow him.”[1] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells admit this claim about Christian ethics sounds unbelievable, but they contend that refocusing Christian ethics on the Church and its worship in the traditional liturgy allows ethics to be defined by discipleship, abundance, and God rather than by judgement, scarcity, and ourselves.[2] I agree, and I will argue that the reconnection of liturgy and ethics is what Christians need to remember their historic identity and way of life. I will proceed by outlining Vigen Guroian’s argument that the Church and its liturgy is the key to resisting secularization, then examining how Hauerwas and Wells see liturgy and ethics shifting relationship, finishing with M. Therese Lysaught’s description of how baptism provides a response to human cloning and some reflections on ‘non-liturgical’ appropriation.
Guroian, an Orthodox theologian, wishes to develop an appropriate ecclesiology and way of life for churches after Christendom, or after Christianity’s “cultural disestablishment.”[3] He rejects attempts to resuscitate ‘neutral’ and tradition-grounded natural-law arguments, finding more promise in exploring, like St. Basil of Caesarea, “forms of community and discipline that would enable Christians to live the gospel and show others the way to the kingdom of God.”[4] Guroian also recruits St. Augustine and St. Benedict for his project to “rediscover the ecclesial context of Christian ethics.”[5] Indeed, Guroian believes that without such retrieval, Christian morality will become impossible in highly secularized societies like North America. How does the ecclesial context help? By being the place where the Christian tradition is transmitted, received, and made normative through worship and liturgy.[6] In other words, the liturgy keeps tradition and moral practice linked, and Christian moral arguments today seem unfounded precisely because this connection has been lost, forgotten even by moral “‘specialists.’”[7] Such integration is biblical: the epistle to the Colossians does not make a “forensic or discursive argument” against the false teachers, but reminds readers of their baptism, the catechism that accompanied it, and the practical consequences of the death and resurrection in Christ they have “anamnetically experienced.”[8] Therefore, to recover ethics’ ecclesial and liturgical context, Guroian suggests Christians need to exercise “the Pauline style of parenesis” seen in Colossians and other letters, reject liberal concepts of agency for a relational, communal, and “dialogic paradigm,” and become “better practiced in their own language of faith” and in engaging others in imaginative dialogue.[9] Guroian also draws an intriguing parallel with icon theology: because icons are “dialogic and kenotic,” Orthodox ethics is “iconic ethics.”[10] Overall, Guroian makes a powerful argument for reclaiming the Church’s liturgy and distinct identity, yet his grounding in the tradition and in Orthodoxy helps him evade the ‘sectarian’ label often levelled at others.
To Rowan Williams, Guroian’s “iconic ethics” is a good term for the ethic presented in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics.[11] Anglicans Hauerwas and Wells’ goal for the Companion is to alter readers’ vision of Christian ethics by “stretching” their understanding of worship and the liturgy.[12] Contrary to the common Kantian distinction between the serious real world of ethics and the unreal spiritual world of religion, they assert that life here is actually rehearsal for the worship that will occupy eternity and for which everything was created.[13] They also argue worship is not only words but also “an ordered series of activities” that “suggest habits and models that inform every aspect of corporate life.”[14] These are bold claims, yet buttressed by their observation that “the Church was able to form and sustain disciples” even when Christian ethics, as we now define it, did not exist.[15] Rather, Christian ethics had to be invented in modernity as a method of separating Christian convictions from the Church’s practices so they could be plausible as an ‘ethic’ available to anyone.[16] According to Hauerwas and Wells, this disintegration began with Kant and continued through H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, which “reproduces a Kantian Christ freed from ecclesial embodiment, who can do no more than hover as a transcendental reminder of human finitude.”[17] Naturally, the concrete practices of the Church thereby became meaningless, and Christian ethics was reduced to cataloguing and dissecting “ideas about ethics by theologians” without reference to the Church’s life, identity, or tradition.[18] In short, Hauerwas and Wells demonstrate the modern concept of Christian ethics is a concession to Enlightenment ideology, incompatible with the historic mooring of morality in the Church’s liturgy.
Yet the question remains how the liturgy actually applies to the novel issues Christians face today, including those raised by new medical technologies. Lysaught, a Roman Catholic, provides such an argument in her analysis of baptism and human cloning. She observes that though reproductive and therapeutic cloning[19] are typically legitimated by appeals to reproductive freedom and potentially tremendous cures for disease, respectively, comments by biotechnology leaders suggest a greater end is in view: scientific progress towards a “promised land” where “illness, aging, and death” have been defeated.[20] Lysaught then asks whether the Church could use cloning as another means to care for children, or if it conflicts with how Christians generally nurture their children, as shown in baptism.[21] Her answer: those “who mean what they do when they baptize their children must find cloning deeply incongruous.”[22] First, baptism questions the narrative of parenting that “privileges biological relationship” by reminding us children are not ours, but God’s; further, it teaches that biological parents alone are insufficient to rear children in the Christian faith and that “spiritual kinship is more fundamental than biological.”[23] Second, baptism “locates the goods of healing” claimed for therapeutic cloning “in a very different narrative and vision of the transcendent.”[24] Christians know healing is not “an end in itself,” but must proclaim God’s reign; baptism trains parents to resist the false god of “bio-utopia” by acknowledging death’s inevitability and affirming God’s constant presence, care, and ultimate triumph over death.[25] Baptism thereby provides the true counter to the hopelessness revealed in the (semi-voluntary) configuration of parents as “desperate”: because children are baptized into Christ, who “has truly risen from the dead, Christians have hope that their children’s death will not be the end for them.”[26] Lysaught ends by describing baptism as an “exercise through which Christians gain virtues necessary for resisting the ways in which culture would shape us.”[27] In other words, baptism is a liturgical discipline that opens up an alternative way of being in modern technological secular culture.
These four theologians present a powerful defence of our need to reintegrate liturgy and ethics and thereby relearn who we are and how we act as Christians today. Guroian demonstrates the historical and biblical basis for liturgy as ethics, Hauerwas and Wells expose the Enlightenment captivity of modern ‘Christian ethics,’ and Lysaught identifies the hidden power of baptism to controvert our medical and techno-scientific idolatry. Yet those from supposedly non-liturgical traditions may wonder what this means for them, especially if they reject infant baptism. It may help to remember that all Christians who meet together have some leitourgia, or public service, and that Evangelical and Anabaptist practices of child dedication are analogous to infant baptism in many ways needed for Lysaught’s argument.[28] Ultimately, though, many may need to discard notions the Church’s liturgy is only for ‘high church’ traditions, or is simply arbitrary human innovation. God has given us his Spirit and his Church as well as his Word, and we need all his gifts to follow him rightly.
[1] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 13.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Vigen Guroian, Ethics After Christendom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 3.
[4] Ibid., 24-5.
[5] Ibid., 26.
[6] Ibid., 33.
[7] Ibid., 38-40.
[8] Ibid., 42-3. His emphasis.
[9] Ibid., 48-51.
[10] Ibid., 50.
[11] Rowan Williams, “Afterword,” in Hauerwas and Wells, 496.
[12] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer,” in Hauerwas and Wells, 3.
[13] Ibid., 4-5.
[14] Ibid., 7.
[15] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “Why Christian Ethics Was Invented,” in Hauerwas and Wells, 28.
[16] Ibid., 28-30.
[17] Ibid., 33.
[18] Ibid., 34.
[19] ‘Therapeutic’ cloning creates cloned embryos for their stem cells.
[20] M. Therese Lysaught, “Becoming One Body: Health Care and Cloning,” in Hauerwas and Wells, 265-7.
[21] Ibid., 268.
[22] Ibid., 272.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., 274.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid., 275.
[28] See ibid., 270-1.
