Recasting the Mould (contd)

But the Christian affirmation is not simply that love ought to be the last word about life, but that, despite all appearances, it is...It is frankly incredible unless the love revealed in Jesus is indeed the nature of ultimate reality, unless he is a window through the surface of things into God. Christianity stands or falls by revelation, by Christ as the disclosure of the final truth not merely about human nature but about all nature and all reality. The Christian's faith cannot rest in the capacities of man. The Christian's faith is in Christ as the revelation, the laying bare, of the very heart and and being of ultimate reality.

Our impasse is primarily an intellectual one: 'It does not immediately or directly affect Christian faith or Christian worship or the conduct of the Christian life. God is still at work. The old formulas continue to be used: they serve in worship, the comprise pictorial imagery useful for meditation, and they mark the continuity of our faith and devotion with that of our Christian ancestors. They preserve what may be meaningless to one generation but meaningful to the next. Our search is fides quaerens intellectum: and so long as they search can and does continue, the insufficiency of our theology need not affect Christian faith or conduct or worship'.

Without the constant discipline of theological thought, asking what we really mean by the symbols, purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God with ourselves and the world, the Church can quickly become obscurantist and its faith and conduct and worship increasingly formal and hollow.

That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant to the world. I would see much more hope for the Church if it was organized not to defend the interests of religion against the inroads of the state but to equip Christians by the quality and power of its community life, to enter with their 'secret discipline' into all the exhilarating, and dangerous, secular strivings of our day, there to follow and to find the workings of God.

For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.

'There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity fo mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted'. Herbert Butterfield.

The basic commitment to Christ may have been in the past-and may be for most of us still-buttressed and fortified by many lesser commitments-to a particular projection of God, a particular 'myth' fo the Incarnation, a particular code of morals, a particular pattern of religion. Without the buttresses it may look as if all would collapse. Nevertheless, we must beware of clinging to the buttresses instead of to Christ. And still more must we beware of insisting on the buttresses as the way to Christ. For to growing numbers in our generation they are barriers rather than supports.

The New Morality (contd)

Tillich seeks to push beyond 'supranaturalism and naturalism' to a third position, in which they transcendent is nothing external or 'out there' but is encountered in, with and under the Thou of all finite relationships as their ultimate depth and ground and meaning. In ethics this means accepting as the basis of moral judgments the actual concrete relationship in all its particularity, refusing to subordinate it to any universal norm or to treat it merely as a case, but yet, in the depth of that unique relationship, meeting and responding to the claims of the sacred, the holy and the absolutely unconditional.

Life in Christ Jesus, in the new being, in the Spirit, means having no absolutes but his love, being totally uncommitted in every other respect but totally committed in this. The claim of the Christ may come to others, as indeed it often comes to the Christian, incognito: but since it is the claim of home, of the personal ground of our very being, it does not come as anything foreign. Love alone, because, as it were, it has a built-in moral compass, enabling it to 'home' intuitively upon the deepest need of the other, can allow itself to be directed completely by the situation. It is able to embrace an ethic of radical responsiveness, meeting every situation on its own merits, with no prescriptive laws. For this reason it is the only ethic which offers a point of constancy in a world of flux and yet remains absolutely free for, and free over, the changing situation. It is prepared to see every moment as a fresh creation from God's hand demanding its own and perhaps wholly unprecedented response.

Brunner argues that Christian ethics is not a scheme of codified conduct. It is a purposive effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry obedient to love. It is a radical 'ethic of the situation' with prescribed-except love. It is love which is the constitutive principle-and law, at most, is only the regulative one, if it is even that.

It is of course a highly dangerous ethic and the representatives of supranaturalistic legalism will, like the Pharisees, always fear it. Seeing it a licence to laxity and to the broadest possible living. But love's gate is strict and narrow and its requirements infinitely deeper and more penetrating. This 'new morality' is, of course, none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. But love is the end of the law precisely because it does respect persons-the unique, individual person-unconditionally. 'The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns'. Whatever the pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no 'packaged' moral judgments-for persons are more important even than 'standards'.

The New Morality

It is impossible to reassess one's doctrine of God without bringing one's view of morality into the same melting pot. For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love - about the ultimate ground and meaning of personal relationships. There is no need to prove that a revolution is required in morals. It has long since broken out; and it is no 'reluctant revolution'. There are plenty of voices within the church greeting it with vociferous dismay. The religious sanctions are losing their strength, the moral landmarks are disappearing beneath the flood, the nation is in danger. This is the end term of the apostasy from Christianity: the fathers rejected the doctrine, the children have abandoned the morals. The great defection from God, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The old way of thinking that right and wrong are derived 'at second hand' from God. They are the commandments which God gives, the laws which he lays down (as with Moses on Mt Sinai). And supranaturalist reasons - that God or Christ have pronounced it 'a sin' - have force, and even meaning, for none but a diminishing religious remnant. But equally there is no suggestion in the Gospels that the Christian ethic is for 'the religious' only. It is for all men: it is based upon the nature of man, and for the foundation of his teaching on marriage Jesus specifically went behind Moses and the Law to creation. It is for all men universally: it is not for homo religiosus.

The moral precepts of Jesus are not intended to be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do, whatever the circumstances, and pronouncing certain courses of action universally right and other universally wrong. They are not legislation laying down what love always demands of every one: they are illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone. They are, as it were, parables of the Kingdom in its moral claims-flashlight pictures of the uncompromising demand which the Kingdom must make upon any who would respond to it. This insistence upon the parabolic character of the ethical sayings of Jesus should deliver us from the danger of taking them either as literal injunctions for any situation or as universal principles for every situation. The sermon on the Mount is relevant not because it provides us with an infallible guide to the moral life, but because as Martin Dibelius put it, 'we are able to be transformed by it'. What the supranaturalist ethic does is to subordinate the actual individual relationship to some universal, whether metaphysical or moral, external to it. The decision is not reached, the judgment is not made, on the empirical realities of the particular concrete relationship between the persons concerned. Man is made for the sabbath, and not the sabbath for man. Be the individual circumstances what they will, the moral law is the same-for all men and for all times. It is imposed on the relationship from without, from above: the function of casuistry is to 'apply' it to the case in question. It stands for 'absolute', 'objective' moral values and presents a dyke against the floods of relativism and subjectivism. And yet this heteronomy is also its profound weakness. Except to the man who believes in 'the God out there' it has no compelling sanction or self-authenticating foundation. It cannot answer the question 'Why is this wrong?' in terms of the intrinsic realities of the situation itself.

The revolt in the field of ethics from supranaturalism to naturalism, from heteronomy to autonomy, has been with us so long that we need not spend much time on it. It began with the magnificent grandeur of Kant's autonomous ideal, perhaps the greatest and most objective of all ethical systems. But this is really only secularized deism-and not completely secularized at that; for though Kant dispensed with the hypothesis of God to account for the source of the moral law, he brought him back, as a very crude deus ex machina, to ensure the eventual coincidence of virtue and happiness. Kant's moral idealism was living on religious capital. As this ran out or was rejected, it came to be replaced by every kind of ethical relativism-utilitarianism, evolutionary naturalism, existentialism. These systems, so different in themselves, have this in common: they have taken their stand, quite correctly, against any subordination of the concrete needs of the individual situation to an alien universal norm. But in the process any objective or unconditional standard has disappeared in a morass of relativism and subjectivism. Tillich sums up the situation in words that refer to culture in general but apply just as much to its ethical aspect:
'Autonomy is able to live as long as it can draw from the religious tradition of the past, from the remnants of a lost theonomy. But more and more it loses this spiritual foundation. It becomes emptier, more formalistic, or more factual and is driven towards skepticism and cynicism, towards the loss of meaning and purpose. The history of autonomous cultures in history of a continuous waste of spiritual substance. At the end of this process autonomy turns back to the lost theonomy with impotent longing, or it looks forward to a new theonomy.'