Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #1

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This series is ultimately about justice. Or rather, this series aims to remember certain fundamental Christian claims about how we recognize the just. In publishing this series, I am laying essential groundwork for future explorations of topics in Christian ethics. 

Questions about justice raise the question of how we know what is true, for to claim that we are able to recognize justice and injustice is to claim that we know truth. Yet often at the center of our brokenness are mutually exclusive claims about what is true. 

The most common ethical theories in American culture (into which disciples are indoctrinated in our culture generally and at universities particularly) arise from Providential Deism or unbelief, and are detached from any explicit reference to Christ. (I have in mind here utilitarianism, pragmatism, contractarianism, and relativism. We'll explore Christian concerns with these secular methods of reasoning in a separate series.)

Some theories aim at consequences that are not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, but plainly the way they define the greatest good is different than the way trinitarian Christian theology understands the greatest good. The way of the Cross is certainly a poor strategy to maximize pleasure, and it certainly leads Christians to perform actions - like sacrificing self - that are not just a defiance of practical reason, but indeed “foolishness to the Greeks” (1Cor 1:23). 

Secular ethical theories may reach the same conclusions as specifically Christian moral reasoning, but they are quite doubtful methods of discernment for Christians precisely because their premises deny or ignore the Church’s claims about and the implications of the Trinity. Since our purpose as the Church is to denote in our common life the life of the triune God, these methods deny or ignore the reality of the very thing we are called to signify.

The Task of the Church is to be the Church

In considering how Christians ought to discern ethically, it is essential for us to remember that, as those grafted into the destiny of Israel through Christ, we are the people called out of the world for a specific purpose. We are to be “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God” for the specific purpose of “declare[ing] the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light (1Pet 2:9). We have been delivered; therefore we are to be a “holy nation,” a people ‘set apart’ from the world in order to teach the world what it means to worship God - even as we wander in the wilderness:

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. (Ex 19:4-6)

It is surely significant that the Lord declares us a people set apart for a special purpose immediately before giving the gift of the Ten Commandments. Our identity as a special people is inseparable from our obedience to our Lord’s voice which is expressed in the Law and the prophets and recapitulated in Christ. Indeed, our purpose of teaching the world what it means to worship God in the wilderness is inseparable from our hearing and obeying God’s voice. Our worship is our ethics, and our ethical acts are our worship. 

Here we find the key to discernment.  Our task as the Church is neither to maximize pleasure, nor to discern our duty in terms that maximize what the Enlightenment describes as human freedom; our task as the Church is to worship God in such a way that all the world is drawn into our worship (1 Peter 2:9; Cf. Isaiah 2:2-6). As Stanley Hauerwas so often says, “the task of the the Church is to be the Church.” And that means that our purpose is to live in such a way that our contingent lives speak the truth about God revealed in Christ so that the world is drawn into the friendship with God that is its destiny. 

If the task of the Church is to be the Church, then the task of Christians is to be faithful.
Ethical discernment is about learning how to tell the truth about God through our actions. The ethical task for Christians is to discern the paths through which “God meets [our] needs when we call upon him in need and expectation, thus enabling [us] to fulfill all righteousness.” (Hauerwas, Stanley, and Samuel Wells.”The Gift of the Church”. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell Companions to Religion). Wiley-Blackwell, 2006, p. 16.) 

Therefore, the first step in discerning ethically is to restate our questions in Christian terms so that we locate our own story within the story about God that it is our purpose to tell. Having rephrased the question, we then turn to consider what is true about our God and, in particular, how our God blesses the Church.

However, restating our questions so that we locate our story within the story about God leads us straight to the questions of how we know that story and how we discern together the ethical implications of our story. How is it reasonable to expect that Christians living in a pluralistic world have the possibility of being of one mind in Christ?  That is the challenge of this series. Over the next few days, we'll work through the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with an emphasis on how the Spirit schools the Church so that we believe what we ought to believe in order for our common life to embody the good news and truth of Christ. 

In our next post, we'll begin to remember how the Holy Spirit teaches the story about God it is our purpose to tell.