چکیده :
from his earliest published writing webster identified the moral life as the horizon of dogmatic enquiry, and his last-published work offers a subtle clarification of how dogmatics relates to ethics.
the principle ‘action follows being’ governs both the relation of the two sub-disciplines and the internal logic of each.
as theology is a knowledge acquired not only speculatively but also practically, dogmatics must look forward and practical theology look back.
their interaction covers the whole range of theological topics.
it is a fittingly chalcedonian conception stressing the duality of dogmatics and ethics alongside their unity.
while specialized dogmatics and ethics are legitimate, the two remain proximate, in a definite order of origin and derivation.
the temptation of a de-moralized theology equalled by that of a theology wrongly constructed on a moral a priori.
in his late essays webster presents worked examples of how dogmatics may handle moral questions without venturing into casuistic exploration of dilemmas.
one essay, however, goes further, troublingly describing ‘mortification and vivification’ as the primary human acts of the regenerate state, a function that the tradition has always assigned to love.
the question of how human action has significance in relation to divine action is treated as an urgent one from the beginning to the end of john webster’s too-short thirty years of theological writing.
in his earliest book, the expository presentation of jüngel which sprang from his doctoral thesis, the question already assumed an importance for him.
‘insufficient emphasis on the primacy of moral action’ was his verdict on jüngel’s theology of salvation.1 the monograph on barth’s ethics of reconciliation, an extended study of the fragmentary ethics section of church dogmatics iv, set out to refute the view that with his ‘anthropological turn’ in the 1950s barth had returned to ethical interests he had rejected in his dialectical phase.
webster argued that, on the contrary, barth’s dogmatic work was conceived throughout as a refoundation of ethics: ‘as dogmatics inquires concerning the action of god and its goodness, it must necessarily make thorough inquiry concerning active man and the goodness of his action.
it has the problem of ethics in view from the very first.’2 barth’s dogmatics, he added, was a ‘moral ontology’ – a phrase explained to mean ‘an extensive account of the situation in which human agents act … primarily devoted to the task of describing the “space” which agents occupy’.
consequently, barth ‘gives only low priority to the description of their character and to the analysis of quandary situations in which they find themselves’.3
does this mean that ethics could be seen as a theological discipline distinct from dogmatics, with the freedom to advance beyond moral ontology and describe human characters and analyse deliberative quandaries? no hint is given in that book of such a further field of theological enquiry; the whole emphasis rests on the responsibility and competence of dogmatics to keep ethical questions in view.
ethics is presented as a ‘positive’ science, ‘describing’, but not deliberating nor seeking to guide action.
yet webster is not content to do as barth sometimes did, and use ‘dogmatics’ as an all-embracing term for theological enquiry.
dogmatics and ethics, while ‘co-inherent’ and not separate, are two; the question of the good is different from the question of god’s being and acts, and we need be ‘neither agnostic nor sceptical’ in confronting it.
barth’s moral theology was a broader work of exposition along the same lines, a collection of essays assessing the place assigned to ethics in barth’s work, notable for the earliest comprehensive treatment in english of the posthumously published ethics.
the same year, 1998, saw webster’s first step towards a constructive exploration of the theme.
the article ‘god and conscience’, derived from a short dictionary article written two years before, is a striking early example of his bold approach to conceptual description.4 in contrast to barth, who treated conscience as a work of the holy spirit, he offers a trinitarian description: ‘we have conscience by the gift of the father’; we have a conscience ‘schooled by christ’; we have a conscience that can judge itself ‘through the secret energy of the spirit … in the repetition of the authoritative judgment of god’.5 the article began by confidently announcing an intention of ‘repair work’ on the concept of conscience, accomplishing ‘theological renovation’.6 the principle is then articulated: ‘moral action is properly action undertaken in view of how the world is … to be and act truthfully’.7 theological ethics is concerned with what he now calls ‘the moral field’.
pannenberg is called as witness that moral judgement requires a ‘comprehensive knowledge of the reality of god, of the specific reality of the created world, and of our existence’.8 of these three kinds of knowledge, however, webster has most to say about the first, the magnalia dei, the redemptive self-revealing of god in the history of christ.
conscience is a life conscious of being caught up in that drama, affirming the word of the spirit that we are made children of god.
pannenberg’s second and third elements of knowledge are then wrapped into one, ‘the human creature who has conscience in fellowship with god’.
yet almost everything said under this heading turns out to be negative: the creature is not autonomous, its conscience is not primarily legislative but indicative, its self-knowledge is not foundational but derivative, it is not a function of personal authenticity, it does not ask primarily about the agent’s actions but about the ground of moral reflection; conscience is not free by any prescriptive right, but needs freeing, not solitary, but depends on the formation it receives in the community of the holy spirit.
given that the scope of this article was not moral reason as a whole, but only ‘conscience’, that is, the formal conditions of moral self-knowledge, these critical antitheses might arguably have been sufficient.
but since a great point was made at the beginning of the article that the fate of conscience was the fate of ethics as a whole, we are left with the sense that not much can be said constructively about the categories ethics typically deals with.
the suggestion that ethical categories – not only rules and law but virtues, practices, dilemmas, decisions, means and ends, ideals and so on – require not merely reorientation but outright displacement, seems to threaten the territory of ethics with a wholesale takeover.
but if webster can sometimes look in that direction in his resolute determination to establish the theological foundations, he can also look towards a more substantial recovery of moral categories.
the article concludes memorably with a striking if vaguely-worded promise of ‘a proper evangelical humanism … which contains resources … we hardly dare to take into our hands’.
to turn directly from that essay to the formulations of the domain of the word (2012) and god without measure ii (2016) is to see how john webster dared to take those resources into his hands.
not content with warnings against false foundations, though these never cease, the final essays are boldly confident about positive redescription of the christian life.
before we turn to the later reflections, however, two intermediate steps should be noted in the two short books of 2003, holy scripture and holiness.
in the first he finds it necessary to develop an account of the sacred authority of scripture with a chapter on reading, where ‘faithful’ reading of scripture is characterized ‘as a moral matter’, requiring ‘teachableness’ and ‘childlikeness’.9 in the second he includes a chapter on ‘the holiness of the christian’, where he maintains ‘a propriety to giving a dogmatic account of the personal life of the christian’.
this is developed in terms of ‘mortification and vivification’, made actual in ‘freedom, obedience and love’.
repeating the warnings we expect from him against making the ‘personal or subjective’ the ‘real centre’ of such a description, he nevertheless proceeds briskly: ‘all that is required is good dogmatic order, in which sanctity is rooted in the ways of the holy trinity’, and adds, in a remark that anticipates much to follow, ‘good dogmatic order will help good pastoral order’.10
in ‘christology and ethics’ a lecture addressed to the society for the study of christian ethics in 2009, webster proceeds further in articulating the unity and difference of dogmatic and pastoral/ethical concerns.
ethical work is characterized as being dependent on dogmatics (as it is on exegesis – a third partner to the theological enterprise which became a concern of the aberdeen years), but it is also allowed that ethics is supplementary and additional to dogmatics.
with support from john owen, a ‘double knowledge’ is said to be contained in the gospel, knowledge of god and his acts, knowledge of god’s will for his creatures.11 from bonhoeffer are drawn two parallel statements that highlight what ethics adds: ‘the subject matter of doctrinal theology is the truth of god’s reality revealed in christ’; ‘the subject matter of a christian ethic is god’s reality revealed in jesus christ becoming real among god’s creatures’.12 to this webster adds a further suggestion: christian ethics itself has a dual focus, oriented to being as well as to action, ‘contemplative’ as well as ‘practical’.
‘moral ontology’ (an old friend) concerns the creature’s ‘appointment’ to be a certain kind of being, a ‘nature’; the nature engages in its own kind of movement, yet to understand the movement we must understand the nature.13 if it is hardly new to say that ‘theology does well not to segregate what it has to say about jesus christ from what it has to say about christian conduct’, what is new is that the non-segregation of the double object is now an interior principle within theological ethics, not only governing its relation to dogmatics.
also new is the concession that investigation and exposition may properly begin at either end, starting from dogmatics or starting from ethics.
a fine essay on ‘theology and the peace of the church’, first published in 2012 in the domain of the word, gives more clarity to the quasi-chalcedonian relationship to which webster has been feeling his way.
thinking about controversy in the church, he tells us, ‘involves working simultaneously’ at dogmatic theology and at ‘moral or ascetical’ theology.
excluding the thought that these two are ‘discrete disciplines’, he recalls a phrase from his barth book and describes them as ‘coinherent reflective activities’, directed to different aspects of a common object.
theology is a ‘unified rational exercise’, and it is a matter of indifference whether a given enquiry starts from moral-ascetical or from dogmatic concerns; yet there is a ‘material primacy’ of dogmatics, which is to say that dogmatics grounds morals.
this does not prevent illumination flowing back to dogmatics from moral theology, however, and that is because ‘knowledge of god and of ourselves in god cannot proceed apart from the tempering of passion’, which paves the way for a memorable passage at the end of the essay on the place of righteous and unrighteous anger in theology.14 once again the moral impetus comes from the need to characterize the study of theology ‘as a moral matter’ – not merely that ethics is ‘in view’, but that doctrinal thinkers are helpless to pursue their enquiries without a moral culture to suggest what such a life requires and accomplishes.
this line of exploration reaches its final equilibrium in john webster’s last book.
a glance at the titles of essays in god without measure ii makes it clear how far he was drawn towards ethical questions in his last years, organizing them primarily around the virtues.
besides the st andrews inaugural lecture on ‘intellectual patience’, there are essays on ‘mercy’, ‘courage’ and ‘sins of speech’, on the emotion of sorrow, on ‘mortification and vivification’, as well as ‘christology and ethics’, on which we have already commented.
an introduction, subtitled with the scholastic phrase agere sequitur esse, brings together the account of the two sub-disciplines that is sketched more fragmentarily in the subsequent essays.
‘action follows being’ is the overarching rule, not only governing the relation of dogmatic and ethical tasks, but also the internal dynamics of each.
in the major doctrinal essays of the first volume of god without measure it was constantly insisted that discussion of god’s acts takes us back to god’s being as their presupposition.
correspondingly, the object of theology as a whole – god, and all things in relation to god, as is tirelessly repeated – divides into knowledge of god-and-creatures on the one hand, the service of god on the other.15 dogmatic reason, though oriented to theological knowledge, must not be without its ‘prospective’ moment, looking forward to ‘temporal enactment’ and open to being ‘enlarged’ by moral-theological reflection.
‘practical-moral theology’, on the other hand, oriented to deliberation, has its ‘retrospective’ moment, grounding deliberation on what can truly be said of god and his works.16 so the two projects relate like two poles in a field of gravitational energy.
connecting them is the field of life and thought which is governed in all its endless differentiations by the movement from being to action.
the common field, now referred to as ‘moral theology’, contains the ‘first principles of human moral history’.17 in setting forth the being and work of god, dogmatics must not fail to display these principles, too, as the basis of human action; ethics, in exploring the directions open to active creaturely life, must not fail to prove their grounding upon that basis.
‘moral theology’ covers the whole of reality that can be known; where in 2010 webster could still suggest that the distinction of dogmatics and ethics followed the topics of theology, ethics aligned with the human creature, dogmatics with the creator-redeemer, moral theology is now ‘distributed across the corpus of dogmatics’, so that ‘there is a moral-theological derivate of all theological doctrines’, beginning with ‘the one principal christian doctrine of god the holy trinity’.
to speak of the ‘material’ priority of dogmatics to ethics is simply to say that being is presupposed in acting, and that whereas being is the specific focus of dogmatics, acting is the specific focus of ethics.
yet, since theology is ‘a mixed knowledge, acquired not only speculatively but also practically’, dogmatics must expect ‘enrichment, illumination or expansion from the considerations of morals and ascetics’.
that happens because the order of reason is not always a priori, following the ontological order; there is such a thing as a posteriori inference, drawn from experience: ‘as deliberative reason combs through circumstances, it acquires further knowledge of our nature.
deliberation, the task of practical-ethical science is not simply the application of already-achieved knowledge.’
when he was in possession of his mature powers, john webster made distinctions like a surgeon teasing apart the tissues of a living body, as respectful of the organic unity as of the difference, knowing that when the operation was over the tissues must bind together again.
in his constant search for precision he deployed terminology in a shifting and sometimes idiosyncratic way.
so let us attempt a characterization of the position he reached.
we have characterized it as ‘chalcedonian’, and not arbitrarily, since the chalcedonian definition (‘two natures in one person/hypostasis’) had in view the relation of human and divine action in the person of christ.
if dogmatics has as its theme god and his works, and ethics the nature and acts of the creature, then the chalcedonian model is the proper matrix for thinking of these two intellectual exercises.
the duality of dogmatics and ethics is not defended as a simple matter of the scholarly independence of two theological sub-disciplines; it arises from a principle which each sub-discipline respects analogously within its own sphere as well as in its external relations: the complementarity of being and action.
at this point the ethical tradition is bound to refer to a traditional aristotelian division of reason into ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’, one reason and not two, confronting one reality and not alternative realities, yet always holding in view a distinction that runs through all reality between what is actual and what is possible.
what is the status of that division for theology? is it, after all, merely another case of anthropological foundationalism, an intrusion into the evangelical proclamation? no, for the dual exercise of reason is conditioned by the dual structure of time, which the evangelical proclamation has made wholly its own.
we live between past and future horizons, between the determined and the indeterminate.
dogmatics is free to wonder whether god in his potentia absoluta could ever foresee such a thing as an indeterminate possibility, but in speaking of actions in time, divine actions included, that absolute perspective must be set aside.
the prophets did not hesitate to assert that god purposed good or evil for the nations hypothetically, and could ‘relent’ of his purposes in the light of their decisions (e.g.
jer.
18:7–10).
there is certainly no evangelical ground for doubting that human agents, redeemed by the accomplished work of god and looking for its full disclosure, are determined in both temporal directions by god’s works, living and acting ‘between the times’.
faith looks back to what has been shown, hope forward to what is not yet shown, while love unifies the two in a consistent embrace of the god who is both past and future – so argued augustine.18 human knowing and deciding can never be collapsed into one another.
sanctified reason, then, no less than unsanctified reason, takes on the twofold form of reflection and deliberation, pursuing now one, now the other proximate conclusion to its searching.
in the second place, then, there is the undergirding unity of the two, asserted, as i read john webster, at three levels.
(a) in a highly chalcedonian way the two enquiries are held together by the need to act as one agent.
if reason reaches proximate conclusions of two kinds, the criterion for rational agency is the capacity to hold the two kinds of conclusion together in a coherent connection.
only so can we know and act reasonably.
that is as true for the practice of theology as for any other human practice.
theology, too, is an activity human beings undertake in the course of living their lives; it cannot be reduced to the putting of certain questions and the championing of certain answers in abstraction from the practical tasks of life.
the skilled theologian, like the skilled surgeon, must have the relevant virtues and be aligned with the relevant practical ends; these are effectively expounded in the 2015 paper, ‘what makes theology theological?’.19 webster learned this lesson originally from barth, but might equally well have learned it from any pre-modern theologian.
it is, of course, at odds with the modern academic conception of a field of study as an abstract accumulation of specialist knowledge independent of those who know it, which treats the investigator as impersonal and disinvolved.
sometimes, then, we find a glance back to the premodern conception of theology as sacra doctrina, flowing uninterruptedly from the sources of divine self-revelation to the concrete pastoral details of the life of faith.
yet webster remains committed to the duality of the two sub-disciplines, admitting, in effect, that two aspects of reality that are indivisible in life may nevertheless be the focus of distinct specialized enquiries.
the specialisms, then, are not a mistake; it is simply that no theologian can be merely a specialist, for a theologian is never less than a human being existing before the grace and judgement of god.20 distinct special fields of theology may appear, and perhaps disappear, in the course of intellectual history.
like all specialized knowledge, these are partly a function of the complexity of the object, partly a function of the prevailing conditions for the pursuit of knowledge.
and perhaps the specialized definitions of dogmatics and ethics are especially important in an era when theology risks being squeezed into the mould of sociology, objectively describing religious practices and organizations.
(b) there is a further level at which the two sub-disciplines must be conscious of their unity.
within the whole that is theology they are not merely parts, but proximate parts, bound, for their own integrity to take care and thought for the interface between them.
they do not, in john webster’s terms, have ‘discrete domains’.
the reality which is the living god shapes the possibilities of human life, and talk about one without recognizing the other would be idle.
that they are also denied ‘discrete procedures’ may seem to pitch the demand for unity too high.
if moral reasoning is essentially inductive and dogmatic reasoning essentially analytic, and if moral reasoning relies on analogy more foundationally than dogmatic thought is prepared to, it should be enough to say that some procedures are necessarily common to them both as basic to all theology, serious attention to the exegesis of scripture, for instance.
(c) to this proximity we must then add a third connection: within the logic of theology they stand in a definite and invariable order of origin and derivation.21 dogmatics is responsible for accounting for the actually real, the work of god as it has been and is, both historical and unchanging, created and miraculous, the fact of witness and the fact of promise.
ethics has to conclude in the purposing of human actions yet to be performed, and unless it follows a train of practical reasoning that leads out from the actually real, it will never attain to the really possible.
real possibility (as opposed to speculative fantasy) belongs to the same world, and is under the same divine government as, actuality.
that is why ethics cannot erect itself on an independent speculative basis without reference to what is given to be known as real.
if it tries to found itself on its own bottom, it becomes merely aspirational, a projection of wishful dreaming that takes leave of the world, a salt that has lost its practical savour.
from the beginning john webster identified two temptations, not only the temptation to a de-moralized theology but the temptation to a wrongly moralized theology.
the ambitious dogmatician may forget that the knowledge of god and his works is, as set before an eschatological horizon, partial and incomplete, and may aspire to a comprehensive theoria that would wrap ourselves and our acts up, without remainder, in a description of the magnalia dei.
the wise dogmatician, understanding the cognitive conditions of theology on pilgrimage, knows that the renewal of self can only be as promised, not as accomplished, so that the work of descriptive praise must always point forwards to a continuing practical engagement of trust and obedience.
the earnest moralist, on the other hand, is easily captivated by a rhetoric of ‘dreams’, ‘visions’ and ‘better worlds’; it is common enough for such aspirations to silence the testimony of reality before it has been heard.
of course, if moral reason finds its point of equilibrium in relation to objective description, it may assist description with that ‘illumination’ that dogmatics can draw from ethics.
but the wise ethicist knows that no one is ever in a position to dictate moral terms to reality, taking over the world-descriptive function for itself, as though it had some perfectly clear intuitive knowledge of goodness from which everything else about the world could be inferred by a kind of necessity.
such a morality is worse than a salt that has lost its savour; it is an ideology, dictating to experience rather than following it, pretending to tell the truth about the universe on the basis of its own self-projection.22 if, while avoiding that mistake, we can still find in theological ethics the fullest expression of the gift of moral reason bestowed on adam’s children, that is because we have listened to representations, dogmatic and narrative, of an actual god, a god who ‘besets us behind’, and not only ‘before’ (cf.
ps.
139:5).
*
in the various moral essays of god without measure ii john webster presents a number of worked examples of what a dogmatician may see and say about moral questions.
the topics are discrete, each addressed on its own terms and with little attempt to discern an organizing structure to connect them.
the derivation of each topic from the doctrinal framework of god’s acts in the renewal of human life is made clear on each occasion, and then the topic is treated as a matter for exhortation, the sources for which are strongly scriptural.
there is no casuistic exploration of interpretative ambiguities or practical dilemmas, an omission specially noticeable in ‘sins of speech’, where selective use is made of patristic and scholastic texts which actually do take up such questions.
but this restraint is wholly in order, given the general programme webster has enunciated.
the mapping of the field of conflicting claims, demands and interpretations is left to ethics, while dogmatics is content to demonstrate the necessary movement forward from its own well-mapped field into the traditions of moral teaching that have been current in the christian church.
in one essay, however, the ambitions appear to be greater.
it is worth devoting some attention, then, to the piece entitled ‘mortification and vivification’.
these terms, defined initially out of the heidelberg confession as ‘sincere sorrow’ for sin and ‘joyful and active compliance’ with god’s commands, refer, webster asserts, to ‘human undertakings’, commonly treated by ‘moral and ascetic theology’.23 they are to be approached from a dogmatic treatment of the regenerate state.
of this state they are ‘the chief acts’, and they bring the regenerate state to completion as ‘the principal forms of (grace-infused) good works’.24 they are then described (‘formally’) as ‘practices’ of ‘daily dying and rising again’, in recollection of jesus christ and in wakefulness to the holy spirit, conforming to the pattern of christ’s death and resurrection.25 materially, they ‘repudiate’ the old nature and ‘amplify’ the new.
mortification is ‘continence’, broadly understood as self-discipline, while vivification is an active ‘yielding’ to the divine movement which ‘sets creatures in motion’.26
two clusters of questions arise about the handling of this theme.
the first concerns the subject of the two verbs ‘mortify’ and ‘vivify’, which must refer primarily to divine acts: may we appropriate them to human acts, too? a general defence of doing so is suggested in terms of the basic rule of divine and human action, which is that they do not exclude each other, but correspond.
human beings cannot act to any real purpose – whatever empty initiatives they may assert for themselves by virtue of their creaturely birthright – unless god acts through and with them to accomplish his purposes.
god, on the other hand, never acts in vain, and his action accomplishes its gracious purpose most decisively when it reaps the full harvest of creaturely action in praise and obedience.
so, too, these human acts of mortification and vivification are ‘not self-initiated but … consequent upon christ’s death and resurrection’, while being ‘properly creaturely movements whose integrity is … upheld by the work of the spirit’.27 to this, however, it must be replied that the correspondence of divine and human action does not authorize a wholesale communicatio idiomatum of action-types.
god performs those actions that belong to him as god, the creature those that belong to creaturely existence.
the agere to be attributed to each reflects the difference in their esse.
so we do not, in any univocal or unparadoxical sense, say that the creature creates, redeems or sustains creation, nor that the creator obeys, worships and suffers and so on.
true, the miracle of the incarnation involves the interchanging of these roles, and in that context we may speak of god’s suffering and obedience, or even, with jüngel, of his dying, as we may speak as well of the glorified creature as ‘reigning’ in heaven.
but language appropriate to the great exchange must not be set loose from that strict historical reference to the person of jesus christ, to project some new mystical order of things: ‘suffering is triumph’, ‘humility is power’, or whatever.
but speech about jesus christ is subject to the chalcedonian discipline of speaking of a unity of person in whom the two natures are present ‘unconfusedly’.
so may we speak of humans not only as ‘putting off the old nature’ and ‘putting on the new nature’, but actually as ‘mortifying and vivifying’? an answer seems ready to hand: holy scripture has no hesitation in bidding us to ‘mortify’ ourselves in response to the mortification god has wrought for us (rom.
8:13; col.
3:5).
but here a second question arises: does this licence to appropriate one member of the duplet to human action extend also to the other? apparently it does not: raising from the dead is an act uniquely attributed to god, not even by a chalcedonian communicatio to the incarnate son, of whom it is said, at the highest, that he ‘abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light’ (2 tim.
1:10).
but sovereignty over the sequence of these two states, creating life out of death, is peculiarly the proprium of god the father.
and so we have to ask a third question: is it not absolutely essential to the character of this pair that this sequence is observed? if we talk of putting-to-death and making-alive, but do not talk of them as following in close succession and in that order, are we still modelling ourselves on the pattern of jesus’ death and resurrection? to appropriate them to the role in human action which he envisages for them, john webster concedes that the two are ‘simultaneous, not sequential’.28 in so lifting mortification and vivification out of their narrative sequence, to become complementary and mutually confirming aspects of reflective self-scrutiny, he risks a great deal.
if what one is doing in mortifying-and-vivifying is simply reviewing and resetting one’s moral compass, that is essentially one act, and not two.
and that raises the question how the mortification–vivification model illuminates the one act that ought above all to serve as a paradigm for it, dying.
in his critique of jüngel’s ‘idealist’ account of death, in which resurrection is not the antithesis of death, but a layer of meaning that invests death with significance, webster had complained that ‘it is difficult to conceive of any sense in which death could constitute a mutual relationship between god and man’.29 the same worry must apply to a vivification that is simply the positive purpose accompanying negative self-criticism: the model of jesus’ death and resurrection is reduced to a loose metaphor with no real application.
if we are to take that model with all seriousness, we must allow that dying and rising are contrasted, not merely complementary, and that while the first is something which we may (to a certain degree) do, the second is something we can only have done for us.
webster was justified in objecting to jüngel’s insistence that death can only be suffered.
to a significant degree we may prepare ourselves to die and may ‘die well’, elevating what is physiologically pure and unqualified suffering to be the focus of human self-disposition.
but raising ourselves from the dead is something that we cannot do in any measure whatever.
we may hope to be raised, in the light of the evangelical promise; but as ‘hope that is seen is not hope’ (rom.
8:24), so hoping is not the substance of what is hoped for, and hoping to be raised is not, as such, our resurrection.
in hopefully anticipating eternal life we do not ‘enact’ it, as we may (partially) ‘enact’ our dying.
dying in faith and dying in hope, indeed, are not two things we do, but only one.
when we have believed and hoped and died, the act of raising will still remain to be accomplished – by god.
the second group of questions concerns the organizing role of this pair of actions in laying out the concerns of the practical christian life.
consistently throughout the essay webster identifies mortification and vivification as the first, the chief actions of human response to the mortifying and vivifying work of god.
not, that is, that actions of mortification and vivification are required of us simply along with other actions, but that they give form to whatever action is required of us as baptized and redeemed creatures.
to which we must ask what has authorized the displacement of love from this chief position, which it is assigned in the teaching of jesus and the apostles.
at the conclusion of the essay vivification is said to ‘extend into’ religion, charity and justice, and – with a reference to 1 john 3:14 – love of the brethren is said to demonstrate the passage from death to life.30 but that is not quite the same.
the organizing categories of ethics are a hermeneutical key to the various types of act that they require and allow, dictating how those action-types are prioritized, fitted together and motivated.
so the traditional primacy of love in christian ethics has generated a distinctive approach to a range of actions involving ambiguous duties of imposing order, sometimes by force, such as punishment, war, going to law and even teaching.
such duties must be approached, it has been said, with sober restraint and even reluctance, constantly attending to the limits of what can be allowed to their pretensions, never failing to integrate them into the wider view of a love that is owed to all human beings regardless.
if we ask what will become of these duties if they are interpreted and licensed by our own mortification and vivification, we shall appreciate the nature of the problem clearly enough.
treated as distinct action-types, mortification and vivification are self-referring where love is other-referring.
so here the next question arises: must the organizing position given to mortification and vivification lead us to assign care-of-the-self a priority in thought and action over engagement with the world? it seems troublingly self-reflexive to say that duties of self-scrutiny, self-affliction, taking courage and the like, are the matrix within which all duties lie, all responses to human and worldly demands that are made upon us.
we can, of course, recognize a strand of tradition lying behind this thought: there is much in the ascetic theology of the eastern fathers, some of which is echoed in luther, and there are passages even in augustine that may be quoted to suggest a love-of-neighbour that enters our deliberations as the decisive answer to the question of how we are to love ourselves.
on how augustine’s doctrine of self-love should be read i have written more than enough elsewhere; for present purposes we note simply that to approach deliberation from the starting-point of self-love (as when we ask how we may be happy) does not imply treating the self as the matrix of all moral reality.
on the contrary, when god intervenes to answer my question about happiness by presenting me with my neighbour to love, he instructs me about the true construction of the reality within which hopes of happiness can have any meaning whatever.
when the neighbour appears dramatically at the end of confessions 10 at the end of a long journey of interior self-exploration by way of ‘continence’, it is as christ, the ‘truthful mediator’, who makes atonement for sin and frees me from the injustice which locks me into my self-absorption.31 all christian living is organized around that moment when a critical engagement with the self becomes an encounter with the redeemer which is, at the same time, an encounter with the fellow-human whose life, from that point on, is constitutive of my own.
in assigning a commanding position to mortification and vivification at the head of ethics, john webster, we have argued, departs from the careful structural mapping that he has given of the relation of ethics to doctrine.
the value of that mapping is shown precisely in its capacity to suggest how his emphasis on dying and rising could be located slightly differently.
there are, in fact, two things that he might wish to impress upon us, in company with the puritan scholastics from whom he learned so much.
one is that a life marked by god’s blessing and direction has conferred upon it a definite and recognizable shape.
it displays in some form or other the pattern of christ’s death and resurrection, so that we may take courage when we recognize this shape in our own or others’ experience.
the second is that there is a specific duty of self-criticism, without which we shall not learn how to understand ourselves in relation to the christological pattern.
either or both of these things may properly be said by a practitioner of christian dogmatics, but the scope and content of each need to be kept distinct.
the first is a pronouncement of dogmatics as such, speaking on its own responsibility.
it concerns the way in which god’s redemptive actions prove themselves within the field of lived experience.
suffering and deliverance from suffering are imprinted upon our lives by god, but they may come in many forms; moral struggle and strengthening is one, but only one way; illness and recovery, bereavement and consolation, calamity and restitution, hostility and reconciliation are others.
in one sense these are all moral experiences: they force us to a decision of faith, in which we may see, or fail to see, the hand of god at work in what we have suffered.
but to want to suffer is a form of spiritual sickness; this pattern of life cannot, then, be an object of practical deliberation.
suffering befalls us, and then we have to decide about its source and purpose; it is not something we decide upon.
suffering and deliverance are not, therefore, moral categories; they are not duties, ideals, norms or goals.
the second claim, on the other hand, is clearly a moral one.
it is an instance of the moral wisdom and teaching of the christian church, an exercise of the traditio which precedes specialized theological and ethical commentary.
the dogmatician has access to that teaching on the same terms as any christian believer, and may put it to excellent use within a dogmatic exposition.
yet this exhortation is one instance of the christian moral tradition, one piece of necessary moral instruction among many.
it can point to a task which we may all need to take up from time to time, but it does not summarize all our tasks for all times.
there is a time to be self-critical and self-exhortatory, and there is a time to respond to immediate demands that come from outside ourselves.
john webster may well have been right to think that that piece of wisdom was one that our age needed to hear again, and we may speculate that it was his own experience of life that impressed him with its urgency.
but the elevation of this one duty to the position of a master-duty presented dangers for the organization of a christian ethic – supremely, that it might become what jean-yves lacoste has memorably described as an éthique sans monde.32 the foundation on which christian action is given us is a world made new, a world external to ourselves which is brought to life and light by the risen body of christ.
love mediates a world, a complex totality that is not-ourselves, but in which we are given to find ourselves; it thus gives concreteness to conversion and a path of life that follows god’s own way through the world as life-giver.
the sovereign place accorded to love in christian moral teaching, then, secures the moral starting-point in the complex new reality god has wrought, the new world that meets us surprisingly at every turn from behind and within the interstices of the old world we thought we knew.
and if we begin there, we shall then find love ‘poured out in our hearts by the holy spirit’, matching the external field of action with an internal field of renewed sensibility.