The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life

Introduction

1 Introduction This book describes the person as a moral agent acting in relation to God.It depicts the acting person within an overarching theological context of sinful estrangement from and gracious reconciliation in God. To describe the way persons negotiate their relationships with God in and through their involvement with others and the world, the book develops its argument under the rubrics of intimacy with God, fidelity to God, and truthfulness before God. It discusses the meaning of intimacy with God with regard to the person’s self-relation in order to render the truth that we live, move, and have our being in God. The notion of intimacy helpfully captures and conveys the intrinsic theological significance of our acting. God creates us for and wills our perfection in intimate relation with him. In our acting we embody and negotiate our free response to God’s self-offer. Moral acting is therefore fittingly understood as a matter of fidelity to God. This fidelity (or its opposite) takes shape in the person’s involvement with the creaturely goods that God gives for our flourishing in God and with one another. The way we pursue, realize, neglect, or violate these goods—both willingly and unwittingly— impacts us in our multiple relations with God,self,and others.Hence our efforts to name moral actions ought to proceed from and to deepen truthful existence before God.If we are to name our actions truthfully,our naming needs to reflect how they do or do not correspond with the reality of the world under God, including the reality of our created nature, alienated in sin and redeemed in Christ. This means that the truthfulness of our moral descriptions, and of Christian ethics more generally ,entails a humble recognition of the integrity of and limits to Christian moral life and ethics. As we learn to speak of sin and grace together, we are drawn into a deeper participation in the reconciliation God accomplishes in Jesus Christ and through the gift of the Spirit. This argument unfolds as follows. Chapter 1 argues that Christian ethics has largely shifted from an act-centered approach to a person-centered approach. It begins by sketching early Christian moral tradition’s roots in penitential practices and the treatment of human actions in manuals of moral theology. Then it identi- fies general features of recent work in Christian ethics that may justly be considered person centered.Recent trends and debates in Catholic and Protestant ethics either exhibit a standing inattention to moral actions or pay them a curiously nontheological attention. A notable exception to this inattention is a protracted debate in 2 introduction late twentieth-century Catholic moral theology between traditionalists and revisionists regarding moral action. The chapter argues that this debate is preoccupied with issues of moral culpability. Such (in)attention to moral actions courts several problems, including an unfitting agnosticism about the theological significance of human actions and an ironic susceptibility to charges of moral subjectivism. We then turn to sin, not because sin is the best or most appropriate starting point for theological anthropology, but because the historical relation between moral act analysis and sin continues to influence Christian ethics. Contemporary Christian ethics either neglects the language of sin altogether or tends to construe sin as a power affecting us and the world, or as a basic orientation of the person away from God.A common characteristic of recent theologies of sin is their neglect of sins. This neglect contributes to the unfitting theological agnosticism explored here, undermines the cogency of theologies of sin, and unwittingly permits determinations of moral culpability to govern Christian ethical reflection on persons and moral actions. Chapter 2 argues that the irreducibly theological character of sin permits us to ask after the theological significance of human actions in ways that are not limited to determinations of moral culpability. Such attention alerts us to the historical, particular, and provisional character of human actions. Chapter 3 explores the connections among particular moral actions,the agent’s moral identity, and the significance of those actions for the agent’s relationship with God. It argues that, since God creates us for intimacy with him, the person’s moral willing and acting involve her in the world of goods that God authors and negotiate her response to God, the origin and end of her freedom. Therefore, particular moral actions merit more attention in Christian ethics than they currently receive...