Biblical Ethics and Social Change by Stephen Charles Mott (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 653 gins to slip out of focus. The gap between theologians and the life of the church seems, if anything, to be widening. For that reason, as for many others, one eagerly awaits his volume on the modern age. Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana WILLIAM: c. PLACHER Biblical Ethics and Social Change. By STEPHEN CHARLES MOTT. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982. Pp. xvii, 254. $17.95 cloth; $6.95 paper. John H. Yoder speaks of modern Christian ethicists who have assumed that the only way to get from the Gospel Story to ethics, from Bethlehem to Rome, or to Washington or Saigon, is to leave the story behind. On the other hand ethicists have frequently complained that Scripture scholars, even when they do not confine themselves to exegesis, remain securely within the biblical world. We have never quite faced the problems created by the division of theological labor. Once a state of apartheid exists between Scripture and Ethics, the source of Christian vision and inspiration ceases to guide reflection and ' false gods ' under the title of reason or experience or the Marxist analysis of social reality are pressed into service in its place. Now clearly both reason and experience have roles in any moral decision-making that deserves to be called human, and at this stage scarcely anybody would hold that Marx had nothing to teach us. But 'reason' and 'experience' are two of the most slippery and ambiguous concepts in theological and philosophical discourse . They bear man's smudge and can finally be purified only by hearing the word of God. Likewise we can hardly deal intelligently with any social (or even private) question without a reading of social reality, and the more explicit and critical this is the better. But it seems to me that if the Gospel is to be taken seriously the Marxist account will have to be significantly recast. The umbilical link between the revelation in Jesus Christ and the ethical reflection and praxis of the Church must therefore be maintained and fostered at all costs. Otherwise the Gospel is not effectively preached and the people perish. Mott joins the restricted number of those who have endeavored to establish and preserve the living link. He is a bridge-builder who moves with ease in the two territories he sets out to relate together. It is the combination of informed attentiveness to Scripture and a deep aware- 654 BOOK REVIEWS ness of and good judgment on current moral issues that makes this book valuable. It is particularly appropriate that the present volume should be devoted to the social dimension. Several factors have forced us to attend to this dimension and to discover its depths and demands. Perceptive minds have set out to 'psychoanalyze ' society, to lay bare its inner workings. As with the Freudian effort we have perforce learned much that is unpalatable and that we preferred to leave out of sight. We have grown in the awareness that we are all involved and implicated together in the functioning of society and that we are all responsible to-gether . No longer can we satisfy ourselves with laying the blame at the doors of those in authority. We know too that there is something seriously askew with our world socio-economic system. Combine all this with the fact that major decisions about the future on issues of vital concern for the whole human race are being made in our time and will not be postponed. The result is that we find ourselves in a novel and very critical situation for which we are ill-prepared on the scriptural and theological fronts. The social issue has become a rock of division. There is confusion , frustration, intense disagreement alongside social apathy and regression . We sometimes seem to lack at the corporate level the light and the hope necessary to cope with such a situation. The situation is reasonably well illustrated by the gap that separates a J. Luis Segundo from a James V. Schall. For Segundo the task of the Church is eminently political. He considers that it should throw its weight behind the socialist struggle for political and social reform, even if this means adopting a...