The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity

Chapter Two: Christian Ethics and Unprecedented Problems

◆ 67 ◆ CHAPTER TWO Christian Ethics and Unprecedented Problems ✦ God’s demands are not overwhelming because whatever comes from God overcomes the world. And this is what overcomes the world: our faith. 1 John 5:3–4 Climate change represents the challenge that anthropocene powers pose to Christian ethics. Unprecedented social and ecological relations threaten to overwhelm capacities of theological response, rendering practices of faith incompetent to their world. If loving neighbors, for example, becomes uncertain within emerging planetary relations, then Christian communities begin to lose a central practice through which they interpret themselves and their world in relation to God. In order to sustain their faith, Christian communities must create ways for love to overcome the storms that would defeat it. Like other moral traditions, Christianity must generate ways to sustain the meaning of its way of life in changing conditions—or face collapse . It must invent ways for love to overcome the world of climate change or concede to atmospheric powers the defeat of a moral life shaped around love. So how do theological communities adapt the practice of faith? A popular view of Christian social ethics supposes that its task is to apply theological ideals to social problems. Christian engagement with society, in this view, starts from fundamental moral values and then works deductively toward concrete situations.When Paul Ramsey introduced his Basic Christian Ethics he opened with that common sense:“before there can be a Christian social ethic, understanding of the fundamental moral perspective of the Christian must be deepened and clarified.”1 The ethicist, on his account, should first establish a fundamental Christian worldview and then work toward applying it to particular problems. This book opened in a different way, starting from the particular problem of climate change and appealing CHAPTER TWO 68 to creative reform projects. My approach shares some of the sensibilities of Traci West’s Disruptive Christian Ethics: skeptical that communities need professional ethicists to clarify their worldview before they can begin acting on their problems, committed to working with the moral knowledges that reform projects are already producing, and focused on empowering moral agency to meet problems through conversation across disciplines and confrontation across boundaries.2 Between“basic”and“disruptive”ways of doing Christian ethics there exists an important choice in practical strategy.What role should social problems and grassroots projects play in shaping the tasks of a religious ethic? By emphasizing “inventive” and “tactical” dimensions of religious ethics, I have signaled an approach that grants high significance to problems and projects. Those emphases align with liberationist claims that moral theory should arise from the margins of power, within communities working to overcome oppression and poverty.With regard to a problem like climate change,however , doing ethics from grassroots struggles may not always be possible. In the last chapter I explained how the “unprecedented” scope and “wicked” features of climate change frustrate meaningful action.When responses are either missing or tactically inadequate to the scale and complexity of the problem, then it might seem better for ethicists to approach climate change by reconstructing a tradition’s “fundamental moral perspective,” in order to offer communities new interpretations of their basic worldview. Confronting climate change thus presses a methodological question about how to do religious ethics in conditions of moral incompetence.This chapter defends a pragmatic strategy by offering reasons from theology and social theory to suppose that traditions of faith are sustained through practical responses to social problems. Differentiating this approach from what I call a “cosmological strategy,” I argue that Christian ethics tends to drift away from concrete problems and communities when it assumes that social change begins by changing worldviews, and when it considers the church as a kind of culture with its own worldview. My theocentric pragmatism explains how new problems drive theological production, and why Christian ethics can begin from what is already going on in communities, even when their projects and concepts remain incompetent to the problems they want to face. Religious ethicists tend to be suspicious of pragmatism for (at least) three reasons. First, problem-based moral reasoning can be crudely instrumentalist toward religious traditions. If an ethicist deploys whatever “moral resource” appears convenient toward the sort of solution that (she already knows) the situation requires, then the moral meaning of a tradition reduces to its use in some extrinsic project. Second, cultural emergencies Christian Ethics and Unprecedented Problems 69 seem to call for revolutionary...