The burden of moral theology is to pose questions, and ascertain answers—considered, principled unravelings of the items quizzed. As fertile for the church such exercise can be, it is a logic, a study in abstraction, a piece of academia. While such endeavour references the world, it cannot enter the concrete world, cannot assume living dynamic. Its information acquires breath, spirit, vitality only as it is made co-extensive with the particular. It is the often overlooked aspect of the moral principle, ideal, or law that it is fundamentally an item subtracted from, “taken out” of reality to consider reality, a manufactured, or more accurately, an imagined tool to aid in the navigation of life. It cannot be plied into a substitute for the skill and artistry of that navigation. A principle enters reality only in shedding its universality, its abstraction, its ecstasy, its out-of-being-ness.[i] Dogmatic theology refines the truth of this observation and elevates it to the divine stratus: the Eternal Logos is wrapped in silent embrace as long as it resides within the Godhead. As soon as it speaks it is the Creating Word, the self-sacrificing Word relinquishing the divine Self/Love into other, the incarnating Word surrendering its eternality into time, into creation, into fore-giving.
Beyond the confines of academic exercise, a principle is never an “answer”. In itself it cannot be applied either to a person or a situation because neither a person nor a situation constitutes an academic question. Reality–people and their situations–demand not answer, but response—not the logic of principle, but a living, concretized, particularized, incarnate, and creative presence. Response requires the appearance of persons. Light, healing, life, and transportive transformation flow solely from a conjunction of persons. In the grammar of dogmatic theology, God is a conflux of persons united in the highest conjunctive of personhood—love—whose connatural radiance is creativity, which creativity in God is concrete creation by virtue of the immeasurable substantiality of the singular divine will. The text book may generalize with pronouncements and answers; in the real world, if one would be authentic and genuine about the humanity of self and other, there can be unpretentiously, unassumingly, unsuperficially, only personal response. Both the dogma of God and the dogma of grace support this.
Twentieth century dogmatic theology was gifted two invaluable insights. Karl Barth reinstated the Trinity as the font of theology, and process theology,[ii] particularly that of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and John Cobb Jr., redirected attention to the triune nature of the divine. Transcendence had for centuries eclipsed the immanent and dynamic aspects of the divine, abandoning the Holy to heights where only the cold eye of law and order could thrive. Providence and grace alone connected God to earth, and they were both found rooted in divine justice and power more than mercy and love. Deism intellectually encapsulated this with precision and removed the world from God. Pietism attempted to amend it but without sufficiently received theological base.[iii] Atheism arose as the emotive rejection of divine domination, and emancipated man from the tyranny of a God made into blind justice. These movements highlight the difficulty resident in every theology of God, the imperative to keep all aspects of the Holy—the ever transcendent, immanent, and dynamic–in balance. God in se, in self, or Creativity Itself in more contemporary parlance, is always the same. From the perspective of the heaven, it is the human capacity to receive and embody the divine that changes. In this sense, it is the understanding of God, the capacities to incarnate the spirit of God that change and grow; the eternal font of being remains the inexhaustible transcendence of being. From the perspective of the world, however, God, as Creator, as Grace, as Love changes, for creation and grace and divine love of creation are relational, and the object of divine love, grace, and creativity historical, and evolving. In this relationship both parties, Creator and created, are in living, dynamic and unfolding interaction. The immanent God, the incarnate God, changes and can be said even to suffer and die. Ancient theology, relentlessly focused on the impassibility of the transcendent Godhead, had endless problem with this notion, exciting too many into convulsions of mind and designations of heresy. Further, as the all-transcending God gives himself in his Word to his creation, he also summons forth creation in the providential dynamic of his Spirit, and awaits its return at the consummation of relativity and time. This tri-unity of being and action is Christian dogma at its root, and were it not, Christianity would be merely a variant of Platonism with Holy Communion or some such ceremonial piously annexed.
In this regard, although they have both exhausted centuries trying to define themselves by denying it, both Reform and Roman theology concur. Grace (the divine love, presence, care, being-with) is constant and sufficient, the groundwork on which all takes place, can take place. It is an alternate form of positing God as the foundation of all reality. To be actualized, concretized, it must be received by man, and that state of openness and receptivity, of bowing to the High Creative One, is faith. As creation flows from the conflux of the divine persons, good works flow from the conjunction, the embrace of God and man, of freely given love and the free acceptance of being loved. Action becomes gracious, godly, truly creative, because it flows from love, because it is neither compelled nor duty-bound but free. This is true whether one considers it theologically or psychologically, as proceeding from on high or from the depths within. The inner embrace of self-worth releases one to embrace the other, to be a being with and for others. It is a process, a progress. According to traditional terminology, one grows in grace, radiates the divine relationship, emanates the beloved. Baptism (being plunged into Christhood), Confirmation (consciously reaffirming self in that identity), Eucharist (exercising oneself in the social, the communal nature of that being-with-and-for) these are the great symbols of that growth, the progress of “putting on”, of “vesting the self in” Christhood, the concrete self-identification as love and creativity in and for this world. Christhood, God’s incarnate agency, as grace always surpasses,[iv] is always a bridge twixt the divine transcendent and the futurity of man—an insight process theology capitalizes upon. In practice, Christhood is experienced as an identity that does not fit, something that is ever one size too large, demanding we grow into it. This resides in its being the gift of the dynamic Spirit of God which, since Resurrection, is ever before us.[v] Thus, we ever find self wanting, and that is our cross, and yet we ever are free to move forward, to arise, and that is our grace, our vocation into the perfection that only the Creator, a return into the Creator, can ultimately secure. It is a psychic journey from the self’s not knowing the world back to the self unified in world-transcending wisdom. It is the spiritual journey of grace being sent forth and retuning in the ecstasy of its purpose accomplished. Hence, as theology was once wont to stress, in the end, even when the entire cosmos is submitted in the Christ, all must, in the Spirit, be handed back to, into, the Parental God-font—theology’s dogmatic final paean that the Transcendent One remains ever the undepletable and transcending, the sole foundation and resolution of time and its divarications.
To return out of this dogmatic base to the issue of moral application, there are three caveats of note. First, there are too many who want to supply both situations and the people in them with answers—curt statements that are forever the same and unchanging. Among these, many look longingly to scripture as the reservoir holding all the answers. Archbishop Cranmer caused his charges every year to pray that the scriptures would be studied and inwardly digested.[vi] Too many, undoubtedly hungering for something more substantive than the gavage of the exorbitantly commercialized world, gorge themselves on snippets of scripture, gobble and gulp words without understanding, and then belch them out without their ever being digested. They are never assimilated into the heart of self and personhood, never allowed to plummet the depths of self, heal the self, nurture the self, and manifest the love of the Holy One they were–in their adhan depths, their unitive vision–writ out to exemplify. They, thus, remain mere words. Yet, they are audaciously presented as “the living Word”. This fraudulent spewing, this deceptive noise is both sacrilege and idolatry, making the unopened-to-Holiness-self judge of the world, and arbitrator of all truth. It is at best lunacy posturing as spirituality. It is at worst self-hate bedizened in a cloak of self-righteousness.
Second, there too many who do likewise with church pronouncements on morals and dogma. Once a statement has been made it must stand forever. If someone once condemned contraception, contraception is forever and in all manner condemned despite whatsoever history and science may bring to light. Once Rome decided Anglican orders were invalid, there can be no revisiting of the arguments, no reconsideration of the historical circumstances and understandings that produced the decision. Once homosexual acts were named “abominations” (a scriptural title they share with lobsters, women in pants, and synthetic clothing, among others), there is left no space for knowledge to evolve. Once, by someone with “authority” Galileo or Luther or the papacy was found wanting, there can be no return to the topic; they must be forever in some manner “wrong”. Life is complex; we thrive on having pre-judged answers to help us navigate its diurnal convolutions. However, we cannot walk unconsciously, unconscientiously, through life as if on automatic pilot and still claim authenticity of personhood. Life demands we deal with self and other realistically. We cannot gloss over life with a pad full of predetermined and prewritten prescriptions in hand. The submission into a religion is not a surrender into having answers given over to self for every situation and person life brings forward. Religion is about taking up a creative task—a sharing in the dynamic of the Creator. It may come with a heritage of instruments for caringly engaging oneself and the world, but these are merely tools. The craft and the crafting demand exercise, skill, labour, honesty, insight, and care. Christianity is a religion about doing all such things lovingly and creatively. If Christianity is about answers and understandings given once and for all time, God errored in sending forth his dynamic Spirit and incarnating his creative Word.
Third, coupling these pretermissions is the dolorous fact that too many are inclined to excuse themselves of all manner of deceit while hurling damnations upon others. A woman once obnounced she could not abide her brother-in-law because he was a sexual deviant–he was gay and in a committed relationship. She, however, had no compunction in–for years–cheating upon her spouse, for he bored her, and divorce was morally wrong! The therapeutics of humour cannot absolve the hypocrisy of this ludicrousness. Yet, such spuriously selective, self-absolving morality abounds, and every self-righteous glance and darting finger betray its cherished harbouring. In every such case there is performed an assault that reaches beyond the bounds of the actors, and erodes everywhere its acidity diffuses the capacities for faith and hope. There is no sin which is private, of merely personal consequence. Hypocrisy is a Hydra, and of its many heads scandal the most pernicious. We all are sinners, and the humiliation of every sin is its debility to point to another’s without implicating oneself. Christian ethic is not condemnatory but creative, a movement into together making the better, the more nearly whole. Drowning persons in damnations, and sterilizing situations in hell fire serve only one’s own anger, and that fallaciously so, for the anger is with one’s own disoriented sense of self-satisfaction. Christian ethic is not imperious. It knows humility, and in that the blunt reality that not every situation will be amendable or even approachable. It knows patience, understands the meaning of process, and that progress at times necessitates a retreat—into prayer, penance, and refocusing.
There can be found near the sanctuary in many churches of the reformed tradition two great plaques, one bearing the Ten Commandments, the other the Lord’s Prayer. The reformers were of a mind that in these two statements could be found the complimentary summary of Christian orientation. The Commandments speak of holiness: do not abuse holiness or treat it as something open to fabrication or manipulation, do not conjure images of God for God cannot be conjured or imagined. They speak of the world: do not treat creation as your property; respect it, honour it, and allow it its times, its seasons, it Sabbath rest, for it is God’s. They speak of respect for one’s world, the need to not harm life, family, neighbour, truth, the rights of others. They speak in negating terms: do not do this, do not entertain thoughts of this. All these things must one do for God stands above them. The essence of both spirituality and psychology reside in understanding the Holy One (the wholly one) is ever above and before the present. There is trumpeted here the summons to perfection, to integration, to the unity of all faculties, the harmony of body and soul. As both Kant and James recognized, this summons is always experienced as sounding from the outside, or the beyond, or the above of the self, the soul. It is, thus, received as a command, a vocation. This summons from beyond the present state of oneself is always oriented toward a future state, a transcending of the now, a “going up”, be it to Jerusalem, to heaven, to God, to wholeness, or in the mind of the more mystically inclined, to a beyond all bounds of being, to ecstasy. Nevertheless, the call from beyond self is always a Commandment: Thou Shalt! It is Law. It is stagnant. It is categorical. It must, to be law, at some level reduce every situation to a “whensoever x, then y”. Alone, it siphons the life out of reality. St Paul, prescient of where modern existential atheism would venture, was of a mind it ultimately frustrates life, taunts it with ideas of stoicism and vainglory. It must be tempered, vivified, galvanized by something higher—love.
The Lord’s Prayer is given as such suscitation, the countering to the legalism, rigourism, and casuistry that accrue to and sclerote the command. This prayer inflames the counsels of Judaism. It does not summon away from the present. It cherishes and blesses the present. It embraces the foundational commonality of holiness, “Our father…Holy thy name”. Its focus is not a future time, but now, and it accepts it as gifted. It is the prayer of the present and the communion of humanity: “Give us today’s sustenance”, “forgive us as we forgive”, “spare us”, “deliver us”. It recognizes the sheer giftedness of life in its dual aspects: the ultimate gifting from God to whom belongs power, kingdom and glory, and the quotidian gifting by each, its “as we do”. The prayer plunges us into the communal nature of our being, our spirituality, our vocation to act on God’s behalf. We are made to assume the gifted power to absolve others, to redeem others, to share in the suffering and trials of others. We are made one, made whole, made holy, only to the degree we make of self one with others, and the capacity to so do is always gift.
The Command reveals a world of good and evil, right and wrong. “Thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” locks the self and the other into a system of law, of justice, of retribution and restitution, requisite penalty and rehabilitation. It is a system that can only either be enforced or rejected. The dominical prayer reveals a world at worship, a communion of blessing—upon God, the world and self. It blesses the name, will, power and glory. As worship alone can, it opens to community, respect, and love. Because it constitutes a bowing down together before the power-greater, it opens both self and the other into the authenticity of community, a dynamic characterized by evolving understanding and respect, care and mutuality of honour. It may be ambiguous compared to the definitive nature of law, but it addresses the person of self and other in the true-most essence of personhood. If religion and religion inspired morality are about such personal depth and essence, such “spirituality”, here is the proper, the propitiating road forward wherein right and wrong, good and evil surrender their power to the unfolding of love. For the Christian, for whom religion and morality are expressions of love, indeed of Love, it is the only path, the sole Way, Truth, and Life. It does not deny room for discipline, for making a space for order, but the prime dynamic is something greater—the avatars of love, blessing and forgiveness. As complex and challenging as it may be, it is the way of true discipleship, the path that honours the gravity of the gift of the creating and fore-giving Spirit. It is the road of grace and graciousness; it is not a “cheap grace”.
It is well to consider the great myth standing at the headwaters of Western morality: the garden of Paradise with its two potent bearing trees. The tree that bore knowledge of good and evil allowed Eve and Adam to see with divine eyes. But there is more to being divine, to being holy, than knowledge. Eve and Adam were blocked from the tree that completed that knowledge, that elevated it into wisdom—the tree of life eternal whose fruit yields the capacity for life beyond the bounds of laws, the undiluted freedom of life, the creative will to make life and to give it away, to give and fore-give, the Spirit of life itself. The great Commandments address the knowledge of good and evil. The great Saviour, from his tree, addresses life and releases the Spirit of life. It is redemptive because it is divinizing; it takes humanity out of servitude to justice and its demands, and implants in its heart and mind the Spirit of the Holy. The definiens of Christocentric humanity is not justice before the powers of good and evil, but the power of creating light and order out of chaos and darkness. The missing ingredient of divine life has been handed over. Humanity may live in its sin, in its thraldom to the relentless command of justice, or it may arise to the freedom, not of possessing a knowledge,[vii] but of giving oneself away, of breathing Spirit–both in and out, fore-giving, moving with unshackled exhilaration, relinquishing all things past and present into liberty and grace.
We are free to examine this world in its every aspect in terms of some logic and derive therefrom principles and theories, but the world can be made an object of investigation only in the service of humanity, and humanity can be approached only personally, as the unique thou in the unique situation. The stylobate graces are gratitude for self and other, clarity of vision to unbiasedly see self and other and situation, honesty regarding both self and other, proficiency in approaching and hearing the other, an open mind and even more open heart and arms. Here stands the consecrated place for humility, for there are no answers, merely people, complexities within complexities, all residing under the call to love. It is a morality of sacrifice, of giving up of one’s treasured items—ideas, hopes, fears, wants, even self. Justice and law may well be used creatively as the inquisitive items of social structure, but love stands above them, as does the cross above Golgotha, the dominical fulcrum from which proceed the power of spirituality and Christoferic ethic.
I was startled one day to have been asked why I do not write on morals. I seem ever to be penning something on Christian vision and practice. Nevertheless, I countered as to what is there to write other than truly love oneself and so love others? There was no intent of being impolite, for even Augustine, that restless moralist who laid the foundations of “original sin” once summarily advised: “Love God, and then do as you will”. As did Augustine, I view morality as having to do with “origins”. One may look upon the self as spewed forth by a restless cosmos, as the fleeting product of chaos, as a random projection of the endless seething of being. Contrarily, one may value the thrust of being as an expression of self-love, be that the unmediated act of a Creator, or an eternal cosmos surging within its core to excel itself. Whatsoever the valuation, it will define oneself and all one’s actions; unfurl a life of hedonism, epicureanism, skepticism, stoicism, asceticism, ennui, disenchantment, joy, camaraderie, love. The prime valuation may be something psycho-socially conditioned, but it remains something open, something freely chosen, and as such stands the primal moral choice. It is immaterial but it gives rise to the concrete. It is rationally indeterminate but by free act of will made the determining moral genetic code. The self is the series of its continued replications.
If love is the prime valuation one places upon being, upon one’s own being, then one becomes oriented to its replication, to loving oneself, knowing[viii] and accepting oneself, forgiving oneself one’s shortfalls, fallibilities, historicity, and evolution, forging oneself forward with retrospective resolve, discipline, and openness, caring for the well-being, harmony and integration of oneself in mind, body, soul and society. The primacy of this valuation will allow it to be framed as the all transcending power, understood religiously as a God, or psychologically as the Self, summoning gracious self-evolution into continuous transcendence. The sociality of orientation will relate the self toward society in the image of this Power and the self-identification with it, allowing oneself a freedom toward and for others and the environment within which all are held. Life becomes a matter of Love being divine and the love of self and other the essence of life. Reason, that font of justice and law, will toss directives before all such efforts, and that is its purpose, but they are impotent to supply either vigour or joy. Love, indeed, mandates some measure of self-discipline, focus, and control, but such are requisites not to suppress but to harmonize, not to condemn but to learn to incorporate and integrate, not to deny self but to open self to other and world in ever evolving understanding, care, empathy, and light. Love is creative and the secret of its ability to create is fore-giving, sending oneself out in front of the situation, meeting the other in a new place, sacrificing the comfort of “me” to bring forth not only “thou” but “us”. This is the reality of love set out in Genesis’ great creation myth, in gospel’s emblazoned “we have a saviour”, and “for God so loved”. It recognizes that creation, like redemption, is not a completed project but a continuous process in which this world and all its contents are a “controlled chaos”, a (providentially) sustained evolution into order and summons into grace. Everyman has a choice. One’s reality is either a Mobius strip of one-sided directions, or something more challenging—a world of innumerable levels, complexly peopled, multifariously situated, and infinitely changeable—a maddening,[ix] but unspeakably divine game whose aureate prize is life, wholly life.
[i] This is acknowledged in the Roman practice of the confessional wherein the public position of church (external forum) is opened to personal application (internal forum). While a brace of summas, manuals, and directories have been compiled to guide priests as they sit in judgement upon the confessing individual, Pius XII succinctly captured the requisite for every confessor, advising they exhibit “the heart of a father, a friend, a physician, and teacher”, that they cause neither harm nor scandal, but with kindness enable the living of a goodly life. Despite the sad fact it is often a box for dispensation and cold adjudication, the confessional was always meant as the vestibule to spiritual direction and support. Unfortunately, both format and architecture have truncated the possibilities of that sacramental.
[ii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 24: World Progress (September 2015).
[iii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 19, Kant, endnote iii. (November 2014).
[iv] This is true even of Jesus as the prime manifest of the eternal Word, the incarnate divine, the Christ. His Christhood, his mission (in intercession and church), remains open until at the end of time, filled with and in the Spirit, he hands the renewed cosmos back to the Father. A philosophy may legitimately claim the end of time is an ever receding event, that the cosmos is eternal, that its notion of “god” is in some manner a final or exemplary cause of all that is. Theology may enlist such a philosophy for intellectual formatting, however, it cannot do so without discrimination regarding its given task. Theology stands under mandate to speak in the iconography and symbolism of its received sacred texts and interpret them to the present situation. In this regard, the final handing over of the sanctified cosmos to the Father is not about a philosophical understanding of causality, an event of time-space, or the possible eternality of the cosmos; it is a declaration that redemption and divine relatedness belonging solely to the Godhead as font and foundation of life. The divine relation to the world comes from God as wholly the gift of God, and its resolution, its finality, its consummation, occurs at every “moment” (in biblical terms: kairos, eschaton) that giftedness, that love, is surrendered back into the embrace of the Godhead. This dogma refers the gracious conjunction and relativity of God and man to an ultimate level. It is not about a future item, but about grace, the giftedness of creation, redemption, renewal, and sanctification, and it is about the gracious acknowledgement and acceptance of this offering. The graciously given divine love is received, completed, consummated only in free and mutual embrace. There is, thus, a “moment” anyone who has ever “fallen in love” can understand, a “when” (because we can only speak in time-space idioms) lovers melt into one. It is not a matter of clocks, cosmic or otherwise. It is a matter of those items always changing but not easily given to measure of time and age; it is a matter of hearts and souls. Theology here speaks of the giftedness and sociality of our being in mythic dress. It is categorical in its claim: creation will return to the Creator; love will overcome all, all things made separate will again be One. This, simply put, is the essence of the dogma. It does come with a postscript: the unwillingness to allow any degree of defeat to the divine initiative has excited some to claim an apocatastasis, an “after everything is said and done” wherein even the most hardened of heart, even hell, falls before the sweeping power of divine love.
[v] Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton (April 2013).
[vi] Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. (Book of Common Prayer, collect for Second Sunday of Advent)
[vii] This constitutes an implicit and foundational refutation of Gnosticism.
[viii] Self-knowing does not simply happen by looking into a mirror. It requires the development of insight, the ability to read oneself and to read between the lines of oneself. Once such exercise was named the examination of conscience. One needs look unbiasedly not only upon one’s acts, but their roots, their motives, and therein to plummet the soul, the entire orientation and history of soul, from which they arise. Wherever amendment is mandated, the methodology for the change of direction (repentance) must be examined and embraced. This self-analysis must be ruthlessly honest, and as open to sincere sorrow as substantive change. While this is a continuous process, its thrust, to be healthful, cannot consist merely in negative self-critique. It must be bracketed in daily enunciated gratitude for the innumerable gifts with which one’s life and being are furnished, and in supplication and action for the kindly considered needs of others. Only then, thusly held between blessings received and given, can the self be examined, can power to separate light from darkness be exercised, and can repentance and resolve authentically emerge. Cf: on Repentance and Advent (January 21012), on Sin (March 2013).
[ix] The coapting of the ideas of divinity and madness has a history that predates Plato. Holiness and inspiration always emerge into the world as a kind of madness, a tossing away of the real or imagined mathematical propensities of the status quo. There is more to this madness than the ecstatic ebullience of prophet and oracle. It has also a tamer side, or perhaps merely a more socially received side. It is there in the sculptor smashing a stone into a statue, a painter causing a blotch of oils to capture the sky, the architect turning the idea of a shelter into the wonderment of a cathedral, the inventor belabouring the theoretical into the actual, the saint remaking a self into a spirit. All this is not madness as something without health, as in-sane; it is madness as in-spiration, as the very breath of the extraordinary, as a defiance of the ordinary in quest for something higher, something more.