wfn.org | Address at Lambeth Plenary on making moral decisions

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@wfn.org>]

[Part 1]

ACNS LC035 - 22 July 1998

Prof. Rowan Williams
Bishop of Monmouth, Wales

Canterbury

1. What is it like to make a choice? The temptation we easily
give way to is to think that it's always the same kind of thing;
or that there's one kind of decision making that's serious and
authentic, and all other kinds ought to be like this. In our
modern climate, the tendency is to imagine that choices are made
by something called the individual will, faced with a series of
clear alternatives, as if we were standing in front of the
supermarket shelf. There may still be disagreement about what the
'right,' choice would be, but we'd know what making the choice
was all about. Perhaps for some people the right choice would be
the one that best expressed my own individual and independent
preference: I'd be saying no to all attempts from outside to
influence me or determine what I should do, so that my choice
would really be mine. Or perhaps I'd be wondering which
alternative was the one that best corresponded to a code of
rules: somewhere there would be one thing I could do that would
be in accord with the system, and the challenge would be to spot
which one it was - though it might sometimes feel a bit like
guessing which egg-cup had the coin under it in a game. But in
any case the basic model would be much the same: the will looks
hard at the range of options and settles for one.

But of course we don't spend all our lives in supermarkets. Some
of us come from environments in which this kind of consumer
choice is at best a remote dream, where it can sound like a cruel
mockery to talk of such choices. And for the rest of us, the ones
who do have the power to exercise such choices - is this model a
sensible account of what it's like to make decisions in general?

Whom shall I marry? Shall I marry at all? Which charity shall I
support this Christmas? Shall I resign from this political party,
which is now committed to things I don't believe in - but is
still better than the other parties in some ways? Should I become
a vegetarian? Should I break the law and join an anti-government
protest? Should I refuse to pay my taxes when I know they're
partly used to buy weapons of mass destruction? How should I
finish this poem or this novel? How should I finish my life if I
know I'm dying? Think about these and choices like them. Each of
them - even 'Which charity shall I support?' - is a decision that
is coloured by the sort of person I am; the choice is not made by
a will operating in the abstract, but by someone who is used to
thinking and imagining in a certain way: someone who is the sort
of person who finds an issue like this an issue of concern
(another person might not be worried in the same way by the same
question). And this means that an answer only in terms of the
system', the catalogue of right answers, would help us not at
all; what kind of code, we may well ask, would give us
impersonally valid solutions to the dilemmas just listed? We
believe that, in some contexts, we can say, 'You ought never to
do that'; but there is no straightforward equivalent formula
allowing us to say, 'You ought to do that'. As the Welsh
philosopher Rush Rhees, argues in an unpublished paper, telling
someone else what they ought to do is as problematic as telling
someone else what they want. There is a significant sense in
which only I can answer the question, 'What ought I to do?' just
as only I can answer, 'What do I want?'

But for me to answer either question is harder than at first it
sounds. Rhees is careful to say that 'What ought I to do?' is
drastically different from a question about my preferences, what
I just happen to want (or think I want) at some specific moment.
Herbert McCabe, a prominent British Catholic theologian and
moralist, wrote many years ago - not without a touch of mischief
- that 'ethics is entirely concerned with doing what you want';
going on to explain that our problem is that we live in a
society, and indeed as part of a fallen humanity, that deceives
us constantly about what we most deeply want. The point that both
Rhees and McCabe are trying to make is emphatically not that
ethics is a matter of the individual's likes or dislikes, but, on
the contrary, that it is a difficult discovering of something
about yourself, a discovering of what has already shaped the
person you are and is moulding you in this or that direction. You
might put it a bit differently by saying that you are trying to
discover what is most 'natural' to you, though this begs too many
questions for comfort. Rheas notes, very pertinently, that if I
say I must discover something about myself in order to make
certain kinds of decisions with honesty, this is not purely
'subjective': I am in pursuit of a truth that is not at my mercy,
even if it is a truth about myself. And when the decision is
made, I shall not at once know for certain that it is 'right' -
in the sense that I might know if it were a matter of performing
an action in accordance with certain rules: it may be that only
as years pass shall I be able to assess something I have done as
the 'natural, or truthful decision.

That too tells us something significant about our
decision-making: we may in retrospect come to believe that -
however difficult a decision seemed at the time - it was the only
thing we could have done. We were less free to choose than we
thought: or, we might say, we were more free (in a different
sense) to do what was deepest in us. Some of our problems
certainly arise from a very shallow idea of what freedom means,
as if it were first and foremost a matter of consumer choice,

being faced with a range of possibilities with no pressure to
choose one rather than another. But we have to reckon with the
freedom that comes in not being distracted from what we determine
to do. The saint is often recognised by this freedom from
distraction. They may not be - subjectively - eager to do what
they are going to do, but they have a mature and direct
discernment of what 'must' be done if they are to be faithful to
the truth they acknowledge. And their confidence comes not from
knowing-a-catalogue- of- recommended or proscribed actions, but
from that knowledge of who or what they are that enables them to
know what action will be an appropriate response to the truth of
themselves and the world.

2. But it is time now to look harder at this matter of
self-knowledge. We can easily misunderstand it of we think first
and foremost of the self as a finished and self-contained
reality, with its own fixed needs and dispositions. That, alas,
is how the culture of the post-enlightenment world has more and
more tended to see it. We romanticise the lonely self, we are
fascinated by its pathos and its drama; we explore it in
literature and psychological analysis, and treat its apparent
requirements with reverence. None of this is wrong - though it
may be risky and a courting of fantasy; but we have to think
harder, in the 'Western' or North Atlantic world about the way
the self is already shaped by the relations in which it stands.
Long before we can have any intelligent account of our 'selfhood'
in absolutely distinct terms, we already have identities we did
not choose; others have entered into what we are - parents and
neighbours, the inheritance of class and nation or tribe, all
those around us who are speaking the language we are going to
learn. To become a conscious self is not to say no to all this:
that would be flatly impossible. It is to learn a way of making
sense and communicating within an environment in which our
options are already limited by what we have come into.

If this is so, self-knowledge is far more than lonely
introspection. We discover who we are, in significant part, by
meditating on the relations in which we already stand. We occupy
a unique place in the whole network of human and other relations
that makes up the world of language and culture; but that isn't
at all the same as saying that we possess an identity that is
fundamentally quite unlike that of others and uninvolved in the
life of others -with its own given agenda. Thus the
self-discovery we have been thinking about in the process of
making certain kinds of decision is also a discovery of the world
that shapes us. I spoke earlier of finding out what has shaped
the person I now am; and this is always going to be more than the
history of my own previous decisions.

And this is where we may begin to talk theologically (at last).
How do Christians make moral decisions? In the same way as other
people. That is to say, they don't automatically have more
information about moral truth in the abstract than anyone else.
What is different is the relations in which they are involved,
relations that shape a particular kind of reaction to their
environment and each other. If you want to say that they know
more than other people, this can only be true in the sense that
they are involved with more than others, with a larger reality,
not that they have been given an extra set of instructions. The
people of Israel in the Old Testament received the Law when God
had already established relation with them, when they were
already beginning to be a community bound by faithfulness to God
and each other. The Law didn't come into a vacuum, but
crystallises what has begun to exist through the action of God.
When the Old Testament prophets announce God's judgement on the
people, they don't primarily complain about the breaking of
specific rules (though they can do this in some contexts) or
about failure to live up to a moral ideal; they denounce those
actions that signify a breaking of the covenant with God and so
the breaking of the bonds of faithfulness that preserve Israel as
a people to whom God has given a unique vocation - above all,
actions such as idolatry and economic oppression. They denounce
Israel for replacing the supremely active and transcendent God
who brought them out of Egypt by local myths that will allow them
to manage and contain the divine; and for creating or tolerating
a social order that allows some among God's chosen nation to be
enslaved by others because of poverty, and that is unworried by
massive luxury and consumption, or sees its deepest safety in
treaties with bloodthirsty superpowers. If you had asked one of
the prophets about moral decision making, he might have responded
(once you had explained what you meant to someone who wouldn't be
starting with such categories) by saying, 'What we seek as we
choose our path in life is what reflects the demands of the
covenant, what is an appropriate response to the complete
commitment of God to us. The Law tells me what kinds of action in
themselves represent betrayal of God; but in deciding what,
positively, I must do, I seek to show the character of the God
who has called me through my people and its history'.

The truth sought by such- a person would be a truth shared with
the community of which they were part, the community that gave
them their identity in a number of basic respects. When we turn
to the New Testament, it is striking that the earliest attempts
at Christian ethical thinking echo this so closely. We can watch
St Paul in Romans 14 and 15 or I Corinthians 10 discussing what
was in fact a profoundly serious dilemma for his converts: to
abstain from meat sacrificed to pagan gods was regarded as one of
the minimum requirements for fidelity to the true God by Jews of
that age (as an aspect of the covenant with Noah, which was
earlier and more comprehensive than the covenant made through
Moses); and it had been reaffirmed by the most authoritative
council we know of in the Church's first decades, the apostolic
synod described in Acts 15. But the growing recognition that the
sacrifice of Christ had put all the laws of ritual purity in
question, combined with the practical complications of urban life
in the Mediterranean cities, was obviously placing urban converts
under strain. Paul is, it seems, fighting on two fronts at once.
He warns, in Romans 14, of the risks of the 'pure', the
ultra-conscientious, passing judgement on the less careful, at
the same time as warning the less careful against causing pain to
the scrupulous by flaunting their freedom in ways that provoke
conflict or, worse, doubt. In the Corinthian text, he offers an
even clearer theological rationale for his advice in arguing that
any decision in this area should be guided by the priority of the
other person's advantage and thus by the imperative of building
the Body of Christ more securely. What will guide me is the need
to show in my choices the character of the God who has called me
and the character of the community I belong to; my God is a God
whose concern for all is equal; my community is one in which all
individual actions are measured by how securely they build up a
pattern of selfless engagement with the interest of the other -
which in itself (if we link it up to what else Paul has to say)
is a manifestation of the completely costly directedness to the
other that is shown in God's act in Christ.

So for the early Christian, as for the Jew, the self that must be
discovered is a self already involved very specifically in this
kind of community, in relation to this kind of God (the God of
self-emptying). The goal of our decision-making is to show what
God's selfless attention might mean in prosaic matters of
everyday life - but also to show God's glory (look, for example,
at Romans 15.7 or I Corinthian 10.31). What am I to do? I am to
act in such a way that my action becomes something given 'into,
the life of the community and in such a way that what results is
glory - the radiating, the visibility, of God's beauty in the
world. The self that I am, the self that I have been made to be,
is the self engaged by God in love and now in process of
recreation through the community of Christ and the work of the
Holy Spirit.

It's no use trying to answer the question about who I really am
independently of this. There is no secret, detached, individual
ego apart from these realities in which I am gracefully
entangled. So perhaps the most important challenge to some of our
conventional ways of talking about morality comes from the
biblical principle that sees ethics as essentially part of our
reflection on the nature of the Body of Christ.

3. What might this mean in more depth? The model of action which
actively promotes the good of the other in the unqualified way
depicted by Paul, and which reflects the self-emptying of God in
Christ, presupposes that every action of the believer is in some
sense designed as a gift to the Body. Gifts are, by definition,
not what has been demanded, not the payment of a debt or the
discharging of a definite duty. To borrow the terms of one of our
most distinguished Anglican thinkers, John Milbank, a gift can't
just be a 'repetition' of what's already there. At the same time,
a gift has its place within a network of activities; it is
prompted by a relationship and it affects that relationship and
others; it may in its turn prompt further giving. But in this
context it is important that a gift be the sort of thing that can
be received, the sort of thing it makes sense to receive;
something recognisable within the symbolic economy of the
community, that speaks the language of the community. In the
Christian context, what this means is that an action offered as
gift to the life of the Body must be recognisable as an action
that in some way or another manifests the character of the God
who has called the community.

And this is where the pain and tension arises of Christian
disagreement over moral questions. Decisions are made after some
struggle and reflection, after some serious effort to discover
what it means to be in Christ; they are made by people who are
happy to make themselves accountable, in prayer and discussion
and spiritual direction. Yet their decisions may be regarded by
others as impossible to receive as a gift that speaks of Christ -
by others who seek no less rigorously to become aware of who they
are in Christ and who are equally concerned to be accountable for
their Christian options. It would be simpler to resolve these
matters if we were more abstract in our Christian learning and
growing. But the truth is that we learn our faith in incarnate
ways; Christ makes sense to us because of the specific Christian
relationships in which we are involved - this community, this
inspirational pastor or teacher, this experience of reading
scripture with others. Of course (it ought not to need saying)
such particularities are always challenged and summoned to move
into the universal sphere, the catholic mind of the whole body.
But this is what can be a struggle. If we learn our discipleship
in specific contexts and relations, as we are bound to, our
Christian identity will never be an abstract matter. We are
slowly coming to acknowledge the role of cultural specificities
in our Christian practice. But it's more than that, more than a
matter of vague cultural relativity, let alone allowing the
surrounding culture to dictate our priorities. It is that local
Christian communities gradually and subtly come to take for
granted slightly different things, to speak of God with a marked
local accent. At a fairly simple level, we might think of
different attitudes to the Christian use of alcohol in many
African contexts as opposed to prevailing assumptions in the
North Atlantic work or differences as to who you might most
immediately ask for help over matters of moral or even spiritual
concern - a cleric or an elder in a community or a family
council. At first sight, when you encounter a different 'accent',
it can sound as though the whole of your Christian world is under
attack or at least under question, precisely because no-one
learns their Christianity without a local accent.

And it would be easy to resolve if we didn't care about Christian
consistency if we didn't somehow share a conviction that the
Church ought to speak coherently to its environment about
discerning the difference between ways that lead to life and ways
that lead to death. We want our faith to be more than just what
we learn from those who are familiar and whom we instinctively
trust, because we remember - or we should-remember - how the
faith moved out from the familiar territory of the Eastern
Mediterranean to become 'naturalised' in other cultures.
Tribalism is never enough. Yet when we begin to put our insights
together, deep and sometimes agonising conflict appears. What are
we to do?

4. So much is being said about issues of sexuality that I believe
it is important to look seriously at some other matters also when
we reflect on moral decision making and the character of our
moral discernment. So let me take a different set of questions,
one in which I have long been involved. I believe that it is
impossible for a Christian to tolerate, let alone bless or even
defend, the manufacture and retention of weapons of mass
destruction by any political authority. And having said that I
believe it is impossible, I at once have to recognise that
Christians do it; not thoughtless, shallow, uninstructed
Christians, but precisely those who make themselves accountable
to the central truths of our faith in the ways I have described.
I cannot at times believe that we are reading the same Bible; I
cannot understand what it is that could conceivably speak of the
nature of the Body of Christ in any defence of such strategy. But
these are people I meet at the Lord's Table; I know they hear the
scriptures I hear, and I am aware that they offer their
discernment as a gift to the Body. At its most impressive, the
kind of argument developed in defence of their stance reminds me
that in a violent world the question of how we take
responsibility for each other, how we avoid a bland and uncostly
withdrawal from the realities of our environment, is not easily
or quickly settled. In this argument, I hear something I need to
hear something that, left to myself, I might not grasp. So I am
left in perplexity. I cannot grasp how this reading of the Bible
is possible; I want to go on arguing against it with all my
powers, and I believe the Christian witness in the world is
weakened by our failure to speak with one voice on the matter.
Yet it seems I am forced to ask what there is in this position
that I might recognise as a gift, as a showing of Christ.

It comes - for me - so near the edge of what I can make any sense
of. I have to ask whether there is any point at which my
inability to recognise anything of gift in another's policy,
another's discernment, might make it a nonsense to pretend to
stay in the same communion. It's finely balanced: I'm not a
Mennonite or a Quaker. I can dimly see that the intention of my
colleagues who see differently is also a kind of obedience, by
their lights, to what we are all trying to look at. I see in them
the signs of struggling with God's Word and with the nature of
Christ's Body. Sixty years ago, Bonhoeffer and others broke the
fragile communion of the German Protestant Churches over the
issue of the anti-Jewish legislation of the Third Reich,
convinced that this so cut at the heart of any imaginable notion
of what Christ's Body might mean that it could only be empty to
pretend that the same faith was still shared. How we get to such
a recognition is perhaps harder than some enthusiasts imagine,
and Bonhoeffer has some wise words about the dangers of deciding
well in advance where the non-negotiable boundaries lie. Our task
is rather to work at becoming a discerning community, ready to
recognise a limit when it appears, a limit that will have a
perfectly concrete and immediate character. For him, the limits
are going to be set 'from outside': 'the boundaries are drawn
arbitrarily by the world, which shuts itself off from the church
by not hearing and believing' (The Way to Freedom, p.79). But of
course the discernment of such boundaries has quite properly
involved the Church in drawing boundaries 'from within', in the
form of baptism and credal confession. To paraphrase Bonhoeffer:
if we didn't have these markers of Christian identity, there
would be no ground on which the Church as a community, a body
with a common language, could discuss and discern a possible
boundary being set by the world's refusal of the gospel.

The question is when and where the 'world' so invades the Church
that the fundamental nature of the Church is destroyed; and to
this question there is - by definition, Bonhoeffer would say - no
general and abstract answer. Up to a certain point we struggle to
keep the conversation alive, as long as we can recognise that our
partners in this conversation are speaking the same language,
wrestling with the same given data of faith. If I might put it in
a formula that may sound too much like jargon, I suggest that
what we are looking for in each other is the grammar f obedience:
we watch to see if our partners take the same kind of time, sense
that they are under the same sort of judgement or scrutiny,
approach the issue with the same attempt to be dispossessed by
the truth they are engaging with. This will not guarantee
agreement; but it might explain why we should always first be
hesitant and attentive to each other. Why might anyone think this
might count as a gift of Christ to the Church? Well, to answer
that I have a great deal of listening to do, even if my
incomprehension remains.

5. And there is a further turn to this. When I reluctantly
continue to share the Church's communion with someone whose moral
judgement I deeply disagree with, I do so in the knowledge that
for both of us part of the cost is that we have to sacrifice a
straightforward confidence in our 'purity'. Being in the Body
means that we are touched by one another's commitments and thus
by one another's failures. If another Christian comes to a
different conclusion and decides in different ways from myself,
and if I can still recognise their discipline and practice as
sufficiently like mine to sustain a conversation, this leaves my
own decisions to some extent under question I cannot have
absolute subjective certainty that this is the only imaginable
reading of the tradition; I need to keep my reflections under
critical review. This, I must emphasise again, is not a form of
relativism; it is a recognition of the element of putting oneself
at risk that is involved in any serious decision making or any
serious exercise of discernment (as any pastor or confessor will
know). But this is only part of the implication of recognising
the differences and risks of decision-making in the Body of
Christ. If I conclude that my Christian brother or sister is
deeply and damagingly mistaken in their decision, I accept for
myself the brokenness in the Body that this entails. These are my
wounds; just as the one who disagrees with me is wounded by what
they consider my failure or even betrayal. So long as we still
have a language in common and the 'grammar of obedience' in
common, we have, I believe, to turn away from the temptation to
seek the purity and assurance of a community speaking with only
one voice and to embrace the reality of living in a communion
that is fallible and divided. The communion's need for health and
mercy is inseparable from my own need for health and mercy. To
remain in communion is to remain in solidarity with those who I
believe are wounded as well as wounding the Church, in the trust
that in the Body of Christ the confronting of wounds is part of
opening ourselves to healing.

This is hard to express. It may be clearer if we think for a
moment of the past of our Church. In the Body of Christ, I am in
communion with past Christians whom I regard as profoundly and
damagingly in error - with those who justified slavery, torture
or the execution of heretics on the basis of the same Bible as
the one I read, who prayed probably more intensely than I ever
shall. How do I relate to them? How much easier if I did not have
to acknowledge that this is my community, the life I share; that
these are consequences that may be drawn from the faith I hold
along with them. I don't seek simply to condemn them but to stand
alongside them in my own prayer, not knowing how, in the strange
economy of the Body, their life and mine may work together for
our common salvation. I don't think for a moment that they might
be right on matters such as those I have mentioned. But I
acknowledge that they 'knew' what their own concrete Christian
communities taught them to know, just as I 'know' what I have
learned in the same concrete and particular way. And when I stand
in God's presence or at the Lord's Table, they are part of the
company I belong to.

Living in the Body of Christ is, in fact, profoundly hard work.
The modern liberal is embarrassed by belonging to a community
whose history is infected by prejudice and cruelty (and so often
tries to sanitise this history or silence it or distance
themselves from it). The modern traditionalist is embarrassed by
belonging to a community whose present is so muddled, secularised
and fragmented (and longs for a renewed and purified Church where
there are apparently clear rules for the making of moral
decisions). If we cared less about the truth and objectivity of
our moral commitments, this would matter infinitely less. But if
I say that our moral decisions involve a risk, I don't mean by
that to suggest that they have nothing to do with truth; they are
risky precisely because we are trying to hear the truth - and to
show the truth, the truth of God's character as uniquely revealed
in Jesus Christ. And there are times when the risky decision
called for is to recognise that we are no longer speaking the
same language at all, no longer seeking to mean the same things,
to symbolise or communicate the same vision of Who God is. But
that moment itself only emerges from the constantly self-critical
struggle to find out who I am and who we are in and as the Body
of Christ.

[continued...]