More broadly, it is sufficient to say, the field of Christian ethics and moral theology is ecumenical; hence, I am thankful for the opportunities to work ecumenically in the field of ethics in a variety of professional settings.
For the last seventeen years I am grateful to have served as professor of Christian ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary, for colleagues and students, for the community of worship, and for the broader support to serve the church. For this work on ethics and the church, I especially want to thank two colleagues in ecumenism: Mitzi Budde, professor and head librarian at the Bishop Payne Library at VTS, and John W. Crossin, OSFS, executive director for ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
Finally, beginning some thirty years ago, my sensibilities and understandings of the church and its mission have been formed through my friendship, conversations, and work together with Philip Turner and Frank Sugeno. Now retired, Philip Turner was Episcopal missionary to Uganda, Episcopal seminary professor of Christian ethics and moral theology, and former President and Dean of Berkley Divinity School. The late Frank Sugeno became a Christian in the Anglican tradition while in a Japanese detention camp during World War II, taught church history at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, and was a significant voice in missiology. For them I give great thanks.
In the midst of divisions within the church over the embrace of gay and lesbian persons in committed relationships forming lives together, I want to create the space to think about Christian faith as dying to self and discovering new life in the love of God and neighbor. This is not about Christian faith as spirituality. This is about life given in the life of the church.
Understanding the nature of Christian faith as given in the life of the church is difficult where the church is divided over doctrine and discipline or over matters of manners or morals. In its divisions, the church is not a place of welcome for a journey of faith and love. You can’t trust or love what is divided. At the same time, to seek consolation among one’s own tribe is to narrow the world and split off conflict and controversy until the larger world all but disappears. In contrast, the unity of the church is a witness to the promise of Christian faith that God in Christ reconciles.
Conflict over “What’s right?” offers opportunity as well as temptation. The temptation is to identify narrowly the life of faith with right belief, right worship, right action, right order, in short, to identify holiness with purity as we see purity. The opportunity is to deepen the life of faith in discovering what is central to Christian faith among those who differ. This is to discover what is shared that reconciles and unites.
This book is not an account of Christian faith as a matter of theology—biblically, theologically, morally, sacramentally, or ecclesiologically. Rather, this book addresses conflict, and specifically the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion, over matters of morals, understandings of human sexuality, and whether to affirm and bless same-sex relationships. The purpose is to step back from the polemics about “who’s right” to consider the church we have and how we teach—or we should say, how we pass on Christian faith as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
My focus in this book is both local and ecumenical. I am focused on the Episcopal Church in relation to the other churches that constitute the Anglican Communion, and I am focused ecumenically on how those who are part of this particular tradition may be in communion with all who seek to follow Christ. As a Christian moral theologian, I want specifically to help think about moral decision-making and how that may be grounded in the life of the church, again not narrowly in terms of who’s right, but in terms of forming a faithful people.
The gospel mandate, says Jesus, is that we who are followers of Christ are to be one as he and the Father are one that the world might believe (Jn 17:23). Our divisions are a scandal to the life that is the central gift of Christ. As Paul says, we are one body, the body of Christ, and we cannot say, “I have no need of you” (1 Cor 12:21). The unity of the church is not only for our sake but is for the sake of the world. If those who follow Christ are not bound in love, they cannot be a witness to the world of the saving work of God revealed in Christ.
I began my first year teaching at an Episcopal seminary at the beginning of the controversies over homosexuality. Students asked me, “Who’s right?” Advocacy was the interest of many. I sought instead to create space to help students understand why persons differed in their moral judgments. I hoped to help them understand how Scripture informed understandings of human sexuality and at the same time was “read” or “heard” differently. I also sought to develop appreciation of differences in understandings of the nature of sin and its relationship to power, desire, and the nature of sexual relationships that formed holiness in life. All in all, these matters created for me and for my students a continuing conversation with the history and science of sexuality and, with that, understandings of marriage, family, and patriarchy.
What happened in class often led to more personal conversations outside of class. I was surprised at the number of men and the increasing number of women who shared their experiences and struggles with sexual identity and relations. I was also moved by the integrity they sought, not only personally but in relationship to the church and its teachings. In helping persons to make personal and vocational decisions, I felt strongly what moral theologians have claimed. In matters of moral conflict, we must follow our consciences as informed by our understanding of Christian faith. We must be, as Roman Catholic moral theologian Bernard Häring said, “free and faithful in Christ.” To do otherwise is to lose our integrity. Our actions then violate and ultimately undermine our sense of self. A divided self finds no rest. Desire and purpose are at odds with our life. This leads to depression or repression, to acting out, to being unable to be honest and present with others, and to feeling unknown and unloved. How we teach became for me the first question in ethics rather than “What’s right?”
My own thoughts on questions of “how we teach” in moral matters that divide the church—what is called the question of ecclesiology and ethics—developed in the 1980s and ’90s. While teaching seminarians, during this time I also had the privilege to serve as a theological consultant for the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and had the opportunity to work on questions about human sexuality and same-sex relations with congregations, diocesan bishops, and clergy. In the last fifteen years I have had the further opportunity to learn and address these issues as the Episcopal Church has sought to offer a broad account of its understanding of the faithfulness of its actions to ordain gay and lesbian persons and to bless same-sex unions. This included the opportunity to consider the proposed Anglican Covenant with its proposals on structures to enhance the mutual accountability and deepen the relationship of fellowship and communion between Anglican churches. This work has come to a focus in my participation on the Episcopal delegation to the Anglican Roman Catholic Theological Consultation in the U.S.A. (ARC-USA), whose focus from 2007 to 2014 has been on the Christian moral life as formed in the church.
Three areas of study inform this account of moral teaching and the church: ecumenical theology, moral theology, and critical histories of religion and secularization. Understandings of the nature of the church and how churches have variously ordered teaching authority is a central focus of what may be called ecumenical theology as developed in the ecumenical movement. The second area of study is that of moral theology (and Christian ethics, to use these two terms as equivalent). This covers the work on Christian moral teaching in its historical diversity. The third area of study is critical histories that provide comparative accounts of understanding ethics and the ways of moral teaching.
The chapters in this book are not intended to create an argument for what particular churches should do. Instead, I seek to do some “ground clearing” in order to help think about the challenge of being the church that is local and universal. Again, instead of arguing for what is right, I want to explore how we come to faith in the church and what that means for moral teaching.
