defined narrowly as a matter of wrong acts, but as idolatry. Understood in the context of worship, idolatry is a matter of misplaced love. Christian faith is not first of all a matter of right belief but of right relationship. In this sense, Christians share the conviction that faith is covenantal, given in a relationship with God. This covenant, moreover, is understood as a matter of grace. Grace is a matter of being loved by God, of being forgiven, of being embraced and invited into a new life. Monotheism, sin as idolatry, faith as covenantal — these are three basic beliefs Christians share in common.
Two more specific convictions Christians also share in common. Christians are Christian because they have come into the covenant with God through Jesus Christ. Jesus is, in this sense, the revelation of God. In other words, as Christians experience Jesus, Jesus is the redeemer. The knowledge of Jesus is given in scripture and worship, what Christians refer to as Word and sacrament. In scripture the story of Jesus is told as the story of God’s relationship to us. In worship that relationship is acknowledged and deepened.
These common convictions about Christian faith and the moral life have not always been apparent given the polemical relationship between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. From the sixteenth century onward, Roman Catholics and Protestants each sought to establish themselves as the religion of the individual nations of Europe and then with colonial expansion as the religion of new lands and peoples throughout the world. In this context, Roman Catholics and Protestants defined themselves over and against each other. This led to dogmatic understandings that hardened differences in terms of basic beliefs rather than fostering common understandings of Christian faith as a way of life given in response to God.
Faith came to be defined for Protestants in terms of justification by faith. Correspondingly, the absolute sovereignty of God was emphasized, so much so that predestination and double predestination were central beliefs for many Calvinists. In God’s absolute power and wisdom, God knew from the beginning of time who was saved and who was damned. These beliefs were reinforced as they were conceived as the alternative to Roman Catholic “works” righteousness, in which God was reduced to a good that humans acquired. For Roman Catholics, such Protestant understandings of faith reflected an individualism centered in a subjective experience of faith. The truths of faith were denied, especially the Roman Catholic beliefs about the church and its authority. Among these defining beliefs of Roman Catholicism was the belief in the pope as head of the church, a belief that eventually was defined in terms of papal infallibility in teaching doctrine essential to faith. For Protestants, these beliefs were idolatrous in that they substituted belief in the church and the pope for faith in God.
The competition between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism fed polemics and hardened understandings of faith as a matter of mutually exclusive beliefs. Points of common identity were lost from view. Alternative frameworks that placed their different beliefs in some larger context were largely inconceivable. All of this changed only recently. While several events mark this change, none is greater than the Roman Catholic Vatican II Council that met from 1962 to 1965. Under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, this Council produced a broad range of documents that no longer defined Christian faith as Roman Catholic over and against Protestantism. Instead began the exploration of what is the faith that is shared among “all people of good will.”20
The present age is ecumenical. Beyond polemics Roman Catholics and Protestants have sought to understand what experiences have given rise to their differences. This has led to an explosion of historical studies examining, for example, scripture, the church, worship and liturgy, theology, and ethics.21 Thicker descriptions have been offered of the life of faith communities. Beliefs have been contextualized, placed in the broader context of these faith communities. Understandings of Christian faith and life have then been enlarged by the inclusion of different communities within Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — for example, communities of women beginning in the early church and continuing through contemporary feminist and womanist movements.22 Increasingly, other voices representing other communities of faith have also become part of this exploration of the nature of faith. For example, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and the Anabaptists have become important conversation partners, as well as contemporary voices ranging from new evangelical and charismatic communities to those based on liberation theologies.23
From each of these communities of faith come theologies that seek to offer a richly detailed description of Christian faith and the moral life. The particularity of these theologies offers the promise of an account that will do more than identify common convictions of faith. A thick description holds the promise of providing a fuller understanding of the specific features of Christian faith as a way of life. The challenge and difficulty in developing such an account is in discerning and describing these features in such a way that they represent more than ritual notes or an ethnographic description of a particular people. Instead, if such an account is to reflect the broader claims of Christian faith, it must place a particular community and tradition in the larger context of human life in general as lived in the presence of God.
This introduction to the Christian moral life is broadly Christian and particularly Anglican. In this chapter I have sought to identify the central claims regarding the nature of Christian faith and the moral life as reflected in the Ten Commandments and in the central claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the next chapter I will turn from defining beliefs about the nature of Christian faith and life to a more detailed description of this life as lived, given my experience and understanding of faith as formed by the Anglican tradition. These first two chapters provide something of a bifocal vision in order to offer in the remaining chapters a thicker, more detailed account of Christian faith as a way of life grounded in the worship of God.
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1. The narrative understanding of ethics as a matter of setting, character, and plot has its origins in Aristotle’s Poetics. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 143. This has been the center of many contemporary understandings of the relationship of Christian faith and ethics. See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Central to this development has been the work of Alasdair Maclntyre, especially After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) in which he argues that all ethics depend on a way of life grounded in a set of practices and understood in terms of a life story. Among the best accounts of the foundations that inform this work is William Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990). For a discussion of these foundations, see the Appendix.
2. This is the argument central to H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
3. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 11, p. 804.
4. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, 2 vols., ed. E G. Stanwood (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), vol. 1, p. 29.
5. Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. 1, p. 3.
6. The following sketches of pieties are intended to reflect different types of responses. These types (traditional, modern, and postmodern) point to the transformation in worldviews and understandings from what might be called pre-enlightenment to modern to postmodern. For an account of the changes informing these sketches and, more broadly, the argument of this book in general, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990); and Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue.
7. Riggins Earl, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self and Community in the Slave Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis, 1993).
8. This is a variation of the
