An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
Formerly the Church of England’s Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries continues to sit in the UK Parliament’s House of Lords as Lord Harries of Pentregarth. Among significant contributions to public life he presently chairs the Ethics and Law Advisory Group of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. In this very clearly written book, Harries explores the contribution that Christian moral theology makes to the decisions that we all face as individuals and as societies. This is a sustained and welcome emphasis on theologically-grounded and oriented moral reasoning. Such reasoning informs careful judgments, the goal or teleology of which is moral maturity and the common good, as shaped by the ultimate good of the Triune God.
After an introductory chapter recognising that there is no longer a unified metanarrative sustaining society’s moral vision, Harries immediately rejects the plausibility of simply holding out the biblical categories of commandment and law by way of an ‘infantile’ project of moralism before the world’s scepticism. Readers are nevertheless alerted to his intention to revisit these categories later, as he asserts that these ‘crucial’ concepts ‘cannot be jettisoned without undermining the whole biblical understanding of religion’ (p. 14). This signals Harries’s apologetic aims in pondering how Christian theology must engage in moral reasoning publicly. His ordering of material is designed to engage serious questions that critics have with certain traditional presentations of Christian ethical claims.
His third chapter very appreciatively and expertly surveys modern ethical theory under the heading of ‘Autonomous Ethics’. This ethics is ultimately judged to provide inadequate foundations for moral reasoning. Two chapters follow exploring ‘The Shape of Christian Ethics’ and ‘Following Jesus in a tough world’. Here we find a core emphasis on the response to the teaching of Jesus in the Church’s tradition that recognises the tension between the now and the consummation of the Kingdom. Later chapters emphasise the importance of recent theological retrievals of Wisdom literature for Christian deliberation. In framing the moral act of deciding, Harries presents a humbly realist ethic ordered by recognition of the beauty of the good, lived out in the primacy of prayer (p. 151) and daily immersion in scripture (p. 153) as creaturely response to grace—in hard-thought-out reasoning (p. 154). Key moments of his thought are delightfully juxtaposed with collects and liturgy from the Anglican Common Worship.
This first half of the book serves to equip the reader to follow Harries in his analysis of the four fundamental drivers of human action—sex, money, power, and fame. It is here that Harries’s commendation of a theological ethic is put to the test. The last two chapters are disappointingly thin in comparison to the first. The fullest is the discussion of sex, and it is here that evangelicals will question whether Harries’s theology is doing enough work. Commending the ideal of marriage, and even US campaigns for ‘chastity (p. 86), Harries nevertheless sees the wisdom of twenty-something cohabitation to discover ‘sexual compatibility (p. 86) and further can commend the touching beauty and fidelity of homosexual relationships (pp. 89–92). Harries seems to perpetuate the confusion that cannot differentiate including the self-identified gay person (whatever criticisms there might subsequently be of this manner of self-identification) in the Christian life and excluding what would traditionally be denoted as fornication—sexual union outside of marriage between and man and a woman. This confusion stems, simply observed, from a failure to allow for singleness and celibacy in the shape of the moral life in the tension between the times. The humble compromise ethic, propounded with great wisdom and dexterity in parts, is also the fruit of a theological failure to take Scripture seriously as canon, as rule, so that the account of who we are as moral agents—Harries’s moral anthropology—is founded on wisdom as the playground of experience, not revelation. Experience will distort precisely the recognition and response to the God of Christ in Scripture by the Holy Spirit when it is lifted into the foreground of moral reasoning. The key term that is missing, even as Harries discusses duty throughout and particularly in his discussion of power, is that of authority. Once experience takes over, as it threatens to do in his account, the human moral agent becomes the authority, rather than the one authorised by the Author. Yet it cannot go unnoticed that Harries, in that same chapter on sex, shows considerable clarity on the distinction between moral and criminal assessments of sexual acts, prostitution and sex trafficking as it informs legislation, assessments for which his Parliamentary career equips him well.
Harries wears his considerable learning lightly and is careful to provide sensitive illustrations and quotations from a range of theological and literary sources. One error stands out, although amusing for the Christian ethicists in crowd, when the author Samuel Wells (correctly named in the endnote reference) is actually called Stanley Wells in the main text, just before being identified as following Stanley Hauerwas, from whence the creeping error has undoubtedly spread. There is a great deal to commend the structure of Harries’s apologetic account of the importance of moral theology for the task of moral reasoning that must sustain our decision-making. He is a graciously irenic writer with whom to disagree, very consciously driving the Christian reader to mine responsively Scripture and the Christian tradition in a way that must at least match Harries’s seriousness of purpose and eloquence of speech.