A Special Calling in History
[1] In 1998, in a series essay on the 21st century in Atlantic Monthly, Bill McKibben examines the population question and concludes as follows:
The bottom-line argument goes like this: The next fifty years are a special time. They will decide how strong and healthy the planet will be for centuries to come. Between now and 2050, we'll see the zenith, or very nearly, of human population. With luck we'll never see any greater production of carbon dioxide or toxic chemicals. We'll never see more species extinction or soil erosion. Greenpeace recently announced a campaign to phase out fossil fuels entirely by mid-century, which sounds utterly quixotic but could-if everything works out just right-happen. So, it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair-any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality. We need in these fifty years to be working simultaneously on all parts of the equation-on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population.[1]
[2] With McKibben, let us assume that our times are special-if
not entirely unique. Let us assume that more could be said about
the interlocking crises of human and planetary welfare that require
serious and timely attention. With Larry Rasmussen and Cynthia
Moe-Lobeda, let us assume that our task, which we should also
commend to future generations, "is the long, difficult transition
from an unsustainable way of life to an economically,
environmentally, politically, socially, morally and spiritually
sustainable world."[2] This, of course, is a
task that encompasses and depends upon almost all human relations
and communities. Given this, what about the social witness of the
churches? Are American churches developing adequate social ethics
for such times and such a task?[3]
[3] This essay examines the social thought and practice of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and argues that this
church deserves a largely positive appraisal. Formed in the late
1980s, the ELCA adopted in 1991 a foundational social statement
("The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective") which situates
this church's moral life in a "diverse, divided, and threatened
global society on a beautiful, fragile planet."[4] Two years later, in a
social statement on the environment, the ELCA speaks of "the
urgency" with which humanity must act to address various threats to
a sustainable future which spring from and intensify longstanding
social injustices.[5] In a 1995 social
statement on peace and a 1999 statement on economic life, the ELCA
sets out normative positions, which carry forward the early
environmental statement.[6] While
this common ethic does not animate all seven statements produced in
the 1990s, it is arguably the main and richest in the corpus.
Further, moral linkages can be established between these three
statements and the rest. The three statements embody an integral
social vision that serves a moral agenda for a sustainable world
and a responsible humanity. Consistent with Luther, this is an
ethic of neighbor love where Christians live out various social
roles obligated to justice, which now includes a new material norm
of responsibility for future generations of planetary life.
Borrowing a construction developed by William Lazareth and recently
retrieved by James Childs, "faith active in love seeking justice"
has become the core, critical ethic of the ELCA.[7] This ethic correlates
with a new holistic ecclesiology.
[4] Fifty years after American Lutherans began regularly to produce
corporate social thought, ELCA thinking exhibits a new level of
social responsibility. In addition to proposing norms that speak to
our times and task, ELCA thought and practice seek to build
relevant institutions and social capital, that the good might be
enacted. For this, a Lutheran church can draw directly upon the
concept of vocation, which the ELCA does. But the ELCA also
champions a new form and fund for social participation and renewal.
Drawing upon an ecclesiology first proposed by James Gustafson, the
ELCA embraces "community of moral deliberation" as a basic
expression of faith active in love seeking justice and thus a basic
form of ecclesial social witness.[8] Even
though an American context presents daunting obstacles to this
project, ELCA thought projects striking hopefulness about the
possibility of improved moral community - both within its churches
and wider public life. Consistent with the paradoxical posture
first noted by H. Richard Niebuhr and recently articulated by
Robert Benne, this American Lutheran church wants to be both
separate from and intertwined with the world.[9] Community of moral
deliberation represents a bold move toward a public church
identity, consistent with contemporary movements and proposals for
social, civic, and political renewal.
Explanatory and Methodological Caveats
[5] Given the characteristics and procedures of the ELCA, the case
for an ethical pattern raises a puzzle that cannot be solved here
but should be noted. In addition to seven social statements to
date, ELCA social thought also includes an impressive body of
various other documents: messages, study documents, books, videos,
and study guides.[10] These documents are the
result of extensive collaboration, communication, consultation, and
self-assessment. Some could be used to support the present
analysis. But the burden of argument will be placed upon social
statements, which are the most authoritative social policy texts.
Years in the making, they are based upon extensive inputs and
authorized at the highest levels of church polity. But herein lies
the puzzle: social statements are also subject to the most
inclusive and participatory processes of development. There are
hundreds of fingerprints on any given text, different one to
another: stakeholders, consultants, bishops, board members,
assembly delegates. These actors do shape the careers of statements
in substantive ways. Final drafts can be quite different from the
first. First drafts can fail to progress to approval. Procedural
requirements are quite modest. In principle, social statements can
be a diverse lot.
[6] While various actors regularly evaluate social statement drafts
relative to the Lutheran tradition, questions of consistency and
adequacy across the corpus do not receive much attention. It would
be unusual to object to a particular social statement proposal for
being at odds with one approved two years earlier. The question of
whether this church has or is building an integral social vision,
it might be argued, should be the concern of the foundational
social statement or a procedures and policies
document.[11] But these ELCA
documents are just that, statements in outline of the church's
normative role in society. Beyond the call to promote justice and
to assume responsibility for the well being of society and the
environment, the texts are silent about middle axioms. Instead of
dealing in the what of social witness, these texts deal in matters
of why and how-motivation and procedure. Put differently, controls
upon the material norms of ELCA social thought are relatively
modest. There is no apparent "moral core," as Benne proposes, that
regulates and transcends empirical ecclesial
diversity.[12] The social statements
of predecessor churches are viewed by the ELCA as "historical"
documents with no binding authority. Consequently, there are more
reasons to expect moral pluralism than consistency. One can rightly
wonder how such a pattern has come to be. This, however, is another
paper.
[7] Before we turn to the pattern, a word about interpretive
procedure. Because ELCA social statement texts change from first
draft to last and because texts always get shorter, early texts are
richer in meaning and sometimes provide an interpretive lens for
grasping the significance of the final statement.[13] When it comes to
understanding the why and how issues of church in society, this is
particularly true. The final draft of the foundational statement
communicates less substance than the study draft. The final means
more when read through the early materials.[14] The following case for
a pattern employs this approach to the data.
PART TWO: INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS
Beyond Dualism and Quietism
[8] In her introduction to a recent multi-authored volume on
American Lutheran ethics, Karen Bloomquist makes the following
observation:
Overall these writers seem to give less attention to the role of contemporary knowledge or to principles or norms held in common with those outside of the church than have some Lutheran writers in the recent past. This shift does not imply that common address of social issues is less important today but that an internal or ecclesial deficit needs to be addressed now that was less evident in earlier periods.[15]
[9] Bloomquist's generalization serves also to illuminate ELCA
social thought. In striking fashion, the three drafts of the
foundational social statement focus increasingly upon ecclesiology.
From a full section on "the world in which we live" in the first
draft to one sentence in the approved draft, attention to
historical context and social relations recedes with increasing
emphasis upon the "Church" and her particular and distinctive
identity.[16] As Bloomquist suggests,
the shift of attention seems to point to certain problem areas.
While ELCA churches today are subject to the many external assaults
upon identity and vitality that other American churches feel, the
turning inward in the foundational documents does not seek to
refuse, deny or abandon the world.[17]
Rather, in typical Lutheran fashion, the emphasis upon ecclesiology
in the foundational statement appears to be a both/and move and not
an either/or one-a relative inwardness for the sake of an emphatic
outwardness. So, what is the problem?
[10] Beginning with the Social Gospel through the Second World War
and into the 1960s, Lutheran social thought has been on the
defensive through much of the 20th century-otherworldly, dualistic,
quietistic, antinomian. Various thinkers, inside and outside of
Lutheranism, have formulated severe critiques that have required
serious reconsideration of central Lutheran ideas like the "two
kingdoms doctrine" (so named and criticized by Karl Barth, among
others). While some Lutheran ethicians continue to defend these
ideas, nobody wants to deny that important 19th century expressions
of Lutheranism were problematic and that these expressions have
left deep imprints upon empirical Lutheran churches.[18] As James Childs
observes: "Most of us who are the 'senior citizens' of Lutheranism
in America, or nearly so, can testify to some form of this
dualistic thinking as a staple of our theological
formation."[19]
[11] The degree to which such thinking continues to shape the
formation of American Lutherans today is obviously a complicated
question. On the one hand, there is evidence to suggest that
Lutherans, for various reasons, have given up quietism. According
to one ELCA survey, almost all lay people now agree that the church
should be "an active force in the world, challenging our society to
be more like what God intended it to be."[20] On the other hand,
another survey indicates that most lay people, say ELCA pastors,
would put "social justice" at the bottom of a long list of images
of their congregation. At the top of that list, they would picture
their church as a "family."[21]
Doubtless, the history of effects of 19th century thinking lives
on. Doubtless, it is also losing potency. In any case,
institutional reflection leading up to the adoption of the
foundational social statements suggests that ecclesiology has been
a principal concern in the formation of the social vision of the
ELCA. According to John Stumme, a senior ELCA staff person from its
beginnings, planning for the foundational statement included the
perceived need to "set forth a convincing understanding of and
rationale for the church speaking as a corporate entity on social
issues."[22] Going further back to
deliberations about ELCA design, planners held a guiding perception
that Lutherans have yet to see congregations as important forms of
the church's social witness. According to these planners, if ELCA
structures could accomplish congregational acceptance of this role,
this would add an element of newness in the new
church."[23]
[12] Given this background information and what the drafts of the
foundational document say, "church" stands out as a problem at all
levels, from the congregational to the universal. For historical
reasons, ELCA social thought does not presume that days of dualism
and quietism are fully past. Consequently, the strong inwardness of
the final approved draft of the foundational statement argues on
behalf of a new outwardness. As the text says: "The Gospel does not
take the Church out of the world but instead calls it to affirm and
to enter more deeply into the world."[24] As a sociological fact,
dualism and quietism surely persist in the ELCA. But they do not
merit mention in the approved foundational
statement.[25] Instead, a new
ecclesiological construct and its correlative ethic get the
attention.
[13] Preliminary drafts of the foundational statement speak of a
new "holistic vision."[26]
Although the final statement drops this language, it carries
forward a four-fold conception of the church's presence in and
witness to society: 1) the baptized and gathered community of Word
and Sacrament, 2) the callings of ordinary life, 3) community of
moral deliberation, and 4) the organized voluntary public
institution. As an antidote to dualism and quietism, "holism"
conceives of the church as a series of overlapping social relations
and spheres, with different roles and commitments, that are joined
in a common moral vision funded by gratitude for the unconditional
love of the living triune God. Faith active in love seeking justice
unites and empowers these relations and spheres, where God is
always already acting for life. All of these relations and spheres
matter to God, including "the earth," which now joins "the
neighbor" as the subjects of mutual giving and receiving.
Consistent with Luther's emphasis upon the moral life as response
to grace, the ELCA thinks of the church's witness to society as
dependent upon "its identity as a community that lives from and for
the Gospel." This identity "distinguishes the Church from all other
communities." But the differentiation ends there. Joined in God's
creation and redemption, the Church and the world share a "common
destiny in the reign of God." Further, this eschatological hope
requires the Church to affirm the world-"enter more deeply into the
world"-by participating in its critical transformation. "The
presence and promise of God's reign makes the church restless and
discontented with the world's brokenness and
violence."[27]
[14] Once Christian solidarity with and seriousness about the world
are grounded in God's universal activities, a holistic ecclesiology
follows. As God is active in all relations and spheres of life, so
the Church should be omni-involved in the structures of life,
holding them all accountable to God. For the ELCA, love as justice
can encompass the manifold beings and relations of life-in a
sinful, broken world. Justice is the summary term for the Church's
responsibility to society. The work of justice, as we will see
below, involves various goods, relations, and claims. Ecclesial
"holism" views the complex welfare of the world as the Church's
corporate calling. Whatever the Church can do to be fully invested
in our world is required. As the world changes and evolves, so does
the social witness of the Church. Here, the third and fourth
spheres of ELCA ecclesiology are critically important.
[15] Before turning to that topic, the conclusion can be drawn that
ecclesiology has been a principal concern of ELCA social thought
during its first decade-and for good reason. In response to 20th
century criticism and experience, this church has quietly but
consistently and seriously been re-conceiving and enacting a new
vision of the Church in society. As evidence of this, four social
statements subsequent to the foundational statement-death penalty,
racism, environment, and peace-all relate their constructive moral
claims and commitments to multiple roles and spheres of Christian
witness to society. Further, in 1997 when the ELCA adopted a
revised policies and procedures document, the question of
ecclesiology was again a principal concern, which the new document
addressed through another formulation of and strategy for ecclesial
holism. The procedural changes adopted in 1997-partly precipitated
by the failure of a social statement on sexuality in 1993-were a
reckoning with the major gap between the ecclesial ideals of the
foundational statement and empirical reality in
congregations.
Deliberation as Public Church
[16] The Studies Department sees its task not as prescribing or
decreeing what shall be the ELCA's position on various social
topics, but to facilitate processes by which the church might come
to one or more positions through its own actions of deliberation.
We recognize that diversity, disagreement and conflict are a
legitimate part of this process. This many-faceted process is one
that will help the ELCA reach some mutual understandings and a
clear public voice on key issues of the day. The participatory
process for getting there is as important a social witness as is
the outcome itself [emphasis added].[28]
[17] Writing in 1988 as a senior ELCA staff person, Karen
Bloomquist makes a striking statement about what has come to be
termed "community of moral deliberation." For both Bloomquist and
John Stumme, as they envisioned the work of the Studies Department,
community of moral deliberation offered a new way of being a
church.[29] It would be a social
witness itself as well as a morally-imperative means for improving
other forms: proclamation and prayer, the formation of civic virtue
and social capital, the callings of the Christian person, corporate
social teaching, political advocacy, social ministry organizations,
and internal institutional practices. While all of these forms can
benefit from community of moral deliberation, the foundational
documents pitch the significance of this ecclesiology toward
becoming a more self-conscious, more strongly organized public
institution. As Robert Benne contends, "The church as an
institution has a calling in a world of institutions. As a
corporate body it is called to relate to the corporate structures
of the world. The church is and has a social ethic."[30] But as any experienced
church person knows, few Lutherans see or relate to the Church
beyond the local congregation. Non-local actors and larger
bureaucratic structures are mostly invisible, irrelevant, or
illegitimate. Therefore, community of moral deliberation, following
the pattern described above, represents a democratic turn to the
local for the sake of a new "public church." It seeks both to
broaden the participatory base and to extend the social presence
and reach of the Church.
[18] As noted, the approved foundational statement says little
about our context. One must examine earlier drafts to see the
problems that community of moral deliberation seeks to correct.
Informed by landmark books of the day (Habits of the Heart,
After Virtue, and Ethics After Babel), ELCA
foundational thought looks to community of moral deliberation as an
antidote to various moral pathologies-radical individualism, moral
pluralism, political cynicism, personal powerlessness-which
undermine the common good and public life.
[19] With the breakdown of public life, persons disengage
themselves from participation in the public arena where common
values, attitudes, and worldviews are formed. They retreat into the
private enclaves of home and family. In these enclaves the pains
not addressed in the public arena come home to roost, as families
struggle to bear up under the pressure and
disappointments.[31]
[20] This retreat from public life to the troubled private haven
(a contemporary moral equivalent of Lutheran dualism and quietism)
includes even the local American congregation of personal choice.
These communities are fragile associations ever threatened by
schism over great questions of faith and life, precisely because
they are voluntary groups in a post-Christian society where all
members are quite free to leave over disappointed personal
preferences. American Lutheran congregations, in these respects, do
fit the cultural portraits of Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre,
and Jeffrey Stout.[32]
[21] Such problems, particularly moral pluralism, are subject to
different solutions. Community of moral deliberation is one and as
such is a form of social capital.[33] As a
way of discerning God's will and as a social institution, community
of moral deliberation entails what I have elsewhere described as an
"unruly" methodology of relatively unbounded inquiry into multiple
sources of insight through open-ended dialogue among diverse agents
who share a faith-based commitment to serious, democratic
conversation about God and world.[34] As
such, community of moral deliberation intends to apprehend and
forge consensus around the truth, albeit elusive truth. It seeks a
hard-won, rare experience of contemporary agreement where, having
taken seriously various sources and questions, the community can
finally say, in Martha Storz's terms, "It seems right to the Holy
Spirit and to us."[35]
[22] The intention toward shared moral truth and the occasional,
even rare, experience of agreement are crucial for the "public
church" that the ELCA wants to be. But there are surely serious
obstacles to this aim, perhaps some insurmountable ones. If James
Davison Hunter's "culture wars" thesis holds up, community of moral
deliberation as a social form cannot enjoy broad acceptance and
vitality because it entails a contentious theory and method of
moral knowledge, which an "orthodox" worldview will find
unacceptable. For Hunter, even a shared ecclesial commitment to
conversation-let alone contemporary agreements-will be plagued by
incommensurable division.[36]
[23] While the ELCA project may get drawn into such conflict, this
church is attempting to challenge any cultural obstacles to the
pursuit of shared moral discourse and the generation of shared
insight. If the fragmentation, babel, and strife cannot be
transcended, public life will only continue to deteriorate. For the
ELCA, community of moral deliberation, against all odds and
barriers, is a moral imperative for the renewal of public life.
Community of moral deliberation can be viewed as a revisionist
moral epistemology. Against moral idolatry, it assumes that we need
to engage others to transcend the limitations of particularity. But
more importantly, the ELCA is interested in institutionalized
reasoning together to draw isolated Americans toward shared,
constructive moral endeavor, what James Childs calls "a quest for
mutually acceptable truths."[37] As
the first draft of the foundational statement contends:
Through such participatory processes we acquire a broader perspective on our world. We become more conscious of those large-scale institutional realities that often leave us feeling like passive recipients of products and decisions from which we feel alienated and powerless The hope is that more participatory and deliberative processes might renew public life and enable a sense of the common good to emerge. There are few places in society where this kind of moral deliberation that can help to mend the social fabric is encouraged and nurtured. It is our hope that the church, and particularly the ELCA, might be such an arena. The church has theological resources for undergirding such deliberation and a moral vision of justice for giving substance to this process.[38]
This language of "hope" acknowledges that the obstacles to
renewal are daunting. Despite them, this church believes that it
can cultivate some power to improve public life and that it has a
special opportunity or calling to do so. Although the approved
foundational statement outlines several goods that community of
moral deliberation can serve, they all have a public interest.
Situated in the local congregation and vitalized by the experiences
and convictions of faith, community of moral deliberation offers a
bridging institution between solitary individuals and various
social wholes. This church has a timely opportunity to witness to
society by modeling the good society. One needed "good" is
procedural justice. Drawing upon Jeffrey Stout's contention that
the "acids of injustice" are the main threat to contemporary public
life, Karen Bloomquist holds that procedural injustice is also
acidic:
We have become aware enough of the particularities and pluralism of perspectives that we cannot go back to some sense of a universal good that applies in the same way to all. But it may be possible to strive for greater procedural as well as substantive justice, that incorporates rather than discounts our diversity, and that empowers people inside as well as those outside the church, particularly in how we go about developing positions on public issues.[39]
Procedural justice is not sufficient for the good society, but
it is necessary. Community of moral deliberation can help a
democratic society still deficient in genuine and inclusive
dialogue about the common good. With Bloomquist, "This sense of the
common good cannot be imposed by hierarchical or coerced power or
an idealistic construct, but it begins to take shape in the space
of our relationality with one another, as we become more empowered
participants in a process rather than passive recipients of its
products."[40] In this way, community
of moral deliberation, as social capital, is a condition for the
possibility of a public church and perhaps the good society.
Responsible Love
[24] Robert Benne contends that a "persisting tendency in
Lutheran ethics is to reduce the whole of the ethical life to the
motivation touched off by justification." In response to the grace
of Christ, Christians are "powerfully motivated to live the life of
love." But Lutherans say little about the character and content of
that life. Love, thinks Benne, "becomes both a permissive
affirmation of any behavior and a rather amorphous serving of the
neighbor." Despite what Luther taught, modern Lutherans do not want
to ask what the Decalogue means for them.[41] To argue that ELCA
Lutherans now stand for "love seeking justice" sounds like more
formlessness. In fact, the six social statements of the 1990s
employ and commend understandings of love which are arguably
faithful to James Childs' translation of the
Decalogue.[42] Consistent with the
foundational statement which argues that God's activity in the
world gives content to justice (which all people can know and
should do), five statements specify various middle principles for
justice.[43] Further, three of these
statements exhibit a pattern that merits notice.
[25] This pattern is the effort to specify various principles of
justice, which together constitute an integral social ethic that
enables persons to think in coordinate and comprehensive ways about
different moral questions. The statements on the environment, on
peace, and on economic life use similar and identical conceptions
of right-relations between humans and others that communicate a
vision of the necessary, constitutive elements of normative life
together. Further, the principles employed in these statements
reinforce in explicit terms the sense of holism and interdependence
implicit in this pattern of complexity and relation. While not
breaking new moral ground in the wider literature, these three
statements do fulfill the expectation of the foundational social
statement that "new ways" be found to speak to the travail of our
world.[44] They satisfy what Larry
Rasmussen and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda require of a minimally adequate
Lutheran ethic, that it "recognize the complicated and
interdependent relationships of humankind and the rest of
nature."[45]
[26] That everything is related to everything is equally evident in
the statements on the environment, peace, and economic life. They
all propose multiple norms and action guides resulting in moral
linkages between the topics. In the 1993 environmental statement
four principles of justice are relevant to the state of the planet
and biblical norms: participation, solidarity, sufficiency, and
sustainability. All living things possess moral standing and
rights; they are part of the same moral community; and they have
basic needs that should be met without compromising the needs of
future generations of life. Participation means that community of
moral deliberation includes all of life. Solidarity entails care
and accountability for the interdependence of life. Sufficiency and
sustainability set limits and establish obligations for the
interactions of humans with all of life. Each principle makes its
own distinct claim, which both supports and stands in tension with
the other principles.
[27] The 1995 peace statement and the 1999 economic life statement
exhibit deep moral agreement with the 1993 environmental text.
Arguing for the moral imperative of "sufficient, sustainable
livelihood for all," the economic statement is a remarkable
extension of the environmental statement. The text does not mention
participation and solidarity, but these principles inform the moral
community of the text: "'For all' refers to the whole household of
God-all people and creation throughout the world. We should assess
economic activities in terms of how they affect 'all,' especially
people living in poverty."[46] In
similar fashion, the peace statement adopts a global perspective
and calls for a "multifaceted" peacemaking agenda that builds
implicitly upon principles of participation, solidarity,
sufficiency, and sustainability:
We affirm therefore that earthly peace is built on the recognition of the unity and goodness of created existence, the oneness of humanity, and the dignity of every person. Peace is difference in unity. It requires both respect for the uniqueness of others-finite persons in particular communities-and acknowledgement of a common humanity.[47]
While this statement could be more explicit about the principles that back its litany of justice claims, there is no question that its vision of peace incorporates environmental and economic justice and that these projects are all complexly related such that one cannot be realized without the other. Such extension and linkage of moral domains are characteristic of an ethic of responsibility. Among contemporary proposals, Wolfgang Huber's four criteria for responsible action overlap substantially with the integral vision of justice in ELCA thought: "prospective care for a shared natural, social, and cultural space of living together; fairness toward the weaker as the test of the legitimacy of actions; self-limitation with respect to the rights of future generations and to the dignity of nature; respect for the freedom of conscience for others as for oneself."[48]
[28] Participation, solidarity, sufficiency, and sustainability
do constitute a new Lutheran ethic of responsibility. While this
ethic is not necessarily complete and not consistently present in
the first generation of ELCA social statements, the texts exhibit
more pattern and substance than one might expect of an American
Lutheran church.
PART THREE: EVALUATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
Shared Moral Truth
[29] Assuming that the next fifty years are special, that
sustainability (broadly construed) is the pressing moral task of
humanity, and that we need, as McKibben says, "to be working
simultaneously on all parts of the equation," how should we
evaluate the social witness of the ELCA? What does this church
offer that we need? Clearly, the nascent social teaching of the
ELCA serves our times and our task. But it is more important for
the internal life of this church than for wider public life, where
many voices already speak this same moral language. While
groundbreaking for Lutheran social thought, the 1990s social
statements do not move the wider conversation forward. However,
ELCA convictions about community as moral inquiry together do
represent an important and distinctive social witness. The
sustainable world we seek will not come to pass by the thinking of
the few or the coercion of the powerful but by masses of diverse
peoples cooperating in almost unimaginable ways. Somehow, if enough
humans work together on all parts of the whole, the Earth may
squeeze through the next fifty years. This appears to be possible
only by way of consensual relations, public agreements, and common
projects born of new associations like community of moral
deliberation. The sustainable world must be a global democratic
project, but the imperiled state of free and voluntary association
(in the United States-let alone other societies) is one of the
parts that needs much work.
[30] Two recent contributions to the civil society literature, one
prescriptive and the other diagnostic, testify to the social
significance of community of moral deliberation: A Call to
Civil Society: A Report to the Nation from the Council on Civil
Society and One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class
Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare,
Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each
Other by Alan Wolfe.[49] For
the Council on Civil Society (hereafter CCS), churches and other
religious communities figure importantly in its vision of change.
Further, its view of Church and society is quite Lutheran. Unlike
CCS, Wolfe makes no case for a public church, but his analysis
illuminates a principal obstacle before the CCS agenda.
[31] CCS enters the debate over social decline and its features by
embracing public perceptions that we suffer from growing inequality
and moral depletion resulting in social fragmentation, alienation,
and incivility. Family values are declining, as well as respect for
authority and personal responsibility. Americans increasingly worry
about the loss of shared values and thus the bases for our project
of self-governance. For some thinkers, this increasing social
distrust should be correlated with a decline in vibrant civic
institutions and voluntary associations (Robert Bellah, Robert
Putnam). For CCS, the civil society needs families, neighborhoods,
faith communities, civic groups, arts groups, local governments,
schools, businesses, the media-all cooperating for good. But these
cooperating social actors will rely for orientation and power upon
underlying moral agreements. For CCS, shared moral beliefs, such as
the dignity of one's neighbor and the possibility of moral
knowledge through reason and good will, are foundational to the
many habits and social patterns that engender the democratic
enterprise.
[32] Put differently, effective civic engagement in a democracy
presupposes and depends on a larger set of shared ideas about human
virtue and the common good. In short, effective civic engagement
requires a public moral philosophy. Absent a guiding set of shared
moral truths, voluntary civic association can be just as harmful to
human flourishing as any big government bureaucracy or big business
bureaucracy.[50]
[33] Our deepest problems, then, are moral. They are more basic
than democratic renewal through civic engagement. Although we need
this, we need also to attend to the moral sensibilities that
incline us to civic engagement at all and that enable us to
discriminate between good and evil in society. "For these reasons,
reverent regard for a public moral philosophy-an ensemble of
knowable, objective moral truths-is our democracy's most
indispensable foundation."[51] For
CCS, civil society is the social sphere where moral formation
typically occurs and should be engaged today in the moral renewal
of our democratic project.
[34] What ails our democracy is not simply the loss of certain
organizational forms, but also the loss of certain organizing
ideals-moral ideals that authorize our civic creed, but do not
derive from it. At the end of this century, our most important
challenge is to strengthen the moral habits and ways of living that
make democracy possible.[52]
[35] CCS's moral realism challenges the established notion that
persons are self-originating and self-authenticating sources of
valid moral claims. On this view, people are unencumbered by moral
claims unless we choose them. In contrast, CCS contends that
democracy-as the great American political classics testify-rests on
that "higher law" (M.L. King, Jr.) authored by God, which enables
us to see ourselves and others as "more alike than different" and
as possessors of transcendent dignity. Formed as social beings,
people realize their authentic selfhood in community, not apart
from it. Service to human flourishing is the proper aim of all
social institutions. The democratic civil society so widely sought
should start with public agreements about the conditions for human
flourishing.
[36] Of course, in a liberal society committed to a thin theory of
the good ("Do as you please as long you do not hurt anyone."), the
search for such agreements does not happen. Thus, CCS asks
Americans to save democracy by becoming a different people. Against
liberalism, we need to think of democratic civil society as a way
of living that calls us to pursue, live out, and transmit moral
truth. Were we to do this, CCS believes that we would be united by
perceptions of common human dignity and sociality. We would
cooperate with one another in discerning how to live together. In
our disagreements, we would conduct ourselves with civility,
openness, and reasonableness. To have this civil society, we need,
then, a new public moral philosophy, which will also equip us to
face the personal and collective challenges of the next fifty
years.
[37] Among its numerous recommendations, CCS positions the faith
communities as the leading institutions for the pursuit, living,
and transmission of moral truth. This, in large part, is what they
do. Yet, in the American situation, faith communities do this in a
private context, in a voluntary association where members are free
to come and go as they please. From now on, these communities
should think of themselves as public forces at the center-not the
fringes-of public life. Apart from noting the need for more
permissive legislation and court decisions about religion from the
federal government, CCS says little about how the churches and
other faith communities might become potent public powers. But the
call is clear: if the faith communities do not act, expect little
or no renewal of our common moral life and little or no American
renewal-with definite implications for our human and planetary
future.
Morality Writ Small
[38] It hardly needs saying that community of moral deliberation
fits the niche that CCS envisions for the churches. Suppose that
the ELCA and other faith communities decide to go public as CCS
envisions, what common moral realities would they find in
contemporary American life? Such is the subject of Alan Wolfe's
ethnographic study of middle-class morality. Wolfe wants to test
the views of James Davison Hunter and others that middle-class
Americans no longer share a common moral worldview. They are
seriously and bitterly embroiled in a culture war between
traditionalist and modernist visions. America, in this view, is
increasingly morally divided into two incommensurable factions. In
this respect, Wolfe examines the popular anxiety that CCS seeks to
calm-that America is losing the shared values required for
democracy. As the lengthy title of his book suggests, Wolfe wants
to know a lot from the 200 people that he interviews in eight
carefully selected suburbs across America. We will focus here upon
the implications of his findings for the public churches that CCS
wants to engender.
[39] In the end, Wolfe concludes that the culture wars are real,
but only for an elite class of intellectuals. Most Americans live
by the irenic, centrist bent expressed by one of Wolfe's
interviewees: "I think America wants to be in the middle more than
anything."[53] At the end of a century
of breathtaking cultural changes, Wolfe sees a middle-class outlook
largely characterized by maturity and moderation. These Americans
have adapted to the pluralism of the late modern world. With the
exception of homosexuality and bilingualism, middle-class people
are tolerant. Nonjudgmentalism has become an 11th commandment. The
virtuous life matters but not in a way that results in imposing it
upon others. A moderate outlook means that extreme views about
anything and extreme behavior are to be avoided. For the middle
class, one can be too religious and too moral. When faced with
difference that cannot be avoided, it should never be taken so
seriously that incivility or violence ensues. Conflict, dissent,
and controversy are to be overcome by a strategy of reconciliation.
Middle-class Americans, thinks Wolfe, have largely escaped the
culture wars because they have been quietly responding and adapting
to beliefs and practices that challenge their core convictions.
Middle-class people worry not about ideological purity. They
embrace both the "traditional" and "modernist" thinking that
intellectuals want to distinguish and battle over. Middle-class
Americans would rather get along.
[40] But getting along comes with a price. The irenic, centrist
tendencies of the middle class have implications for a common
public philosophy, what Wolfe terms "morality writ small." Given a
tendency to avoid engaging the other and to be moderate in the
exercise of any virtue, middle-class Americans tend to restrict
their social obligations to close relations. Moderation means not
seeking to save the world but making a difference where one can. If
one wishes to transmit moral values, one does so through personal
example, not preaching or instruction. One should not promise or
attempt too much on behalf of the other for that might undermine
the obligation we all share for taking care of ourselves, for
personal responsibility. A strong sense of individual
responsibility combined with concern that one's efforts are noted
and are effective tends to result in service to close relations in
modest proportions. "I do not know about being my brother's
keeper," says one of Wolfe's interviewees, "maybe my brother's
helper."[54] Middle-class Americans are not
for heroism. They look for moral standards that everybody can keep.
By achieving modest expectations, we can think of ourselves as
equally morally decent.
[41] This is enough to illustrate how Wolfe sees middle-class
Americans working to create a moral center in a diverse society, an
aspiration which CCS notes as well. Unlike the culture wars
intellectuals, ordinary Americans want to believe that we can be
one nation, after all. They see the ideological battling and, by
way of morality writ small, seek a public moral philosophy that
creates a moral union. Yet, the private moral philosophy of the
middle class and the public moral philosophy sought by CCS are very
different. CCS wants morality "writ large." It calls on Americans
to come together-consistent with human sociality-for a great
conversation about objective moral truth, which will create social
and political unity by relativizing the sovereignty of the self.
Common loyalty to moral beliefs creates the civil society where we
all matter and belong and where we accept significant obligations
to the common good as part of basic moral decency.
[42] CCS seeks a public moral philosophy that serves a renewed
democratic politics. Wolfe's middle-class Americans have no
pretensions to cure an ailing civil society, which would require
robust civic engagment. They will concede that public affairs,
political institutions, and collective social decisions are
necessary. But government and politics still violate the
aspirations of Americans to be obligated only to those whom they
know and trust. Obligations to family, friends, and neighbors can
be managed. The giving and the getting can be modulated and
fine-tuned so that actors do not corrupt personal responsibility
and fall into dependency. A situational ethics works in
middle-class living, not so for the moral discourse of justice that
serves the collective business of politics. Justice requires thick
commitments to strangers that morality writ small has few resources
to handle.
Seeking Together as Community
[43] Wolfe thinks that moderation and toleration are the bedrock
principles of the middle class. They seek to swallow up extremist
thinking and to make space for real difference in the private
sphere, where people do as they please so long as others can do
likewise. Accordingly, little in Wolfe' account of middle-class
morality would support efforts by the faith communities to engender
public dialogue about a shared moral philosophy. Wolfe reports that
"there is not much support out there in middle-class America, at
least among our respondents, for the notion that religion can play
an official and didactic role in guiding public morality." This is
to take religion too seriously-to think that it should guide how
other people should live. Such a "politicized Christianity," says
Wolfe, "is everything that an inclusive, nonabsolutist, modest, and
nonjudgmental religious mentality is not."[55]
[44] During the last decades of the second millennium, American
churches and religious communities have survived and even
flourished in support of this private "quiet" faith of the American
middle class. By relegating religion to the private, America has
made space for but also contained its thousands of forms and
millions of believers. Wolfe describes a pervasive and influential
moral vision, which would not do well with churches that went
public. People who work on behalf of a public church already know
this. Yet the question remains, at our "special moment in history,"
do the faith communities, as CCS and others contend, have something
vital and necessary to offer a society and world seeking another
millennium on Earth? What would it mean for the ELCA to be the
public church that the CCS thinks our human and planetary future
requires? Should the ELCA respond to CCS's call to civil
society?
[45] Given the substance of ELCA social thought to date, this
church cannot refuse. ELCA thinking about moral deliberation offers
both the kind of community that American society needs
(re-empowering, local, inclusive, face-to-face civic interaction)
and the kind of conversation that can nourish democratic
institutions (foundational moral truth sought and discerned
dialogically). It would be a distinctive and timely witness to
society for the ELCA to answer CCS's call. As Glenn Tinder
contends, it would also be a godly practice and a creative
one:
Community does not consist solely in the possession of truth but also in the search for truth. Thus, Socrates declared that his wisdom lay only in the realization of his ignorance, and it is suggested in the Gospel of John that claiming the truth as a possession blinds us. If community consists in the search for truth, then communal relationships do not come about in holding common dogmas, but rather in inquiring together. Sharing uncertainty, so long as the uncertainty shared is hopeful and communicative, is more communal than sharing doctrinaire certainty. To put this in Christian terms, in revelation God simultaneously unveils and veils the truth. In Christ, the truth comes to us, but it comes as a mystery and not as a visible fact, plain to all. According to Christianity, then, we must inquire into Christ, into destiny. When we do this, we respond to God's command, "Seek ye my face." We engage, at the same time, in communication of the most serious kind and create the substance of community."[56]
[1] Bill McKibben, "A Special Moment in History," The Atlantic Monthly, May 1998, 78.
[2] Larry Rasmussen with Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, "The Reform Dynamic: Addressing New Issues in Uncertain Times," in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, ed. Karen L. Bloomquist and John R. Stumme (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 133.
[3] "Social witness" can be defined as a general rubric for the external relations of the Church. These relations can be manifest in various social roles and institutions. Broadly, "social witness" involves the Church&=javascript:goNote(39s intentional, critical interactions with other social groups. The precise meaning of "social witness" is always correlated to some larger ecclesiology with its attendant conceptions of society and world.
[4] "The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, A Social Statement on," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 28-September 4, 1991, 1.
[5] "Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice, A Social Statement on," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 23, 1993.
[6] "For Peace in God&=javascript:goNote(39s World: A Social Statement," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 20, 1995; "Economic Life: Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All, A Social Statement on," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 20, 1999.
[7] James M. Childs, Jr., "Ethics and the Promise of God: Moral Authority and the Church&=javascript:goNote(39s Witness" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 101-2.
[8] James Gustafson, "The Church: A Community of Moral Discourse," chap. in The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 83-96.
[9] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 149-89; Robert Benne, The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-first Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 59-103.
[10] In addition to four texts cited above, these social statements are: "Abortion, A Social Statement on" Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 28-September 4, 1991; "The Death Penalty, A Social Statement on," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 28-September 4, 1991; "Freed in Christ: Race, Ethnicity, and Culture," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwde Assembly, August 31, 1993.
[11] "The Church in Society" (1991) and "Policies and Procedures of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for Addressing Social Concerns," adopted by the Church Council and affirmed by the Churchwide Assembly, August 1997, as a revision of the former document, "Social Statements of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America-Principles and Procedures," adopted by the first Churchwide Assembly, August 28, 1989.
[12] Robert Benne notes that the development and approval of the foundational statement did not precede the development of social statements. Two social statements were under development while the foundational statement was being developed. See Benne, Paradoxical, 73-76, 136-37.
[13] Regarding the typical brevity of American Lutheran social statements, John Stumme thinks that this is a concession to the fact that these statements are adopted by churchwide assemblies: "The necessary demand that a large legislative body be able to act upon them in a relatively short time restricts the nature of social statements." See John Stumme, "Building on our Legacy: Observations on the Social Statements of the ALC and LCA," a study paper prepared for the Advisory Committee of the Foundational Study Commission for Church in Society, ELCA, October 1988, 18.
[14] Study documents and preliminary drafts do not get reprinted and do not carry official institutional authority.
[15] Karen Bloomquist, "In Today&=javascript:goNote(39s Context" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 9.
[16] "The Church in Society: Toward a Lutheran Perspective," Study Draft, December 1989; "The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, A Social Statement on," Fall 1990 Draft; "The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, A Social Statement on," approved social statement, 1991.
[17] The ELCA was founded in an intellectual and cultural context in which it might have adopted what James Gustafson termed at that time "the sectarian temptation." See Gustafson, "The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church and the University," CTSA Proceedings 40 (1985): 83-94.
[18] See Carl F. Braaten with Robert Benne et al. "Two Kingdoms as Social Doctrine," Dialog 23 (Summer 1984): 207-12; William Lazareth, "Two Realms" in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, eds. James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 633-34; John Petty, "The Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms and the Church Today," Dialog 31 (Autumn 1992): 313-19; Brent W. Sockness, "Luther&=javascript:goNote(39s Two Kingdom Revisited: A Response to Reinhold Neibuhr's Criticism of Luther," Journal of Religious Ethics 20 (Spring 1992): 93-110.
[19] Childs, "Ethics and the Promise of God" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 99.
[20] Stephen Hart and Kenneth Inskeep, Lutherans Say … Faith, the Church, and the World: How ELCA Members See the Connections" (Office of Research, Planning, and Evaluation, ELCA, 1989).
[21] Congregational Panel Survey 2, Clergy Reports (Department for Research and Evaluation, ELCA, 1995).
[22] Stumme, "Building on our Legacy," 14.
[23] Ibid., 33.
[24] "The Church in Society" (1991), 2.
[25] However, the question of quietism appears on the third page of the 1989 study draft.
[26] "The Church in Society: Toward a Lutheran Perspective" (1989), 6; "The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective" (1990), 3.
[27] "The Church in Society" (1991), 1-3. The use of eschatological theology to dethrone dualism may be indebted to Wolfhart Pannenberg&=javascript:goNote(39s work and to its recent appropriation in the work of James Childs. See Childs, "Ethics and the Promise of God" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 98-104 and Faith, Formation, and Decision: Ethics in the Community of Promise (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 19-26.
[28] Karen Bloomquist, "Department of Studies&=javascript:goNote(39 Vision and Philosophy: Initial Reflections," February 1988, 2.
[29] Stumme, "Building on our Legacy," 34.
[30] Robert Benne, "Lutheran Ethics: Perennial Themes and Contemporary Challenges" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 17-8.
[31] "The Church in Society: Toward a Lutheran Perspective" (1989), 11-12.
[32] Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Language of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
[33] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
[34] Per Anderson, "In Defense of Unruly Discernment: Moral Deliberation in the ELCA, Currents in Theology and Mission 23 (April 1996): 104-18.
[35] Martha Stortz et al., "A Table Talk on Lutheran Ethics" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 165.
[36] James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Harper Collins, Basic Books, 1991). In fact, ELCA community of moral deliberation does not fit neatly within Hunter&=javascript:goNote(39s "progressive" typology.
[37] Childs, "Ethics and the Promise of God" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 113.
[38] "The Church in Society: Toward a Lutheran Perspective" (1989), 12.
[39] Karen Bloomquist, "Moral Deliberation as a Public Witness of the Church," prepublication manuscript for Theology and Public Policy (April 1991), 2.
[40] Ibid., 6
[41] Benne, "Lutheran Ethics" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 27-28
[42] Childs, Faith, Formation, and Decision, 91-149.
[43] "The Church in Society" (1991), 3. The statement on abortion is the exception.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Rasmussen with Moe-Lobeda, "The Reform Dynamic" in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, 135.
[46] "Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All," 4.
[47] "For Peace in God&=javascript:goNote(39s World," 7.
[48] Wolfgang Huber, "Toward an Ethics of Responsibility," Journal of Religion 73 (October 1993): 589.
[49] Council on Civil Society, A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths (New York: Institute for American Values, 1998); Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998).
[50] Council on Civil Society, Call to Civil Society, 14.
[51] Ibid., 13
[52] Ibid., 15.
[53] Wolfe, 277.
[54] Wolfe, 267.
[55] Wolfe, 55, 58.
[56] Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance: An Interpretation (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 121-22.