Teaching Ethics from a Missional Perspective

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TEACHING ETHICS FROM A MISSIONAL PERSPECTIVE
John H. Yoder
I. Surveying the Terrain for Ethical Perspective
Before attempting to come closer to the specific "program projection"
which was assigned, I offer an unsifted inventory of elements that
relate somehow to the picture, without my being sure that they contribute
specifically to what our planners meant by a "program" for "refocusing"
theological education. The meaning of the word "program" is not made
more clear for me by its having been put in quotation marks when the
other operational terms in the assignment were not.
All of the important terms can have meanings of great flexibility.
From one perspective everything the church does is educational.
Everything the church does is theological. Likewise everything the
church does is ethics. As I moved through the texts provided by the
earlier stage of drafting, it was clear that there were different
assumptions being about the breadth of meaning of each of these
potentially all-inclusive terms.
This breadth as to definition contributes to my feeling it appro-priate
to scatter my observations first, before attempting to pull a few
notions together about the actual seminary level education operation
(nor is it sure that the planners meant seminary level education: they
might have meant whatever kind of leadership training operation takes
place anywhere in the world wide mission enterprise).
If we are to refocus education in ethics with a view to mission,
this will also need to mean refocusing education in mission with a
view to ethics. If our ethical perspective were clearer, how would we
teach missions better? I begin by taking stock of the obvious fact
that one albatross encumbering the world missionary cause has been the
inadequacy of ethical concern on the part of the missionary movements
of the past. The place this is most evident is the contemporary
tendency of critics to charge the mission with all the sins of the West.
The missions and missionaries were not guilty of all the sins of that
West: but neither were they adequately critical of the same, nor did
much that was repentant or self-critical about the posture of the
churches. The point is not simply that one piece was missing in the
total message of missionaries, so that they came to be seen as religiously
linked with colonialism: it is that there was a central flaw in their
theology "back home", such that they did not come to be perceived
predominantly as liberators.
We need therefore to find not only the specimens of ethical
inadequacy in the past implementation of the Christian world mission,
but, more important, the theological roots of this inadequacy. One of
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obvious ones has been the revivalist insistence on the sufficiency of
personal decision, when it is said that with conversion all the other
problems will go away. Yet the people who preach conversion do not
demonstrate in fact that the problems go away. This was focused in a
critic ism of Billy Graham, during the Vietnam period, taking the war
as a specimen of the evils which would go away if only people would be
converted, while the converted evangelicals were the ones most in favor
of the war.
We can identify at least two of the most salient foci of this
theological inadequacy: violence which should not persist once we know
that the Messiah has chosen the cross; and ethnocentrism which should
have been done away with by the proclamation that the end time kingdom
has come and the Gentiles are called into the joy of knowing the law.
When these points are not seen, then mission is less than gospel. They
have often not been seen with adequate pro fun di ty in the missiona;:y thought
and practice of established Western Protestantism.
If our perspective were more sweepingly missionary, how would we
teach ethics better? One obvious way would be that we would always
think of the person or groups with whom we are dealing in an ethical
relationship from the perspective of concern for their being able to
respond to the proclamation of Christ. That will mean that it is
impossible to kill anybody as a solution to an ethical problem. A
missionary concern for the communication of the gospel thereby enhances,
from another direction than the traditional talk about "sanctity of
human life," the wrongness of any relationship which mikes another
person a means rather than an end.
The communication of any message ought to be more authentic or more
valid in the measure in which that message is more clearly understood
and more holistically and purely formulated. A message that includes
the ethical dimension of the love of God for his enemies will therefore
be a rounder message and should be more apt so to be forumuJated as
to be understood. clearly.
Christian behavior is part of the proclamation of the gospel. Therefore
Christian ethics talking about Christian behavior is also talking about
the proclamation of the gospel. This is not simply a general statement
of holism as a corrective thrust as over against narrowness of focus,
which happens to be "in" right now in some ci rel es. It is not only a
bridge to the Lutherans for whom everything must "proclaim" to be part
of the Gospel. Such a bridge to the Lutherans is however important.
We will stand to learn much by hearing better the ways in which Hans-werner
Bartsch and Dietrich Fischinger have illuminated the ethics of Jesus
by pointing out how every element of discipleship behavior is also a
proclamation of justification by faith.
The statement that ethics is a proclamation is much more than
simply unfolding a word of Jesus , where he said that the good works of
the disciples would like a city on a hill proclaim the grace of the father.
The more profound way of saying it is to insist that no communication
is meaningful if it is not operational i.e. if it is not a description
of how human behavior is different because of what one is saying. If
one is saying that Christ makes a difference, then that statement is not
meaningful if we do not include in the communication a description
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of how human behavior is changed by his being, by his being Messiah,
by his being the Son of God, by his being risen, etc ....
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A change in the missionary situation, and in the educational
situation in our time, which should be of assistance in doing better
what we try to do in beth directions, is that through the developments
of conununications and by migration the mission field has "come home. t'
Anywhere in North America people can see through the audiovisual media
something of what life is like in the rest of the world. In many parts
of North America people from those other cultures are moving in, with
their histories of refugee experience and the sufferings of war.
Linguistic and cultural variety have invaded even the small town, so that
the problem of otherness which used to be assigned to "the missionary"
who went to distant places and brought back strange artifacts is in the
process of being transformed into an intercultural encounter possible
almost anywhere. That is both more frightening and more promising. It
increases the possibility of including intercultura1 ethics in the
education of everybody back home, and including its inter-cultural
communication potential as a part of ethical thought.
The "home culture" thought. it knew what it was doing about ethics
before "reaching out. 11 We may learn some things about ethics by the
backlash or feedback from -transcultural mission, in that working out
the implications of ethics in a new place will make us more aware of
the adequacy or inadequacy of the tools we had been using to think
about ethics. One very important such tool was the contrast between ethics
and the gospel in the sense that ethics comes later. First you convert
people and then they will grow or be sanctified. First they must be
saved and then they can become more moral. The inadequacy of this
approach was not self evident back home. There, conversion had come
to mean not turning to Christ from another world or culture or from
"the world," but rather' growing up or settling down as an adolescent
within a Christian culture, with the assistance of the revivalist. The
question is different if there is genuinely inter-cultural clash. The
insufficiency of this discrimination of ethics from what must go before
shows in the fact that completely opposite conclusions can be drawn:
A) Alan Tippett, from the perspective of South Pacific anthropology,
sees the coming of the mission as representing a new power
realm, a new history under a new Lord, in which Christ is
first of all proclaimed as Lord over everything, as more
powerful than the old idols. This is also the pattern of
the conversion of much of Germanic Europe in the Middle Ages.
Only after having established the sovereignty of Christ as a
Lord stronger than the other lords does the culture then
grow in the direction of monotheism, wiping out the other
deities, and of morality, developing individual persons.
B) On the other hand Peter Wagner takes the American pattern to
be normative for everywhere: first you get people saved and
then you count on them to grow; but you must get the ethical
message out of the way of the gospel call because that would
be to impose foreign patterns. You accept their culture
and its lords and expect the Jesus message to work within it
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by way of the inwardly changed individual. My point is not
here to say that either Tippett or Wagner is wrong, or even
to spell out my surprise that they could be for a decade
working under the same roof, using the same language, without
making more of their difference. It is simply to have observed
that we are up against questions which traditional revivalist
language does not help to resolve.
Postscript after discussion 27 February: There can be debate ·
about whether one's analysis should in the above way take account of
the fact that there exists a "back home" where the life of the church
does not have a missionary character. It can be challenged on two
levels:
a) in every possible situation there is some missionary
potential; one should perceive it, and the failure to
perceive it is fostered by talking as if it were not
there;
b) if one is by some strange fate in a situation of
limited mission potential, one should move.
Both observations have merit. A. is a criticism of people's aware-ness.
It does not set aside the accuracy of my describing above how
things work where that awareness is not alive. B. is a generally
valid moral imperative, though not necessarily universal.
Ethical agenda would seem, from the literature, to constitute an
adequately used resource or teaching about cultural relativity. The
examples of cultural relativity used in the literature such as the paper
by Paul Hiebert pay more attention to other than ethical varities:
meanings of words like God or matters of cosmology or matters of cooking
and clothing. Would paying more attention to ethics make it harder
or easier to work with cultural relativism? Paul Hiebert says on his
page 5 that "the sins of which the Holy Spirit convicts the church
will depend upon the setting. n It is obvious that people can only see
as sinful something that they are doing, but Paul probably means more
than this. Does he mean that according to the particular strengths and
weaknesses of a given culture, in a given missionary context, this sin
rather than that m1e will be seen to be a vice in that culture? Or does he
mean that the same action might be sinful in one culture and not in
another? Would this relativism apply to all categories of sin? He
does not mean that every culture is morally self-contained, because he
also says that it "sometimes takes an outsider to point out hidden faults."
The question which Paul points to without resolving it would be worthy
of more analysis. Is it the case that. the realm of ethics is different
from some other realms (God language, world view, taste in cooking) in
the way it relates to the problem of universals? It could be argued
that ethics is more transculturally solid, because in every culture
it matters thatmarriages be solid and that people not be murdered and
that promises be kept. Or on the other hand you could argue that it is
in the realm of ethics that cultures differ most, so that we will be most
in need of anthropological know-how in order to know what we mean when
we say that adultery or murder or lying is wrong. Whichever be the case,
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whether ethics is more universal or less so, at least it seams to be
different. To deal with that difference would be good for both the
teaching of ethics back home and theological education for mission.
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Don Jacobs said that after conversion the first issues new
believers become sensitive about are ethical, but he did not say whether
the evangelist contributed to the sensitivity.
It is around ethical matters that we seem first to see the claim
becoming vocal that the young church should have its own theology. The
use of healing techniques or the propriety of polygamy are the points
around which African churches first make the case for thinking independently.
The priority of political liberation as theologically imperative is
the subject around which Latin American theology makes its claim to
need to be indigenous and authentic. The ethical agenda seems to be the
primary one raising questions about the specific focus of Peter Wagner on
what some call "market research" in gospel communication.
If it be the case that ethics demands more flexibility than other
parts 0£ Christian thought, then that awareness should make a big
di££erence in what we teach about ethics at home, and how we prepare
people to meet with ethical sensitivity other cultures than their own.
I£ on the other hand ethics is more universal than other elements of
Christian thought, this confidence will need special support as
Christian communicators move from one culture to another, knowing ahead
of time they will need to face the objection that the ethical gospel
they bear is £oreign.
An important resource £or the New Testament church, given new
prominence by the Protestant Re£ormation and the Anabaptists, is that
we have from our Lord not only a body of teachings about how to behave
but also some teachings about how to go about doing ethics, i.e., how to
find out what to do. The "rule of Christ" .in Matthew 18 places ethical
discernment in the context of empowernment by the Holy Spirit and
the mandate to £orgive. It guarantees that ethical agenda will be moved
forward by the unavoidable con£licts between people and perspectives.
We are warned against our normal tendency to avoid such conflicts by
hiding them, or by transferring or projecting them, and are told to go
directly to the brother. This means that wherever there is an issue
we have a procedure for dealing with it, in a context of reconciliation
and Spirit guidance. Such issues will however only arise if we continue
to bring new people into our community. Otherwise the operation of
the rule of Christ atrophies, and the £urther leading which is promised
both in that passage and in John 14-16 cannot happen.
I£ we see ethics in the rule of Christ we must also see ethics in
the unity 0£ the body as described in I Car. 10-14. We are instructed
to be patient with one another because the brother whom our action risks
shocking is someone for whom Christ died. Ethics is the cultivation
of community, the maintenance , of the articulations 0£ the body in which
every member has a different function yet all of the functions harmonize
with one another. This unity of the body is itself a further outworking
of the unity 0£ Jew and Greek which is at the heart 0£ the missionary
potential 0£ the New Testament message. What we are doing in ethics
is then not simply asking "how I can avoid sinning and hurting people"
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and "how you can avoid sinning and hurting people".
about the unity of the body in the Spirit, and about
with which we support one another's ministries. Not
even back home, seen in that framework.
We are asking
the complementarity
always is ethics,
Let me jump to the other end of the spectrum to observe that
education within the missionary enterprise, i.e., overseas leadership
training, the specific preparation of professional missionaries for full
time service, etc., itself raises a special set of ethical questions.
This education is done by organizations concerning which there is debate
as to who should control them. Missionary schools are ways of controlling
the younger church, since they often control access to church related
leadership assignments. Schools are usually the places where the most
emphasis and attention is given to problems of trans-cultural contextuali-zation.
Here is where there are people who have time to think about
the inter-cultural differences. It is also the place where decisions
are made about inter-church relations, where ecumenical expression is
defined and realigned, so that (for instance) Mennonites who back home
never had occasi~n to cooperate concretely with pedobaptists or non-pacifists
need to think seriously about doing so in the overseas context.
Theological education is often the last element of the missionary structure
to be "indigenized. '·' Is that fitting or wrong? Thus ethical issues
arise in doing the task of theological education as they did not in the
non-missionary community back home. Wilbert Shenk' s paper says that
reflection and actions do not naturally co-exist: that those who are
busy working do not take time to think, and those who make a point of
"thinking" tend to be less active. Does that need to be the case? Or
might it be our call to find ways to hold those two callings together,
not simply as not destructive for one another but as supportive of one
another?
II. Programmatic Suggestions
After this scattering of observations which I have found difficult to
coordinate, I am not much more able than before to know what would be a
"program" to respond to the assignment of our planners. Al 1 of the
above observations would have some impact for how to carry on educational
processes, but I do not immediately see how to do that.
I limit myself then to such focal theses as may contribute to the
continuing conversations.
1. What ethics talks about must be considered as good news. Ethics as an
analytical discipline is different from Christian behavior, just as
homiletics as an analytical discipline is different from preaching,
and dogmatics is different from believing. But the call to obedience,
including the content of obedience, must be understood as good news, as
gospel, not only as part of the gospel or consequence of the gospel. This
was certainly the case in the New Testament. The privilege of being
free to obey, the joy of being enabled by grace to praise God by obeying
(even if that might mean sanctifying his name through suffering), the
discovery of new alternatives for faithfulness opened by the power of the
spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, all located the disciples'
free obedience as good news.
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We have maoe morality into bad news in several ways which need
to be corrected.
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a. We have used anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic reflexes in an
effort to make certain other points that we thought important
in clarifying the gospel or in renewing the church, and
have thereby set aside the older cultural rootage of
morality within believing culture and community.
b. Most of us have come to a discussion of matters of morality
not from conversion but from adolescent conditioning, responding
to our parents who told us what we must and must not do.
"Do I have to do that?" is an adolescent way of putting the
question. Very often it is in that form that a person with
that background looks at moral issues in a context of
communication with non-Christians. This is a non-missiona~y
context if there ever was one. It makes morality a part of
parental authority instead of liberation from the powers of
this world. It is no surprise that someone whose own spiritual
maturity was reached by conversion within that kind of a
parentally dominated culture considers moral prescriptions as
separate from gospel acceptance.
c. From the above perspectives which could be spelled out in more
critical detail the call to include Christian obedience as
a part of the gospel looks like "making it hard to get in"
rather than like clarifying what is news about the good news.
d. The above is all the more the case if a particular missionary
activity is being carried out by people of a culture which
is superior: either "superior" in their own vision of its
qualities, or "stronger" in technological and financial kinds
of power. Then "don't impose your foreign rule" is a fitting
response to the tendency of the missionary to disrespect the
local culture. But as a corrective it shares the error which
it seeks to correct against, by associating the content of
ethical guidance not with the gospel itself but with the
carrier culture of the powerful missionary. It thereby
makes in reverse the same mistake missionaries made by
reacting against it rather than becoming free from it.
2. What ethics talks about must be seen from the center, !1~! __ the edges.
When in a non-missionary context one studies carefully the agenda of
ethics, i.e. the way one discourses responsibly about right behavior, it
is proper that a significant portion of the effort is devoted not to
demonstrating the appropriateness of the primary affirmations about
value and obedience (since everyone knows about and largely agrees on
them) but to testing and adjudicating the "edges" or borderlines of
ethical discourse.
a. There are the fringes of ethical method: should ethics use
absolutes or pragmatic calculation, revelation or reason as
warrants;
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b. There are the fringes of casuistry; one concentrates on
exceptions and the borderlines where one value must be
sacrificed for another; can you be perfectly obedient?
Must one withdraw to be faithful or compromise to be
responsible?
c. There are the fringes of application; does discipleship apply
to non-believers? can one commend one's values to others?
enforce them?
d. There are the fringes of articulation:
the norms mean? Who cultivates memory?
who interprets what
Who adapts to change?
In a non-missionary context, academically, it is proper to ask
these questions. They belong to the inner self-questioning of an
established culture where the central value affirmations are solid.
They belong to the ecumenical questioning of how far one's own grasp
of these values reaches. They belong to the academic task of "neutral"
or "objective" interpretation "as if from outside the bias of faith."
All of these are _proper. Yet to concentrate upon them, and to let that
concentration set the shape of the training experience is to make
missionary and catechetical effectiveness more difficult. Let us rather
rediscover that the heart of the value commitment to truthtelling or
monogamy, promise-keeping or non-violence, needs to be studied so -thut it
can be proclaimed as liberating halakah.
Again after discussion: again one may test the logic of granting
that there may be "non-missionary" situations in which detailed debate
about ethics as a way of reasoning is appropriate. My analogy was the
study of Biblical languages. It needs to be done, but not by everyone,
and a strong awareness of the presence of unbelievers in dialogue is
not needed for it to be valid (nor vice versa). The group's unresolved
uncertainty about the notion of a "non-missionary context" might point
to some unclarity as to the exact meaning of saying that every situation
is missionary. On the other hand, defining those activities which need
to be done but do not need to be done everywhere might be a way to get
at the proper role of a specialized school.
3. Case material related to ethics instruction should be drawn
preferably from transcultural experiences and should include issues of
institutional oppression and empowerment as well as personal punctual
decisions.
a. Thus awareness of the importance of cultural context will be
built into the ethical debate rather than "added on later".
b. Thus the aspects of "common sense" or "natural reason" wi 11
be given less credence than they get in monocultural or
monolingual situation.
c. The resources of Scripture and tradition will be sifted and
refracted not by the critical skepticism of homegrown
doubters but by the real questioning of outsiders needing
to _be convinced.
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d. How the missionary agents and agencies operate (their use
of office, money, cultural advantage, political allies)
will be seen as part of the substance of their message,
not merely as the logistics whereby they get the word out.
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4. If theological education is being reconceived from a transcultural
and missionary perspective, the importance of the social shape of
decision-making will be greater than ever. New Testament ethics is
elaborated in a context of Spirit-led dialogue and forgiveness (binding
and loosing"). In a monocultural situation this can be replaced by a
simple magisterial catechesis, where one person who knows tells others
what already has been decided, and by individual casuistics, where
each person in his/her place applies the general instructions to cases.
' This is inadequateeven"at home," but in the missionary context it is
more so. The training agency should itself practice the ecclesiology
of Spirit-led casuistry, so that itinerant transcultural witnesses
and young Christians can continue it:
a. Decisions are made and· reviewed conversationally.
b. The context is one of reconciliation.
c. A variety of gifts/perspectives are brought to bear.
5. In preparation for mission the perspective of ethics should be
included in all the other theologic~l disciplines. It is not enough
for one teacher of ethics to reconceive his/her offerings with a view
to mission. The teacher of church history must be asked to draw from
the past more information on how ethics was done in other ages and how
that related then to mission. The teacher of pastoral care, the
Scripture scholar should be urged to give more attention to ethical
material as one part of the communication of the faith. The interlocking
of morality and liturgy if given more attention should revitali ze both
areas in t .heir missionary potential.
6. Since Emil Brunner put on the agenda the question of the place of
the Old Testament in foreign missions, most Western missionary thought
has been ambivalent about the place of Jewishness and ~udaism in the work
and outreach of Christianity. A renewed and repentant appropriation
of the Jewishness of Jesus and the Gospel will also assist in putting
ethics back into place. It will protect against the Lutheran and
pietist concern to separate gospel from law by making law first of all
bad news. It will appreciate more the elements of lived life style as
a part of being the people of God, rather than as "cultural" elements
to. be sloughed off in order to have a "more portable" or "less foreign"
or "more spiritual" message. It will thereby be provided with more
elements of ethical substance (jubilee, covenant, prophecy, eldership ... )
rather than trusting to the platonic "love and do what you pl ease." It
will be easier to see that the way to move a message from one culture
to another is not to distill from the first some "general principles"
to be carried disincarnate across the borders to be "applied" over th ere,
but rather to migrate in concret e fun ct i oning peopl ehood, doing ethi c s
"As You Go."
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