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98 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 1 99 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 2 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 .... 100 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 3 101 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, 4 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. 102 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" 5 103 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. 6 We have maoe morality into bad news in several ways which need to be corrected. 104 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; 7 105 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. 8 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. 106 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." 9
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Title | Teaching Ethics from a Missional Perspective |
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AMBS and GC John Howard Yoder Digital Library |
Date created | 1981 |
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Mennonites -- Missions Missions -- Theology Mennonite theological seminaries Christian ethics -- Study and teaching |
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Yoder, John Howard |
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Goshen College |
Description | In Occasional Papers of the Council of Mennonite Seminaries and the Institute of Mennonite Studies, No. 2, edited by Willard M. Swartley (Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1981). |
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Description
Title | Teaching Ethics from a Missional Perspective |
Institution | Mennonite Historical Library |
Original format |
text |
Language |
English |
Collection Name |
AMBS and GC John Howard Yoder Digital Library |
Date created | 1981 |
Subject |
Mennonites -- Missions Missions -- Theology Mennonite theological seminaries Christian ethics -- Study and teaching |
Creator |
Yoder, John Howard |
Publisher |
Goshen College |
Description | In Occasional Papers of the Council of Mennonite Seminaries and the Institute of Mennonite Studies, No. 2, edited by Willard M. Swartley (Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1981). |
Rights Explanation | Used by permission of the Institute of Mennonite Studies. Researchers are responsible for using in accordance with 17 U.S.C. Copyright owned by the Institute of Mennonite Studies. |
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Item ID | im-amdc-jhy-0285 |
Text | 98 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 1 99 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 2 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 .... 100 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 3 101 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, 4 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. 102 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" 5 103 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. 6 We have maoe morality into bad news in several ways which need to be corrected. 104 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; 7 105 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. 8 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. 106 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." 9 |