Best of It: Methods in Ethics

[Series Index]

We have been reviewing John Stackhouse’s book Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. We now enter part three of the book “Making the Best of It” (Chapters 5-8), where Stackhouse builds his case for Christian realism. Today we will look at chapter five, “Method in Ethics: A Sketch.”

Method in Ethics

Discipleship

“I take discipleship to be the fundamental concept in the Christian ethos.”  (165) God calls us into friendship and servanthood and adopts us into family. Stackhouse writes:

Let us posit two axioms about Christian discipleship: (1) the primary calling of Christians is to increase in knowledge and love of God and to do what he wants us to do, and (2) God will provide Christians with all we need to fulfill that calling, namely, to increase in knowledge and love of God and to work with him in mission to the world. (166)

God supplies us with the understanding we need, not necessarily the understanding we want, and not necessarily with a greater understanding the others (Christian or not.) Our reliance is on God, not on gifts of knowledge. Stackhouse goes on:

Immediately, however, we confront a paradox. We must understand that the will of God in our day-to-day lives ought to be defined as “what is consonant with God’s overarching and ultimate purposes as working out in this particular situation,” rather than as “what God would like to happen if the world had not fallen and nothing else were wrong.” (167)

I can’t stress enough how central this statement is to how I process decisions and how disturbing to me is the absence of this perspective in so much of the idealistic Christian transformation agendas (left, right, or whatever) bandied about today.

So how should we approach ethical/theological issues we confront?

A (Protestant) Christian Tetralectic

Christians have traditionally drawn on four resources: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience (i.e., The Wesleyan Quadrilateral). Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have often weighted or coordinated the resources differently. Stackhouse believes this is a particularly Protestant view, but he believes much of it has application for other streams of the church as well. Stackhouse calls his conceptualization a “tetralectic” signifying the dynamic interactive quality of the four resources.

Scripture – The canon of sixty-six books. Scripture is typically understood to play both a foundational role (the fundamental written revelation of God) and an adjudicatory role as we wrestle with the issues.

Tradition – “… that which one generation deems worthwhile to pass on to the next. This could include formal creeds but also would include things like rituals, hymns or, “other encodings of Christian thought, behavior, and values.” Quoting G. K. Chesterton, tradition means giving one’s ancestors a vote.

Reason – While cultures may differ in what they see as authoritative data (say tradition versus science), most have a sense of things like the law of non-contradiction. Reason is an important human quality. Reason would include natural sciences, social sciences, applied sciences, and humanities.

Experience – We take into account, as individuals or communities, past experiences that relate to the issues we are considering.

Conceiving these as a quadrilateral is problematic because we may be inclined to see them as static discreet entities. Theology and Christian life are dynamic. The four resources operate as an ongoing four-way conversation … a tetralectic. Some other concerns.

First, we do not start simply with Scripture. Our knowledge of Scripture comes to us in mediated form, via some combination of family, friends, enemies, schooling, cultural flotsam and jetsam, church, reading, movies, and the like. …”

Second, we never have at our disposal simply Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. In the case of the Bible, for example, the actual Bible that we have on hand in any given case is just those portions of the Bible we can remember, that we are bringing to bear on the question, and that operate in the background shaping our presuppositions. … The tetralectic thus takes place not among Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience but among our interpretations of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

Third, it is unlikely that a single pass through the resources or – better – one round of conversation among them will be enough. The hermeneutical circle is better seen as hermeneutical spiral, in which successive readings of each resource and successive syntheses of the four resources bring us to what we hope are progressively better understandings. (173-174)

Stackhouse observes that errors in the tetralectic approach can also spiral us away from the truth. Furthermore, he cautions against binary thinking: yes or no, right or wrong, true or false. It is better to think of a strong warrant versus a weak one for taking a position, not absolutism. There is no way we can be sure we’ve collected and interpreted all relevant data correctly. (In other posts, I’ve referred to Kenneth Bailey’s posture of “tentative finality” about decisions, and I think Stackhouse has something similar in mind.) There is no, “…epistemic guarantee outside the person of God himself to guide us.” (175)

Stackhouse points out that God typically locates believers in a community and that community participation is important for positively shaping our thinking and decision-making. But Stackhouse cautions against the tendency of some to offer community as the panacea for Western “individualism.” Community also has a dark side and can lead us away from truth.

Finally, in closing the chapter, Stackhouse stresses the importance of the Holy Spirit in our discipleship. As we engage in a tetralectic dynamic, the Spirit aids in our quest. Moving more deeply into this tetralectic mode, we can better discern the Spirit’s leading. There is a type of intuition we sometimes use that makes sense of things below “articulate consciousness,” but there are also acts of the Spirit that give us insight. Whether intuition or the Spirit, these insights figure into and are tested by the tetralectic dynamic.

There you have a summary of the ethical dynamic Stackhouse sees at work in our discipleship. This is a great articulation of many of the conclusions I’ve come to over my lifetime, though Stackhouse puts them together with such artful focus and nuance. What do you think?

Next, we will spend some time in chapter six, “The Story and the Mission.”

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Comments

[Travis Greene]

I think of community as folded into the quadrilateral/tetralectic under tradition. Or perhaps the other way around: tradition is just how we experience community with someone who happens to have lived during the time of Charlemagne, or whenever.

Obviously community can, like cancerous cells, become aberrant and harmful.

[Michael W. Kruse]

"...tradition is just how we experience community with someone who happens to have lived during the time of Charlemagne, or whenever."

I like it.

[Travis Greene]

Like many good ideas, Chesterton thought of it first.

[John Stackhouse]

No, community in my scheme is not merely tradition. I refer to our past and current social contexts in which we do our thinking: the family we were raised in, the schools we went to, the clubs or teams or ensembles in which we participated, the countries or ethnic groups we belong to, the churches we have inhabited and now attend, and more. These communities represent social resources and social forces that shape us willy-nilly and also can be intentionally drawn upon, even intentionally inhabited (the way one changes churches or attends a particular graduate school or subscribes to a certain blog) in order to improve our thinking.

So it's not just tradition, per Chesterton, but social context, per Berger, Luckmann, et al.

(I am staying out of this discussion for obvious reasons, but I think this point needs to be clarified!)

[Michael W. Kruse]

Thanks for this clarifiction.

What I liked about Travis' comment is the idea that community exteneds to those who are departed. Unfortunately, tradition is almost all we have that links us with those of the past. We don't have the serendipitous experiences or the "intentionally inhabited" communities with daily interaction. Tradition is but an echo of past community.

Every page of your book is so rich that I regularly feel like I'm not doing it justice. Please feel free to jump in anytime, Dr. Stackhouse, especially if I've seriously misrepresented you in anyway.

[Travis Greene]

Dang, corrected by the man himself!

[Michael W. Kruse]

I think I initially read past your opening "...community as folded into..." I think that is what he was reacting to and rightly so. That is a divergence from the his perspective in the book.

I was responding to your second sentence. I do agree that tradition is an important way we are in community with those who came before.

"Dang, corrected by the man himself!"

Hey, if were gonna get corrected, who better to get it from? ;-)