Nein: On Barthian Ethics
Several months ago, Carl Trueman wrote a timely and somewhat sharp-elbowed essay exploring what he considers the shortcomings of contemporary Protestant ethics, including why he thinks the bench of ethicists is so thin.
As Trueman, a Protestant, sees it, the recent “evangelical Protestant practice of building ethics on proof texts” is insufficient to respond to many of the debates of the day. When the culture no longer corresponds to a broadly Christian conception, such an approach will fail to persuade, and current technological advances, such as in vitro fertilization, create issues to which the proof-text method has very little to contribute. Second, the evangelical imagination has succumbed, like the culture in general, to a thoughtless utilitarianism of an emotional kind, in which it is very difficult to imagine why you wouldn’t use IVF to bring happiness to a couple. Third, with the passing away of cultural Christianity, the background assumptions, commitments, and imaginations of many Christians are thinly formed, and “Protestant circles need a new pedagogical strategy” to teach and catechize their faithful.
Trueman suggests, and I heartily agree, that we need serious Protestant ethicists capable of responding to the challenges of the moment, but in his estimation “the field is not strong,” and those who stand out—he names Gilbert Meilaender and Oliver O’Donovan—are “a rare breed.”
I hadn’t read O’Donovan in some years, so prompted by Trueman’s essay I read The Disappearance of Ethics, O’Donovan’s 2021 St. Andrews Gifford Lectures, published in 2024. The Gifford Lectures are immensely prestigious, and those invited to deliver them are respected scholars tackling a theme they take to be of great significance. Trueman is in good company in his esteem for O’Donovan, who discusses not the failure of evangelical ethicists but the eclipse of the discipline of ethics itself. Perhaps, I thought when beginning the book, Trueman’s critique would turn out to be too narrow, for it might be the case that the scholarship of Protestant ethicists is in decline because the discipline of ethics itself is adrift and at sea.
Now, after reading the book, it seems to me that Trueman may have understated the crisis of evangelical Protestant ethics. While I have enormous regard for O’Donovan as a scholar, and the book itself is erudite, sophisticated, well-informed, and fundamentally wise, it does not provide a basis for ethics but rather a moral theology: whenever evangelical ethics relies on a Barthian or quasi-Barthian insistence on doing Christian ethics, I suggest we robustly answer, “nein.” Just a simple, “no.” (This was Barth’s own famous response to a particular flawed version of natural theology, a rejoinder I’ll mirror back.) This is not a complaint about the quality of O’Donovan’s work, for the book is very good, and I have no objection to good moral theology. But if Trueman’s plea is to be heard and answered, it is going to require evangelical Protestant rejection of Barth (or anything Barth-ish) and a recovery of the natural law tradition. If you want to revivify ethics, go with Aquinas.
According to O’Donovan, the discipline of ethics is confused, particularly because it has lost its object, frontier, and agent. First is the missing object of ethics: the good. The Aristotelian (among others) takes the good as the starting point of ethics, for, indeed, “all action” seeks some good—the good just is the object of practical reason, and it is about the good that we deliberate. O’Donovan provides a succinct history of Augustine on good and evil (the privation of good), and the supplanting of good by Kant, who distinguishes the world of nature, with its necessity of natural appetites and natural inclinations, from the world of freedom, with no interest in goods but with concern for the right. The good ends up playing “no part in authentic practical reasoning,” a view striking the Aristotelian as a non-starter. Max Scheler attempts a partial recovery of moral realism with his turn to values, though values seem to depend on intuitions or inspections that cannot but appear as uncritical to the Kantian mind (and perhaps to the Aristotelian and Thomistic mind as well). Given this, O’Donovan turns to liturgical worship as a “disciplined exercise of a convergent and unifying view of the good.”
Not only is the object of ethics missing, but so also is its frontier: time. Ethics, says O’Donovan, has struggled with the tension between nature and time. Nature indicates what is the case, and the older ethics suggested something “is good by virtue of what it is,” perhaps something gained through “pure contemplation” far “above the changing time of life and action.” However, something is good for us not only in light of what it is but also “by virtue of when we meet it,” for a good thing must be done at the right time, and reality “has a temporal, not only an ontological, dimension.” Humans have histories, including an eschatological dimension stretching beyond individual persons and beyond this temporal mode itself. In early modern thought, history clashed with nature and development with fixity, although some thought to naturalize history itself, finding an inevitability and totality in history that rendered it more like nature than otherwise. But to deliberate is to deal with what is not yet, and all real deliberation occurs in light of our hope of a future good. To lose temporality contributes to the loss of ethics’ purpose.
The third aspect missing from ethics is the person, the agent. O’Donovan is excellent on this theme, drawing on Scheler’s criticism of Kant in a chapter that could serve as a primer for those looking to understand personalism. Kant fails to understand real persons, replacing them with “an impersonal principle of rational conduct.” While Kant considers us as self-enclosed agents, orbiting our own rationality, Scheler suggests persons are best understood as self-transcendent, able to evaluate and encounter, and to commit to value, including the ability to change commitments, or convert. Such agency is especially prompted by the need to confess wrongdoing, for in confession we recognize our freedom rather than our fate or our passivity.
Given these three losses, ethics has all but disappeared, and O’Donovan turns to theology for redress, including creation as a recovery of reality, law as a recovery of history, and spirit as a recovery of agency.
Creation is not synonymous with nature, according to O’Donovan, and he clearly accepts the early modern denuding of nature into valueless matter and motion. But “if nature offers no foundation for values or for obligations to life,” it is because “nature” does not exhaust the meanings of “creation.” Creation, following Barth, is “God’s ‘good deed,’” linking being, goodness, and time in a manner resistant to the reductive tendencies of metaphysics but proper to narrative and the Narrator who creates and directs all.
God’s will grounds the category of law, not as a static and changeless artifact but as the basis for history. The book of Deuteronomy serves as archetype, for it commands in a manner challenging the sense of a “present imperative, without past or future.” In Deuteronomy it is a past event, the saving act of God for the Hebrew people, that gives sense to the command of all subsequent times. Law, in other words, establishes the moral meaning of history. Command is not inferred from the order of creation, but law also brings with it guilt, and thus a future-oriented promise of salvation, a salvation granted by the original narrator in his ongoing acts. Good appears through the mediation of historical command, while natural law is too limited to include the sense of divine promise and its eschatological fulfillment.
Since law brings not only guilt and death but also an anticipation of a promise, it must be read “prophetically,” or “spiritually.” The fulfillment of history will be the fulfillment of justification, which “means, and can only mean, justification of agency, both divine and human.” Human and divine action are “decisive against the imputation or suspicion of failure and incoherence.” God acts in time, but through an analogy to his act there is human agency, and the cooperative agency of the divine and the human shapes history. The capacity and meaning of such cooperation is the Spirit.
Now, I’m in broad agreement with this as a presentation of the Christian gospel, but I don’t grant the disappearance of ethics, in part because I see little or no reason to accept the Kantian limitations on ethics or to grant that the early modern conception of nature has anything to do with what we mean by nature in the natural law tradition. First, why is the discipline of ethics presented as if the failures of Kant determine the future of ethics? One needn’t follow MacIntyre in all things (and O’Donovan is especially sharp in his brief criticism of MacIntyre) to accept his argument from After Virtue that the Enlightenment project of ethics was doomed to fail because it had attempted normativity based on a merely descriptive account of humans while evacuating notions of purpose or fulfillment. This is a mistake natural law and Thomas Aquinas don’t make. Furthermore, nature, for natural law, does not mean the universe of matter and motion, nor does it mean something analogous to the laws of nature, nor does it mean what is instinctual, nor does it mean what is static and unchanging in opposition to the world of freedom.
Thomas is quite clear on all this, describing in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics four orders of reason, irreducible to each other. First, theoretical reason articulates the truth of reality that we do not invent or control, such as physics or theology. Second, logic articulates the truth of reality about thought itself, even though we do not invent or control that truth. Third, practical reason articulates the truth of what ought to be—not of what already is, but what ought to be—through our own free and voluntary action in pursuit of the good. Fourth, the world of making, of production, is a domain of reason that includes our agency, albeit with respect to technē rather than prudence. Note that this account of reason already includes a sense of the good, a sense of agency, and a sense of the complete fulfillment of the person, which is why, in his account of basic goods in the Treatise on Law, Thomas includes not merely existence and life but also friendship, political goods, and the good of religion. That’s all there in nature, because it is all there already in practical reason. And what is meant by “nature” in “natural law” are those goods that it is natural for us to know and seek because we are rational, and, even more, because we are practically rational. For natural law, the object, the time, and the person needed for ethics have never disappeared and need no recovering. If we wish instead to declare that Kantian ethics ruins ethics, I’ll happily sign on.
In an earlier work, Resurrection and Moral Order, O’Donovan suggests that the important distinction between practical and theoretical reason made by John Finnis (and by others working in contemporary natural law theory) means we cannot derive true practical judgments, the judgments proper to ethics, from metaphysical or theoretical accounts of the world or human nature. (As, indeed, is clearly indicated by Aquinas’s four orders.) Since, for O’Donovan, the truth of reality is primarily revealed by the person and work of Christ, and it is only in Christ that we know the moral structure of creation, he concludes that while Finnis “does not deny right practical judgments a coherence with reality,” nonetheless since “coherence cannot itself be known” “it cannot form right practical judgments.” This is, he says, because Finnis does not begin with revelation. Furthermore, Finnis’s ethics might cohere with Christianity but cannot be a “theological ethics,” since he holds that there are not “specifically Christian first principles to supplant the first principles of natural law.” O’Donovan disagrees, for he believes that “a distinct behavior is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus,” while Finnis (he suggests) “believes that the same behavior is demanded which was demanded anyway.”
He continues, noting correctly that according to Finnis we do not derive our practical knowledge of the human goods “from an account of human nature or the world”—because practical knowledge is its own order of reason and because the basic human goods are per se nota, or self-evident, and thus not derived from anything. As Thomas Aquinas recognizes in the Treatise on Law, the first principles of theoretical reason, say the Principle of Noncontradiction, are grasped by an insight that is neither an intuition devoid of data nor a conclusion. If they are a conclusion they are not self-evident; instead, a unique and particular act of the mind (an insight) apprehends what must be the case in all of the particulars, but this is not a generalization but an apprehension of what must be. So, too, in just the same manner, the first principles of practical reason—the truth of what ought to be—are grasped by an insight of what is good that is neither an intuition nor a conclusion.
For O’Donovan, this is not only to lose “evangelical morality,” because we have not begun with Christ, but is an “unintended consequence of [Finnis’s] relegation of the reality principle.” Again, according to O’Donovan, the “foundations of Christian ethics must be evangelical foundations . . . must arise from the gospel of Jesus Christ.” It is he “whose faithfulness to the created moral order was answered by God’s deed of acceptance and vindication, so that the life of man within this order is not lost but assured for all time. True knowledge of the moral order is knowledge ‘in Christ.’” For this reason O’Donovan explicitly avoids the term “natural law,” and despite a few corrections insists that the “epistemological positions” of Karl Barth, “this greatest of twentieth-century theologians[,] remain fundamentally important for Christian ethics.” Objective reality, reality as it is, is “a world order restored by Christ, the reality which the gospel declares.”
It’s striking that The Disappearance of Ethics contains only two references to Aquinas: one, merely a claim that MacIntyre cannot plausibly claim to be Thomistic, and the second a momentary note about how much Kierkegaard differs from the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of character. But it turns out there is a robust and thriving literature on natural law, and since nature in that account is not facts of the universe but the operations of reason, and reason of a practical sort—about the good, in time, by persons—in that tradition ethics never disappeared at all.
Furthermore, a Thomist would suggest that grace presupposes nature, in a manner not unrelated to the fact that the Incarnation presupposes the Virgin’s womb. Grace (for the human who is graced) is a relative term, for grace cannot operate without a nature on which to operate. Any understanding of grace must make reference to that nature that it heals, perfects, and elevates. Even more, nature is not self-enclosed, for it can be disposed to grace, and natural law itself poses no barrier or impediment to revelation, salvation, or the Spirit. Natural law is an inner law, for it is the rational being’s participation in the eternal law, not something imposed or external to us, in a manner analogous to how the new law (the gospel) is an inner law, given to us by the grace of baptism and the other sacraments. The new law does not supplant the natural law, nor is it out of keeping with the natural law, and it should be no surprise to find Thomists like Servais Pinckaers show how nature is perfected by the virtues (both natural and theological), the beatitudes, and the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. This is moral theology, to be sure, but a moral theology that recognizes nature in its (non-Kantian) fullness, and natural law as the ever-present ethics that cannot be eradicated from the human heart and is the basis of every agent’s temporal quest for the good, a good that cannot disappear so long as humans are rational animals, which they cannot but be.
If you wish an ethic, natural law answers.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.