Oliver O’Donovan - Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

Self, World, and Time

Ethics as Theology 1

An Induction

Finding and Seeking

Ethics as Theology 2

Forthcoming:

Entering into Rest

Ethics as Theology 3

Finding and Seeking

Ethics as Theology 2

Oliver ODonovan

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

2014 Oliver ODonovan
All rights reserved
Published 2014 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ODonovan, Oliver.
Finding and seeking / Oliver ODonovan.
pages cm. (Ethics as theology; 2)
ISBN 978-0-8028-7187-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
eISBN 978-1-4674-4223-7 (ePub)
eISBN 978-1-4674-4189-6 (Kindle)
1. Christian ethics. 2. Self-knowledge, Theory of.
3. God. I. Title.
BJ1251.O3634 2014
241 dc23
2014025022

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Preface

1. Spirit and Self

Ethics in the Spirit

The Giver of Life

Naming God

The Flesh

Sin against the Self

2. Faith and Purpose

The Root of Action

Command and Obedience

Self-offering

Self-consistency

Doubt of Purpose

3. Faith and Meaning

Know Thyself!

The Objectified Self

I and We

Mankind

Doubt of Meaning

4. The Good of Man

Self-communicating Good

Love of the World

The Order of Love

Sin against the World

Virtue

Prejudice

5. Wisdom and Time

The Call of Wisdom

Seeking

Ideology

World and Time

6. Love and Testimony

The Analogy of Love

The Testimony

Receiving the Testimony

Confession

The Moral Confession

7. Hope and Anticipation

The Future of Today

Three Prospects

Critique of Anticipation

Hope and Anticipation

Endurance and Temptation

Sin against Time

8. Deliberation

Purpose and Deliberation

Against Deliberation

Prudence

The Ordering of Law

Consequentialism

The Particular

Circumstances and Consequences

Ideals and Compromises

9. Discernment

Indeterminacy

The Path

Vocation

Historicism

Prospective Postscript

Index of Subjects and Persons

Index of Scripture Quotations

Preface

In Self, World, and Time, the first part of Ethics as Theology, we described Christian Ethics, alias Moral Theology, as an intellectual discipline: distinct from moral thinking on the one hand and from moral teaching on the other, it offers to each of them an ordered reflection on their assumptions and procedures in the light of the Christian gospel. We came finally to focus on a conceptual trajectory which would encompass the logic of moral thought within the three virtues of faith, love, and hope (the sequence in which the three most usually occur in the New Testament). This now gives rise to two further tasks. One lies before us in this second part: to follow moral thought from self-awareness to decision through the sequence of virtues from faith to hope. The second, guided by the claim made for the sovereignty of love, is to explore ends-of-action, penultimate and ultimate, the objects, natural and supernatural, that we may anticipate and pursue.

Today, if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts... (Ps. 95:7). Today is the day of some agent, some I or we who find ourselves addressed in that you; more precisely, this I or we ourselves, as we take up the question of what to do as our own question. Another agents day is not today, but then. We do not deliberate about it. We deliberate about the today on which it is given to you, or me, or us, to live and act. But there can be no framing this today it remains no more than a pleasing philosophical abstraction unless the you, I, or we in question have come to know ourselves as agents summoned by God to answer him in action, and in that knowledge have addressed the question of what we are to do as the supremely important question. And there can be no framing this today except as a moment within world-time. The subjective here and now of action has to be correlated to the objective there and then that can be seen and spoken of all around us. The today we face presupposes our agency and presupposes the world with its time. Ethics, in helping us face it, must point us to the knowledge of self and world that is actually given us, a knowledge through which the Spirit of God leads us to the action and life that are offered to us.

To the expressions of gratitude in the Preface of Self, World, and Time, most of which are relevant also to this volume, I must add thanks to the editors of The American Journal of Jurisprudence, in which parts of chapter 9 appeared, and of The Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture, which hosted parts of chapter 8. A section of chapter 6 first appeared on http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk , and, translated into German, in Wie kommt die Bibel in die Ethik? ed. Marco Hofheinz, Frank Mathwig, Matthias Zeindler (Theologischer Verlag Zrich, 2011), 229-42.

Those who find themselves perusing a volume called The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver ODonovan, edited by Robert Song and Brent Waters, shortly to be published by Eerdmans, will find an unusual degree of overlap, I fear, between my essay there and some pages in this book. It was not quite what was intended, but that is how it turned out. Ignoscat lector! It is not for anything I have contributed, after all, that that book will make its appeal to the reader, but for the interpretative insight of a remarkable constellation of contributors. May the reader gain no less profit from it than I do, and make better use of it! Finally, in that context, I mention the staff of Eerdmans, of whom the conventional word of thanks says too little. In an age when publishers despair, they continue to encourage us all.

Chapter 1

Spirit and Self

Ethics in the Spirit

The Spirit comes to our aid in our weakness (Rom. 8:26). Weak in confidence, weak in understanding, weak in endurance, our sickened agency is restored, our ill-conceived undertakings are given good effect. What do we mean by weakness? Paul has described it, borrowing a telling image from the Isaianic Apocalypse, as a world that groans and labors in the pangs of childbirth (8:19-22). Striving to produce something but unable to tell what it would produce, it is wholly bent upon painful effort, a world with a historical destiny but no vision of fulfillment. The future is laid upon it as a goal to strive for, but it is opaque and beyond any clear imagination. Within this world there are some who possess the firstfruits of the Spirit (8:23), who share in the cosmic groaning of history with a certain self-awareness, knowing that their own accomplishment is bound up with a point of arrival for the material universe, the resurrection of the body. But neither the unconscious groaning of the world nor the conscious groaning of the spiritually aware achieves anything. They are formless aspirations towards an object that is neither envisaged nor realized. The salvation they look for is hidden behind the curtain of the future; it has no presence, and they can only wait.

This shortfall in agency cannot be made good from the side of its object. From an abstract future there is no clarity or energy to be drawn, no meaning sufficient to direct or command. The shortfall must be supplied from the side of the subject. And here Paul speaks, remarkably, of a third groaning, one that arises in the being of God himself. Gods Spirit groans for the fulfillment of Gods purpose, and if the Spirits groans are inexpressible, that does not mean that they are doomed, like ours, to be contentless and ill-focused. The divine purpose may be incommunicable, but the secret understanding of the future which the Father and the Spirit hold between them comes to our assistance. We do not know how we are to pray aright; yet prayer can be effective if it springs from the praying of the Spirit. Our formless aspirations, taken up and woven into Gods purposes, aim at more than we can know.