The Need for Protestant Ethicists: A Response to Carl Trueman

I.

I read with great interest Carl Trueman’s recent post on the need for protestant ethicists to assist the church in its confrontation with contemporary moral challenges.  I myself have been involved in this work since about 2011. I taught Christian ethics first at a seminary and then a liberal arts college for the better part of eleven years. I’ve published books and articles on a wide range of moral questions. For several years I chaired the Christian ethics unit of the Evangelical Theological Society. I have skin in the game, as they say. 

To begin with, let me simply affirm the great majority of what Trueman argues in the post.

Trueman is correct that moral sensibilities have profoundly shifted both within the church and without in recent decades. The church is generally ill-equipped even to begin formulating rationale to address the complex ethical questions it is confronted with. He refers to IVF as an example and is, again, largely right. I wrote a book nearly 10 years ago on this very subject, warning about the inherent moral problems of these reproductive technologies. The reception of that book was very, shall we say, mixed. It took me a few years to understand why.

Trueman is also right about the evangelical penchant for proof-texting and its casual utilitarianism. Proof texting offers little theological support for Christians seeking to live faithfully in an increasingly complex world. It is entirely possible that the utilitarianism he rightly criticizes was itself latent within much evangelical ethics from the outset. When proof texting proved inadequate to the task, utilitarian reasonings were easiest to invoke. By consequence, too many Christians struggle to distinguish prudence from the utility principle.

Given all of that, Trueman is absolutely right about the need for protestant ethics. I’ve spent most of my life devoted to that work. What I’d like to do here is expand in greater detail upon why he’s right about this need and also shed some light on how, perhaps subtly and in a limited way, that need is being at least partially satisfied. This isn’t so much of a rebuttal as it is an effort to widen and clarify the scope of the challenges we face.

I want to focus primarily on Trueman’s emphasis on developing new pedagogical strategies. He is, again, correct that too little differentiates the Christian community from the wider society in which it finds itself. A great many books have been written on why that is and why it should change; we needn’t rehearse them here. Professor that he is, Trueman’s thinking about this problem naturally gravitates toward the promise inherent to Christian instruction and the holistic formation of students. Mine does too. Thinking theologically about pedagogy and formation opens still other constructive lines of thought. More on that later.

The final paragraph of his post might raise a few eyebrows but is in truth simply a logical extension of what he’s already said to point. We do need good protestant Christian ethicists. We especially need good theological ethicists. 

For my part, I think we have more than a few good ones. Perhaps some may one day equal Meilaender or O’Donovan, whom Trueman praises for their depth and theological rigor. I think the deeper problem, however, is not that protestant ethicists are too few, but that protestants either cannot or will not hear what their theological ethicists have to say, and the ethicists either cannot or will not say it. 

II.

All of this leads me to pose two related questions: the first, why is the field “not strong”? And second, why has communication between protestants and their ethicists become so muted? I can’t answer these questions with anything remotely comprehensive here, but would like to situate Trueman’s concerns within a wider context on the hope that in doing so the scale of the challenge before us comes into sharper relief. 

I’ll restrict myself to three general comments, which run as follows:

The discipline of Christian ethics has itself fragmented.

There is a story to be told about what happened to the modern discipline known as “Christian ethics.” We could begin with Schleiermacher, perhaps, proceed step-by-German-step to the American reception of Barth, highlight a few of the prophetic American free churchmen, labor through Niebuhr, puzzle over the existentialists and post-structuralists, wonder aloud at how Catholics and protestants could come together and form a professional society of Christian ethics, and muse over the post-liberals. That would account for only a very partial narrative, of course; all how-we-got-here stories are. But without a basic grasp of a few characters, settings, dialogues, and plot points it will be difficult to understand which moral questions make the most forceful impression on contemporary ethicists, and why. 

I mention the formation of the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) primarily because it is so illustrative of the disciplinary fragmentation. The fogs of Catholic-protestant antagonism had so lifted and the socio-cultural state of affairs so transformed that a unitary project seemed feasible and worthwhile. And it was theologically focused. You have but to skim past issues of the society’s journal to see what I mean. Over ensuing decades, but particularly since the turn of the century and the rapid ascent of social sciences, the disciplinary aims are now far more fragmentary. Perhaps that is inevitable for academic disciplines; it needn’t be for theological disciplines, in my opinion.

Oliver O’Donovan outlines the problems confronting the discipline similarly in his introduction to Self, World, and Time: “too much a creature of fashion to be trustworthy as a science, too much a creature of ideas to be pastorally helpful to the church, too ‘soft’ for the university, too ‘abstract’ for the theological seminary, Christian ethics finds itself a despised outcast in the world, always hunting round for protective allegiances.” Does it come as any surprise that the most neglected source for doing theological ethics today is holy scripture?

There is deep distrust within protestantism.

Any distrust between protestants and their ethicists goes both ways. Ethicists worry that what they offer fellow protestants might be misinterpreted or misrepresented, and protestants worry that any ethicist’s deviation from the prevailing view on some moral question will lead people astray and impede the church’s mission. This ‘soft-suspicion,’ let’s call it, has a natural restraining effect, as each is concerned not to take anything further than the other can bear, but also has a quieting effect, as each elects to forego communication altogether. The distrust needs to be brought to conclusion.

It often seems that protestants do not really understand what Christian ethics is, as a theological discipline or reasoning practice. I’ve heard all manner of definitions. The most common equate ethics with personal piety, which is unquestionably part but by no means the whole of Christian ethics. Just how far this unfamiliarity reaches is an open question but it has gotten to where it has because ethicists have been reticent to adopt a public voice, because ethics is a specialized discipline that can be difficult to make accessible, and because of some strange features in theological education, which I’ll mention later.

So why aren’t there more ethicists out there? Several reasons. All graduate students with even the faintest aspiration to become an academic understand that there are virtually no jobs. Probably even fewer than “virtually.” The number of open positions in ethics that have come up since the financial downturn (2008-11) is laughable. I mention the lack of available jobs because higher education is the only feasible career path for protestant ethicists who wish to pursue scholarship. Fewer jobs leads to fewer professional ethicists, which leads to few grad students pursuing the discipline, and the problem compounds itself.

Having said that, however, I think there are more good protestant ethicists than Trueman is perhaps aware. A quick consultation with my mental rolodex brings two dozen names quickly to mind, all of them excellent teachers and scholars. Not all are focused narrowly on anthropological concerns, admittedly, but because Christian ethics is interdisciplinary, their scholarship invariably takes up anthropological considerations at some point or other. Some are focused on the more hotly contested topics in public discourse, while others devote their attention to less publicly contested but equally worthwhile projects.

Why many of them are not more widely known among protestants (particularly evangelicals) is an important question with a complicated answer. They’ll have their own reasons, of course, but I think the primary reasons are as follows: (i) their work isn’t addressed to lay audiences, (ii) their work is mostly published in academic journals or with academic publishers, which makes it less accessible to lay audiences, and (iii) they are reticent to adopt a too-public voice that reaches lay audiences. 

It is worth repeating that most scholarship is produced for the edification of fellow scholars. That same scholarship might, if pertinent and with a little luck, get transmitted to the masses. Either way, it takes quite a long time for scholarship to become widely diffused. Think here of Charles Taylor’s work, for example. Most popular level readers will not grasp the full sweep of his multi-decade project on modernity and secularization because they simply haven’t spent enough time reading the sources Taylor is addressing. Even so, interpreters and disseminators have made many of his ideas commonplace.

Here’s another reason why protestant ethicists aren’t more widely known: many are (understandably) distrustful of digital media and reluctant to shoulder the risk of getting ratioed. In the frantic effort to retain audiences and survive, digital media have over-adapted their aims to appease readership and in turn allowed the tone of discourse to become too insidious and volatile. Theology Twitter is a cesspool of vitriol. The reputation of digital media is diminished as a result. Writing for digital media outlets carries real risks. For some, the risks are worth it. For others, adopting a more public voice seems to require suspending moral principles they’ve devoted their career to protecting. If there’s a list of reasons ethicists are reluctant to take a more public voice, this one is at the top.

There is a lack of ethics courses or specialists in seminary education.

I could write a long-form essay on this problem alone, so in a heroic effort at self-restraint I’ll focus on the two most glaring reasons for this lack of ethics in seminary education: (i) lack of faculty and (ii) lack of courses.

I don’t have the data in front of me, but I’d wager most protestant seminaries do not have a formally trained ethicist on faculty. That’s true of institutions within Trueman’s own reformed tradition. So far as I’m aware, neither Westminster nor RTS have trained ethicists on faculty, and haven’t for decades (if ever). Some faculty members may have ancillary expertise, enough to teach the one required course in it, but it likely wasn’t their primary field. Seminaries that do have an ethicist have but one. If staffing is a direct expression of institutional priorities, which I believe it is, then seminaries that fail to staff or under-staff in Christian ethics are communicating disregard for the discipline as such.

Seminary degrees often do not include a required course in Christian ethics and when they do the requirement is singular. One course; that’s it. One course is better than none, I suppose, but having taught multiple sections of introduction to Christian ethics for 10+ years, a single course is nowhere near enough for ministry students. A semester is scarcely enough time to introduce moral vocabulary, much less familiarize students with moral theory or contemporary issues. No Christian ethicist—none—will say a semester of Christian ethics is enough to introduce it. Plus the design of the degree itself suggests to students that this is all the ethics a ministry student really needs to know.  

When these same ministry students are appointed to the pastorate in actual churches they will soon realize how mistaken that suggestion was as they are confronted with a baffling range of moral challenges for which they have no compelling response. When the lay people in these churches see this, of course, they are simply pushed further into the various sorts of wrong approaches that Trueman referenced in his post.

III.

I said at the outset that the deeper problem behind Trueman’s concern is a sort of refusal by protestants and their ethicists to communicate constructively with one another. For laypersons and pastors this is sometimes because they lack the background in ethics to follow a debate well. In other cases it is because ethicists themselves have simply failed to communicate themselves plainly. And in still other situations it is because readers have been so shaped by digital media they lack the patience to think carefully about complex ethical questions.

Doing ethics well requires careful articulation of concepts, precise imposition of distinctions, and clear development of argument. A single word, ill or well chosen, can make all the difference. That kind of work, often lengthy and complex, demands certain effort from readers and listeners. A similar effort is required of ethicists to render their moral accounts in ways more widely accessible without sacrificing substance.

I haven’t answered the question of why the field of protestant ethics isn’t “strong” and that is because I think protestant scholars in the field are in greater number and of greater quality than is commonly believed. I sympathize with Trueman’s perplexity; I really do. Measured, substantive voices are badly needed. By my lights, though, the problem isn’t that there are too few ethicists, but that the reprehensible conditions of social discourse combined with the frequent unwillingness of protestants and moral theologians to communicate consistently with one another, giving and receiving in goodwill, make the current impasse easy to accept. 

There was a time when I thought my book on infertility was published too early. I took the tepid reception as a sign that my intended audience wasn’t quite ready for it, or wasn’t sufficiently appraised of the stakes. What I’ve come to realize is that the book was too late. The subterranean sensibilities of American Christians had already shifted; acceptance of IVF and other reproductive technologies had already become widespread. I’ve noticed a similar tardiness to accounts I’ve offered on other subjects, too. 

It is anecdotal, but I think this is a decent example of why protestants will not listen to what their ethicists have to say: They often simply reject overtly Christian ethics in favor of personal preferences or prevailing conventions. I needn’t even go into the ridiculous claims offered as justification. It happens with other topics, too: warfare, poverty, assisted suicide, the list goes on and on. I’m essentially convinced at this point that the protestant moral imagination is more secular than Christian, which helps explain the lack of moral differentiation between Christians and society that Trueman highlights.

I’m unconvinced American protestantism has ever really been familiar with Christian ethics as a theological discipline. An argument could be made, I suppose, that mainline protestantism was considerably more familiar with ethics during the war and post-war era, when mainlines were at their zenith. A plausible distinction, perhaps; but that was also 60 years ago, when a theologian could grace the cover of Time Magazine! To the extent Protestantism has now any familiarity, it is at best narrow and partial. They are generally more familiar with pietism than with theological ethics.

That’s why I think scholarship should remain the primary focus for protestant ethics. It is ‘out front.’ It’s exploratory. It presses for moral purchase on reality. When done well it will find its way to the churches, not fast, but in its own time. My advice: let them do their work. Let them exercise their vocations! Afford them the latitude to offer the church moral accounts assistive to the church’s life and mission. Its being the “primary” focus does not, however, fully excuse the ethicist from attempting to assist the church in her moral reflections and deliberations when opportunity presents itself. 

A final comment on the need for protestant ethicists to offer moral “solutions” for the moral challenges we face: It is a semantic distinction I want to draw, but a meaningful one. “Solutions” are achievable in advanced algebra, pest control, custom cabinetry, or accounting. Ethics does not aspire to solutions. I’m uncertain it could provide solutions even if it tried. It does, however, through reflection, deliberation, and prayer, aspire to account as thoroughly as possible for moral truth and goodness, which may in turn provide the church resolution on its identity and mission. Moral challenges do not present themselves as equations to be solved for, so much as questions requiring answers. It may seem a small semantic distinction, but its a meaningful one.

Could these same ethicists also offer christians prompter, more consistent moral support in light of contemporary challenges? I believe they could. To sustain it will require a mutual  commitment to hear one another out. It might mean not impulsively quote tweeting for a while. It might mean emailing someone a clarifying question before publishing a take down piece. It might mean seeking advice before tarnishing another person’s reputation. It might even mean picking up the phone or meeting interlocutors in person! We really have to get past the idea that the life of the church is accurately and realistically mirrored by social media. We could all do with a little more trust. Ethicists can help with that.