Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Formed by Love
    Formed by Love
    Formed by Love
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Formed by Love

    By Scott Bader-Saye

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The driving question: How do Episcopalians decide the right thing to do?

    In volume five, Scott Bader-Saye, Academic Dean and Professor of Christian Ethics and Moral Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, examines the moral life through the lens of the Episcopal Church and its traditions. Beginning with an introduction to ethics in a changing world, Bader-Saye helps the reader move past the idea that we either accept cultural change as a whole or reject it whole, suggesting that we need to make discriminating judgments about where to affirm change and where to resist it.

    Part I looks at distinctive aspects of the Episcopal ethos, noting that “ethics” comes from “ethos,” and so has to do with habits and enculturation of a particular people. Topics include creation, incarnation, holiness, sacrament, scripture, and “via media.” Part II looks at big moral questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What are good and evil? What are right and wrong? Part III examines how an Episcopal approach might shape a typical day by examining Morning Prayer and Compline as moral formation, in between discussing work, eating, and playing. Each part begins by analyzing cultural assumptions, asking what should be affirmed and what resisted about contemporary context, setting the stage for discussion in subsequent chapters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMorehouse Publishing
    Release dateMar 1, 2017
    ISBN9780819233080
    Formed by Love
    Author

    Scott Bader-Saye

    Scott Bader-Saye serves as Academic Dean and holds the Helen and Everett H. Jones Chair in Christian Ethics and Moral Theology at Seminary of the Southwest. His teaching and research interests include virtue ethics, economy, ecology, political theology, and Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue. His publications include Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear and Church and Israel After Christendom, as well as contributions to The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics and The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels. He helped found and lead Peacemeal, a missional Episcopal community in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and is active as a teacher and parishioner at St. Julian of Norwich Episcopal Church, a mission in northwest Austin. He lives in Austin, Texas.

    Read more from Scott Bader Saye

    Related to Formed by Love

    Titles in the series (8)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Hanukkah Joy

      Sep 27, 2022

      Hanukkah Joy
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Protestant Look At Mary, Mother Of Fesus

      Apr 22, 2019

      She is known by dozens of names: The Blessed Virgin, Saint Mary, Madonna, Queen of Heaven, Mother of Mercy, Our Lady, Mother of Perpetual Help, Queen of Peace, Mother of God, plus numerous devotional titles as well. In the Bible she is simply known a

      4 min read

    • Article

      Holiday Teas

      Sep 27, 2022

      Holiday Teas
      1 min read

    • Article

      How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary

      Aug 14, 2022

      Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a

      4 min read

    • Article

      BRUDERH OF The Cult Of Community

      Sep 11, 2019

      BRUDERH OF The Cult Of Community
      9 min read

    • Article

      Let Us Pray To The God Of Small Things

      Jun 2, 2021

      ‘May we give glory to God by the lives that we lead.’ These are the words spoken by the priest at the end of our daily Mass. The day had barely begun. In general, was it going to give God glory? And, in particular, was my day going to do so? It was a

      2 min read

    • Article

      Wrapping Our Prayers Around The Immigration Crisis

      Oct 22, 2019

      Strongly held convictions about immigration crises around the world can polarize and divide people. But prayer that seeks God’s answers brings less stridency and more listening, opens the door to wise and balanced solutions, and lifts thoughts from f

      3 min read

    • Article

      Spirits In The Material World

      Sep 3, 2019

      Spirits In The Material World
      4 min read

    • Article

      Time For The Church To Embark On A Navel-gazing Exercise

      Mar 31, 2024

      FOR any political structure that fails in the absence of moral direction, it would seem natural for it to turn to organised religion for leadership. Unfortunately, the direction of most modern institutional religion is decidedly secular. The institu

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Jul 30, 2021

      Dear readers, we love to hear your thoughts on the stories that we publish, what is going on around the world, and what the Lord has placed on your heart! Email your letter through to editor@joymag.co.za for a chance to be featured – please try to ke

      7 min read

    • Article

      Fatherhood Above The Sun

      Mar 8, 2024

      Fatherhood Above The Sun
      3 min read

    • Article

      How Should We Respond To Celebrities Coming To Christ?

      Dec 30, 2019

      If you’ve been following the news lately, you will have noticed a significant wave of celebrities who are turning to Christ. In what is referred to as a massive spiritual movement, the sinful city of Hollywood is turning more and more stars away from

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Rebel Evangelical

      Aug 23, 2019

      The Rebel Evangelical
      9 min read

    • Article

      Jen Hatmaker

      Aug 19, 2017

      Jen Hatmaker
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Formed by Love

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Formed by Love - Scott Bader-Saye

      Preface

      Formed by Love

      If you asked a group of people, What is ethics? they might say it is the study of right and wrong, or it is a set of rules to live by, or it is a code of customs for a particular people. And if you asked specifically about Christian ethics you might hear reference to divine commands or altruism or self-sacrifice. In 1941 the Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis pondered a similar question. He asked, if you polled twenty people to find out what they thought was the highest virtue, what would they say? He surmised that most, perhaps nineteen of the twenty, would say unselfishness, in contrast to the great writers of the Christian tradition who would have said love. He observed that a negative (unselfishness) had come to replace a positive (love).¹

      The tendency continues today to think of ethics in terms of restriction (rules or laws) or negation (sacrifice). But if we were to start from scratch and explore Christian ethics from an Episcopal perspective, we would do well to follow Lewis and highlight the traditionally expansive and positive focus on love. Of course, such a focus is not without its own complications, given that the word love can mean so many things and be used in so many ways. If love is just a good feeling, it will do little to help us live well. But if love is the energy of gift that made the earth and the stars, if it is the force of connection that moves us into common life, if it is the very nature of a God who exists as three persons in an eternal dance of reciprocating charity—then love is exactly the place to start when we think about Christian ethics.

      The Gift of Love

      In his first letter to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul spoke to the divisions and quarrels that were present in the community. Different members of the church were appealing to different spiritual leaders—Paul, Apollos, or Cephas. They were disagreeing about basic moral issues from sex to food, even going so far as to bring lawsuits against one another. The issues sound all too familiar to anyone paying attention to the landscape of moral arguments and church divisions today.

      Paul challenged the Corinthians to think of themselves as one body with many members. Each member had a gift to bring to the community, but these gifts were useless or even destructive if they were not directed to the upbuilding of the whole. The way to solve the problem of difference, suspicion, competition, and disagreement was not necessarily to decide which side was going to win (though at times Paul did very clearly take sides) but to ask whether love was present in all the various gifts and perspectives and differences. Are you gifted as an apostle? a healer? a leader? If so, wonderful, but it means nothing if you do not enact your role with love. Can you speak like the angels or do you perform miracles or have you given away all your possessions? If so, great, but none of it matters if it is not done with love (1 Cor. 13:3).

      In his appeal to love, Paul does not imply that you can do whatever you want as long as you intend something loving with it—romantic love does not justify adultery any more than love of country justifies torture. Love is not a handy legitimation for self-interested actions. It is rather the ongoing and ever-expanding currency of gift, born not from obligation but from the self-offering that is at the same time self-discovery.

      Formed by Love

      The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, following Paul, put the matter like this: all our actions, habits, and dispositions must be formed by love if we are to grow into what God intends for us.² Love is like the mold into which we pour all our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to give them a particular shape (here love and beauty come together). Or, to describe it another way, for Thomas the form of something indicates its purpose or its goal. To have a certain form is to have a kind of velocity—an energy moving in a particular direction. We might say that love is the velocity of all good things by which these things are launched toward their highest purpose—to draw together the widest possible network of gift between self, neighbor, and God (what the Abrahamic traditions have called blessing or beatitude).

      In a changing and sometimes frightening world, the church brings good news: being formed by love is at the heart of both what the world needs and what God offers. Everything the church does can be measured by this standard. Our worsh ip, our parish life, our organizational structures, our outreach and good works are only good to the extent that they take the form of love and launch us toward blessing. This book can be read as an exploration of what it looks like to be a people propelled by love’s velocity.

      PART I

      Episcopal Ethics

      in a Changing World

      Chapter 1

      When All Bets Are Off

      The sign said no smoking and no selfie sticks but no one seemed to care. I was deep into three days at the Austin City Limits music festival when it dawned on me that the posted rules meant very little to the party-minded crowd pressed against the stage. To be honest, the smoking did not bother me nearly as much as the selfie sticks. It’s hard enough to see the band with a bank of phones blocking your view; add selfie sticks and all bets are off. Apparently, even performers are fed up with staring at the backs of phones. In recent years Beyoncé, the Lumineers, the Eagles, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have all asked fans to pocket their devices.

      Of course, the idea that one can get a pure and undistracted experience of music in a park full of 75,000 people, most of whom have been drinking, is a bit naive. Yet every now and then, even in a setting short on rules and long on self-expression, there arises an implicit expectation that people will behave in a certain way. I watched one concertgoer complain about people cutting in line to enter the venue—not to the people cutting but with pure passive-aggressive bliss to someone else on the other end of their cell phone—Hey, I’m gonna be a little late meeting you, because some jerks are cutting in line.

      Navigating a crowd of people busy doing their own thing is a small problem, but it opens onto larger ones: How do we decide what can be expected of one another? Do we owe each other something and, if so, what? Are there rules that apply to us all? Can we agree on what it means to be a good person, or are we moving into a world in which that very notion is quaint and archaic? If we want to do right by ourselves and others, how do we even know what that looks like?

      This is the problem of ethics in a changing world. Many things that earlier generations took for granted as prohibited—gay and lesbian relationships, for instance—are today not only legal but blessed in the Episcopal Church. Other things that earlier generations fought for—like civil rights and a social safety net—appear threatened by sanctioned racial bias and the economic free-forall we call modern capitalism. As prohibitions and expectations change, where do we find our footing? Where is the platform from which we can say this is good and that is bad, this is right and that is wrong, this is worth pursuing and that is ultimately destructive? We will be exploring these questions in the pages that follow.

      Christ, Church, and Changing Culture

      To say we live in a changing world is almost too obvious to be interesting. The world is always changing, so everyone who has ever lived lived in a changing world. The question is not whether our world is changing (it is) but how it is changing and how Christians might engage these changes for the sake of nurturing the good, the true, and the beautiful.

      In 1951 H. Richard Niebuhr wrote an influential book titled Christ and Culture.¹ In it, he suggested that there are five ways Christians might relate to culture: to be for it, against it, above it, transforming it, or in paradox with it. The book shaped a generation of clergy and ethicists but recently has been found dated and wanting. Perhaps in Niebuhr’s day it made sense to talk of culture as one thing that could be encountered in one way (though even then such a monolithic idea of culture was oversimplified). But certainly today we can all recognize that we live within a multiplicity of cultures and subcultures overlapping and interacting every day. And within each one there are things to affirm, things to resist, things to explore, and things we don’t understand. The

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1