Christian Ethics in The Postmodern Condition

Studies in Christian Ethics
http://sce.sagepub.com Christian Ethics in the Postmodern Condition

Philip Goodchild Studies in Christian Ethics 1995; 8; 20 DOI: 10.1177/095394689500800103 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sce.sagepub.com
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CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

Philip Goodchild
explore implications and intellectual phase known thepostmodern condition cultural for moral and I shall examine of this
some as
n this article I shall attempt to
of the
of the
thought
practice.
two sources
condition, one theoretical and another practical, before moving on to
survey briefly some possible ethical responses. The second half of the article will develop a theological foundation for ethics, drawing upon Pauline theology and some contemporary ethical responses to the postmodern condition. The postmodern condition will be characterized in terms of a loss of transcendence, and a theological response as an approach that restores transcendence to human character and thought by comprehending transcendence as a style of relating our explanatory presuppositions about the world to the real and disruptive events which we encounter. The Postmodern Condition and Its Sources
The postmodern condition is often described as an arena of confusion, where people no longer know how to think about, articulate or debate the values, practices, institutions and goals which mean most to them. Under such conditions, common endeavour is focused upon ends with which most can agree: material wealth, technological advance, increasing comfort along with decreasing responsibility, and mechanisms for ensuring a sufficient level of service provided by various institutions. This common goal of peace and wealth is the aim
For example, see Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); and Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings , (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
20
of a people which then wishes to use its individual freedoms to pursue its individual combinations of meanings, values, and practices. In spite of such an emphasis, personal moral responsibility is often replaced with artificial techniques and statistical knowledge in domains as diverse as education, health-care and spiritual growth. Descriptions of the postmodern condition are subject to a paradox of self-legitimation: we are told that we live amid an irreducible plurality of meanings and values, but we are not told how we can be certain of this. If there are no more meta-narratives to legitimate the grand narratives describing our world and present age, then what are we to make of the narrative of the postmodern condition?2 This widely recognized and repeated paradox is taken by some to be a selfcontradiction, refuting the case for the postmodern condition and allowing an uninterrupted exploration of a philosophicalrealism; by others, it is taken as an example of an inescapable vicious circle that is inherent in all thought, capturing us all the more powerfully within the postmodern condition. An approach that resolves such a paradox, to be adopted here, is to hold that our world-views, theories, or narratives are cross-sections taken from differing perspectives upon our lives. One can be arealist in continuing to believe that there remains something outside thought a realm variously comprising bodies, the unconscious, history, culture, language, God - that connects and underlies all the different cross-sections made by thought. This real life is composed of events of interaction between thoughts and different ways of thinking, amongst other things; it positions perspectives and lays out the imaginary worlds they describe. One can also be an idealist, however, in suspecting that every perspective produces an imaginary world that fails to represent real life as it is. Real life will then manifest itself as a transcendental condition of thought by interrupting our theories and imaginary worlds in instances where they no longer work.3This picture of a plurality of fictional worlds functioning as cross-sections within our lives is also a fiction itself - a refinement of 4 the postmodern condition, having no definite ontological status.4 Some light may therefore be cast upon the postmodern condition by the events and crises that led to its being imagined. The metaphysical space of moral nihilism was first portrayed by Nietzsche: he questioned the value of our highest values, and sought a revaluation of all values.
2
See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The U.P., 1984).

3
Postmodern Condition
(Manchester: Manchester
This approach is a broad simplification of the kinds of Gilles Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone,
positions developed by 1983), and Anti-Oedipus
(London: Athlone, 1984).

4
I have explored such a philosophical position at some length in my Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, forthcoming). 5 See Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968).
21
The considerations that run throughout Nietzsches texts and have been amplified by post-Nietzschean and other contributors to the story of the postmodern condition, include: the existence of a cultural plurality of differing values; observations of the historical formation and transformation of values; the role of language in shaping and articulating values; and the roles that such values play within an economy of power-relations.6Where formerly a transcendent presence had legitimated certain sets of values, considerations of pluralism, history, language and power raise questions about historical conditioning, and demand that the bond between transcendence and our highest values be legitimated. One cannot consider such questions if one believes one still has a direct revelation from the absolute; the death of God, far from being a result of skeptical inquiry, is its precondition.One source of the postmodern condition can therefore be described as a loss of transcendence: the messages of revelation from the absolute no longer seems to be getting through. As such, the postmodern condition may be regarded as essentially anti-monotheist, the reign of the Nietzschean Anti-Christ. The loss of an absolute site of evaluation causes a change in the way people think. One might have roughly the same values, but these are now unfounded. The problem of transcendence becomes one of theodicy: it is a question of how we justify our transcendent authority, together with whatever imaginary world we might spin out on the basis of such an authority and our juridical status within such a world, in the face of revelations of real life that tend to disrupt our worlds: pain, sickness, cruelty, disaster, deprivation, war, famine, disease and death. Now, while a life of peace and comfort tends to reinforce any imagined world, it also removes the need for justification and legitimation and hence for a transcendent authority. The presence of suffering, by contrast, reinforces the need for a transcendent order such as a fictional land not yet present in which justice, based upon our highest values, will finally be restored. Suffering often tends to produce its own theodicy by reinforcing expectations of a transcendent order. More extreme forms of suffering may lead to despair but the victims of this double degradation, who are broken in spirit as well as in body, have little to say and are rarely heard in public discourse. In recent times, perhaps, a new dynamic has entered the situation. The voices of victims, formerly discounted in virtue of their status as victims, are also beginning to be heard - even if only very slightly. Where the victims of the countless massacres, slaveries, exploitations and petty domestic cruelties of history have left almost no voice within history, the victims of more recent times have left a stronger
-
These factors have been explored throughout the work of thinkers such as Martin Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Heidegger, 7 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 106-7.
22
tracedFormerly, the absolute
certainty of a transcendent order had made the voice of its victims inaudible as, for example, in the colonial conquests of European powers. When economic progress leads a significant proportion of the population to a position of comfort in which it no longer needs to be deafened by the voice of transcendent authority, the clamour of suffering finally becomes audible. No longer relying upon authority, modem reason begins to see its own responsibility for producing such suffering. The victims of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the famine created by global Capitalism, insofar as we share in the tell us of our responsibility in their pain modern reason which has produced such events. Under such conditions one begins to lose faith in ones comprehension of transcendence, and the postmodern condition emerges. Suffering begins to tear down our theodicy when it is no longer we who suffer, but another in our place and as a result of our worldviews. The suffering of bodies transcends our fictional worlds, interrupts them, and unmasks their pretensions. The postmodern condition should not merely be understood as the play of free market, mass-media culture, but also as a condition of trauma and impotence resulting from a shock that dislodges us from former sources of meaning.
-
Ethical Responses to the Postmodern Condition

These two
sources
problems, therefore, can be considered as significant (among others) of the postmodern condition: the question of the value of values, and vulnerability to the suffering of others. There appear to be four main ethical responses. The first is to deny the postmodern condition altogether, and to continue in the modern project of metaphysical realism which aims at discovering the true nature of the transcendent authority able to legitimate our highest values. Here, transcendence is believed to be something which is approximately approachable and describable by thought. The second is to oppose the cultural confusion of our age by attempting to reconstruct a tradition and community in which thought and action will be given their own intra-specific meaning and value.9 Here, transcendence is believed to be encountered at the source and goal of a tradition or community. A third approach is to listen to the voice of
the victim, and act, at whatever cost to oneself, in order to alleviate their suffering. Here, transcendence is encountered in the relation to
8 9
Jewish reflections on the Holocaust would be a prime example.
E.g. the recent work of Alasdair MacIntyre, as
well as that of Stanley Hauerwas and
John Milbank.
10 E.g. those ethical philosophies which follow Emmanuel Levinas, such as Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), and Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
— 23 —
no
other who is in need. A fourth is pragmatic and deconstructive appeal is made to transcendence at all, but each action is assessed according to its consequences, and all fixed strategies of legitimation are opened up for questioning.&dquo; A specifically theological approach to ethics must attempt to recover a sense of transcendence and hence move beyond the postmodern condition itself. Yet here we must proceed with extreme caution, for the transcendent certainties and authorities of Christianity have been invoked in some of the terrible crimes of history. Insofar as the postmodern condition removes our certainties, it may cleanse theology of over-reaching pretensions. Each of the above approaches may be drawn upon, in an eclectic spirit, but only, for the present author, with some reservations. Some accounts of postmodernism that celebrate the free play of fictions, images, and desires are clearly excessive: there are real conditions that shape our fictions, images and desires, and real bodies, outside thought, that condition the way we think. Metaphysical realism has value, therefore, but we should hesitate before believing that we can create a discourse that can approximately overlay and describe such conditions. This is to believe that the empirical can map the transcendental that we can proceed from the conditioned nature of thought to the conditions of thought. Our difficulty may be, however, that we cannot comprehend the transcendent if we do not have the right subjective presuppositions we cannot understand the Good if we are not good ourselves. A tradition or community that forms moral character may be a precondition for any recovery of transcendence. Here there is a danger, however, of resting content with our fictions or reconstructing idealized traditions without being able to hear the voices of those who are affected by them. The characters formed may not have the broadest understanding of the Good. We can only gain a deeper understanding of that which transcends our fictional worlds if we are also able to hear the voice and respond to the needs of others outside such communities. We must allow ourselves to be shaken and dispossessed of meaning by the voices from without. The response to the needs of the other, however, is merely one ethical situation, and should not be made an absolute foundation for ethical theory. Anyone who has worked in the caring professions may observe the danger of taking too much responsibility for the suffering of others it violates the carer, and may encourage a form of dependency in the needy which is ultimately unhelpful to them. Moreover, in absolutizing the physical and emotional needs of another, one implicitly despairs of working for spiritual needs, both for self and others. In order to avoid hasty presuppositions about the nature of transcendence, a pragmatic,
an
-
11
E.g. the work of Mark C. Taylor and John D. Caputo.

24
nomadic, and deconstructive approach to ethics may liberate us from

subordination to
our
own, created
presuppositions.
Theological Approach
-
The postmodern condition tells us that the political, ethical and social theories which we construct are all doomed to failure and will probably be subjected to a searching critique even before being worked out in practice. For there is a radical difference in nature between any theory, fictional world, tradition, community, character, value, practice, experience, or imperative which we can construct, and the real workings and characteristics of life which are concerned with the encounters and relations between these instances. The messenger of this bad news is always the body, and the physical events which happen to us and those we influence. Sin may now be considered in terms of a displacement between the fictional worlds we construct, together with the moral actions which are possible within them, and the level of real life and the ambiguous consequences of all actions at this level. We observe both helpful and harmful consequences, from differing perspectives, of every event and action. This moral ambiguity of all thought and action evident within the postmodern condition effectively prevents us from pointing towards transcendence. 12 The result is a failure of moral authority in our present age we can see, and the media tends to emphasize, the negative consequences of any value, practice, or institution. Those who are born into the culture of this moral vacuum will be bred in an environment of cynicism where moral responsibility merely involves criticizing others. The fiction of the postmodern condition, therefore, is not something which we can allow to retain dominance in contemporary thought. We must recover a sense of transcendence. Consequently, the redemption of ethics should proceed along specifically theological lines, no longer basing itself upon copies of secular reason.&dquo; A theological approach to Christian ethics may emerge by interpreting the Christian gospel within the postmodern context. Indeed, perhaps the Christian gospel does not gain meaning until it is considered within a specific, worldly, incarnate context. 14 For if we
-
12 For example, every action or inaction of participants in and observers of the Bosnian war may be considered culpable from a differing perspective: no one seems able to divine the right response in the right place at the right time. Bauman emphasizes the moral ambiguity of all action as one of the principal characteristics of Postmodern Ethics , pp. 9-15, 32-4, 94-8. postmodernity. 13 A similar point is argued on historical grounds by John Milbank in his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 14 Such considerations are of particular importance in feminist theology. See, for example, Isabel Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God (London: Univ. Press of America, 1982), p. 7.
— 25 —
by disincarnating the divine realm from this one. These theological concepts should primarily have meaning for our moral status in this life, if they are to be meaningful at all. In this context, repentance does not merely involve accepting the fallibility of our own juridical status
within
our
postpone the juridical meanings of salvation, justification, and sanctification until the eschaton, we repeat a kind of Docetic heresy
fictional worlds, but also of the theories, values and
practices legitimated within such worlds. Repentance is not merely to

be attained at the level of ego,self-image or self-will, but must also be applied at the level of the world which we construct we must also repent of our view about life as a whole, including the values and practices which we admire, and the forms of transcendence which we elevate. We must cease pretending to ourselves that we already understand the meaning of transcendence, or know what we should do. In this respect, repentance can coincide with the postmodern condition. Once we acknowledge our practical reason to be composed and of fictions, however, we begin to distance ourselves from it that our lives are unknowable conditions. accept governed by This repenting of our fictional worlds, together with their practices and values, changes the nature of theodicy: we can no longer attempt to justify the existence and character of God on the basis of our own conceptions of morality. If God is good, it will not be in the way which we imagine. The Pauline gospel has a different kind of theodicy: God has now revealed his righteousness apart from the law ... it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:21, 26). The value of our values is put into question by the revelation of a new site of evaluation - revealing transcendent righteousness and allowing us to participate in it, to be justified. Here we come to the strangest part: we are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith (Rom. 3:24, 25). We await the Good, but we are offered a death. Having given up our understandings of law, morality, value, and practice, we can no longer interpret the death of Christ according to the magic of sacrifice, the legality of penal substitution, or the example of self-sacrifice. The blood of Christ does not tell us of any particular transcendent value it only speaks to us of a suffering body. The humour of the Incarnation is that the two forms of transcendence the site of evaluation which sets the value of our highest values, and the suffering and death of the body which questions the value of our highest values are now linked. We do not find the righteousness of God, the meaning of transcendence, in any supreme value, law, practice or fictional world revealed directly in the teaching and action of some divine messenger, but we encounter it in the blood of Christ. The Incarnation can be taken to mean that any image of transcendent
-
26
is replaced by real suffering within history. The Incarnation tells us to seek the highest in the basest: Christ was born the illegitimate son of a Jewish carpenter; he ate with tax-collectors and sinners; he is welcomed by welcoming children; he is encountered in the prisoner, the hungry, the stranger, the homeless, the widow and the orphan; we enter the riches of the Kingdom by abandoning our possessions; and as a Messiah, he is crucified. A greater paradox than any abstract conjunction of divine and human natures is a conjunction between the source of all values and the body and blood of Jesus. The body of Christ, in which the believer participates eucharistically, means the banal and physical reality of suffering. The only opportunities we have to encounter transcendence will be through the real crises that disrupt our theodicy and security: through the Holocaust, through Hiroshima, through mass starvation, and through the insoluble conflict of the Bosnian war - as well as all kinds of minor shocks and deaths which render our thoughts and actions ambiguous.&dquo; The postmodern condition may also become a revelation of Christ. We only learn about righteousness by facing up to our real, lived histories where they diverge from the fictional worlds which we prefer to inhabit. Repentance, then, becomes an act not towards some abstract of turning away from fictional lands but back to the signs of real life and history that transcendence escape explanation and interpretation. We need to beborn again into the real world, outside of our fictions. The blood of Christ, his life-principle or mode of existence, means less a particular way of living than a particular way of dying, a sacrifice. One learns to participate in Christ by learning how to die attempting to make the event of dying into a transcendental principle from which the value of all values will derive. In literal terms, this will be impossible, for there is no comparison between real, physical death, the fallibility of imaginary worlds, and internal structures of consciousness. Dying, as a process, however, has a particular temporal structure, and this may be repeated as a mode of existence. At the physical level, to die is for ones body to lose autonomy and coherence, so that its self-organizing and self-directing capacities are overtaken by exterior forces, whether of disease, accident, or violence. At the mental level, to die is for ones past to gradually lose its determining power over future actions, projects, and hopes. For the meaning of what has been is significant insofar as it relates to a present and a possible future; in death, the present collapses towards uniformity, and the future vanishes altogether. To die, as a process, involves
righteousness
facing meaninglessness.
15
Rowan Williams has interpreted the spiritual basis of the theological tradition as implying that the knowledge of God is attained through experience of daily and insignificant trials. See Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: DLT, 1979).
— 27 —
A Return to Transcendence
The scandalous hope of Christian belief is that the transcendence which we may be granted is a transcendence over death both the death which limits our fictional worlds of meaning, and real, physical death. The shocking consequences of a belief in resurrection have rarely been appropriated in Christian thought, which has preferred to cling to its traditional structures of meaning. All our values and practices in the Western tradition are derived from a response to life in its apparent finitude: death stands over all our fictional lands as an absolute and negative boundary. Ethics are characteristically concerned with the prosperity and enhancement of the community or individual in its resistance to an inevitable finitude. Death appears to be our single remaining universal absolute, governing the thought of the most committed relativist. Yet if death is relativized or transcended, all our values, beliefs and practices start to fall apart. The consequences of any religious appeal to an absolute that transcends death are extremely shocking: any destruction is permitted in the name of such an absolute. This factor has frequently been present in religious wars and it exemplifies how any theological approach to ethics can be
-
perilous.
The transcendence over death which we are exploring here, however, requires no such cavalier treatment of issues of life and death. Death is not simply an enemy to be opposed, defeated, overcome, or forgotten for any claim to know the absolute that legitimates such an attitude claims an infinite power for itself, creating a fictional world which is able to impose its own interpretation upon all events without meeting any possible opposition, even if it includes an ascetic degradation of ones own self-image and status within ones fictional world. Such an attitude has often been regarded as true religious devotion, with catastrophic consequences for the believer, if not also for others. By contrast, a Christ-like attitude towards death is one of impotence before death and its messengers and a respect and valuing of death insofar as it is able to dispossess us of our fictions, and restore us to real life. When death is forgotten, the only possible relations between persons are mediated by the meanings given to them within fictional worlds. Death gives us the opportunity of real life a life of direct interaction, action and passion, rather than the staging of a shared fantasy. The meaninglessness of the process of dying can be considered as a particular temporal structure. For, as Heidegger demonstrated, the meaning of Being, and therefore the ground of all meaning, is given by a particular modality of temporality which he called authentic care: the past is recovered by being repeated in the future.6 Time
-
16 In the ontological inquiry of Dasein, the future is anticipated as that which makes the present by repeating the Being of Dasein as it has been. See Being and Time (Oxford:
— 28 —
continuity by the way in which the past is carried over into the future. In living out death, however, as opposed to Heideggers being-towards-death, death does not merely signify finitude, but impotence: death becomes authentically futural when it emerges from outside the imaginary world of the subject. Instead of continuity, time proceeds by discontinuity. 17 One has no responsibility for the way in which the future follows the present. The future no longer follows naturally from the past, whether constrained to do so by mechanical causality, the free causality of a self-positing ego, social and cultural conditioning, or ontological necessity. Various alternative kinds of constraint or necessity have been suggested for the way in which the future may proceed in discontinuity from the present: artistic inspiration, power-relations, desire, chaos, and ethical necessity, for example. 18 Each indicates some domain outside or transcending thought that gives rise to thought and action.9 This outside of thought, or discontinuity in time, suggests a new direction in which to look for transcendence. Previous varieties of such philosophies of difference have tended to emphasize the
constructs its
discontinuity between self and other, inside and outside, present and future, imaginary world and transcendent reality, or whatever terms between which the boundary is drawn. A specifically Christian and incarnational approach should emphasize the gratuitous overcoming
of transcendence on behalf of transcendence itself. The way in which the future will proceed from the present is then no longer a matter of necessity, butgratuity or suchness. This is not to say that the past will have no relation to the future, as it would in the case of ultimate death; it is merely to say that any relation between past and future is given by the future, or only revealedafter the event. Time gains a continuity, and meaning can again be constructed, no longer according to the Heideggerean scheme of question and answer, but according to a prophetic scheme of promise and fulfilment, where the fulfilment always contains an element of surprise, revealing potentialities in the promise that were not present until the time of fulfilment. For the meaning of any event or action is not solely determined by what happens - there are a variety of perspectives from which one can
Blackwell, 1962), pp.
care
is
374-378. In
Heideggers later work, the subjective structure of

Event of
Appropriation that constrains Being to be thought in terms of presence, that is, as lasting and hence still continuous. See Tune and (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977). Being 17 This analysis of time was given by two of Heideggers close readers and critics: Maurice Blanchot, in The (Lincoln: Space of Literature Nebraska U.P., 1982), and Emmanuel
replaced by an epochal
Levinas, in Time and the Other, The Levinas Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989). 18 These form the principal determinants of the philosophies of Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Levinas, respectively. 19 See, in particular, Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone, 1987), and Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
— 29 —
view and interpret what has happened. The perspective can be given after the event: the purely gratuitous passage of time involves the creation of a new perspective by establishing bonds of meaning between the past and present that had not previously existed. According to this model of gratuity of time, an acceptance of death, meaninglessness, and impotence is the precondition for life, thought and moral action. Thinking no longer proceeds by contemplation,
reflection, representation, legislation, interpretation, or communication, but by revelation. The Good is not recollected, but
anticipated. Of course, it is all too easy to turn newly established meanings into authoritative imaginary worlds. For this reason, the
moment of faith in death can
never
be left behind,
so
that
we are
alternatives depending upon the perspective taken, leading to moral ambiguity. Hence the Christian life is less a once for all dialectic between death and truth than a pilgrimage that tries to embrace more deeply the experience of death and the complexity of truth, a life of
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies (2 Cor. 4:10). Even subsequent to the revelation of new meanings and bonds between the present and the past, such newly created meanings still give rise to imaginary worlds, and differ from real life by virtue of being limited crosssections, unable to grasp the sophistications and subtleties of life. In the same way that a quantum wave-function collapses, being resolved into mutually exclusive alternatives depending upon the kind of measurement taken, reality may be resolved into mutually exclusive
eschatological tension. Of far greater significance than any apparent finalities of meaning
revealed in the present, with their absolute values and imaginary worlds, is something that may be called the resurrection of the body or the life of the spirit. This is the mode of existence that increasingly participates in Christs body and blood, the life of faith that acts as a transcendental condition of thought and action, making a pilgrimage through a history of deaths and gratuitous resurrections. It is a way of living and dying, irreducible to a fictional land or dying body. Although this mode of existence is general in the sense that it responds to life and death as a whole, it is particular in the sense that it forms a specific character. More precisely, it is singular in the sense that it develops in a real life that lives out its own history. General characteristics involve an acceptance of death and suffering insofar as it loves a life which is these restore it to real life and relation inseparably linked to death as two sides of the same transcendent reality, a reality in which it participates. This acceptance of a greater life, including death, is a profound forgiveness of life as a whole, including ones own life and ones own mode of existence. One no longer finds a distinction held between ones own mode of existence, with the fictional lands it creates, and the events of transcendent life
-
30
whole. The displacement of sin is removed or expiated through this participation in Christs mode of existence, his spiritual principle his blood. One accepts ones own or style and force of life forgiveness by the greater life which includes death. The life of spirit may also be understood according to the following particular characteristics: a capacity to live as a suffering body; a capacity to laugh at, let go of, and forgive oneself; a capacity to disclose oneself and be vulnerable to others; a capacity to hope for new revelations; and a capacity to carry around fragments of heaven and hell within oneself. In addition, the righteousness and transcendence of the life of spirit are inseparable from a real history, a singular biography of courage and suffering. One learns how to love by responding to personal, social and global events. Such singular biographies are not constituted by a linear, nomadic progress of imaginary worlds through time, but only through events conditioned by personal, social, economic, and ecological relations. The considerations which we applied to the bonds between moments of time apply with equal force to the bonds of ethical relations. Death is just as much a social event as it is a physical or temporal event: it involves the breaking of social relations, leaving others with unpaid debts, unfulfilled expectations, unsatisfied needs, betrayed trusts, and unsupported dependencies. The life of Christian discipleship involves failing to fulfil all the normal duties and expectations that constitute human community (see Lk 9:57-62). Such a scandalous dereliction of duty need not be regarded as leading to the end of human relationship. Instead, ethical relations are no longer conducted on the basis of pre-existing values and traditions. The Good is not something that we can know or do, but something that happens to us, by grace through faith. Ethical relation is no longer conceived according to paradigms of command and obedience, duty and fulfilment, debt and repayment, need and provision, or expectation and satisfaction. Instead, it attains the level of gratuity and surprise: all moral action becomes supererogatory. Care of others must be directed primarily towards the spirit. To this end, it involves some degree of disruption of the imaginary worlds and lack of fulfilment of bodily needs of others one of the scandalous consequences of the Christian hope of overcoming death.
as a
-
Conclusion
theological reflections may seem an unusual basis for ethics. They set out no guidelines for values, laws, practices, communities, or institutions. The moral realm transcends all these, and all our thoughts and actions will remain morally ambiguous. Instead, these theological reflections are guidelines for the construction of the human spirit. The
These
31
life of faith exhibits a form of moral realism, believing in a true spiritual and moral realm transcending our conventional thought about morality. One gains access to such a realm through events of suffering and breakdown of human relationship. These occur all too frequently in life to require artificial reproduction; instead, the Christian emphasis is on the redemption of such moments of breakdown. The way we respond to suffering in life is the measure of, and opportunity for us to build, moral character. There is only an opportunity for compassion and intimacy when we break through the established habits and roles by which we relate to one another, and enter into more profound relations of mutual forgiveness and sharing each others suffering. The Good is not a product of our action, but a product of our faith which allows the working of providence. It does not take the form of the alleviation of suffering, but the redemption of suffering through a change in meaning of past events and broken relations by means of the greater degree of intimacy, forgiveness, opportunity, and affirmation of life, death and each other which they enable. Perhaps this emphasis upon death, however, is something that must be transcended. For the death of Christ, when lived out in practice, is merely an antidote to the pretensions of moral absolutes and imaginary worlds death is a consequence of sin. To live the life of spirit involves a condition of moral ambiguity and unresolved paradox, holding together incompatible cross-sections and perspectives in order to relativize them. Spirit is communicated less by negation or dereliction of duty, than by humour - one holds together incompatible fictional worlds, and lives according to competing values, in order to draw attention to the distance between them. One shows a self in perpetual flux, transforming the fictions with which one lives. One holds heterogeneous sources of meaning together to illuminate each other such as the Good and death, or the postmodern condition and Pauline theology.
-
— 32 —

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Studies in Christian Ethics

http://sce.sagepub.com Christian Ethics in the Postmodern Condition

CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

n this article I shall attempt to

condition, one theoretical and another practical, before moving on to

See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The U.P., 1984).

positions developed by 1983), and Anti-Oedipus

(London: Athlone, 1984).

tracedFormerly, the absolute

Ethical Responses to the Postmodern Condition

Jewish reflections on the Holocaust would be a prime example.

E.g. the recent work of Alasdair MacIntyre, as

well as that of Stanley Hauerwas and

E.g. the work of Mark C. Taylor and John D. Caputo.

nomadic, and deconstructive approach to ethics may liberate us from

fictional worlds, but also of the theories, values and

practices legitimated within such worlds. Repentance is not merely to

Heideggers later work, the subjective structure of

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