What Does Doctrine Have To Do With Ethics?

I’m setting out to unravel a knot, hopefully so that I can tie it again. One strand in this knot is doctrine, and the other is ethics. The way these two relate to one another has recently been thrust into denominational debate among my fellow Nazarenes. The debate has revealed that we might need additional reflection on how doctrine and ethics are related, so while I’m not offering comment on the ruling at the heart of the controversy, I do want to try to tie these strands back together in a way that is true to the Wesleyan spirit that breathes through our little global body that I love.

The tricky question of doctrine’s relationship to ethics largely stems from the way modern Christians have understood those things to be separate from one another. I hear it named in various ways: ‘theory or practice,’ ‘doctrinal or practical,’ ‘theological or pastoral.’ It is the notion that we think and then we do. In this approach, doctrine largely is about beliefs or principles which inform what kinds of actions we take in the world, making doctrine a ‘first order’ form of theology, while ethics is a ‘second order’ reflection of doctrine. In other words, we have come to think that ‘ethics’ is simply what flows from doctrine because doctrine comes first. This is an approach that has left us in the lurch and is the issue, I believe, at the core of our current dilemma.

A Bit on Doctrine; A Bit on Ethics

My former professor Tom Noble’s recently released Christian Theology offers a helpfully corrective integrative approach to theology, rightly linking systematic, biblical, and practical theology. ‘Dogmatics’ is the name Noble chooses for the historic confessions of the Church, “the most comprehensive for of the core conviction of the Christian faith” (Noble, Christian Theology, 1:1, 9). These core convictions also sometimes go by the name ‘doctrines,’ which means ‘teaching’ (and doctors, therefore, as those who teach). The term ‘doctrines,’ Noble points out, now carries the distinct disadvantage of connoting abstract principles about God “rather than on the living God we actually know in Jesus Christ” (Noble, CT, 1:1, 9). It’s a disadvantage he’s out to correct.

This is one of the reasons I’m glad for Noble’s contribution: he is helping us beyond the doctrine/practice divide that has festered like a rot at the root. His integrative approach is healing a wound the church has endured for at least a generation and is manifesting in our current debate. In what Noble offers, doctrine and ethics are being tied together again. But how? The kind of knot we tie determines how we are held together. I want to be sure the knot we tie is used as a bond of unity and not to choke our common life together.

I like the way Stanley Hauerwas puts it as he reflects on the relationship between doctrine and ethics: “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behavior. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between doctrine and life impossible” (Hauerwas, Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine).

In another essay (that I require my theology students to read every chance I get), Hauerwas affirms the vital connection between theology and ministry. The crux of his argument is a reminder to know the story that makes sense of our actions.

Trevecca’s campus features a beautiful water fountain and pond called The Cascades. I ask students what they’d think if they ever saw me standing in the fountain, dunking one of their colleagues under the water. “Oh, that’s easy,” they’ll often say. “A baptism!” Of course, that answer only makes sense inside of the story of Christian faith and practice. Take away that story, and my role in it as an ordained minister, and we have the behavior of an unstable or violent person who probably needs to be stopped by campus security. In other words, the story makes sense of the action. “Christians have lost our concepts because we have lost the story that is necessary for our concepts to work,” Hauerwas writes (Hauerwas, The Work of Theology).

Tying The Knot

Here's where I want to tie the strands back together: the relationship between doctrine and ethics is vital because the doctrine tells the story that makes sense of our ethics. We could flip it the other way: Christian ethics (what we do) only makes sense inside of what we confess about who God is and what God is doing in the world. Let me take it from one more angle. Apart from the story that roots them, moral positions make no sense. For the earliest Christians, practices like martyrdom made no sense apart from the story of Christ’s own death and resurrection.

The story that renders Christian ethics sensible is nothing short of the gospel. It is the story found in Scripture and carried through the worldwide family tradition of the classical and orthodox Church. We Wesleyans love to remind our brothers and sisters in the worldwide Church that part of that story is God filling the human heart so full of love that it excludes sin. Sin, as we often discuss it, is whatever moves us away from the life-giving relationship with the God who breathes life into us. Personal, original, social – all of it chokes out the life God’s Spirit is breathing into creation. Sin is the negative space that opens when we shut down the dynamic relationship we need to be fully alive as human beings – the kind of relationship that we see on fullest display in Jesus’s relationship with the Father. In the face of this reality, let’s name the good news: God’s grace is on offer to return us to unobstructed relationship, making us fully alive in the likeness of Jesus. It’s on offer for all of humanity and the rest of this creation that God loves. Often, we talk about this offer in terms of new creation, an image we borrow from Revelation 21 and 22, where the flow of life is unobstructed and free because God and creation are united. That, friends, is the story that makes sense of our ethics.

Here’s the challenge: When we hold doctrine and ethics too far apart from one another, tying them loosely through the false dichotomy of the theory/practice divide, doctrine becomes a set of ideas from which we might distill some more positions or principles, but that is short of participating in the story morally. It’s why, as I argue in my recent book, that Christian ethics don’t apply to your life. That is, they aren’t supposed to be layered on top of an already formed life. Christian ethics are the shape of how we live our response to the gospel. If we think we need to ‘apply’ ethics, the knot is probably too loose.

On the other hand, when we conflate ethics and doctrine, making them the same thing, we don’t leave enough room for us to evaluate whether a moral position is made sensible by the story doctrine is telling. The knot we need to tie allows doctrine to speak the story and ethics to be linked up in vital ways. It also needs to give us the capacity to continually evaluate the faithfulness of the arrangement. Are the practices of our lives a faithful embodiment of the story of God making all things new? Is this practice a participation in God redeeming all things?

Let’s Knot Move Toward Legalism

Let me, then, be clear about the alternative. Upholding moral codes apart from the story of the gospel is legalism. Notice I’m not critiquing any particular moral position. What I am saying is that upholding a code without being neck deep in the story that makes the code sensible is nothing short of legalism. For those who follow in Wesley’s footsteps, we must remember his lively description of what happens in our redemption. It is that our hearts are so filled with love that it excludes sin – the gap is closed. Do we see how the work of God and its moral consequences are related? Do we see the joyful proclamation that God’s activity makes possible a full expression of human life? For Wesleyans especially, Christian ethics is not willing ourselves to adhere to moral principles, but joyful, responsive participation in God’s work of making all things new, including us. Ethics is simply what happens when we are caught up in the grace-filled story.

The poison pill of legalism flips this dynamic on its head. It begins with moral positions and commands. It seeks adherence before the story. It expects behavioral conformity before it tells the story that makes sense of the behaviors. Again, these moral positions may not be objectively bad; they just aren’t sensible outside of the story.

Retuning to Hauerwas’s argument for a moment, I think he has it right when he points out the earliest Christians couldn’t see daylight between doctrine and ethics because what they taught was that God was making the world new through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and they lived in the overflow of that story. They lived what they taught and taught what they lived. Their lives, as they saw it, were in the flow of new creation. Or, as Paul puts it, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17).

How Shall We Tie the Knot?

How, then, do we proceed? My constructive suggestion is that we pour our energy into telling the story vigorously and joyfully. As we tell that story, we also need to leave space, as the church has since its beginning, to discern what kinds of moral positions are descriptive of a life that is made alive in that story. We need to continually ask, “Is this moral position a faithful description of how we participate in God making all things new? Does it faithfully reflect what we see in Jesus, the fullest expression of humanity?” Discernment is a vital component of Christian ethics, and there’s more on that in this previous post.

For Wesleyans, there is a vital moral component to life, precisely because we are being renewed by God – that is our doctrine! But our doctrine also reminds us that this renewal is our participation in the dynamic of redemption, our participatory response to God’s grace. And that, it seems to me, makes all of this a story worth telling, teaching, and joyfully living.

The Art of Ministry in a Technological Age

If you serve in ministry, do you think of yourself more as an artist or a technician? I'm more of a 'both/and' person than an 'either/or' on questions like this, but the world we inhabit has made it increasingly difficult for these two identities and approaches to meet in the vocation of ministry. Taking a quick survey of the landscape around me today, there's a lot of pressure on pastors and others to think of themselves as technicians and train themselves as technicians. In this short series of posts, I'm going to engage this issue, not only to raise the question, but also to hopefully infuse some joy into the vocation of ministry. Burnout usually follows closely after ministry losing a sense of joy. If doing ministry like a technician has been squeezing the joy of ministry, maybe it's time to tap into the artistic side of our calling.

A Technological Culture

I'm no enemy of using technology, but I am becoming more and more aware that we are living in a technological world that shapes our imaginations on just about everything, including ministry. Not only are our imaginations technological, but our identities were technological. In our eating, our drinking, our waking and our sleeping, we are technological people.

​Being a technological people may have a lot to do with how many times we pick up a cell phone to send our kids a text message rather than walking upstairs to tell them that dinner is ready, but it probably has more to do with the way in which our technology has shaped us to see the world. The technology that we began to use – things like gas engines, interstates, air travel, assembly lines, computers and the internet – started to tell us that the world was under our control. No longer were nature, distance or ignorance things which had power over us, but now, we began to be able to shape the world, to use our technologies to make it less of a wilderness, to iron out the wrinkles that make life difficult, and to enjoy the incredible promises of advances in transportation, medicine and information sharing.

Even our worship and ministry bears the benefits of technology: you don’t need to know Greek or Hebrew when preparing a sermon anymore, because there’s Bible software that will know it for you. The absence of a forgetful parishioner’s tithe check doesn’t ever have to be a problem again, because the funds can now be automatically withdrawn from her bank account each week. Busy members of our congregations who travel for work on Sunday don’t need to miss your sermon because they can download it as a podcast and listen to it in the car on the way to their Monday morning appointment. Undoubtedly, technology brings with it incredible benefits, but every benefit comes with a cost. Perhaps this is why George Grant, a philosopher who studied technology, was so fond of the old Spanish proverb: “Take what you want, said God – take it and pay for it.”

What are the costs of being a technological people? Arguably, one of the biggest costs may be that we are a people who have been so shaped by the technology we use that it has robbed us of our ability to see the beauty of our vocations – even ministerial vocations. If we look back at the roots of the word ‘technology,’ we see that it comes from the Greek word techne, meaning art or craft. In the ancient mind, techne was the kind of thing one did for the sake of the beauty in performing the task. Think of a sculptor sitting in front of a piece of marble, chisel in hand. The sculptor looks over the rough surfaces of the raw stone, runs one hand over the rock, and carefully begins to apply the wisdom of his craft. He knows how the marble will react to his tools, he knows just which tool to use to bring out the desired effect, and he knows all this because he is deeply familiar with his craft. Only after a deep familiarity with the art of sculpture can he do the work of unveiling the beauty that hides inside the stone, and in unveiling the beauty of the sculpture, he also reveals the beauty of his craft, of his techne.

​But in the time of technology, techne took on a different meaning. On the lips of a deeply technological people, the word became ‘technique’ rather than ‘art’ and this began to shape our imaginations so that what we once thought of as artful vocations are now seen as technical jobs. For example, whereas politics was once understood to be the art of governing justly, it might now be said that politics is more about using the right techniques – slogans, sound bites, slander and opinion polling – to be elected; the good politician is the one who can use the best technique. The business leaders, I fear, are not formed to think of their work in terms of creatively and imaginatively introducing new services to new markets, but understand their work in terms of using the right technique to achieve outcomes. As a technological people, we have come to be shaped by the technology we use, to understand that we are good when we can apply the best technique, so that those things which were once our tools now suggest to us that they have the ability to make us into better politicians, business leaders and pastors. The problem is that tools can only get you as far as technique – they can’t make the user into a more imaginative artist.

Could it be that pastors in a technological world are subjected to the same kinds of pressures? Could it be that ministry in a technological world is now defined in terms of simply using the right method, skill or technique? I wonder sometimes if our technological vision of the world has transformed the vocation of ministry from an artistic and creative call to preach the good news of Christ into a mere job in which ministers of the gospel are seen as good pastors if they simply employ the right techniques. The deluge of best-selling pastoral ‘how-to’ books, blogs and articles may provide an answer to my wondering.

Pastoral Identity in a Technological Age

The implications of ministering in a technological age also apply to questions of identity. In our imaginations, do we understand ourselves to be pastoral artisans, or achievers of technique? If your congregation is anything like mine, you can probably recount the ways in which our people have been formed to think of pastors as those who need to execute the right techniques: to preach the right way, to counsel the right way, to administrate the right way to achieve proper outcomes. Fulfilling one’s responsibilities is certainly a good thing, but I wonder how much the techniques we use in ministry begin to tell us who we are as pastors.

In a technological world, technicians are the masters of their machines. They can replace, operate and tinker until their machine does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But the irony of the situation is that the machine actually becomes the master of the technician, for the technician’s skills and knowledge are only valuable in relationship to this particular machine. Refrigerator technicians are only valuable if they can make a refrigerator refrigerate. If, after a visit from a technician, your refrigerator does anything other than refrigerate (even if it now makes toast or dries your laundry), the technician’s vocation can be called into serious question. The value of a technical vocation is rarely novelty.

Artists, on the other hand, do not command their materials as much as they work with them to bring out the potential of beauty that the media suggest. The media with which artists work also don’t make any kind of value claim on the artist, because the artist’s vocation isn’t necessarily found in forming the media in only one particular way. Unlike the refrigerator technician, artists are not charged with making their media do only one thing or act in only one way, but are instead freed to bring new expressions of beauty into being. The value of an artistic vocation often embraces experimentation and novelty, especially when those expressions spring out of the particularity of the artist’s location or context.

What might vocational identity look like in a technological time? It’s not that we must use the latest and greatest technology to be good pastors, and it’s not even that using this technology means that we are selling our souls. It’s more that we need to see technology for what it is – a useful tool. When technology becomes the tool, pastors can be the artists.

In part two, I'm going to make a few suggestions for the way a ministry vocation can be artistic and joyful. If you'd like to be notified when it's available, you can sign up here.

The Good of Christian Higher Ed in a Restless Heart World

The university where I teach has a long-standing tradition of selecting one faculty member each year to receive the Teaching Excellence Award. My friend and truly

excellent colleague, Dr. Nyk Reed, was selected as this year's recipient, and gave a beautifully challenging address to our community you can see here. Putting that address together is no joke. What do you say in such a short time about that meets the moment and speaks to faculty and students alike? Last year, when I preceded Nyk in that humbling honor, I had to think a lot about what makes teaching excellent for communities like ours. That is, of course, connected to the many questions are swirling about what education is and how it should take place. Here are a few of my thoughts I worked up for the Trevecca community, and I offer them more widely here.

There’s a cherished treasure in Christian higher education that is, I think, directly related to a prevalent problem facing modern people. First, an outline of the problem: a life of meaning and significance is lost on us. We are a people who have no problem setting goals, tackling issues, or getting things done. We just don’t really know why we’re doing most of this stuff. Yes, many of us can point to some quick connection that quickly justify what we’re doing. We get a job to make money. We make money to buy the things we want and need. We get a college education to be able to get the job that gets us everything I’ve just mentioned.

There’s nothing overtly wrong with anything I’ve just mentioned, but it rings a bit hollow in comparison with the gift that Christian higher education offers, so let me offer a description of that gift by appealing to a theological hero of mine. Augustine of Hippo was an unlikely saint on a quest for fulfillment through the achievement of lofty goals. His parents had high hopes for him, outpaced only by the even higher hopes he had for himself. On top of that, Augustine had the intellectual gifts to achieve everything he ever wanted. A top-of-the-class golden child, he set out on a quest to get the best education, the best job, and the girl of his dreams, and did exactly that, only to realize that none of it was satisfying to his heart.

Eventually, he came to an important realization: no finite thing was ever going to give his heart the satisfaction it craved. That doesn’t mean finite things are bad, only that they had limits, and every time he got one he wanted, it couldn’t quite quench his thirst for more. It was only the limitless beauty of God, he came to realize, that would offer him a field without border, a sea without floor, a sky without ceiling. “Our hearts are restless,” he would eventually come to confess to God, “until they find their rest in You.”

I get the sense that higher education in general is primed to perpetuate the restless heart syndrome. If nothing else, higher education is fueled by desire. We want the degree, the job, the relationship, the future possibilities, and so we enroll, driven by hopes for what might be. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Every August, I get a front-row seat to incoming classes of students alongside their parents, driven with desires for the future, hearts on quest to find something that will satisfy. Many of them have enrolled riding a type of futuristic promise that this college degree will be an effective pathway to getting everything they want. My persistent concern is that they’ll get everything they want out of their college experience, and still be left with a restless heart. They’ll get the scholarship, the job, the relationship, and find out ten years down the line that while none of it was bad, it was also no match for the limitless goodness of an infinite God.

The restless heart syndrome happens when we confuse the limited goods of life for things that can satisfy our longing hearts. When we try to infuse infinite worth in things that couldn’t possibly hold that kind of water, they’re going to burst the skins of expectations every time. The joy of landing the job will eventually wear thin. The accomplishment at work will leave you longing for another one. Even that special relationship will finally reveal that the person you’ve found isn’t God, good as they are.

There’s tried-and-true wisdom in what Augustine eventually comes to recommend: use the finite goods of life – the college degree, the job, the relationship – as a way to enjoy the infinite goodness of God. Point your job toward something it can never be on its own. Make it a means of grace and come to discover the joy of a human life lived on mission for a purpose beyond itself. Aim the finite goods of life toward the infinite goodness of God and let your heart find a joyful home.

Higher education institutions are experiencing pressure on every side to become excellent, often by how effectively we can infect students with the restless heart syndrome. We measure excellence according to metrics like ‘return on investment’ and ‘job placement rates.’ And again, my argument isn’t that job placement is a bad thing, but so far, I’ve yet to discover the job that, on its own, can satisfy my restless heart. In honesty, I think I resonate so much with Augustine because I’ve found in his story a pattern of my own, questing after the next finite achievement just over that illusive horizon. To some degree, I think I have higher education institutions to blame for a piece of this. They’ve introduced to me a vision of possibilities I couldn’t have ever imagined, complete with a ranking system, GPA, test scores, scholarships, and awards, all offering a serpentine lie that the more I achieve, the more satisfied I’ll be.

But gladly, it was Christian higher education that also offered the gift of envisioning achievements and jobs for what they are: finite goods. Augustine had Ambrose, a teacher who helped him come to this realization. I had people like Michael, Herb, Helen, Doug, Judy, Ron, Steve, Jack, and Brent – all excellent teachers who have modeled for me a vision of education that serves something beyond finitude. They are gifted educators who were able to help me learn content and develop skills, while also offering a vision of who I could do with that content and skills that moved to the rhythms of prayers that became my heartbeat: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Christian higher education isn’t just the same content you can get at a state school with a Bible verse tacked on. It’s the nuanced development of an imaginative vision for how one might use content and skills in ways that offers a home to restless hearts.

Here’s a snapshot of what I think that might look like around places like Trevecca: Some students who enroll in my Christian Tradition course aren’t shy about telling me that their lack of excitement for that course is linked to the perception that it “doesn’t apply to their major.” It’s a course in history and doctrine, after all, and they are at a university to become a medical professional, business professional, or educator, so how will any of this apply to the skills they’re developing in their other courses? I tend to agree with them. Taking a course like mine isn’t meant to apply to their major – it’s meant to make sense of their major. At heart, I want a course like that to give them a story to locate their work as a teacher, nurse, or entrepreneur that will allow them to live life on mission, and to take what we’ve given them and how to know how to aim it in service to an infinite kingdom where the poor are blessed, the mourners are comforted, and the meek inherit the earth. Among the thousands of colleges and universities that are offering really good training and delivering really good content, Christian higher education gets to offer that training and content with a vision of how to use it in ways that are for more than the job itself, but for the distinct, colorful, beautifully offbeat, particular kingdom that Jesus established. Christian communities are those that get to point to something truly unique in the world – like the kingdom where the poor are blessed and the meek inherit the earth – and say, “Let’s use this training to do that really well.”

I’m really thankful for teachers who have taught me a way beyond the restless heart syndrome, and I’m really thankful for places where teaching like that can be called excellent.