Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds

256 Pages·2004·1.342 MB·English

by  William Schweiker(auth.)

Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics
Theological Ethics
and Global
Dynamics
In the Time of Many Worlds
William Schweiker
© 2004 by William Schweiker
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First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schweiker,William.
Theological ethics and global dynamics :in the time of many worlds / William Schweiker.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4051-1344-8 (alk.paper)—ISBN 1-4051-1345-6 (pbk.:alk.paper)
1. Christian ethics. 2. Globalization—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.
BJ1275.S39 2004
241—dc22
2003021332
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This book is dedicated to my teachers and my students.I have been blessed
by having insightful and demanding teachers throughout my life.Each of them
was willing to take a risk on my capacities and then to labor to further my
thought. I mention just a few: Loren C. Gruber, during my BA studies
at Simpson College; Jill Raitt, Robert Gregg, Harmon Smith, Thomas
Langford,and Fred Herzog who taught at Duke Divinity School where I took
the M.Div degree. Most important, this book is dedicated to James M.
Gustafson, David Tracy, and Langdon Gilkey, who in different ways pro-
foundly shaped my thought while I undertook doctoral studies at the Univer-
sity of Chicago.In fact,I am bold enough to fancy that this book continues
insights I first learned from them.I can only hope that each of them sees some
evidence of influence in my ongoing work.
I also thank my students,too many (happily) individually to name.It has been
one of the true gifts of my life to work with exceedingly intelligent students.
These men and women seek to ponder and to respond with integrity to the
hopes and possibilities of life. I have learned more from you than you could
possibly learn from me.
So,to my teachers and students:
May your thoughts ever deepen and your lives always flourish
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction x
Part I Creation and World-Making 1
1 Global Dynamics and the Integrity of Life 3
2 Pluralism in Creation 25
3 Reconsidering Greed 44
Part II Time and Responsibility 65
4 Timing Moral Cosmologies 67
5 Love in the End Times 86
6 From Toleration to Political Forgiveness 110
Part III Imagination and Conscience 129
7 Sacred Texts and the Social Imaginary 131
8 Comparing Religions,Comparing Lives 153
9 On Moral Madness 172
Postscript 197
10 Presenting Theological Humanism 199
Select Bibliography 220
Index ofNames 231
Index ofScripture 234
Index ofSubjects 235
Acknowledgments
Several of the chapters in this book have been published in other volumes
or were originally given as lectures at international conferences. I wish to
acknowledge gratitude for permission to publish these sources in this new,
revised form and also to express my thanks to everyone who has made my
work possible.I especially want to thank the institutions that have supported
my work at the various stages of writing:the University of Chicago Divinity
School, the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, and the
Wissenschaftlich-Theologisches Seminar of the University of Heidelberg.
I have also benefited from conversations with friends and colleagues.I thank
Maria Antonaccio, Hans Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning, Kelton Cobb,
Kristine Culp, Wendy Doniger, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Franklin I. Gamwell,
Clark W.Gilpin,David E.Klemm,Robin Lovin,Patrick D.Miller,Richard
B. Miller,Terence J. Martin, Piet Naude, Douglas Ottati, Andreas Schüler,
Günter Thomas,Michael Welker,and Charles Wilson.These friends and col-
leagues have enriched my thought and life.I also want to thank my assistants
Aimee Burant,Michael Johnson,Kevin Jung and Jonathan Rothchild for their
excellent help with the text.Ms.Sandy Crane aided with the final production
of the manuscript.
Chapter 1 was published as “A Preface to Ethics”in the Journal ofReligious
Ethics 32:1 (2003):13–37.
Chapter 2 was published in a different form as “Verantwortungsethik in
einer Pluralistischen Welt: Schöpfung und die Integrität des Lebens” in
Evangelische Theologie 59:5 (1999):320–35.
Chapter 3 was written for the Project on Property,Possession and the The-
ology of Culture funded by the Lilly Endowment,Inc.It was published in a
different form in Having:Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life,
edited by William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans,2004).
 ix
Chapter 4 was published in a different form as “Time as a Moral Space:
Moral Cosmologies, Creation and Last Judgment” in The End of the World
and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, edited by John
Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press Interna-
tional,2000).
Chapter 7 was originally published in a different form as “Images of Scrip-
ture and Contemporary Theological Ethics”in Character and Scripture:Moral
Formation,Community,and Biblical Interpretation,edited by William P.Brown
(Grand Rapids,MI:Eerdmans,2002).
Chapter 8 was originally given for the series “9/11 Causes and Conse-
quences:Beyond the Clash of Civilizations”held at the University of Chicago,
November 2001.That lecture then appeared in Sightingsin a three part series
in October 2001.
Chapter 10 appeared in a different form as “Theological Ethics and the
Question of Humanism”in theJournal ofReligion 83:4 (2003):539–61.
Introduction
We live in a time of twilight.The sun sets too often on a pitiless and weeping
world.Or is this half-light the dawn when a new global reality emerges into
day? The travail of the twentieth century – the horrors of mass death and
terrors of tyranny – is now matched by a sense that we live amid a global whirl
and confusion in which meaning and orientation are difficult to attain.Many
people feel their hopes and dreams fade in the dusk of an age.The anxieties
of our time drive them to seek comfort in the past.And yet others,blinking
in dawn’s gray light, struggle to step forth and embrace the future. Mindful
that half-light conceals,these people nevertheless bend their wills to fashion
a world worthy of high aspirations.In truth,twilight can be dusk and dawn.1
The purpose of this book is to make sense of the current situation and to
discover truths needed to guide life realistically in our time.People around this
planet must orient their existence by the commitment to respect and enhance
the integrity of life.This is the challenge and the great possibility of our age.
Sadly,most forms of ethics hardly seem adequate to the present task.There is
a profound symbolic and conceptual poverty in much current thought.The
inadequacy and poverty of ethics, I contend, is due in some measure to the
modern banishment of religious sources from moral thinking, coupled with
the assumption by many religious thinkers that valid ethical arguments are
confined to their community.Beyond that banishment of religious resources,
I seek in the course of this book to deploy in a comparative way the insights
of the Christian tradition for the purposes of outlining an adequate ethics.I
hope to show how this approach to moral thinking provides a richer way than
other options in moral philosophy to understand and respond rightly to the
current twilight situation. Yet this book is written not just for Christians or
people with religious sensibilities.It is written for anyone concerned to think
profoundly about the demands of responsible existence.Religious sources are
not just thinly veiled pious wishes.They can provoke and fund thought about
 xi
how best to live within a complex vision of reality.Of course,the religions,all
the religions,continue to fuel hatred and ignorance.They too are part of the
global whirl and confusion facing us.One must defuse the potential vicious-
ness of these resources and also overcome their systematic distortions.The way
to overcome the inadequacy and poverty of ethics,as far as I can see,is to use
religious and other resources in a genuinely critical and constructive way,
thereby to enrich moral thinking and transform those resources.This is just
what I do in the following chapters.
Many themes link together the chapters of this book.I develop the idea of
the integrity of life in order to articulate the central moral good needed to
orient existence in our age.Throughout the chapters there is also an ongoing
comparative analysis of various symbolic and mythic forms, especially ones
about creation and moral order. I also explore the deep connection between
emotions and the cultural forms that saturate human experience in an age of
global media.At a deeper level,I address the problem of religious and cultural
violence that rages in every society and among nations.So,many themes link
the chapters into a multidimensional theological–ethical analysis and response
to global dynamics.
That being said,two basic themes structure the argument of the book.One
basic theme centers on an account of the global situation and the challenge it
places before us.I name this the “time of many worlds.”The other basic theme
is about a particular perspective in ethics called theological humanism.In order
to provide some guidance through the thicket of what follows,it is wise at the
outset to put these themes in high relief.After explaining them,a few words
are offered about the method and structure of the book.
The Time of Many Worlds
Every work in ethics must provide some account of what is going on.Mindful
of the sense of twilight, I write about the present age as the “time of many
worlds.” The idea of a “world” signals the fact that human beings always
inhabit some space of meaning and value structured by cultural and social
dynamics. Currently, diverse peoples and cultures, diverse “worlds,” are
merging into an interdependent global reality.As one scholar has noted,the
era “is creating a stronger sense of shared destiny among diverse peoples of the
world, even while it is also generating a more stressful sense of ethnic, reli-
gious,and cultural difference.”2The stress of “worlds”colliding can take hor-
rific expression in war and in terrorist attacks like the one on the World Trade
Center in New York City in 2001 that killed thousands of innocent people
from many cultures and religions.The stress of shared destiny can also take
positive form, say in the human rights movement and growing ecological
xii 
awareness around the planet.Interactions among peoples are forging,for good
or ill,the future of planetary life.No one remains untouched by this emerg-
ing reality. From tiny villages in sub-Saharan Africa to high-tech businesses
on Wall Street and in Tokyo,a defining feature of this age is the collision and
confusion of cultural forms.How people meet this situation will shape forever
life on this planet.
However, there is a paradox captured by the idea of the “time of many
worlds.” For long stretches of Western history, time was imagined like a
stream,a process.Christians can quickly recall the great hymn of Isaac Watts:
O God,our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home...
Time,like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten,as a dream
Dies at the opening day.3
Human beings contend with the limits that time places on life.Our lives are
swept in and out of existence.The marking of time by natural processes (e.g.,
the rate of decay in particles,the movement of planets,the aging of our bodies)
forms a background of regularity to human experiences of time.That is why
the idea of time as a stream or process intuitively makes sense.And yet some-
thing subtle is now happening in human consciousness.What provides a basic
order and limit to existence nowadays is no longer just the relentless press of
time that bears all life away.Time is given meaning through human descrip-
tions of temporal processes.4Increasingly,people can communicate in a shared,
universally present “real time” despite the fluctuations in personal life and
natural processes. While it may seem odd, human time is being accelerated
and homogenized around the planet.Humanity is now becoming omnipresent
to itself amid its diversity.The fusion of experience and technological speed is
changing existence forever.The moral order of life is increasingly an all-too-
human reality.
Oddly enough,we must speak at one and the same moment about the inter-
action and even conflict of diverse “worlds,”diverse cultures and moral spaces,
but within a shared global time.The uniformity of “real”time is the space of
human differences.Put somewhat abstractly,the present situation is the con-
junction of an accelerating homogeneous present amid reflexively interacting
“cultures.”The fact of human diversity amid unified time is signified by speak-
ing of the “time of many worlds”as the emerging global moral order.Within
this idea are to be found others that span the chapters of the book, namely,