Your correspondent is just back just back from the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics annual conference in Oxford. This is usually a sleepy English affair, but this year the SSCE held a joint conference with the Europe-wide Societas Ethica on ‘Political Ethics and International Order’.
But, oh dear, what happened to Christian ethics, Christian theological ethics? I heard studies on international affairs, and calls for more studies of international affairs.
But what we want is surely not more studies in the sense of more information, for there is already a vast mud-slide of scholarship from the international relations departments of universities. We want to learn how to judge all this scholarship of international political relations, don’t we? We want to learn our own (Christian) tradition well enough to be able to comment intelligently – theologically – on all this information, so we can offer more than a crock of platitudes on international political affairs.
Christian ethics seems to me to be a great righteous clucking that occurs whenever nice people get together to be enraged because other people are not nice.
What can save Christian ethics from Pelagianism is gratitude to God, expressed in worship of God (theology as doxology) and discussion of the cost to the Christian community of saying, and in its own community life showing, what is the cost of the peace and justice we commend, nationally and internationally.
So I was hoping to learn something about the distinctive voice of the Christian community and its witness to the great geo-political circus, by pointing towards an alternative, counter-cultural, way of life. I wanted to hear a little about the cost of this witness, because this witness is not always popular, and some times and places it is even opposed. I think the best way to talk about international politics is to talk about how churches exchange information and practices across continents and cultures. By this exchange the churches, and their discourse on justice and forgiveness, sustain and support the rule of law, pioneering the way for other international institutions, legal frameworks, courts of justice and commissions of peace and reconciliation. In this way churches support any institution anywhere (not just states) which wants to provide justice and security for their citizens.
Christians can point out the social and environmental costs of fossil fuel industries in places where the state is too weak to protect its own citizens from the multinationals intent on serving my demand for cheap fuel. They can point out where a severe labour discipline imposed by some regimes on their workers in order to satisfy my demand for cheap goods. They can even drawn attention to the violence that some states mete out on those Christian leaders that become too articulate on such subjects. And they can remember those Christian leaders in their prayer and vigils. They can point out the temptations for states (and not only other people’s states) to become kleptocracies, robber-gangs (I was listening to Michael Northcott and Luke Bretherton at this point. You see, I do pay attention).
I wanted to hear how the Christian community can explain to our (Western) societies how to receive the challenge and rebuke of international legal bodies. Are we are aiding the illegal detention of suspects without trial, the import of war material into conflict zones, supporting Israel’s occupation of territory that is not its own, in defiance of UN resolutions? (I wish the Church in the UK was more in touch with the Church in the Middle East – Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine. I have been meaning to find links from this blog to churches in Lebanon.) You see, I don’t want to hear about what other people should do, without learning the cost to ourselves of our political-ethical prescriptions, and understanding that the Christians bear these costs gladly – because they know that they are really borne by their Lord. That is how Christian politics begins.
Bonhoeffer got a regular mention, but there was no interaction with the very considerable Catholic and Papal contribution to thinking on international relations, all of it very accessible and better than any of the papers I heard at this conference.
But the company was good and Oxford, in the sunshine, is still beguiling…
