The Context of Action: Christ of the Scriptures and of Creation

Adding "What is Jesus Doing" to "What Would Jesus Do"

In the Introduction to Christian Ethics course which I teach regularly, there are two halves. The first seven weeks is purely vocabulary-building, a quick dash through basic concepts of duty, obligation, sources of ethics, and so forth. In the second half of the course, we work through 3-4 accounts of contemporary Christian Ethics that put these into motion. It’s gratifying to see the hard sledding of the first half of the semester open up in the second half, which always put these concepts to work in different ways. The first one up over the last two weeks was Oliver O’Donovan’s modern classic Resurrection and Moral Order. It’s a book that helped make O’Donovan one of the major names in 20th century Christian Ethics, albeit one with which has its own problems.

O’Donovan’s approach of the book can be summed up in this way: we all come to exist in a world of Christ’s making, and as such, the moral life is described as a summons of God to take our place within that world, a world destined for fulfillment in Christ. The freedom that is ours as creatures is for participating in the world well, deliberating with other creatures about the shape of our common life, but the guardrails and telos of moral lives are not endlessly open. If the world is held together in Christ, then what it is to be a creature is ordered toward Christ.

The implications of this vision could be construed as colonialist—that the church triumphantly takes its place at the apex of political and social order to ensure this right ordering of creation—but O’Donovan doesn’t make this move. To be sure, the church is a political body, authorized by Christ to speak to the shape and order of the cosmos, but there are no guarantees (or as I read it, any desirability) in the church having a socially prominent place. It says what it says, and does what it does, not because it works, but because it’s bearing witness to the grain of the cosmos.

There’s a lot to unpack about O’Donovan’s approach, but what I want to focus on here is something found in a variety of places in the history of Christian Ethics, from Justin Martyr to Bonhoeffer: that because the world is held together in Christ, then the moral life is not merely a matter of imitating the actions of Jesus in Scripture, but attending to the living presence of Christ in the ongoing preservation of creation. As Bonhoeffer put it, the question is not who was Jesus, but who is Christ for us today?

This can be asked in a way which makes Jesus into an empty container for whatever values we wish to put in there, conservative, progressive, or in-between: there’s a real temptation to simply colonizing whatever we think is good and valuable as the work of God. In this, the hardcore theocrats and the liberal progressives are working out of the same playbook—Jesus is the image of whatever values we want to see in the world. What divides them is what Jesus’ authorization means for issues of governance.

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So, what does it mean to take this approach seriously? What does it mean to confess that Christ exists not only a historical figure, or as a textual figure, but as living? A better way forward than the one above, I think, is one which requires us to seek coherence between then and now: that the Christ we see in the Scriptures delineates the guardrails for what it means to live morally in our world and to discern Christ’s ongoing renewal of not only the church, but creation. Insofar as Christ is the one in whom all creation subsists, what we find in Scripture is a rendering of the words and actions of God Incarnate, and as such, a picture of what it means to be truly human: humanity exists as no other kind of creature than as the ones which are loved into exist by God. We neglect that rendering at our peril.

But—and this is where things get interesting—the Christ of the Scriptures is the same one who calls us into the world today—into our world, and by this I mean “world” in the sense of a shared social space. This is the difficulty with WWJD, for example: it assumes Jesus as a past figure, a textual authority, but not as a living presence who prays for us, mediates us to God the Father, and upholds creation. What it means for us to live out the moral life befitting us as God’s creatures will be consistent with the vision of the Scriptures, but not identical: our social reality is united with the past, but not the same as the past. The Christian is not called to ask what Jesus would have done in this instance, but to ask what Jesus—the one at the heart of creation—is already doing.

In some cases, our interpretative judgments about what this looks like stretch to breaking. I’m reviewing a book on just war and martyrdom for Comment which I think wants to take this dynamic seriously: for the book, just war is not just politically prudent but Christologically authorized insofar as we live in Christ’s world. As such, for the author, whatever nonviolence the church exercised early on cannot be replicated, and to do so would risk idolatry, being inattentive to Christ’s presence in creation. The problem in this case is that the consequence of the book is that Christ calls his followers to lend a hand in preserving the world in this restrained form of the just warrior. While I have many, many questions about the shape of Christian nonviolence, I take this book to be trying to unite the Christ of Scripture with the living Christ, but doing so in a way which ultimately lacks cohesion.

But at its best, O’Donovan’s approach gives us a rich vision of the Christian moral life in which we reflect, listen to, and seek out the wisdom of Scripture by the moral life, while not seeking to simply repeat it: we are called to, as it were, improvise within the bounds of what we are as creatures summoned into being by Christ and ordered to be a part of God’s ongoing work in creation. This moral life is one of freedom, in which freedom binds us to the life of the world, seeking out the shape of Christian faithfulness amidst neighbors with whom we will inevitably share goods and commitments for no other reason than our common origin in God’s love. It is one which requires deliberation amongst the hearers of Scripture and the bearers of the Christian life. It is one which requires us to attend to Christ’s form in our worship and in our devotion and in our prayer, and to remember that this is the Christ who upholds all creation. And, importantly, it is one which offers little assurance that when Christians speak of the direction of the world, that the world will receive it or heed it in any way.

The material implications of this approach which O’Donovan provides in his book are mostly ones which consider the place of politics within Christian Ethics, but let me one a little less theoretical. In my own city of Abilene, there was a proposed, and then cancelled Pride parade: in Abilene, it was a new question posed, and one which the city handled awkwardly. Christians of good faith have come to a variety of conclusions about the validity of LGBTQ+ relationships, on the basis of the framework something like the one outlined by O’Donovan.¹

But it occurs to me that, regardless of where one comes out on this question, that the best approach to such a parade (following the need to attend to Christ as not only the heart of Scripture, but as the meaning of human existence) might be to show up wearing a MOM HUGS t-shirt, or in my case, a DAD HUGS shirt, offering an invitation to friendship, or better yet, a JESUS LOVES YOU shirt—a scandalous reminder that the world is called to Christ, made through Christ, and called to bear his shape. The Christian appears in the world, O’Donovan writes, with the authority to proclaim such a message of Christ’s love for creation, listening for what pain and what goodness there is, with an invitation to come join the body of Christ which is the redemption of all bodies, and with an offer to bear Christ’s love even if it is refused.

There can be reasons for being present at the parade which I can think of which do not stem from this framework: perhaps one disagrees and wishes to voice that disagreement, or agrees and wishes to voice support. Perhaps one is LGBTQ+ and Christian. And so, being present in the way O’Donovan lays out invites misunderstanding, but it also offers an opportunity for giving and receiving reasons with others, for finding what common ground there may be, for seeking Christ’s presence, for bearing witness. In any event, the frame which O’Donovan sets out here is one which requires presence of the Christian to the world’s questions, and presence without a net, confident that they speak not of themselves but of the Christ in whom all things hang together, and the one to who heals the world.

1. O’Donovan wrote a short volume on elements of this, entitled A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy (SCM, 2009). In adopting his approach here, I am not simply adopting his answer as he lays it out in that work, but trying to think with his approach.