Contents
 back to Books |
 previous story
|
next story 
|
Virtue depends on hard choices
A stirring defence of liberal Anglicanism by an eloquent advocate,says Michael Northcott
 |
| The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a troubled world Richard Harries
SPCK £10.99 (978-0-281-05947-8) Church Times Bookshop £9.90 THE SHAPE of this new book by Richard Harries rests upon his definition of Christian ethics as “the study of the implications of God’s saving disclosure in Jesus for decision-making and action”. For Harries, the moral life at its heart concerns the making of decisions. He presents, in the first part of the book, those sources of wisdom that may guide the Christian in such decisions, including law, virtue, and the judgement of consequences. Harries suggests that all, in different ways, are lacking without some sense of how individuals come to recognise what is truly of worth, and this arises, for the Christian, from the recognition that God is good, and that God is in Jesus. This recognition is matched in the life of the Christian by the action of grace, and hence prayer, which are the sources of that inner transformation that is to dwell in God. But the individual experience of dwelling in God is not a sufficient source of wisdom, and needs to be supplemented by the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. And Christ is no prudential consequentialist. The absolute demands of this supreme moral teacher are not easily translatable into the messy realities of life. There is a need for compromise between the absolute ideal, and what it is reasonable to expect in a sinful world. Harries goes on to examine the nature of the sinful world in terms of sex, money, power, and fame, in four chapters that reflect his rich experience as a leading bishop in the Church of England, and as a public intellectual. In terms of its moral stance, the book is an eloquent defence of liberal Anglicanism by perhaps its foremost advocate in the late 20th century. Richard Harries was the Hensley Henson of his time on the bishops’ bench, and that is no small achievement in an era when being a bishop no longer guarantees that the public will take any particular note of an episcopal voice. The reader will not find in this book, however, a clear introduction to the nature of theological ethics. This is because Harries’s founding meta-phor for the moral life — the individual making a hard choice — is closer to a modern secular account of morality than to Christian ethics as described by Augustine or Aquinas, Luther, or Barth. The contemporary Christian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whom Harries briefly quotes, describes the moral life in terms of its direction towards an ultimate end or goal, which is contemplation of, and union with, the one true source of all being and becoming. MacIntyre describes the vital moral power of community in directing individuals towards the good life. On this account the reason for the moral heedlessness of contem-porary society, which Harries laments, is not the inability of individuals any longer to reason about hard choices. It is, instead, the modern loss of those forms of community — morally nurturing families, and worshipping communities shaped by truthful stories — without which individuals find it hard to acquire those inner dispositions that the ancients called the virtues, and which St Paul describes as the fruit of the Spirit. Canon Northcott is Professor of Ethics in the University of Edinburgh, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop |
