liturgy and ethics

Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc

Liturgy and EthicsAuthor(s): Paul RamseySource: The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 1979), pp. 139-171Published by: on behalf of Journal of Religious Ethics, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40025978 .

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LITURGY AND ETHICS

Paul Ramsey

ABSTRACT

Both liturgy and morality are "formed references'* to Divine events to which faith also testifies. So there is parity among the orandi, the bene operandi, and the credendi of the Christian church, and multi-directional, shaping influences among them. An ethicist's under-

standing of morality is diminished without the context of liturgy and the rule of faith. An impoverished or distorted, shapeless liturgy influences the morality we credit. If today the church struggled for itself against itself over a proper understanding of the Christian moral life, this would be both reflected in and aided by certain liturgical innovations.

Lex orandi lex credendi. The order of prayer is the order of believing. This familiar statement concerning liturgy is reversible. No subordination of the one to the other is implied. So we can say with equal validity, Lex credendi lex orandi. The order of believing is the order of prayer.

On the question of liturgy and ethics, we can come at once to the heart of the matter simply by adding- across a second implied "is"- the appropriate Latin words. Lex orandi lex credendi lex bene Oferandu The order of

prayer is the order of believing is the order of doing well. This statement, too, is reversible, and in any combination of the three activities of the church to which the words refer: praying, believing and well-doing. No subordination should be implied of one or two of these actions to a third in which Christian life more fundamentally consists.

Arthur C. Cochrane's important book The Church's Confession under Hitler, was more than a study of the Barmen declaration. It was throughout an analysis of "the nature of a confession of faith"- the title of the author's final chapter. "After a silence of more than three hundred years the church

JRE 7/2 (1979), 139-171



140 RAMSEY

of the Reformation again learned [1] what it means to confess Christ as a Church before men and [2] what is the nature of a true Confession of Faith" (Cochrane, 1962:14). The second lesson is important for our topic if, as I have suggested, the rule of faith is also the rule of liturgy and the rule of Christian ethics. Cochrane's thesis (1962:15; cf.ll) is that a confession is "from its inception . . . essentially a struggle of the Church against itself for itself." Thus he writes (Cochrane, 1962:16): "A Confession of Faith is a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing for those who approach too closely to it. Those among us"- he continues- "who glibly call for a new Confession know not what they ask."

I draw from this, for our present purposes, the conclusion that in all three actions of the church the crucial question is whether a confession or the

generation of new liturgical forms or some new witness to Christian well-doing had their inception in the consuming fire of a struggle of the church against itself for itself. No doubt there will be new forms, but the crucial question is whether Divine governance in world history and the Holy Spirit who

keeps the community indefectable to the end of time compels us once again to manifest "the church being the church" believing and praying and doing well in a manner not already traditioned to us.

Those who elect themselves to draw up modern creeds, devise new litur-

gies and experiments or proposals for Christian living when there is no crisis of the church's struggle for its authentic witness in the world against invasion from the world turn out to be at best plunderers and looters or at worst petty pilferers of the Christian tradition. These efforts are often only exercises in translation, efforts to communicate better in contemporary idiom. This is not apt to prove generative.

Saving Events, the Lex

We need only to ask, what is the meaning of the lex1 governing all three activities: the ordering principle of the church's liturgical action, the rule of faith, the norm of Christian life? From this perhaps it may be possible to draw some general conclusions about the family resemblance, the complex interrelation, or whatever, among the orandi, the credendi and the hene

operandi. Our topic is Liturgy and Ethics. The ambiguity of the word "ethics"

allows me to say that the topic is Liturgy and the Christian moral life. Both of these expressions refer to actions or spheres of activity. The other mean-

ing of "ethics" would require us to talk about Liturgies and Ethics. Liturgies talks about liturgical action; and ethics, about the moral life. Liturgists are historians, critics and students of Christian worship; ethicists are historians, critics and students of the Christian moral life- just as theologians are historians, critics and students of Christian believing. Theology is rational reflection upon or conceptual depiction of the faith of the church. Christian ethics is a rational reflection upon and conceptual depiction of the Christian



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moral life. Liturgies, I suppose, is rational reflection upon and conceptual depiction of the worship of the church.

Thus, theologians, ethicists and liturgists offer "good reasons" of some sort related in some way to what they study. While I am inclined to say that "ethics" in this sense is subordinate to theology, as life is to faith, nevertheless the fact is, I believe, that liturgies, ethics and theology bear upon and assist one another in a variety of ways depending on the moves or even the

idiosyncratic tendencies of the scholar or scholars in question. That question, I have suggested, is not the one this panel is asked to address. Liturgy and the Christian moral life is- at least by comparison- a first-order question.

If these "sciences" have anything to talk about it cannot be some shapeless thing, indefinitely plastic to human initiative and changing times. Thus, our topic cannot be something general like "Worship and Work" or "Con-

templation and Action" or "Mysticism and Life." There is a rich literature on these themes showing the need for mutual enrichment between the active life and prayer or worship, the need for periods of retreat from the world's affairs to recoup the soul's resources the better to discharge our responsibilities in those affairs. These themes, however important, I set aside because they address the question of motivation or inspiration or endurance in Christian action. They do not address the substantive question what that action should be to claim to be Christian in any distinctive sense. There is a shape to Christian liturgy (else no liturgies) and the Christian moral life has some

shape or character (else no Christian ethics). For this reason alone the litur-

gical action of the church may have bearing on the contours and contents of the Christian moral life. Or the reverse relation may pertain. In any case there can be no topic of interest to the discipline of Christian ethics unless we can measure the authenticity of Christian liturgies and can measure the authenticity of Christian moral life; and ask what may be their relation.

Plurality of Liturgies

Hence, it is absolutely crucial that we search out the meaning of the lex- the measure- of Christian worship, faith, and practice. Let me say at once that the unity to be discerned is obviously a unity admitting extra-

ordinary variety. While orandi, credendi and bene oferandi are ruled by the same Divine events to which they respond and testify, there are nevertheless a wide variety of accents placed by different Christian communities on our common account of these events which are the source of all our worship, belief and doing.

To embrace them all I suggest that we think of the two marvelous ex-

pressions Karl Barth used (C-D, IV/1:157 and IV/2:20) in his treatment of the doctrine of reconciliation: "The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country" [The Lord as Servant] and "The Homecoming [Exaltation] of the Son of Man" [The Servant as Lord].

As a measure of what I would call the "orthodoxy" of liturgies, faith and



142 RAMSEY

life (if the word "orthodoxy" was not already limited to believing), these formulations of Barth's may help us to see both the diversity that may be

encompassed within their measure and also that there is still a measure: some worship, belief, and practice can be ruled "heretical" in the church's

struggle for itself against itself in any age. This is crucial in excluding shapeless generalities; and also to exclude orandi, credendi and bene oferandi attuned to other events or realities.

Still there is great variety among Christian liturgies. There are theologies of the cross and theologies of glory (and corresponding ethics and liturgies as well). The humility of Christ and his exaltation are different accents. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, with its grand processions, and at midnight when Easter begins the brilliant light in their cathedrals that everyone has waited for, links in some manner with its emphasis on the elevation of

humanity in the final redemption toward which we move. Latin Christianity, by contrast, draws the rule of faith and of moral and liturgical practice at an earlier point on the curve downgoing and uprising, witnessing the more to the going forth of the Son of God into a far country, with its stress on atonement and forgiveness; and correspondingly, in the West we have placed less exclusive stress on resurrection and glory, the return of the Son of Man to the Father's house. But in all cases the rule of faith and life and worship alike is some common understanding of God's presence with us and His action for us in Jesus Christ, and the triumph of that action.

Hence, we can understand the unity in diversity of liturgies. When the Bible is read- Old Testament and New Testament lessons, or Gospels and

Epistles- this is liturgy and faith and life. In family prayer, there the church is worshipping. When Evangelicals lustily sing, "There is power, there is

power, in the blood; there is power in the blood of the Lamb," or "Revive us

again/' or "Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me," or "The Old Rugged Cross," that is liturgy, and faith confessed and Christian life formed. When an old Calvinist stood uj> before God to pray, saying "Lord, have mercy upon us, poor worms of the dust," that was liturgy, and a life concentrated both at the nadir of humility and the crest of exaltation. When members of the Society of Friends meet in silence, that is

liturgy. Even without the external signs of the "quaking" that used to go on, we ought to suppose- since we ought to suppose the best of everyone- that the Friends are not just communing with their better natures but are rather engaging in a liturgical action designed to help one another to remove themselves from any inward activity of their own and to allow "opening" to come, the inner supernatural light to enkindle. When Baptism is performed or the Eucharist celebrated or any other of the seven sacraments are ad- ministered-or, if you please, what the Book of Common Prayer calls the "two sacraments of the Gospel and five other ordinances commonly called sacraments"- that is liturgy. When in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, the

congregation standing to say the Nicene Creed goes down on its knees at



143

the first mention of the incarnation: " . . . who for us men and our salvation came down from Heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the

Virgin Mary, and was made man"- that is liturgy. When in the old English rite- the Sarum rite- they stay down and rise together when the resurrection is mentioned, that is liturgy. Where the "Christian year" shapes the devotion of churches, or within this when every Sunday is an Easter and every Friday "good," observed by fasting from meat other than the symbolic fish, that is

liturgy. As both Ezekiel and Jonathan Edwards knew, God's dispensations, by which he is bringing the human world to his end for it, may be wheels within wheels. In the language of Puritan typology, liturgy "types out" the

"antitype" which are the mighty acts of God. This recital should make clear that I do not identify Christian liturgy

simply with what goes on in the more so-called liturgical churches. Even if I had been brought up and nurtured by a more all-encompassing liturgy, I would consider it question-begging to deny that the other simpler "divine services" are also Christian liturgies, or to deny that they shape the Christian moral life in equally important ways. Indeed, I have often thought that the "foot washing" practiced by the Pope once a year ceremonially on a few seminarians in Rome, but by the entire congregation in a certain Southern

Baptist sect, might qualify as a sacrament if only Jesus Christ had instituted it as such and attached to it words of promise. These actions, too, are liturgy, a type of Him who is the antitype (John 13:3-17).

All the liturgies in the foregoing recital have a common shape. The

engendering event gives shape to the engendered liturgical response. To use a geometric image, the convex of God's action determines the concave shape of Christian liturgies. Christians as such should have no interest in any other worship or mysticism, aspiration or spirituality.

As Karl Barth wrote, human response to the Divine event is not left "monotonous, colourless and formless," but "articulated, colourful and con- toured!' One's response is not "a mere point" but "a formed reference* in return. Since there is "a character which the [Divine] event will always take," a character "peculiar" to it, an "outline" made manifest, there will be a character and "standards" which are always valid, a "constancy and conti-

nuity," in the Divine services that are appropriate responses of a people who must and can and shall stand in God's presence. "Formless reference" is not a possibility. As our account of God is "the narration of his history or

description of his way," there will be a discoverable description of the fitting actions of the congregation even though these are fluid, various and not in every case specifically commanded ordinances.

I have made my point, rather cunningly, I think. The words from Karl Barth (C-D, 111/4:17, 18, 22, 25, italics added) that I just used to enrich my geometric image of the church's concave to the convex of the Divine event out of which the church lives and to which it witnesses are not about liturgy at all. I have elided them to make them sound so. Barth's words



144 RAMSEY

were about Christian ethics.2 Barth undertook to write of "ethics as a formed reference to the ethical

event as a description and attestation of the command of God and the right human action corresponding to it." He even acknowledges that formed references "might very well be called orders or ordinances. "But then"- he

goes on- "there would always be the possibility of misunderstanding them as laws, prescriptions and imperatives. These are spheres in which God commands and man is obedient or disobedient, but not laws according to which God commands and man does right or wrong/' Barth will have nothing to do with legal righteousness, but anyone who supposes that this means the Christian moral life is structureless simply has not read him. Just as no more than guidance to faith -knowledge of Christian truth is to be expected from the most precise and detailed dogmatics, so also no more than guidance should be expected from even the most particular ethics. Nevertheless, Barth provides more guidance than most Christian ethicists do in what follows in III/4: Man- Womanhood, Parents and Children, Near and Distant

Neighbors, Respect for Life and Protection of Life (e.g., abortion, eutha- nasia), Vocation.3

But I go too far into Barth's ethics. It is worth remarking, however, that everything basic I have just summarized him saying about Christian moral life can be said as well about Christian liturgies- as I began to do. Both liturgy and ethics have the same Lord. Liturgy and morality are both "formed references"- even though there remains much disparity among both

liturgies and moralities that can still claim to be authentically Christian. In either case, when all family resemblance has been lost, something has gone wrong. Somebody is claiming the Name in the name of secular causes (we may as well say Anti-Christ).

Some General Statements About the Relation

of Liturgy and Morality Elsewhere (Ramsey, 1968:120-125; 133-135; Ramsey, 1977:44-77) I have

undertaken to exhibit the relation of Christian ethics to theology by resort to the performative-language school and to William K. Frankena's notion of normative (as opposed to elucidatory or reportive) metaethics (Frankena, 1966:21-42). Christian theology, I wrote, is the "normative metaethics" of Christian normative ethics; theology warrants, clarifies and gives the meaning to the terms we ethicists use. The performative speech-acts of Christian

morality (covenants, for example) follow upon and are shaped by the Divine

performance. My concern was to accord to the Christian community in all ages the

status of standing "metaethical" communities of discourse about substantive moral matters. The church proposes normatively to shape and fashion how that discourse should proceed, how to say the ethical thing. At the center of every congregation of church or synagogue, men and women are continu-



145

ally giving themselves, renewing and enforcing, from the faith that brought them together, the meanings that they deem appropriate to be used in making moral appraisals. Church and synagogue are religious communities living from the past through the present into the future engaged continually (among other things) in recommending and conveying (traditioning) the meaning of

righteousness and unrighteousness. Likewise, a "people of God" proposes to understand the righteousness by

which it judges performances among men according to the measure of the

righteousness it believes God displayed in his word-deeds intervening in times

past in men's deeds and moral-talk. His were the Master speech-acts; ours should be in character and have self-involving correlative force. Our Father in heaven is the Name from whom the meaning of all performatives (like all fatherhood) in heaven and earth is taken, and also the meaning of "right" and "wrong," "good" and "evil" in normative Christian moral discourse. The

"good reasons" in Christian ethics for looking on all men as brothers for whom Christ died is the theological affirmation that Christ did actually die for them.

That- summarized briefly- was to locate Christian ethics as derivative rational reflection on moral life. Consciously, I was attempting to rest ethics

upon a proper Christian theology- both sciences secondary- with the assis- tance of a couple of positions in philosophical ethics used subordinately, even

instrumentally- which is all any philosophy deserves- in order to exhibit the

meaning of Christian ethics. The foregoing account needs correction to make clear, as suggested above, that theology, ethics and liturgies (in whatever relation to one another) piggy-back on the credendi, the hene operandi and the orandi of Christian communities in their history.

Fred Carney pointed out to me that I had implicitly already turned to the topic of liturgy and the Christian moral life. I must concede he was correct. The following passage, for example, was written without thinking of "liturgy" as a special topic:

Church and synagogue are communities of adoration, remembrance, celebration, worship, and praise. These communities engage in faith-ing whenever by common liturgical action or procession they say forth their faith by doing; or when by song, recital, confession, reading or preaching they, by saying, do. These acts-speech and speech-acts are understood to be human performatives in response to a divine performative. Each of these faith-acts and faith-statements of a congregation is at the same time a way of talking about ethical talk, a way of conveying and fostering what the community means by righteousness. (Ramsey, 1977:66)

What more shall I say about these three: orandi, credendi and hene

operandi? How shall we further articulate the interrelation of the three? It is important to insist on (1) a parity among these activities and (2)

that no one-directional influence from one to the other, or derivation of one from the other, will always be the case. . ;



146 RAMSEY

There is parity. Each is formed reference. The order of knowing, be-

lieving, worship, and living corresponds to the depiction of who it is who is known, believed, praised and followed. We imitate whom we adore, as

Augustine said. In the believing, there is a trusting heart; worship is with all one's mind and not only by heart or imagination; in being and doing-well there is faith in action, and our liturgies shall follow us all the days of our lives.

There is no fixed hierarchy. I thought at first to ascribe primacy to the

liturgical action of the church. Consider the following summary definition:

"Worship is the glad homage of mind, heart, imagination and conscience offered by the Body of Christ to its Lord as a response to revelation. The mind is open to the truth of God in Scripture and sermon. The imagination is enthralled by the majesty of God, Creator and Redeemer, in symbolism, architecture, music and the sacraments. The heart is overjoyed by the for-

giving love of God and by the fellowship of the redeemed in heaven and on earth. The conscience is opened and purified by the commands of God and the example and teachings of our Lord. The entire personality in community is educated in the prayers of adoration, confession, petition, inter- cession, and consecration, so that we are elevated, abased, judged and driven forth in sacrificial service of the world."4 If this is the meaning of liturgy, then a strong claim might be made for its primacy in nourishing both faith and well-doing.

Moreover, it could be asserted that the story of the Christian Story that is the principium of both credendi and hene Oferandi can best be told by the dramaturgy, the rehearsal, the reenactment, the repetition which belong to the nature of liturgy. So there is strong support for the assertion that the

liturgical action of the church comes first, faith and the moral life following. Still I think this "ain't necessarily so." Even when not recited, creeds and confessions always serve the purpose of community-formation (and delimita- tion) no less than liturgy, and the formation of Christian moral character and agency as well. Sometimes a renewal of vital faith draws attention to the fact that ignorance has been mistaken for mystery (as in some defenses of the Latin liturgy against the vernacular), and sometimes a renewal of the Christian moral life may draw attention to the fact that the elements of

liturgy evoke only a familiar sentimentality. So faith-ing and doing-well may nourish and renew the person- and community-forming power of the

liturgy in which we may have been reared. Instead of ascribing primacy to liturgy, we might better ask whether

theology and ethics are not more faithfully done when not sharply marked off as second-order disciplines, when theology and ethics are no more specu- lative or abstract than liturgies, when they too attend to dramatic rehearsal and reiteration of the Divine events that are their "allotted framework" no less than "liturgies"- and no less than these same Divine events are the lex of the church's actions: orandi, credendi, and hene operandi. In the Pre-



147

face of his book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei (1947:viii) drew attention to two sections in Karl Barth (C-D, 11/2:340-409; IV/ 1:224- 228) that he believes to be exemplary recoveries (not discussed in his study of the eclipse) of Biblical narrative in twentieth century theology. In a recent lengthy book review, Frei (1978) gives the following account of Barth's theological "method":

. . . Barth was about the business of conceptual description : He took the classical themes of communal Christian language moulded by the Bible, tradition and constant usage in worship, practice, instruction and contro- versy, and he restated or redescribed them, rather than evolving argu- ments on their behalf. It was of the utmost importance to him that this communal language ... had an integrity of its own: It was irreducible. But in that case its lengthy, even leisurely unfolding was equally indis- pensable. For he was restating and re-using a language that had once been accustomed talk- both in first-order use in ordinary or real life, and in second-order technical theological reflection- but had now for a long time, perhaps for more than 250 years, been receding from natural famil- iarity, certainly in theological discourse. So Barth had as it were to recreate a universe of discourse, and he had to put the reader in the middle of that world, instructing him in the use of that language by showing him how- extensively, and not only by stating the rules or principles of the discourse.

Perhaps it is also the task of Christian ethics to "recreate a universe of discourse" and "put the reader in the middle of it, instructing him in the use of that language by showing how- extensively, and not only by stating the rules and principles of the discourse." This seems to me remarkably like the task of "liturgies" as well.

Of course, theology is more than rehearsal. In his "redescription of the

temporal world of eternal grace"- Frei (1978) goes on to say- Barth employs a

battery of auodliary instruments to indicate two things simultaneously: (1) that this world is a world with its own linguistic integrity . . . one that we can have only under a depiction, under its own particular depiction and not any other, and certainly not in pre-linguistic immediacy or experience, without depiction; but (2) that unlike any other depicted world it is the one common world in which we live and move and have our being. To indicate all this he will use scriptural exegesis to illustrate his themes; he will do ethics to indicate that this narrated, narratable world is at the same time the ordinary world in which we are responsible for our actions; and he will do ad hoc apologetics, in order to throw into relief particular features of this world by distancing them from and approximating them to other descriptions of the same or other linguistic worlds.

In order not to become trapped by his philosophy, it is best for a theologian to be philosophically eclectic, in any given case employing the particular . . . conceptualities . . . that serve best to cast into relief the

particular theological subject matter under consideration.



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He set forth a textual world which he refused to understand by para- phrase, or by transportation or 'translation* into some other context but interpreted in second-order reflection with an array of formal, technical tools. Sometimes the second-order talk merged with imaginative restate- ments, in various modes, of parts of the original narrative to which it is fitly related. In a sense, then, he was a poet, setting forth mimetically a world of discourse, but with a clear and strong sense of the appropriate coinherence of technical theological analysis with its more imaginative counterpart.

In any case, not everyone who today cries, "Story, Story" in theology, or "Covenant, Covenant" in ethics as I have, shall enter into the kingdom beyond the eclipse of Biblical narrative. If as I have just suggested "theology" and "ethics" and "liturgies" have a common family resemblance with one another, and reciprocal interrelations, then a fortiori we ought not to ascribe to credendi or bene oferandi or orandi lexical or causal or any other priority over the other two activities of the Christian community. If "liturgies," "theology," and "ethics" are alike reflections on the primary activities they study, and these in turn are reflections of Divine events, then a strong case can be made that these second-order reflections should fittingly take the form of "con-

ceptual depiction." Hence my definitions above of these three fields of

study included this possible mode for theology and ethics as well as liturgies. For another reason, both parity and reciprocity must be affirmed of liturgy

and the moral life. Liturgy is no less an earthen vessel than are the credendi or our bene Oferandi. All three are all-too-human "statements" of the fitting formed reference. The mirror of liturgy can be clouded over no less than faith and life by pollutants in the atmosphere. Any of the three mirrors can be turned away from their common object, and cease to represent the Divine event. Heresy or apostasy or ossification can occur in liturgy as well as in the church's faith-ing or our doing. Tinkerers have come; more will. Then there will be need for some returning renewal, correction and nourish- ment of liturgy from the vitalities of faith and life. There will be needed

theological or ethical critics of liturgy, no less than, I suppose, a liturgist may have something to tell us who are theologians and ethicists. To affirm

parity and reciprocity is only to say that the church is reliant equally not on its liturgy, its faith-ing or our living, but these are together reliant on another Lord and Master.

It has been suggested to me that in particular traditions the Christian life

may be precedent to liturgy. Stanley Hauerwas at Notre Dame sometimes

strengthens his students in their Roman Catholic faith and practice by asking them to listen to language Mennonites use concerning the Christian life. Their being and doing-well is expressed in profoundly Eucharistic language. I am not sure that this fact makes his point for the reverse movement from life to liturgy- particularly not, if liturgy is understood to include the rich

variety of typing out the faith of the church which I sketched above. How different would the Mennonite instance be from the Eucharistic language



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Mother Teresa uses throughout whenever she speaks of her doing well?5 The derelicts she serves in Calcutta are the sacrament offered to her again and again. In their lost lives she partakes again of the body and blood of the Derelict on the cross. Her well-doing is therefore a matter of thankfulness and joy; it is no sacrifice she offers. Again, I think, that at the heart of the matter we have simply to say lex orandi lex credendi lex bene oferandi.

Particular Examples I turn now to selected examples of Christian liturgy and the Christian

moral life in their reciprocal relations. I shall not bother to distinguish in

separate sections between (1) examples of the diminishment of ethicists'

understanding of the moral life when the latter is deprived of its context of

liturgical action and the life of faith and (2) examples of impoverished or distorted liturgy that surely must adversely affect the moral life, which is the concern of Christian ethics. In the end I propose (3) two liturgical innovations that one can imagine would be instituted if today the church were

really struggling against itself for its understanding of the Christian moral life. 1. Drawing upon Arthur Cochrane, we have observed that the church's

credendi and its orandi are preserved through the fiery furnace of its threatened witness to the one and only Lord. The same can be said of the church's bene oferandi. Thus Cochrane (1962:211) observes that when Barmen declared "We reject this false doctrine . . . ," the condemnation, the damnamus, strikes down also some evil-doing threatening the well-springs and contours of the Christian life as well. Schicklgruber had no objections to Christians who confessed that Jesus is Lord; but he was enraged when

they confessed that Jesus is Lord and Hitler was not. We can extend this historical point to give an adequate account of the

awesome significance of negative commandments in Biblical ethics. We ethicists may appeal for warrant and support to the distinction philosophers make between negative and positive duties, between the commandments to do no harm, which have universal sway, and positive injunctions to do good, which may have many qualifications and possible exceptions. But this gives us no sufficient account of the increased imperativeness that Divine sanction

puts behind negative commandments in the Decalogue, for example, or the woes that Jesus in his teachings cried against those who live fundamentally against the ethics of the Kingdom. The account which we must give of the condemnations, the damnamus, must be what Cochrane suggests, namely, that there are actions and attitudes which trespass on holy ground. And we know not what we do if we lightly call for either a new confession of faith or a new ethics. Our use as Christian ethicists of the philosophers' negative and positive duties can only be a convenience to show that Christian morality is not unreasonable. If their distinction becomes finally normative, we have lost our way.

2. The same can be said of the mileage we get from appeals to the



150 RAMSEY

"dignity" of human life, respect for "persons," etc. These are translations to which we should not lower Christian ethics. Christian credendi and bene

operandi require us to speak rather of the sanctity of human life, holy ground. So does Christian orandi.

3. The same can be said of a number of other philosophical concepts, which we are not excluded from using provided they are not given supremacy. The notion of steadfast "covenant" love, or agape, in Christian ethics must

obviously be constantly nourished by liturgy, and the entirety of Biblical narrative, or else it loses its meaning and becomes a mere "concept." I my- self use the terms agape and covenant as shorthand expressions when moving on to analyse specific problems. But I have never supposed these terms have

any meaning unless nurtured by the Word of God read and preached, and enacted by the multitude of the church's liturgies mentioned above. If agape means only benevolence or equal regard or the universalizability-principle, then I see no particular reason for taking the trouble to be a Christian in the

present age or any age. Other, less-disputable philosophies provide sufficient

grounds for such positions in ethics. Therefore I am distressed by somewhat "scholastic" articles- some referring to my writings, and some in JRE- that assume agape to be a sort of philosophical concept to be tested like any other, say, by the universalizability principle. Philosophically this principle is per- suasive; to me it is, but also and primarily on Scriptural grounds. A Christian ethicist should know, however, which is overriding if that principle were shown to conflict with the sources of Christian ethics. This is required if Christian ethics is given its proper primacy. The word agape- ox some other- has to be used if one is going to push further its guidance and the

light it throws on our pathway. Still we need to remember what the French author and philosopher Bernanos once said, "All the ideas one sends along into the world, with their pigtails hanging behind them . . are raped on the first corner they come to by any old slogan in uniform." Ripped from its total Biblical context, and if not nurtured in liturgy, agape itself can become a slogan in uniform, or function as a philosophical concept.

Professor R. M. Hare (1965:90-95) chose to expound his theory of universal prescriptivism by formulating an "example . . . adapted from a well-known parable"- the story Jesus told about the unforgiving steward or the unmerciful servant (Mattfien; 18:23-35). The unadapted parable, by contrast, shows the meaning of Christian ethics as "formed reference" (as is the liturgy). Hare begins with a situation of comparative equipoise, and it is human inclination or disinclination that is universalized. A owes money to B, and B owes money to C, and the law is that creditors may exact payment or else put their debtors in prison. The question is what B should do to A,

having in mind what C may do to him. It is no surprise that, in this situ- tion of equally interchangeable plight, the principle of universalizability should produce a "golden rule" argument6 sufficiently tender to A's predica- ment for B to judge that the debtors-prison option should not be invoked



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but instead A should be forgiven (B having in rhind that C will do likewise to him if he does not forgive A). Or rather, having in mind that to do the ethical thing toward A> B must be willing to prescribe that this be done in like circumstances, i.e., by C to B.

The New Testament story begins with no such equipoise, and ends with far more than the formal principle of universalizability as criterion. In the

parable, B (the servant who later proved unmerciful) owed C (the king) ten thousand talents- let us say, a million dollars, an indebtedness impossible to pay, which gives the measure of the extent and quality of C's forgiveness when, moved by compassion, he loosed B (the servant) from obligation to make recompense. Thereupon B went out and found a fellow servant (A) who owed him a hundred pence. The debt is, by exaggerated contrast, minimal, repayable eventually even on poor wages; let us say, it was twenty dollars. Yet B would not forgive A even that small debt, and instead cast him into prison.

When C (the merciful king) heard about this, he called B into his

presence and judged him by the moral standard the parable intends to say is the meaning of the good: "O thou wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt. . . . Should not you also have had compassion on your fellow servant, even as I had pity on you? Then was B delivered up to wrath until- which was impossible- he had paid all he owed and had earned forgiveness. "So likewise shall my heavenly father/* the parable concludes, "do also unto you, if you from your hearts forgive not every one his brothers their trespasses.**

Here, obviously, the definition of doing the ethical thing is decisively not prescriptive universalizability. It is rather a substantive, material moral norm, which has its source in the attitude and action of the merciful king. This, then, should be extended by anyone who has been so gratuitously for-

given; this is the standard to apply in determining one's attitude and action toward others in similar situations. Such a man nevertheless prescribes to himself and others; he prescribes the same sort of moral attitudes and acts; he prescribes universally for all in similar circumstances. The logical tests are not set aside or without force in the parable. But what is prescribed universally is given content by the merciful king's forgiveness, not- as with Hare- by the native inclinations or disinclinations or preferences of moral

agents themselves. All this follows, for Christian ethics, from beginning as "formed reference" to a situation of prodigious uncalled-for Divine forgiveness.

4. If the Christian orandi and credendi and bene operandi are, as I have

argued, formed reference to the engendering events, then, I think, we have a measure to be applied to liberation theologies and ethics.

Liberation movements, and especially the black freedom movement led

by Martin Luther King, have all invoked the Exodus symbol of God's people freed by his mighty acts from bondage in Egypt. That original and proto- typical emancipation was prolepticly conditioned by the people's adherence to God's righteousness revealed in his will and law (blessed be He!).



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Deliverance completed was at Sinai; there the covenant was given and received. From this, falling short takes its measure; to this, prophets call for return in every subsequent age.

The question to be raised about liberation theologies of any sort- if liturgy and the Bible taken up into liturgy have any bearing on Christian morality- is whether liberation theologies have or have not truncated the Exodus symbol to mean only emancipation from former slaveries or inequalities into secular versions of justice or egalitarianism, and not into covenant-obedience. Do liberation theologies "type out'* Christian deliverance?

I raise the question without answering it. The question does not imply separation of the spiritual from earthly deliverance, or that people can count on surviving on manna in the deserts of modern life or on the elements of the Holy Supper. However, I do suggest that one test to be used in answer-

ing the question is whether liberationists are set to reading Karl Marx or the

pronouncements of the American Civil Liberties Union more than the Bible, or whether the contours given the life of action are influenced by these sources more than by the liturgies by which in church we enact also a formed reference to Divine events.

5. One of these liturgies is the sacrament of Christian marriage. This

impinges- or so I think- on women's liberation and on male "liberation" as well, because of the irremovable fact that Ephesians 5 remains in our Scrip- ture, liturgy and theology. Whatever one makes of the "headship" passages, indissolvability remains patterned after Christ's indefectable faithfulness to his church. There is no Christian liberation into atomistic individualism in

marriage bonding. Nor, taking the Bible as a whole, liberation into a dualism

by which we are "persons" and not embodied women-persons or men-persons. I am aware of no way to stop well-meaning people in the churches who

tamper with Christian liturgy and remove the ancient landmarks in the Christian moral life as well from proposing bland and novel rituals that are not "formed references," that are not concaves to God's convex. So some

people today who call themselves "Christian" are writing, proposing and using in churches rituals of divorce contrary to the Scriptural words we have in authentic liturgies. Moreover, diminished seriousness can be the only result of repeating words from Ephesians 5, the words of Jesus about marriage and divorce, and pointing to the marriage of our first parents to which he referred as basis in our original creation for these prohibitions and warnings when all this is said a second and a third time with no liturgical notice of the

incongruity. Rituals of repentance upon second marriage would be another thing, but

rituals upon the occasion of divorce articulate quite different "contours" to which to make "formed reference/' Such actions within the church cannot be the meaning of steadfast covenant-love modeled after the unswerving love of Christ for us. Despite the Mosaic permission of divorce, and despite the

patriarchialism of its rabbinical interpretation, the Hebrew Bible does not



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fail to record that the covenant-God, who watches over all covenants, has a

special care for the primary fidelity between husband and wife. Thus, Malachi 2:14-16 speaks for God: "Because the Lord was witness to the covenant between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless though she is your companion and your wife by covenant . . . take heed to yourselves, and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. For I hate divorce, says the Lord the God of Israel. ... So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless." This passage is parallel to Efhesians 5 in their common religious and moral meaning. Upon second marriage following divorce there can only be liturgies of repentance for human short-falls.7

Whether we believe that marriage is- in the strict sense- a sacrament, or not, the liturgical and moral meaning of the marriage-covenant remains the same. It is a covenant of life with life specially touched, strengthened and elevated by God's covenant with humankind. "Divorce rituals'* only signalize the fact that we are coming close to defining divorce as a sort of "sacrament." Indeed, divorce may be looked on as a "means of grace," a passage to a more abundant life, to human flourishing defined in an individualistic way. Against such notions Christians who believe marriage is a sacrament and those who do not must urgently ask whether an entire congregation (the minister included) who were all divorced and remarried would any longer symbolize Christ's unbreakable love for his church.

On this point there is a witness in Eastern Orthodoxy among the plurali- ties of Christian liturgies and moralities to which it might be helpful to attend. In the East, the church by the sacrament marries the two parties, it betroths them and it marries them. In the West, Roman contract-marriage was taken up, the exchange of vows by the two parties makes the marriage and constitutes its beginning, and they are the priests administering the sacrament to one another. On the one hand, it is a glory of the Western church to have elevated the marital consent of the parties out of secular collectivities and customs (e.g., the father bringing the bride to her husband) and to their signal role as priests or ministers of this one of the sacraments. On the other hand, in the cultural history of the West this location of the sacrament upon consent may have contributed to our present individualism, the fragmenta- tion of the marriage bond, and to the anomaly that persons may, with the church's unqualified blessing, several times take the same perpetual vow.

In the East the same church that sacramentally marries the parties also divorces them- not by rituals but in canonical courts. In doing so, there is no need, as in the West, to preserve indissolubility by seeking out grounds that "reach back" to some defect in the consent that made the marriage, discovered to warrant decrees of "nullity," not divorce. Thus, today incompati- bility or psychological defect are often said to reach back, so that it can be declared that a marriage never existed. Eastern churches simply find the parties incompatible, i.e., as it were, dead to one another, and divorce them.8

How, then, is the church's witness to the indissolvability of Christian



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marriage not weakened, or set aside? This is accomplished, I suggest, by the fact that Eastern churches have two rituals for marriage, one for first

marriages, another for second or third marriage. To understand this, we must remember that in Easten churches theology and ethics (almost in their

entirety) are contained, subsumed and conveyed by the liturgy. The liturgy forms the believing and the well-doing and the theological reflection of the church almost exclusively (see n. 5)- at least in comparison with the West. We in the West speculate about whether marriage is dissolvable or not; the East does not. Having decided that marriage is dissoluble, we Protestants are left with the incongruity that practice is one thing while our marriage liturgy says another thing. And Roman Catholics debate whether they should go the same route. In the East there is no such paradox, because there is a separate liturgy for second marriages.

The liturgy for second marriage is filled with extensive, vivid and specific reference to sin, human weakness, failure, repentance in the face of con-

cretely and fully acknowledged short-fall. Therefore the Rite for first mar-

riage can continue to be enacted by a church that grants divorce without the

incongruity, hypocrisy and threatening dissolution of the church's witness in the world to the meaning and nature of Christian marriage to which the West seems doomed.

The liturgy for second marriages is an ancient one, going back to that time in the early church when second marriage after the death of one's

spouse was looked upon with disfavor and a third such marriage with even

greater disfavor.9 This is the liturgy used for second marriage following divorce. In granting divorce, Eastern churches in effect declare the parties now to be dead to one another. No human defect (i.e., of consent) could have such force as to render the first sacrament null and void, since consent as such does not make marriage. The Eastern churches, then, unmistakably marry people for eternity; they also divorce people; and in a second rite they marry them again. This makes sense because, and only because, of signal differences between the two rites.

I am not enough of a liturgist to spot the symbolism of things in the first

ceremony that are omitted from the second. But hear the words of two

prayers that are in the ceremony for second marriages but not in the first.

O Master, Lord our God, who showst pity upon all men, and whose providence is over all thy works; who knowest the secrets of man, and understandest all men: Purge away our sins, and forgive the transgressions of thy servants, calling diem to repentance, granting them remission of their iniquities, purification from their sins, and pardon for their errors, voluntary and involuntary. O Thou who knowest the frailty of man's nature, in that thou art his Maker and Creator; who didst pardon Rahah the harlot, and accept the contrition of the Publican: remember not the sins of our ignorance from our youth up. For if thou wilt consider

iniquity, O Lord, Lord, who shall stand before thee? Or what flesh

living shall be justified in thy sight? For thou only are righteous, sin-



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less, holy, plenteous in mercy, of great compassion, and repentest thee of the evil of men. Do thou, O Master, who hast brought together in wedlock thy servants, N. and N., unite them to one another in love: vouchsafe unto them the contrition of the Publican, the tears of the Harlot, the confession of the Thief; that, repenting with their whole heart, and doing thy commandments in peace and oneness of mind, they may be deemed worthy also of thy heavenly kingdom.

O Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, who wast lifted up on the precious and life-giving cross, and didst thereby destroy the handwriting against us, and deliver us from the dominion of the Devil: Cleanse thou the iniquities of thy servants, because, they being unable to bear the heat and burden of the day and the hot desires of the flesh, are now entering into the bond of a second marriage, as thou didst render lawful by thy chosen vessel, the Apostle Paul, saying, for the sake of us humble sinners, it is better to marry than to burn. Wherefore, inasmuch as thou art good and lovest mankind, do thou show mercy and forgive. Cleanse, put away, pardon our transgressions; for thou art he who didst take our infirmities on thy shoulders; for there is none sinless, or without uncleanness for so much as a single day of his life, save only thou, who without sin didst endure the flesh, and bestowests on us passionlessness eternal. (Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 1956:304-305; cf. 604-605)

To Western ears these will seem to be harsh words, indeed, to be used in a church's celebration of second marriage that it nevertheless blesses and sacrarrientalizes. In behalf of the Eastern liturgy I would reply to the spoken and unspoken objections as follows: (1) Interlaced in these prayers are a

general confession that we are all sinners with specific confession connected with the undertaking of a second marriage. But if there were only words of

general confession or declarations that we all live by the mercies of Christ, standing alone, this would surely be a mere sentimentality to address to the

specific enactment the parties undertake and for which they now ask the church's sacramental blessing over a second perpetual union. One could

propose in a thrice liturgies that would similarly signalize a Roman Catholic

priest's abandonment of his perpetual vows and his immediately following resolve to assume another, namely, marriage. The Roman Catholic Church confirms or certifies the vows of priestly celibacy. Eastern churches do the same in regard to marriage. The passage from one lifelong vow to another, whether from the priestly vocation of celibacy to marriage, or from one

marriage to another, involve the same quandary, namely, how can a person forsaking one permanent vow for whatever sufficient reason enter into another such vow with no repentance, confession of failure, no liturgical acknowledg- ment of the specific personal identity or character with which one proposes to enter into a new commitment that has the same essential demands? (2) Divorce has never been the chief issue for Christian morality, but rather

remarriage following divorce. Doubtless, in divorcing, Christian partners face significant moral issues. Nevertheless, these are arguable one way or another. On the one hand, it is certain that no divorcing couples can do



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otherwise than impair the vested interests of their children. On the other hand, it can be argued that children are often more injured by a continuation of a marriage for their sakes than by its rupture. These important moral

obligations can be argued one way or another. Whatever be the reconciliation of these responsibilities, divorce as such has never been the crucial issue for Christians. With regard to a family that stays together without praying together, and having many other things in common, it may certainly be both

necessary and just to put asunder. The issue has always been remarriage following divorce; this has been to trespass on holy ground marked off by the prohibitions of Scripture and the words of the liturgy. (3) To allow second marriage, it may be objected, Eastern liturgies are involved in a far more irresolvable paradox than the Roman Catholic search for grounds of

nullity or our genial Protestant endorsement of the remarriage of divorced

persons. The deepest incongruity, an objector may say, is that the Eastern churches sacramentalize second marriage even while in the ceremony con-

demning and confessing the sin of it, and not just in general terms. How can the church bless, it may be asked, an action and way of life for which it itself requires repentance even while it is undertaken? Is not the rite for second marriages far more of an incongruity than those of us of the West who must settle for dissolvability or indissolvability doctrinally and conceptually before concluding one way or another about marriage after divorce? The answer to this objection, from the point of view of the Eastern orthodox churches, seems to me to be clear. God's ordinance of the good of marriage is not annulled by deepening thraldom to sin. But then God's ordinance of

marriage as a remedy for sin has all the more to be accented. So the Eastern churches consecrate the sacrament of Christian marriage even for persons of failed first marriages. They leave to God's disposition where these marriages shall be located in the storied mansions of heaven in comparison with first and only marriages. Every particular marriage, in all its concreteness, is with the church in via. (4) If Western ears are offended by the references in the liturgy for second marriage to the harlot, the publican and the thief, this must be compared with the concrete depictions in the ceremony for first

marriage, and the entirety of the context of Biblical narrative in which this Rite is set.

Both marriage ceremonies are encompassed within the procession of God's

people toward redemption and perfection. So Eastern Orthodoxy can allow the dissolution of some marriages, and less worthy marriages after that (two divorces is the limit) without compromising the indissolvability toward which

every marriage, in all its concreteness, is in via. Marriage may fail to reach its end; yet the Eastern churches need not choose conceptually between dis-

solvability and indissolvability, which is the choice debated among Roman Catholics. They do not need to say- as we Protestants do in the twilight of

Christianity- that lifelong union is only an ideal or a hope hovering over the

worldly reality of marriages. Nor do they need to accept Barth's strange



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notion that while marriage as such is indissolvable, one never knows whether his or her worldly reality is one of those marriages or not (Karl Barth, C-D, III/4: 203-209). 10 Instead Orthodox orandi, credendi, and hene operandi in both marriage rites are together on pilgrimage, in separable degrees, toward the perfection.

No liturgy for the sacrament of Christian marriage that I know sets the

wedding within the context of the movement of human generations depicted by realistic Biblical narrative more exhaustively, processionally, or in more concrete detail than the Eastern liturgy. By contrast, Western liturgies are often limited to the Feast at Cana or to Jesus' words about marriage as a created ordinance or to "whom God has joined together let no man put asunder." This is pretty thin stuff when compared with the Biblical narrative depiction incorporated into the Eastern liturgy. More of the Old Testa- ment, for example, is brought to bear on the present marriage, and the couple is set by leisurely, lengthy prayers in the context of marriages throughout the whole of Biblical history, from the marriage of our first parents until precisely now. So I suggest that the stark realism of the Order of Second Marriage can be- not softened but- understood along our pulses only when we appre- hend the exhaustive narrative realism of the first Rite.

The Eastern Rite of Holy Matrimony11 breaks down into two parts: the Betrothal and the Marriage, or Crowning. At some times and places betrothal has been separated from marriage by a greater length of time. Ordinarily today the two parts are celebrated in the same service. Betrothal takes place near the entrance of the church.

Anyone reading with Western ears what takes place in Betrothal is likely to suppose that this is the marriage. The commitments here enacted by the church seem as everlasting as anything can be. The church betroths, as later at the Table the church performs the marriage sacrament. The parties are not asked to exchange vows of betrothal- in the future tense; and in the

subsequent Order of Marriage, while they do exchange vows, in this the

marriage does not primarily consist. In Betrothal, the parties are given lighted tapers, signifying purity of life, and rings are exchanged. The priest by prayer reminds them of the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (whom God

miraculously identified to Abraham's servant); and concerning the symbolic rings, the priest says:

By a ring was power given unto Joseph in Egypt; by a ring was Daniel glorified in the land of Babylon; by a ring was the uprightness of Tamar revealed; by a ring did our heavenly Father show forth his bounty upon his Son; for he saith: Put a ring on his hand, and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it and eat, and make merry. By thine own right hand, O Lord, didst thou arm Moses in the Red Sea; by the word of thy truth were the heavens established, and the foundations of the earth were made firm; and the right hands of thy servants shall be blessed also by thy mighty words, and by thine upraised arm. Wherefore, O Lord, do



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thou now bless this putting-on o£ rings with thy heavenly benediction : and let thine Angel go before them all the days o£ their life.

A liturgy that includes a reference to Tatnar in the Betrothal stage of its

first Rite can then not unfittingly refer to Rahab the harlot in its Order of Second Marriage!

The plighting of their troth here accomplished by the church's action would seem already to be an indefeasible union. So strong are the words of this part of the liturgy that one might think the indissoluble bond between the two has already come into being, But this is not so. Marriage takes

place before the Table to which the priest now leads the wedding party. One way to understand this is to imagine a case in which one of the parties drops dead immediately after the Betrothal. There would then be no mar-

riage, however strong may be the words the church enacts over this stage of its Rite of Holy Matrimony. The still-living party to a Betrothal would

certainly not be required in future to be married under the Order of Second

Marriage. Space does not permit me to do more than suggest the detailed depiction

of numerous Biblical marriages, and other figures in Biblical history, called to memory by the priest's prayers in the Order of Marriage. The following example must suffice:

Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Abraham and Sarah: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Jacob and all the patriarchs: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Joseph and Asemath: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Moses and Sepphora: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Joachim and Anna: Bless them, O Lord our God, as thou didst bless Zacharias and Elizabeth: Preserve them, O Lord our God, as thou didst preserve Noah in the ark . . . Jonah in the belly of the whale . . . the three Holy Children from the fire, sending down upon them dew from heaven. Remember them, O Lord our God, as thou didst remember Enoch, Shem, Elijah: . . . thy Forty Holy Martyrs, sending down upon them crowns from heaven: Remember them, O Lord our God, and the parents who have nurtured them; for the prayers of parents make firm the foundations of houses. . . . Exalt them like the cedars of Lebanon, like a luxuriant vine. . . . And let them behold their children's children, like a newly- planted olive-orchard, round about their table; that obtaining favour in

thy sight, they may shine like the stars of heaven, in thee, our God.

The latter words could suggest to Western ears that the "chief blessing" of

marriages of old and until now is "their generation." But this is not the case. The reason is in that the Order of Marriage is faithful to the; Genesis account of the marriage of Adam and Eve. In an earlier prayer, before we come to: "Thou didst bless thy servant Abraham, and opening the womb of Sarah didst make him to be the father of many nations; who didst give Isaac to Rebecca, and didst bless her with child-bearing; who didst join Jacob unto

Rachel, and from that union didst generate the twelve Patriarchs . . . ," the



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following are the opening words: "O God most pure, the Creator of every living being, who didst transform the rib of our forefather Adam into a wife, because of thy love towards mankind, and didst bless them, and say unto them: "Increase, and multiply, and have dominion over the earth; and didst make the twain one flesh : for which cause a man shall leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife and the two shall be one flesh: and what God has joined together let no man put asunder . . ." Or again, in a prayer just before the Crowning: "O holy God, who didst make man out of the dust, and didst fashion his wife out of his rib, and didst join her to him as a helpmeet; for it seemed good to thy majesty that man should not be alone

upon the earth: Do thou, the same Lord, stretch out now also thy hand from thy holy dwelling-place, and conjoin this thy servant, N., and this thy handmaid, N.; for by thee is the husband united unto the wife. Unite them in one mind: wed them into one flesh, [and then in proper sequence:] granting unto them the fruit of the body and the procreation of fair children."

Now it may be that Western liturgies are better than our theologies about the "goods of marriage/' Still, it is extraordinary that these ancient Christian

liturgies of the Eastern churches- which contain so much of their theology and ethics in narrative depiction- rightly ordered the goods of marriage. Be-

ginning with the first marriage in the Garden and all subsequent marriages in the Biblical account here exhaustively rehearsed, including the marriage now begun (which of course has its own sign of hope in "then race," "seeing their children's children") the "primary" meaning (to use Western language) and blessing of marriage is the union of life between the two. In our specu- lative theologies and ethics one has to wait for some of the Reformation Confessions,12 the pre-Milton Puritan divines (Johnson, 1970),13 Jeremy Taylor in the Anglican tradition (Bailey, 1959:196-197), and the Second Vatican Council14 to find this ordering of the goods of marriage union clearly and definitively stated. This, I suppose, is also what is principally blessed, inseverable from procreation, in the Order of Second Marriage; and why the Eastern churches do not refuse this sacrament to divorced persons, i.e., "because it seemed good to thy majesty that man should not be alone upon the earth." The Creator's purpose endures, and his church is not on earth to

deny this even to Rahab the harlot, or to comparable offenders who are divorced and ask the church to marry them a second time. So it may be believed that the same Lord "stretches out now also his hand from his holy dwelling-place"- in the case of second marriages.15

One final comment. In the Order of Marriage, the priest leads the bride and groom and the rest of the wedding party three times around the Table (in honor of the Holy Trinity). The same processions are used while the same hymns are sung in the liturgy for the setting apart of Deacons. This obviously signifies that the priest is wedded to the church. Less obviously, it may be that in the repetition of the same processions and hymns in the marriage liturgy there is some suggestion that the parties are in some sense



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"pries ted" on and for this occasion. They are certainly set apart; indeed they are crowned (whatever this may signify)16 with wreaths of olive branches in the Greek church, with real crowns in the Russian. But as I have said the consents exchanged in the vows the two persons utter in no sense indicate that this is the earthly means God uses in the sacrament, or that they are

expressly ministers of the sacrament to one another. This has been for the present writer a voyage of discovery. Anyone

studying the Rite of Holy Matrimony in the Eastern churches for the first time will find this to be a bracing event. This liturgy is not- as the novelist Somerset Maugham said of the Book of Common Prayer- a lukewarm shower. Nor is it mystery and mystification or other-worldliness. Instead the anchor-

age of this liturgy in Biblical narrative depiction is quite astonishing. More- over, we stand to be corrected if any of us has been beguiled by Nicholas

Berdyaev to believe that the piety of the Eastern churches gives room for a dualism of "the spirit and its freedom"17- to which viewpoint Christian out- looks among us have rapidly capitulated under the name of "personalism," "personal relatedness," "commitment" or "encounter." Again, there can be no accounting for the sense of embodiment to be found here apart from the

liturgy's starkly realistic narrative depiction which shapes the orandi and the credendi and the hene oferandi of Eastern Christianity.

6. The controlling creation story in the Hebrew Bible is God's creation of a people out of next to nothing in Egypt. They were the littlest of all

people, inherently deserving nothing in particular. Yet God called them, made them his own, and determined for them a destiny under his providence (Deuteronomy 7:7, 8a). That was the model for the creation of the world out of chaos. There, too, God called being into being from things that were

naught. It should surprise no one that the same thought-form governs God's

calling into being every single one of us. He called us out of nothing, loved us when we were next to nothing, and determined for us a future destiny.

We should think both of Exodus and Genesis when we read: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou earnest forth from the womb I sanctified thee; and I ordained thee . . . Qeremiah 1:5). Or when we read in Psalm 139:1, 5, 12b-14:

0 Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me

Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand upon me.

Behold, . . . the darkness and the light are alike to thee. For thou hast possessed my reins: Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. 1 will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Marvelous are thy works and that my soul knoweth right well.

Thus, in Exodus, Genesis, Jeremiah and the Psalm, the shape of God's convex determines the shape of our human concave response of gratitude and

rejoicing in the goodness of our creation. For vividness and perhaps greater



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exactitude than the Kg. James, I insert here three alternative translations of the crucial passage: "Thou didst form my inward parts, Thou didst knit me

together in my mother's womb" (RSV). "Thou didst fashion my inward

parts; Thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb" (New English Bible). "It was you who created my inmost self, and put me together in

my mother's womb" (Jerusalem Bible, italics added). It is simply stupid for

anyone to say that the Bible gives no point of departure for addressing the

question of the morality of abortion. Note that in saying this I am not

simply lighting upon the verses in Jeremiah and Psalm 139. If these verses were not there, a prophet or poet could still write them if he or she had any religious sensibility for the Exodus and the Genesis stories of creation, and within these embracing contexts wished to say whence and how came the creation of our particular, individual lives.

If we do not exclude Scripture from the liturgy, from all eternity God resolved not to be God without our particular human life from its microscopic origins. He then began to give us our "incomparable and non-recurrent op- portunity to praise God," as Barth says (C-D, 111/4:339); and in New Testament terms, "The true light of the world shines already in the darkness of the mother's womb" (C-D, 111/4:416). Thus in all three creations- of his people Israel and the second Israel by the new covenant, of the entire cosmos, and of each one of us in particular- God calls into existence the

things that are from things that are not. This is the shape of Biblical

thought. And it is the shape of Christian liturgies so far as the Bible has not been excluded from them.

Yet there are multitudes of sincere contemporary Christian people who seem to believe that the Bible says nothing definitive to the abortion question. I can only conclude that they have not heard Biblical sermons; or else have

responded: "Speak Lord, and thy servant will think it over!" "Pro-choice"

opinion if there be such among us18- or worrying first about when scientifi- cally human life begins or making a crucial and dualist distinction between conscious and pre-conscious life, between personal and individuated "knit

together" biological life- are secular points of view not bent to God's convex. Even if one or another of these other issues must also be taken up, we need first to make it at least as far as Exodus. There the Choice has already been made for covenants of life with life most fragile. Perhaps that conclusively settles nothing yet, but this is how we should look on the question.

Jewish ethics despite its legal code (or despite Christians' failure to understand its legal tradition) is still a formed reference to the covenant. Therefore for Judaism the fetus is a very precious form of life despite the belief and teaching that only when the head or the larger part of the baby passes out of the birth canal do we have a human life with equal sacredness to that of the mother. Despite this "definition," one should violate the most holy day- the Sabbath- in order to save unborn life. You violate for him one Sabbath in order that he may observe many Sabbaths. Not to. work on the



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Sabbath to save fetal life, no less than to save a conscious person, would be (in secular terms) criminal negligence of the highest order or (in religious terms) to violate a sacredness that is greater than Sabbath observances and lesser than only the sacredness of the full-born image of God in cases of conflict. There is more similarity between normative Judaism and normative Christian ethics on the morality of abortion than there is between either and "pro-choice"- if I don't misunderstand the latter claim. The religious background of this commonality should be quite clear. Both Biblical traditions are reflections of covenant and of the narrative of Divine events that

shape the shape of the moral lives of adherents to either community. Different terms have to be used to home in on the narrative that has

determined through all ages until now the Christian outlook and on-look on the ethical question I am now using for an illustration. First, an excursion into propositional theology. How many readers of this article have ever heard of the Christian Action Council? It is the voice in Washington, D. C, of Evangelicals of many sorts in the United States. Evangelicals seem to be

making Christians faster than convex liberals make up their minds to drop out of a movement in which they no longer believe. Our society [The American Society of Christian Ethics] will not become truly national until

Evangelicals are made welcome among us, brought into our dialogue, get on the program, etc.19

Some Evangelicals make a straightforward Christological argument. When was God made man? Surely not in the stable in Bethlehem. The same

Gospel tells us when: at conception. All, then, one needs to learn is how with accuracy to conceive of conception. We learned this when the ovum was discovered. Before then Christian views about when God was made man varied with the then current notions of conception. So did Christian

teaching about the morality of abortion. On this question there is no more to say- unless one wants to embrace a novel form of gnosticism- about the

person of Jesus Christ incarnate. Let us call this "uterine gnosticism"; during his life in Mary's womb Jesus was only becoming man. One either embraces a heresy, or else believes that we become human later in development than

Jesus Christ did. That's more of a miracle than these particular Evangelicals care to swallow.

I bring this in as preamble to saying something far more important; and connected with liturgy, not propositional doctrine. Far more than any argument, it was surely the power of the Nativity Stories and their place in ritual and celebration and song that tempered the conscience of the West to its audacious effort to wipe out the practice of abortion and infanticide. As the hold of the stories over the minds and imaginations of millions upon millions of men and women recedes, it is clear that both abortion and infanticide are

becoming "thinkable" again as permissable practices, even good. After the Annunciation it is recorded in St. Luke's Gospel that "Mary

rose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of



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Judea; and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth. "Hi, Liz/' she said; "I am 'with embryo'." And Elizabeth responded, "Hail, Mary, didn't you know? I'm 'carrying a fetus' .... Lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy" QLuke 1:39-44, slightly revised). So did John the Baptist, the Forerunner, first point to the Christ.

But that is not how the story goes. From the correct version heard and

sung and dramatized generations of men and women learned to feel and think of their own unborn children in a very special way. The Nativity Narratives served as a model for human beginnings, just as the creation of a

people out of Egypt did for Genesis, Jeremiah and the Psalm. The Christmas story and songs did more than any argument to form the consciences of generations of men and women to respect and protect human life when next to

nothing. It was liturgy and not theology or ethics that turned the face of Christians against abortion and infanticide prevalently practiced in Graeco- Roman times, in all known cultures, and both of which practices are gaining in approval in our heralded post-Christian age.

Renewal might begin where we started- by enactment and reenactment of the following modest liturgical proposal. On the occasion of just and necessary abortions the parents and family could be led in a prayer drafted

by Anglican Bishop John Taylor (1978:23) of Winchester, England: Heavenly Father, you are the giver of life, and you share with us the care of the life that is given. Into your hands we commit in trust the developing life that we have cut short. Look in kindly judgment on the decision that we have made and assure us in all our uncertainty that your love for us can never change. Amen.

Vigorous objection has been raised against the Bishop of Winchester's proposed ritual. He would turn a crime against humanity into a liturgical act; "pray his people into believing that all seven deadly sins are properly seven little sacraments, creative alternatives to the seven big ones." Torguemada, the objector goes on to say, "had a few collects for sticking pins into Ana-

baptists, but nothing for children" (Rutler, 1978:20). I raised a similar objection to rituals on the occasion of divorce. But

everything here depends on what the Bishop of Winchester meant. If he meant the prayer to be used in elective abortion, of course the objector is correct: this would be a cover-up to salve still scrupulous consciences with a sentimental and hypocritical piety. "This hurts me more than it does

you," the objector said was the excuse offered, to God and to the child being killed. I suggest that an opposite meaning may be ascribed to Winchester, or use made of his liturgical proposal. If Christians prayed these words, with their priests and ministers, in the case of just and necessary abortion, then with them could begin a struggle of the church for itself against itself for the hene operandi of the Christian life.

The truth is, on this point and many others in ethics and the Christian



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moral life, that as Karl Barth wrote in 1932 in the preface to the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, anyone waiting for the Protestant church to take itself (i.e., its dogmatic-theological-ethical task) seriously would have to wait until doomsday "unless in all modesty he dares in his own place and as well as he knows how, to be the church" (Frei, 1978).

This article is incomplete without a consideration of the importance of the triune "heads" of the traditional creeds, the violation of this order in certain modern creeds recited in the liturgy, and the significance of each in the formation or malformation of the bene esse and bene operandi of Chris- tian communities and persons. Also needed is an extended treatment of the confessions of certain churches in the tradition of the Reformation that are never recited, and of the relation of worship in these churches to the rule of faith and life expressed at great length in their confessions. Even the im-

poverishment of the English language, the loss of elevating cadences, in much contemporary worship has paramount importance when at issue is the

liturgy of the church, and as well Christian faith and moral life. From the

point of view of their specialty, liturgists need to criticize theological or ethical developments that may be incompatible with a living and authentic

liturgy. Theological ethicists, in turn, need to criticize developments in

liturgy that run against Christian believing and doing well. Together we

may assist the contemporary church better to worship, praise and adore the God we believe and mean to obey with our lives.

Since I have mentioned certain changes in Christian liturgy that are unwarranted and that ultimately impair our credendi bene oyerandi, I conclude by citing a degraded liturgy that did me no ultimate harm- as it turned out. So maybe the formation of Christian persons and communities can survive despite liturgical tinkerers and religious leaders uninformed by lex orandi lex credendi lex bene operandi.

The Methodist Youth Fellowship did its best to bring me up to say John Wesley's grace before meals in the following words:

Be present at our table, Lord; Be here and everywhere adored. These mercies bless, and grant that we May feast in fellowship with Thee.

Wesley's words were: "Be here as everywhere adored/' This meant that the small company gathered at table were joining their voices to the voice of the church universal and the invisible choirs of heaven in praise and thanks-

giving. The prayer was not that God be adored everywhere as here. There was not the slightest temptation toward such spiritual work-righteousness. Wesley's words were: "May feast in Paradise with Thee." But I had a surfeit of "fellowship" so as not finally to define paradise in such terms, even



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without Hans Frei's caution that I needed better conceptual depiction to inform my youthful immediacies and experience. The third alteration made

by the MYF probably required more maturity and theological critique of this

piece of liturgy, to recover from. For Wesley did not write "These mercies bless ..." "Mercies" only hover over our concrete reality; any kind of re-

ligiousness can do that. The word does not inform or form the persons who

say them in any special way. Wesley's words were "These creatures bless . . ." "Creatures" is a word that intrudes into our embodied existence, and brings to bear the doctrine of creation. It also recalls to mind the fact that as the Fall deepened after the Garden where wre were originally intended by God to tend his creation and eat only of the fruit of the plants and trees- as one

generation followed another east of Eden- it was only by gracious permission in the covenant with Noah, accommodated to the preservation of humankind in a fallen world, that we are allowed to eat our fellow living creatures, the animals.

Here I mean only to give an autobiographical instance of the fact that diminished contemporary pieces of liturgy are not omnideterminant. Direct access to Biblical narrative20 can provide the credendi and perhaps the bene

oferandi place on which to stand.

NOTES

11 thought at first to say "Lex/Ordo" to indicate the principium (a "beginning") and corresponding derivative regularities in our orandi, credendi and hene operandu But the Latin word Lex says all this. Its first meaning, of course, is "law" in our familiar sense. But the word is also used for precept, regulation, principle, rule, mode or manner (one can act in a disorderly, i.e., unlawful, manner); contract, agreement or covenant; condition or stipulation (as in terms of peace). (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary'). Albert Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin-Vrangais des Auteurs Chretien lists the

following ecclesiastical usages: strictly, the law of Moses and in the N.T. "the whole law" introducing the love commandments; the lex fidei, as in Romans 3:27, which the Oxford Annotated Bible translates as the "principle" of faith vs. the "principle" of works; the law of Christ, as in Galatians 6:2; the law of God, as in natural law; any social law, precept or command; the law of death, as in Romans 8:2. Thanks to my colleague Paula Fredrickson, an Augustine scholar, for this footnote.

2 In the first section, entitled "The Problem of Special Ethics," of §52 "Ethics as a Task of the Doctrine of Creation" at the beginning of C-D, III/ 4. Some Barthians I know- and students of Barth- seem never to get beyond the "instant" ethics of Divine Command in 11/ 2. Although Barth doesn't like Bonhoeffer's expression "mandates," he praises Bonhoeffer for perceiving that "what is involved in the constancy of ethical events must also be learned only from the Word of God if a formed reference to it is to be legitimate and meaningful." The task of ethics is to explain "why the connexion and differentiation of this Word compels us in this question of constancy to turn to these particular spheres in this particular way" [to follow in this volume]. "At all times and places it [the ethical event] will show this outline" because God characterizes himself "(in accordance with His inner trinitarian being) as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer." The ethical event means "action on the three corresponding planes," corresponding to Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer; man exists and the moral life answers to God in these different respects. "God is indeed the Creator of the field to



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which we would look in special ethics- even though we cannot know Him in this field as the Creator he is. While there can be no casuistry (as Barth defines it), neither can there be a formless "purely piecemeal ethics'* (Barth, C-D, 111/4:22, 23, 28, 29-30, italics added).

3 Elsewhere in III/4, Barth continues to use expressions like "sphere," "field" and "the character of an allotted framework." Of "Near and Distant Neighbors," he writes that "that there are particular peoples rests on those ordinances Qordinationes'). But these are not permanent orders Qordines*) of creation like the being of man and woman or parents and children" (first italics added). The latter are "irremoveable" structures (my word) of "confrontation" and coexistence, while the former are fluid. So he calls the state "a genuine and specific order of the covenant" and not an "order of creation" (Barth, CD, 111/4:288, 300, 303).

*I owe this conceptual depiction of the orandi to my colleague, Horton Davies, author of the definitive 5-vol. work on Worship and Theology in England. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1970, 1975.

5 For thirty minutes in a TV interview by Philip Scharfer, on the occasion of the Eucharistic Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, a few years ago.

Eastern Orthodoxy does seem to be a standing example of shaping influence

running from liturgy to faith and life- as we shall see below in an examination of its Rite of Holy Matrimony. Fr. Georges Florovsky (1972:58) insists that this is the case. "One has to return from the school-room to the worshipping Church and perhaps to

change the school dialectic of theology for the pictorial and metaphorical language of

Scripture. The very nature of the Church can be rather depicted and described than

properly defined." He affirms the primacy of liturgy: ut legem credendi statuat lex orandi; so that the rule of worship should establish the rule of faith. This is a

quotation from St. Prosper of Aquitania, who found the truth and reality of original sin in infant baptism. St. Basil used doxologies in theological argument against the later Arians concerning the Holy Spirit. For him dogmata meant "unwritten habits"- the whole structure of liturgical and sacramental acts. St. Irenaeus spoke of traditio veritatis (tradition of truth), regula veritatis, regula fidei, in a depositum juvenescens (a living tradition). Faith and life are shaped by traditio et redditio symholi-the transmission and repetition of the Creed, which until the 4th century in both East and West were not to be written down (Florovsky, 1972:84-86, 88). If Eastern Orthodoxy was our only example, it might be agreed that lex orandi is regnant over credendi and hene operandi.

6 The Golden Rule in no way reflects moral events that are the concave of the convex of God's action.

7 Ramsey (1963) may still be worth reading. This essay was an extension of my third 1958 Ashley Lectures on Law and Theology at the New York University School of Law, the first two having been published as parts of the final two chapters in my Nine Modern Moralists (Ramsey, 1962). The essay may be worth reading precisely because it is dated as to the civil law of marriage; and thus it mirrors how much and how rapidly the imprint of a Christian understanding of marriage has been removed from the public order- how far we have "progressed" in fragmenting the marriage bond. In this situation there would seem to be need for the church to struggle against itself for itself in its witness to the world on the matter of marriage. Instead all signs point to the fact that these worldly trends have met with little resistance, indeed are welcomed, and widely incorporated into a bene operandi still called "Christian" without warrant in credendi or orandi.

Thus, in the statement of "Social Principles" adopted by the General Conference of the United Methodist Church in 1972 we read: "We assert the sanctity of the

marriage covenant." In the commission that drew up these social principles for adoption



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or emendation by the General Conference, it was proposed that we say "the sanctity of marriage as a lifelong partnership." To this it was objected that this had already been said by the word "sanctity"- which was not true, else the overwhelming majority would not have rejected the additional words. Where the social principles affirm "we recognize divorce and the right of divorced persons to remarry," it was proposed to add the words "pleading only God's mercies and forgiveness and with thankfulness for his grace in the renewal of life." Here our social action curia hit the roof, saying this would place us in the position of Anglican churches- which was not true, since Methodists have no relic of canonical courts or appeals to the Bishop to review proposed second marriages. The words would have simply stated a standard to be held before lay persons and for ministers to apply freely in their judgments about remarriages within the church. Those words, too, were rejected. So individual conscience and pastoral practice was left with no relic of a proper Christian context. I dubbed our minority the "four just men," a scriptural reference I leave the reader to locate. On another matter, the social principles adopted state that "the blessing of God is upon marriage whether or not the persons have children." This is true beyond doubt. But behind this statement was a penultimate draft: "We urge social approval, and not mere tolerance, of marriages in which the partners elect not to have children"- itself a position that is possibly defensible as a vocation if set in a proper Christian context and not that of an arbitrary liberty or despair over the future. On this point the minority of four succeeded in introducing the draft words "The child is a blessing of marriage and a sign of hope. Yet God also blesses childless marriages." These words were lost somewhere in the course of revision left to staff, who could have restored the penultimate meaning, or lost in the procedures by which the General Conference adopted them (United Methodist Church, 1972).

8 The symbolism of "death" of a marriage partner as grounds permitting remarriage is used in The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647): "In the case of Adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a Divorce: Arid after the Divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead" (Ch. XXIV, par. V). The next paragraph goes on to affirm that "nothing but Adultery, or such wilfull deser- tion as can no way be remedied, by the Church, or Civil Magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of Marriage." My understanding is that in granting divorces- i.e., declaring a marriage dead- the Orthodox churches do not need to search out a limited number of scriptural grounds. Instead it is the Order of Second Marriages with its vivid and specific penitences that liturgically preserves the indissolvability that is so pronounced in the first Rite.

The entire chapter on marriage and divorce was revised when the Westminster Confession was adopted by The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1958. There We read that "as a breach of that holy relation may occasion divorce, so remarriage after a divorce granted on grounds explicitly stated in Scripture or implicit in the gospel of Christ may be sanctioned in keeping with his redemptive gospel. . . ." Presumably, it is left to pastoral care to determine whether the grounds for dissolution were "implicit in the gospel of Christ"; and this of course is apt to be an open sesame. The words, however, just quoted continue by saying "when sufficient penitence for sin and failure is evident, and a firm purpose of and endeavor after Christian marriage is manifest"; and the words are preceded by the church's declaration of concern "with the present penitence as well as the past innocence or guilt of those whose marriage has been broken" (United Presbyterian Church, 1970:6.123-124 and n. 25). This does sound remarkably like generalized, non-specific penitence; and since the same ceremony is used for second as for first marriages there is no public acknowl-

edgment in the corporate body of the church of what a remarkable thing it must be for persons to be able to vow lifelong union a second time. Such practice of remarriage



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after divorce cannot fail to weaken the lifelong union the church intends, and turn it into an ideal or hope- and finally (as we are seeing in our culture) not even that.

9 The Western church has the better scriptural authority for rejecting the East's disfavor upon marriage after the death of a spouse. For example, the Second Helvetic Confession, Ch. XXIX: "We therefore condemn polygamy, and those who condemn second marriages." This line is headed "THE SECTS"; it was against sectarian extremes that the 16th century Reformed confession took aim. Moreover, the Orthodox churches "condemn" second marriages while yet performing them- as some sectarians did not (United Presbyterian Church, 1970:5.246).

10Barth knows very well that, without accepting the sacramental interpretation, there are sufficient grounds in Scripture for affirming the indissolvability of marriage. It is "a lasting life-partnership. ... To enter upon marriage is to renounce the possibility of leaving it ... for all their common future. . . . What is mirrored and reflected in them, and this constitutes their norm, is the faithfulness ( in the sense of constancy) of the gracious God to His covenant-partner . . . and the indelibility of the character which for all time is thus imparted to this His people" (pp. 203-204). But then Barth asks, "But what then, what marriage . . . has God really put together in this irre- vocable way? It is better for no lovers or married couple, even the happiest, to claim to be in this situation. . . . What is present to their consciousness cannot be the divine irrevocability of their union. . . . The calling and gift of God on which this indissolubility depends flow from the mercy which He does not owe to anyone in this particular form" (pp. 207-208). So marriages are also "radically dissoluble"- qualified only by Barth 's insistence that it is also better for no lovers or married couple, even the

wnhappiest, the most unsuited, etc., to claim that their marriage is among those that God has not blessed with indissolvability! (p. 209).

11 In the following I refer without specific page citation to "The Rite of Holy Matrimony: The Betrothal Service" and "The Order of Marriage, or of Crowning" (Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 1956:291-302).

12 For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647): "Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of Husband and Wife, for the increase of man-kinde with legitimate issue, and of the Church with holy seed, and for preventing of uncleannesse" (Ch. XXIV, par. II). This entire chapter was revised when the confession was adopted by The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1958. Both texts are printed in United Presbyterian Church, 1970:6.123-124 and n. 25.

13 See. esp. p. 92, n. 5 for a comparison of the Puritan view of marriage with that of Thomas Aquinas specifically on their respective locations of the good of procreation.

14 "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" (Vatican Council II, 1965:47-55). I say only "clearly and definitively stated." See Ramsey (1975:15) for an analysis of the "mutual love" section of that too much maligned 1930 Encyclical Casti Connuhii.

15 Here my words are drawn from the Rite for first marriage in order to express what the Eastern churches believe, and liturgically enact, in the case of second marriages also. Second marriage is not exclusively a post-lapsarian concession.

Concerning the order of the goods of marriage, we ought not to forget in inter- preting a liturgy so rich in Biblical imagery that the reference to the marriage of Jacob and Rachel in the prayer quoted in the text above from the first Rite cannot mean to elevate to first place the fact that from this union sprang the twelve Patriarchs. Any mention of Jacob and Rachel calls also to mind that Jacob worked twice seven years to gain her, and that at least the first seven years "seemed to him but a few days, for the love that he had for her" (Genesis 29:20). And Jacob buried her in Bethlehem (Genesis 35:19), where was to be born the Man of Sorrows.

16 Nicholas Berdyaev (1937:234) suggests that the crowns convey a comparison



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with the martyrs' crowns. Graced fortitude will be needed if husband and wife are to bear each other's burdens; since life on earth is always full of pain, all true love means tragedy and suffering. Cf. the words, "Remember them, O Lord our God, as thou didst remember thy Forty Holy Martyrs, sending down upon them crowns from heaven . . ." in the prayer quoted in the text above.

17Berdyaev (1950:75) wrote in his autobiographical reflections that "I am repelled by the very sight of pregnant women: but I do not take any pride in this; in fact I am distressed by such reactions. I never disliked children. I was for instance, very much attached to my nephews. But I could not help seeing in child-bearing something hostile to personality; something that is evidence of the dissolution of personality." In this entire section Berdyaev (1950:68-77) develops an opposition between genus and sex, on the one hand, and love and personality on the other. See Berdyaev 1937:232-242 and 1955:180-224 for this author's move from a simple dualism to a more complex one: androgynity. No great harm, of course, can be done by one Russian romantic. But when large sections of the contemporary church opinion goes gnostic or Albigensian, there is cause for alarm.

18 It is alleged, for example, that the position of the United Methodist Church is identical with the so-called "pro-choice" position of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights whose headquarters are housed in the Methodist Building near the Capitol in Washington, D. C, and which coalition has managed to effect permanent relation with a number of state Councils of Churches. The basis of such an assertion about the Methodist position is the statement introduced from the floor and adopted by the 1972 General Conference in Atlanta. This statement reads: "We support the removal of abortion from the criminal code, placing it instead under laws relating to other procedures of standard medical practice." This was, of course, a statement about the legal order, and not about Methodist church bene operandi. The latter was not left to individualistic choice of parents, or of the woman principally concerned. The controlling words, into which that statement was introduced are: "Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy. In continuity with past Christian tradition, we recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion. We call all Christians to a searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that warrant abortion." ("Social Principles," United Methodist Church, 1972.)

These are serious words. They concern the church, and not the legal order only. At stake is the bene operandi of the Christian faith. The words are "unacceptable" not simply an "unwanted" pregnancy. That unacceptability is measured against loss of life or devastating damage. The word "mother" is used, and "fetus" is not. No pro- choice, individualistic point-of-view is endorsed. Most important of all, these words call the church to a common searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that warrant abortions. This means that the Christian community is in some, but definite, sense the "decision maker." If in answer to this call Methodists had responded in any way, i.e., if we had been a church, there would still, of course, have been individual freedom to go contrary to what the church might teach as our well-doing or wrong-doing in the matter of abortion. Parents, or individual women, who chose contrary to the sorts of pregnancies believed acceptable, or the sorts of abortions believed unjustifiable, would still be free to do so. But let no one say that the United Methodist Church has as yet officially endorsed the preposterous proposition that individualistic, voluntaristic decision is capable of making right right, or wrong wrong.

19 There is no journal of Christian opinion to be compared with Sh'ma which man- ages to get Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed rabbis, laymen and women to write articles.



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20 Of course, one can also learn the same lesson from reading Karl Barth, C-D, 111/4:349-356.

REFERENCES

Bailey, Derrick Sherwin 1959 Sexual Relation in Christian Thought. New York: Harper.

Barth, Karl C-D Church Dogmatics.

Berdyaev, Nicholas 1937 The Destiny of Man. London: Geoffrey Bles. 1950 Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography. London: Geoffrey

Bles. 1955 The Meaning of the Creative Act. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Cochrane, Arthur C. 1962 The Church's Confession under Hitler. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Florovsky, Georges 1972 Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. The Collected

Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. 1. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Pub-

lishing Co.

Frankena, William K. 1966 "On saying the ethical thing," Presidential Address, American Philo-

sophical Association (Western Division), 1966. Proceedings and Ad- dresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 39, 1965-1966. Yellow Springs, Ohio: The Antioch Press.

Frei, Hans 1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press. 1978 Review of Eberhard Busch's Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and

Autobiographical Texts (transl. by John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), in Virginia Seminary Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2, July 1978; enlarged and to be reprinted in the Canadian Journal of Religious Studies I Sciences Religieuses.

Hare, R. M. 1965 Freedom and Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Translated and Arranged by Isabel Florence Hapgood. Brooklyn, N. Y.: Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.

Johnson, James Turner 1970 A Society Ordained By God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the

First Half of the Seventeenth Century. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press.

Ramsey, Paul 1962 Nine Modern Moralists. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1963 "Marriage law and biblical covenant." Pp. 41-77 in Donald A. Giannella,



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ed., Religion and the Public Order. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

1968 "The case of the curious exception." Pp. 67-135 in Gene Outka and Paul Ramsey, eds., Norm and Context in Christian Ethics. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

1975 One Flesh: A Christian View of Sex Within, Outside and Before Mar- riage. Bramcote Notts, England: Grove Booklets in Ethics.

1977 "Kant's moral theology or a religious ethicsr" (Response to Alasdair Maclntyre), pp. 44-74 in H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Daniel Cal- lahan, eds., Knowledge, Value and Belief. Hastings-on-Hudson, N. Y.: Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences.

Rutler, George William 1978 "Diary of a country priest." New Oxford Review, October.

Taylor, Bishop John 1978 "Prayer on the occasion of abortion." America, July 22.

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Assembly. Vatican Council II

1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. (Gaudium et Spes*), December 7. Washington, D. C: National Catholic Welfare Conference, Reprint, 1976.



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