Luke Bretherton’s On Living Well: A Primer in Christian Ethics is a constructive and highly original work, which introduces students to central questions, issues, tasks, and themes in the fields of Christian ethics and political theology. The book seamlessly draws together various strands of Christian ethics and theology often thought to be at odds, showing that living well is intimately bound up with listening, acting, and relating to others well amid difficulty and even tragedy. As Bretherton notes in the introduction, the book is the product of having taught introductory Christian ethics courses for over twenty years on both sides of the Atlantic as well as his wealth of experience working with churches and community organizations.

My first experience teaching an introductory course in Christian ethics was as a preceptor for Eric Gregory’s course at Princeton University in which he assigned Stanley Hauerwas’s primer in Christian ethics, The Peaceable Kingdom (1991). Perhaps for this reason, I found myself comparing Bretherton’s primer with Hauerwas’s. The two primers share many similar themes from the role of scripture, tradition, virtue, character, laws, commands, rules, practical wisdom, sin, and tragedy in Christian ethics, to the centrality of Jesus’s life and teaching. But they are also distinct in several important ways. Hauerwas famously emphasizes Christian identity and narratives (the church vs. world) in the formation of ethical character. Bretherton’s central questions, which frame the three main parts—“What is going on? What is to be done? How shall we live?”—conclude with an emphasis on plurality as well as secular and democratic politics as moral theological commitments. Other distinctives of the book include its synthesis of moral and political theology, its effort to put traditional sources of Christian ethical thought in conversation with liberationists and critical voices, and the centrality of the non-human natural world for Christian ethics (4). In short, the scope, depth, and thematic emphases distinguish this primer from Hauerwas’s among others.

At a time when conversations in Christian ethics and political theology are often polarized and polarizing, this text exemplifies alternative ways to think and talk about contemporary challenges in light of the Christian tradition. The questions that follow invite reflections from Bretherton in three related areas: Why this primer now? What ought a primer do? And how might we help students to navigate the landscape of “modern” philosophy, theology, and ethics?

Why this primer now?

In the introduction, Bretherton addresses several key questions including “Why a Primer? And Why This Primer?” and “What is Christian Ethics?” So, I invite him to reflect on related questions that are pressing for the field today. Why this primer now, given institutional and programmatic constraints for the field of Christian ethics?

As Bretherton well knows, liberal arts colleges, universities, seminaries, and divinity schools have begun to cast Christian ethics as an elective of graduate education or the occasional ambitious undergraduate student.1 Religion and theology majors are waning in secular and Christian universities alike. Even Catholic universities (like my own) are following the trends of their Protestant counterparts over a century ago: overhauling core curricula, making introductory courses in theology and Christian ethics negligible or outsourcing them to seminaries, divinity schools, or theological institutes. Gregory’s packed lecture hall at Princeton is the exception.

Why, then, write a primer in Christian ethics in such a time, and for whom? Is the aim to resuscitate conversations and resource classes in Christian ethics or to contribute to wider conversations in religious ethics, or both? Is the hope to reinvigorate the field of Christian ethics at the undergraduate or graduate levels, or both?

What might a Primer in Christian Ethics Do?

As Bretherton states from the outset, the book does not merely introduce central debates or themes in Christian Ethics, but also makes constructive arguments: “like any good guide, it narrates a landscape while at the same time charting a specific path” (5). I wonder how Bretherton thought about and navigated this tension throughout. The path he charts is laudable: emphasizing the importance of listening carefully to creation, scripture, strangers, cries for liberation, and ancestors (Chs. 2–6). And yet I have questions about the landscape and path or paths.

Might a primer introduce students to the landscape of specific debates in the field, and if so, how? Bretherton notes the reality of conflict within Christian communities and emphasizes the importance of debate, deliberation, and discernment in Christian ethics, but the book does not introduce students to the landscape or chart a path through many of the central debates that persist among Christian ethicists (or moral and political theologians) today—whether gender, sexuality, abortion, women’s ordination, just war, pacifism, vegan or vegetarian food ethics, etc. (3). To be fair, Bretherton might respond that his emphasis on the call to listen to specific human communities (strangers, ancestors, and those who cry for liberation) and non-human creation suggests certain paths through various thorny thickets. And he acknowledges that the book, like a good pedagogue, may inspire more questions than it resolves. But I wonder how Bretherton wrestled with whether the book might serve as a guide to or though these debates, explaining why they have come to be contentious or how Christian ethicists in various ecclesial traditions navigate these differences.

In this light, I invite Bretherton to share more about what he wanted this primer to be and do: how and why did he choose to orient readers to particular features of the landscape and not others, to guide readers through specific aspects of the “the meaning and practices of a moral life” and not others. Of course, as Bretherton notes, a primer is “a first word” not a last or comprehensive word (5). Still, I wonder how he determined which constructive arguments he would and would not make.

Again, granting that a primer cannot “speak to every contemporary issue or ethical concern” nor “cover every figure mentioned or question raised with the depth they invite,” I wonder how Bretherton thinks about the role of a primer in orienting students to the landscape of the wider and interrelated fields of Christian ethics (5). This is, in part, a question about how to introduce students not just to various themes, but also to thinkers that have and continue to shape the landscape of the field today.

The range of thinkers and texts highlighted throughout the book suggests that Bretherton is attuned to the politics of citation, in the best sense, bringing an array of historical and contemporary Christian ethicists, theologians, and philosophers into a shared conversation about living well. Indeed, the text exemplifies the very practice of “listening well” that it commends as a practice to readers. The range of reference especially with respect to black Christian ethicists and theologians is notable, featuring the essential contributions of scholars such as Katie Cannon, James Cone, emilie townes, Shawn Copeland, Willie James Jennings, Cornel West, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Vincent Lloyd, Melanie Harris, and Thelathia Nikki Young. So too, a student perusing the index would find references to a range of contemporary secular philosophers like Kate Mann, Danielle Allen, Miranda Fricker, Lisa Tessman, and Joan Tronto, and queer theologians and theorists from Marcella Althaus-Reid to Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler.

And precisely because of this range, I found it somewhat surprising that major thinkers and texts are not mentioned or cited where it would seem fitting to do so, not just to credit their contributions but also to introduce students to recent conversations and thinkers in the field. Again, the point is not comprehensiveness or maximal inclusion, but rather to orient students to the landscape by introducing them to important contributions to the field: Keri Day on Azusa, Melissa Snarr on labor and the living wage movement, Gary Dorrien on histories of Christian social ethics, Rebecca Todd Peters on reproductive justice, Jeffrey Stout on democracy and tradition, Willis Jenkins on environmental ethics, etc. In an earlier draft of the book, I found it striking that there was no mention of Stanley Hauerwas or Alasdair MacIntyre in the chapter on virtue ethics. My concern is not that such an elision would fail to acknowledge their contributions to Christian and virtue ethics broadly, but that it would fail to orient students to thinkers and conversations that continue to shape the field today, indeed, conversations that make the contributions of those featured in the book, like Katie Cannon, Melanie Harris, and Lisa Tessman, all the more important. How did Bretherton, how should we, think about these questions of citation as we help students navigate the landscape, introduce students to conversations, in the field?

How might we narrate and help students navigate “modern” philosophy, theology, and ethics?

Antipathy toward modernity has become prevalent among those who romanticize the pre-modern era as well those who recognize the horrors of modernity and hope for a post-modern, de-colonial, anti-racist future. I tend to sympathize with the latter and be suspicious of the former. Many scholars over the past few decades, including myself, have argued that grand narratives of modern decline, which look somewhat wistfully to the pre-modern era, are inadequate, oversimplified, and depend on an overly narrow canon of modern thinkers. Modernity has many horrors and tragedies of its own devising, but the pre-modern era is no less replete with its own forms of domination, exploitation, and horror. Moreover, modernity is not one thing but many things.

I trust Bretherton is familiar with efforts to expand so-called modern canons and thereby tell more nuanced stories about the mixed bag of modernity. For this reason, I found it curious that many chapters repeat various of the narratives of modern demise or of “dominant modern stories” (29, 114). I wondered why Bretherton found it pedagogically useful to do so. In the book, the term “modern” is typically used to describe some negative or undesirable development, whether in conceptions of nature, culture, and sin, or science, medicine, moral philosophy, human rights, and economics (29–32, 122, 144, 159–160, 279). Admitting that primers must paint with some broad strokes, what might be gained or lost by painting modernity in such broad strokes, particularly when introducing students to the relevant literatures and debates? Consider a few examples.

In the second chapter, Bretherton is critical of modern moral philosophy broadly and specifically modern conceptions of nature and culture and anthropocentric forms of environmental ethics. According to this narrative, modernity entails a shift from a conception of culture as cultivating to dominating nature, from cosmology to a materialist and mechanistic view of the universe, and from supernaturalism and ethics based in natural law to philosophical naturalism (29–31). Surely, there’s some truth to this story. But alone, I worry that it conceals the ways that natural law frameworks persist in modernity, as well as the reasons why many feminist and queer ethicists have rejected the conceptions of nature supported by these frameworks. Moreover, this narrative conceals the wide array of resources within modern moral philosophy, Christian ethics, and environmental ethics, for doing precisely what Bretherton commends, namely for “imagining and narrating… how the material conditions of human flourishing are interwoven with those of nonhuman flourishing” (33). Why not also narrate the streams of thought—from indigenous spiritualities or the Romantics and Transcendentalists to contemporary environmental ethicists—that provide resources for the non-anthropocentric “metabolic vision of moral and political agency” that Bretherton commends (32)?

Likewise, Bretherton rightly laments the ways that “modern medicine constitutively reduces the body to biology” and “modern medical knowledge” tends to discredit prior, inherited, and experiential knowledge, for instance, that held by women and midwives about pregnancy and birthing (95). Still, this narrative seems to elide important gains in modern medicine including its contribution to dramatically reducing the maternal mortality rate since the eighteenth century. Why not celebrate the knowledge and wisdom gained by modern medicine and practices of midwifery, while refusing the elitism of the former?

As a final example, in chapter six “Listening to the Ancestors,” Bretherton narrates the ways that “modern moral philosophy claimed to free itself from tradition, particularly religious tradition” believing that “ethical injunctions needed to be universal and impartial” (113). By “modern moral philosophy” Bretherton has in mind the framework of Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Kant, which he claims became and remains the “dominant framework for thinking about moral questions” (115). This framework is “exemplified in human rights discourse, which begins from the assumption that human rights are universal, derived from reason alone, and provide a means of critiquing other kinds of moral and political claims” (114). As ever, there is some truth to this story—one that’s been reiterated by many narratives of modern decline.

But why let this small canon stand in for “modern moral philosophy” or even “the Enlightenment” when there are other significant strands of modern moral philosophy one could highlight for students, from figures in the so-called “radical Enlightenment” or religious dissenters who understood themselves as participating in “traditions of dissent,” to Scottish Enlightenment figures who emphasized the role of affect and emotion for ethical reasoning, or those who radicalized traditions of the virtues and rights in modernity? Moreover, as Brian Tierney convincingly argues, the idea of natural and human rights has much deeper historical and theological roots than Locke, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Grotius, and Ockham, among medieval Franciscans and Canonists.2 Indeed, the idea of subjective human rights (whether particular or universal) can be traced to twelfth-century theological arguments about justice and poverty. These histories suggest slightly different narratives and highlight different features of the landscape of modern moral philosophy, theology, ethics, and rights discourse.

These three questions are not meant to diminish the extraordinary contribution of Bretherton’s to the field of Christian and religious ethics more broadly, as guide, devotional resource, and catalyst to provoke reflection and engagement with ethical questions (5). Rather, I hope my questions provoke further conversations about why the field needs this primer now, what a primer in Christian ethics should do, and how we should introduce students to the hazards and resources of modernity for Christian ethics today.

Readers of Luke Bretherton are familiar with his encyclopedic erudition, which spans an astonishing range of areas. A Primer in Christian Ethics is written for a wider audience than Bretherton’s previous books, displaying his sensitivities as a teacher and his integrity as a scholar-practitioner. As I was reading this text, I noticed a pattern in my reactions to it. Bretherton would offer some learned, provocative insight, and I would pause to consider the implications. As my mind wandered to questions that I have been pondering for some time, I would think, “What would Bretherton say about this topic? I wish I could ask him.” Then I would remember that this forum gives me the opportunity. Thank you, Syndicate! Here are three topics for discussion.

Politics and Domination

Chapter 14 defines politics in the most general terms as the activity by which humans structure their collective lives (317, 322–23). Politics is not restricted to the voting booth or elected officials. It applies to any sphere of life in which humans interact with each other and need social order. Politics is thus an activity for churches, boardrooms, neighbors, and even nomadic communities (325–26). Not everyone is a vocational politician, but everyone does politics.

Bretherton poses politics as an alternative to violence and coercion. Apart from politics, the only options are killing, dominating, or persecuting one’s enemies (317, 326–27, 348). Politics promotes participation and collaboration, listening and dialogue in which everyone can be heard, including marginalized members of a given community (335–37). The community can then assess what practices, policies, or arrangements would equitably serve all members. I am sympathetic to much of this vision, particularly in the present moment when dialogue and deliberation are in short supply. I have questions, however, about whether politics can avoid violence and coercion, and what this entails for Christian political engagement.

If politics involves the establishment of practices and structures to govern a given community, it seems also to require the establishment of behavioral and other boundaries to define the community. When members violate these boundaries, the community must decide how to respond. Offenders can be excluded, coerced into conformity, or tolerated (which involves a redefinition of boundaries, even if by failure to hold offenders to account). Many Christian ethicists get nervous about boundaries, given their potential for abuse. Yet there are situations where they are necessary. Perpetrators of sexual assault should be excluded from college campuses, for instance, and Holocaust denial is not a position to tolerate in class discussion.

In higher education, the harshest consequence for violating community standards is expulsion. In the criminal justice system, violence is an option, and it is arguably essential to the enforcement of law. I have been troubled on this matter by Robert Cover’s “Violence and the Word,” a celebrated work in legal scholarship that bears Augustinian resonances.1 As Cover argues, violence is what distinguishes legal interpretation from other forms of interpretation. Unlike readers of literature or philosophy, for instance, authorized interpreters of the law possess the power to deal death and confinement. When a judge rules against a defendant, the defendant almost always complies with the verdict because those who do not cooperate will be dragged or beaten into prison—or if they continue to resist, killed.

Citizens accept this violent reality because it has been institutionally authorized. They are also inured to it by the separation of actors and the specification of roles. A judge interprets the law but does not inflict its consequences; jailers and wardens simply follow orders. In cases involving capital punishment, the intricate coordination between judicial and penal hierarchies renders execution an exercise in institutional, collective violence. Cover does not condemn state violence itself, which he considers necessary for ordering society. But he exposes what our system of laws entails.

It is tempting to suggest that Christians should not participate in such systems, that we repudiate coercion altogether. What keeps me from this conclusion is the failure of Christian communities to discipline their own offenders. The Roman Catholic clerical abuse scandal eviscerated public trust in the church’s commitment to protecting children. Whereas public officials once refrained from intervening in ecclesial affairs, it is now widely accepted that cases of sexual abuse demand external, secular accountability. The case of John Howard Yoder has reinforced this conviction. His sexual predation persisted because his seminary president determined to address it through private discipline, following the pattern of Matt 18:15.2 In retrospect, law enforcement would have been the appropriate response. When the church fails to protect vulnerable populations, there is little recourse besides coercive authorities.

These considerations seem to support the necessity of coercion in our common life. Arguably, when a political system bears legitimacy, it is authorized to exercise force against offenders. The problem is the potential for abuse, a concern that especially worries me because of my work in Augustine (who is also foundational for Bretherton’s scholarship). Much of my research concentrates on Augustine’s religious coercion and the (in)compatibility of his campaign against the Donatists with his theology of the two cities. As John Bowlin and Michael Lamb have argued, Augustine’s writings on coercion are far more coherent and resonant with modern sensibilities than many scholars have acknowledged.3 Augustine restricts coercive authority to role-specific contexts, he believes coercion should be oriented toward genuine goods, and he insists that coercion reflect pastoral concern for its recipients, who will eventually benefit from discipline even if they initially resist it. Lamb has gone so far as to claim Augustine’s defense of coercion exhibits principles of classical republicanism, especially as articulated by Philip Pettit.

But Augustine’s defense of coercion relies on the same reasoning he uses to defend other forms of domination. One of them is slavery, the topic of two superb, forthcoming books by Matt Elia and Toni Alimi.4 Together, their books expose the necessity of retrieving the tradition critically lest we replicate the errors of the past. They also signal a shift in Augustinian political theology from questions of citizenship and liberal democracy to questions of oppression and marginality.

Augustine explains slavery as a mechanism of divine providence to correct and punish sin. The enslaved do not bear their condition because of sins they have personally committed; though all are sinners, not all are enslaved. It is a mystery of providence why God has chosen some and not others for this condition, and slavery serves the good of preserving social and domestic order. Though Augustine occasionally encourages masters to be less harsh with their slaves, this is not a pervasive theme in his writings.5 Though he forbids masters from sexual relations with their slaves, this reflects his aversion to sex and not to slavery as such. There can be good and bad masters, just as there can be good and bad slaves. Good slaves sometimes suffer under evil masters, but this is only a temporary burden to endure until Christ’s return.

The task of the Christian master is not to manumit his slaves but to love them and promote their ultimate good. Christian masters will thus direct their slaves to proper worship, disciplining them with words or physical blows as necessary. Since the master’s intent is benevolent, corporal punishment does not count as domination but as service and care. (Note Augustine’s assumption that slavery may not constitute domination.) Masters are called to humility, in imitation of Christ himself.

Humility, service, care, benevolent severity, inflicting pain that victims will appreciate later—this rhetoric fills the gap between masters and slaves. It underwrites domination by commending virtue in those who dominate. Elia’s book keenly perceives the dangers of this language. So will those who have suffered trauma in Christian contexts, only to have their experiences dismissed by invocations of providence, sincerity of intent, and the requirement for subordinates to submit to their leaders. I see similar potential for abuse in Bretherton’s chapter, which encourages readers to take politics seriously without making it an idol. As Bretherton writes, politics concerns penultimate ends (334), it should be oriented to the common good and not to factional interests (324), and it should not treat political positions as placeholders for character (326–27). Though this is sound advice for groups with power, it must be qualified for dominated groups who are characteristically excluded from the common good and told their grievances do not matter.

To summarize my questions: Can politics avoid violence and coercion? Can Christians avoid reliance on violent and coercive systems? How can we preserve social order without falling into domination, especially given the accessibility of Christian rhetoric to manipulation and abuse? What structures and practices guard against domination in Christian communities? More broadly, if earthly politics is necessarily coercive, what posture should Christians adopt toward it? Is it something to promote as a creational good, or something to endure, make less bad, and engage for limited purposes?

The Sources and Content of Retrieval

The second topic grows from the first. Bretherton stresses the importance of listening to our ancestors, including the Christian tradition. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, he acknowledges that traditions involve contestation and require revision (119–21). He also expands how the Christian tradition has been defined, drawing liberally from minority, feminist, womanist, queer, and non-Western scholars. James Cone, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Delores Williams sit alongside Augustine, Aquinas, Bonhoeffer, and Barth. Bretherton finds insight in them all and rarely pits them against each other.

But some of these authors have forged their positions against the others. Liberationist voices have (appropriately) critiqued figures like Augustine for trivializing injustice through an eschatology of deferral. Can these sources be held together, and what methodological considerations inform who is included in the conversation? Augustine is inextricable from the Western tradition. Do we include him from necessity, or because the good from him outweighs the bad, or do we start from scratch? What about Yoder? I remain shaped by insights I read in Yoder before understanding the nature of his sexual offenses. Are those insights now tainted?6 What is the relation between who articulates a given idea and its value for theological discourse? What are we doing when we invoke a theological ancestor? Appealing to authority or simply acknowledging our past, whether with gratitude or shame?

Ethics and Theological Education

Perhaps my favorite part of Bretherton’s book is its structure, which progresses from describing to acting to living. By identifying description as the first task of ethics, Bretherton stresses the centrality of listening. Christian ethicists must listen not just to traditional sources (chapters 3 and 6) but also to those often forgotten in theological discourse: strangers (chapter 4), the marginalized (chapter 5), and non-human creatures (chapter 2). This approach avoids the myth that we can construct our ethics through abstract reflection on Scripture, tradition, and philosophy, as if we first establish truths, then apply them to situations. Ethics of this vein can become an exercise in intellectual domination, according to which elites dictate morality for less privileged populations whose concerns they do not share or understand. By contrast, Bretherton conceives of Christian ethics as a journey, characterized by faith, hope, and love. Christian ethicists are ever learning, especially from those they are encountering for the first time. Ethics is a communal endeavor, indexed to the Spirit’s accessibility to all people.

I am curious what forms of theological education might support Bretherton’s approach to Christian ethics. Academics are often divorced from the concerns of ordinary Christians because we lack professional incentive to address them. We are rewarded for our publications and not for our character, for advancing the field as opposed to edifying the church. We assess students on similar terms, for their academic promise as opposed to their service to others. Many of us have little idea what our students are like outside the classroom. Bretherton has one foot in the academy, another on the ground. How has he bridged these worlds? How does he connect the dots for students? What institutions has he witnessed doing this well?

It is a privilege to ask these questions of someone whose work I admire so much. Bretherton’s book is a gift to academy, church, and world, and I am grateful to Syndicate for facilitating this discussion.

Luke Bretherton’s new introductory text on Christian ethics has an elegant three-part structure. In certain respects, it resembles the influential “See – Judge – Act” model proposed by the Catholic labor organizer Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, except that Bretherton’s model might be renamed “Listen – Judge – Live Well Together.” Both proceed from a first task of understanding concrete situations, to a second task of evaluating them according to received moral traditions, to a third task of engaging in social praxis. While Bretherton’s book pays some attention to classical views of the individual ethical agent, it is also an account of the contemporary social and ecological worlds that such agents are called to understand, evaluate, and transform.

Bretherton argues that by listening to nonhuman creatures in nature (27), “strangers” that belong to groups different from one’s own (73), and persons and communities that are “crying out for liberation” (91), one becomes aware of concrete situations that require ethical engagement. At the same time, he asks his readers to listen for the Word of God that may be revealed through such channels, as well as through sacred scripture (52) and the traditions of “ancestors” (111). Listening, then, has a double purpose: it makes one cognizant of ethically weighty facts of the material, historical world and attuned to the ethically normative commands and callings of the Creator.

I am interested in thinking further with Bretherton about his account of listening to those crying out for liberation, which he develops in Chapter 5 and in several other sections of the book. Of course, I agree that such cries have a vital role to play in shaping Christian ethics. My questions revolve around the implied addressee of his exhortation to listen to such cries, what metamorphoses this listening subject is supposed to undergo in order to receive and truly understand them, and what sort of ethics is meant to be enacted by those who are not in the same subject position—specifically, the criers themselves.

Bretherton’s main audience seems to be a large, diverse group that he characterizes as “those who are materially or politically advantaged in some way, even marginally so” (92). He observes that members of this group can easily choose not to listen to oppressed people, that they “often suffer from the vice of indifference” (92), and that they tend to react defensively when their comfortable lives are questioned. Bretherton’s analysis of the conditions of this privileged group is perceptive:

Structural advantage is often woven out of the very fabric of our lives and operates in subtle, unseen ways. For example, how we sit, talk, eat, dress, and comport ourselves can express and reproduce socioeconomic class or racial divisions that favor some people over others in access to education, loans, jobs, housing, and the like. Yet, at an instinctive level, those whose behaviors and bodies comport with what is deemed normal or socially correct feel their behaviors are simply good, right, and proper. (92–93)

This description of how differences in everyday actions and bodily dispositions translate into disparate opportunities seems sound to me, as does Bretherton’s suggestion that those complying with norms that confer access do not typically regard themselves as doing anything wrong. Social injustices emerge from a normativity that is either imperceptible to those who benefit from it or perceived by them as quite natural and good. People in this social position and psychological frame of mind are those Bretherton wants to challenge and provoke. He urges them to break out of their comfort zones by listening to others who are cut off from the advantages they enjoy.

The set of the structurally advantaged is called “those” but also “we.” The latter word choice indicates that this set is supposed to include both author and presumed audience. To some degree, Bretherton’s group-description is a self-description in which he suggests most readers can or should see themselves. He is probably not wrong. He tells us that “this book is born out of over twenty years’ experience teaching introductory courses in Christian ethics on two sides of the Atlantic” (3), at institutions of higher learning that represent and convey the very sorts of access he names. Many of the people who will be assigned this book are students like the ones Bretherton teaches, students who, in order to make it into such academic spaces, have already been participating in the behavior- and body-linked structural advantages that he wants them to acknowledge. I too, as a scholar employed at an elite university, can and should see myself in Bretherton’s implied audience of the relatively privileged and powerful. I agree with him that “we” (hereafter in quotes to designate this specific group, from which I cannot exclude myself) ought to listen to others who have been denied access to the advantages “we” enjoy and who, moreover, have been oppressed and are crying out for liberation. I agree, as well, that this is a necessary step toward any of “us” becoming ethical agents, because ethics does not depend merely on individual adherence to norms and virtues (especially considered abstractly) but on how one responds to concrete social realities.

Bretherton draws on Latin American liberation theologians, Black theologians, Womanist theologians, and Korean Minjung theologians as he discusses who the oppressed are, what interlocking conditions they are suffering from, and how to hear God’s Word speaking through them. In my opinion, these are all excellent sources. To read such literature is one way to begin to do the sort of listening Bretherton encourages, even though, as educated theologians and ethicists, the purveyors of these traditions often occupy a mediating position between the halls of the academy and the other places—e.g., slums, prison cells, and war zones—where people are literally crying out for liberation. By “literal” I mean visceral: tears falling down faces, screams rising up from bodies. Scholars from historically oppressed groups (a category in which I also count myself insofar as I am descended from slaves) and those engaging with their writings both do and do not represent the subaltern. Bretherton’s ethics seems destined to occur in this intermediate territory between contexts of power and powerlessness, a place of asymmetrical encounter where acts of listening to those who are unjustly suffering may spur moral conversions among the more comfortable.

I agree with Bretherton’s contention that ethics is not reducible to the work of listening but also requires deliberation and an active striving for communal wellbeing. The voice of the oppressed continues to play a crucial role in these further efforts, because, as the Black theologian James Cone argues and Bretherton affirms, “oppressors cannot determine what does or does not constitute Christian behavior” (200). It would seem, then, that the standards of moral judgment must lie with those crying out for liberation and that their perspectives—not those of “our” privileged group—should guide the work of social transformation. However, matters are complicated by the fact that, as Bretherton puts it, “the priority of the poor and oppressed does not imply they are intrinsically good or their ways of narrating their experience are infallible” (102). Their words and God’s Word are not (always or necessarily) identical, because, like everyone else, they remain finite and fallen creatures (133), and, in any case, they do not all say and think the same things.

Given such limitations, it is difficult to know who is in a position to judge well. The poor are not perfect and should not be romanticized, even though they often do know whereof they speak. Meanwhile, the social advantages that give one access to higher education are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, one may use this access to study the Bible, various moral traditions, and relevant humanistic and empirical disciplines with great rigor and let this training refine one’s moral judgments. The fruits of such study are evident throughout Bretherton’s book. On the other hand, he argues that, among other things, “an elite lifestyle closed off from relationship with others unlike oneself constrain[s] possible courses of action and people’s ability to discuss, deliberate, and discern what to do and how to do it” (228). He acknowledges, as well, that “formal education is often irrelevant to practical reasoning” (227). The oppressed are not impeccable moral guides, but the same point must be made even more strongly about the sheltered and highly educated (groups that overlap to some degree, if not entirely).

Solidarity of one kind or another seems the only viable answer to the dilemma created by such distinct yet universal epistemological limitations. The best moral judgments seem likely to come from a communal effort to combine academic and experiential insights about oppression, liberation, and other related topics and to hold each source accountable for its potential shortcomings. For his part, Bretherton promotes a form of “agitational solidarity” (332) that would balance practices of “conflict and conciliation” in a sort of “dance” (333). This approach asks would-be ethical agents to challenge powerful people (possibly including themselves) to confront their complicity in structures of domination. At the same time, it demands that such persons be loved as neighbors and not rejected as reified enemies.

In this dance of solidarity, Bretherton contends that “everyone must change, and we must all lose something to someone at some point” (333). He continues: “The temptation for those with concentrations of privilege and power is to fix the system so that they lose nothing and others always lose, no matter how hard they work. The fight is to ensure that the loss is not borne disproportionately by the poor and marginalized” (333). Once again, this way of thinking seems to be most intelligible within a certain interstitial space between contexts of power and powerlessness. Christian ethics—from listening, to judgment, to living well together—appears to move within these parameters, coaxing people who could afford to be indifferent actually to care and cautioning those crying out for liberation to accept some proportionate change and even loss of their own for the sake of the common good.

While I am grateful for this argument because of its many insights and remarkable syntheses, I am also interested in certain questions it has sparked for me: What, if anything, must privileged persons change about their habits or ways of life in order to hear cries for liberation and really appreciate their significance? Is the task of listening complete without a fusion of horizons, an alignment of affects and priorities, and a commitment to collective action? Moreover, what would a Christian ethics look like whose central subject is not a privileged person traveling between contexts of power and powerlessness but the very people who are trapped in zones of violence and neglect produced by systems of domination? Is such a recentered ethics conceivable (by “us”)? Is centering a helpful metaphor? These questions are motivated by a desire to understand how much Christian ethics currently is, realistically can be, and ideally ought to be defined by the victims of history, including their circumstances, thoughts, and practices and their various imperfect (because human) ways of relating to God. For me, these questions are genuine, not merely rhetorical, though I suppose by asking them I am making the point that these are matters worth discussing further.

Every so often a Christian ethicist bravely merges the wisdom of their syllabi, their course lectures, and their own spiritual and moral struggles into a soup-to-nuts guide to Christian moral discernment. My own mentors Paul Ramsey—Basic Christian Ethics—and James M. Gustafson—Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective—produced such works, and now, with A Primer in Christian Ethics, Luke Bretherton has joined their ranks.

Trying to squeeze all the criteria, definitions, sources, and reasoning of Christian ethics into a single work is either an act of folly or an act of courage. No one could accuse any of the three of folly. Rather, they were brave enough to publish their theories of everything and take the arrows that fly when readers judge that they’ve omitted something important, or gone about the task in the wrong way, or attempted something that is inherently impossible and therefore deluded. In recognition of that courage, I want to take this space not to sling arrows but to appreciate what Bretherton is up to and then ask him to develop and sharpen one idea that seems to drive his argument.

Appreciation

Bretherton’s fans will recognize his theme of living by and for shalom—peaceful flourishing—in a world in which the whole spectrum of actors from institutions and governments to individual inhabitants, Christians included, are pursuing their ends violently and destructively. The marks of his teaching at Duke University show in his addressees: persons of entitlement and privilege (92) who must learn truly to listen to systematically oppressed persons (93) and humbly compensate for the undeserved excess of credibility that they enjoy (95).1 They show in his rich and wide-ranging footnotes and suggestions for further reading, which span the distance from St. Gregory of Nyssa to the queer Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, from Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard to Pope Francis to womanist ethicist Emilie M. Townes.

They show, sometimes unnamed, in his theological infrastructure as well. Thomas Aquinas agreed that part of doing Christian ethics is discerning the meaning that the divinely created world already contains. St. Augustine warned that we, and all human institutions, are “wrecked and accursed” (360). H. Richard Niebuhr insisted that before even asking what we should do, we must always discern what God is doing. Karl Barth reminded us that all the prayer, scripture study, worship, and debate in the world are simply preparation to clearly hear God’s command to us, as individuals and churches. Stanley Hauerwas refuses to let us forget that Christianity is not a position, but a communal way lived by worshiping, serving, and struggling with scripture together.

Not surprisingly, for Bretherton Christian ethics is a practical and spiritual art (12) that amounts to “theology with people in it” (234) and a theology literally done with people; it is “dense with the lives of people trying to live well” (9). Here, he lets us look over his shoulder at his work with churches. He means A Primer in Christian Ethics to “narrat[e] a landscape,” chart “a specific” as well as “difficult and costly” path through it, and serve as a “devotional manual” to support this always-communal process (5). For example, he encourages Christians toward “ways of reading Scripture that combine plain sense, critical, and spiritual readings but don’t require sophisticated ‘hermeneutics’” (62). Simply gathering to read slowly, envisioning the parts in the whole of the canon, and centering Christ and love as interpretive criteria will sustain community moral discernment (62–68).

To be sure, scripture study alone is inadequate; ethics draws on all available media (68–69). The main point of his example is that reading together is an existential practice that transforms readers, not a search for the “correct” answer. The gathered community can and must interpret all the “inputs” of moral discernment together in real time rather than turn the process over to scholars in ethics. He wants to nurture the Christian moral life, not trigger the publication of further academic books.

The Challenge

But what else inspired this effort? Bretherton wants to reframe Christian moral discernment and moral life in light of two related, unavoidable twenty-first-century realizations. First, to be alive at all is to exist in networks of interdependence not just with other humans but with the global ecosystem, with its myriad other kinds of beings. Everything we do impinges on the life of every other being, whose needs and welfare we must take seriously, and their existence impinges on us, shaping whether and who we are. Second, to be alive today is to swim in a stream of history that contains the good, the bad, and the ugly, a stream that will flow on from us. We must avoid passing on the pollutants that we can’t help receiving.

All of this means that Christian ethics must discard language about essences, static natures, and purely “good” or “evil” acts. We need language that fits the interdependent, dynamic, messy reality in which we live. To fill this void, Bretherton experiments with the terms metabolism, metabolize, and metabolic. I’ll sketch the uses I’ve noticed, and I invite him to correct and flesh them out for us. What work can they do for us, theologically and morally?

Metabolic Theological Ethics

Technically, “metabolism” refers to processes that transform substances—like food—into energy an organism can use. A “metabolic” being is a being that can do this for itself: a living organism. Analogously, we might think of petroleum or hydro power, which we collectively convert to energy for common use. Even more generally, Bretherton uses “metabolize” to signal taking something in and incorporating it into oneself—or even acknowledging that a thing is always, already part of our normal functioning. This suggests a number of other uses that describe our interdependence and our existence in time.

First and most simply, a “metabolic” approach rejects the dualistic view of the human being as a mind and soul walking around in an otherwise irrelevant, problematic body. Instead, it is holistic, embracing the whole of our embodied, dynamic, metabolizing selves. Not only does it describe us as living, breathing creatures, but–“not privileging one aspect of agency, the mind, character, will, or desire—metabolism encompasses the person as a biospiritual whole.” (36)

Second, our interdependence with other creatures is metabolic, in a sense, because we all exist “within a meshwork of symbiotic relationships” (34) with humans and others. Trees generate the oxygen we need, and we generate the carbon dioxide they need. This “meshwork” even “constitute[s] the agency of the person and the context of their actions.” (34). Because I cannot be or act in the world without the oxygen that trees produce, it makes sense to say that trees are co-actors with me.

Bretherton sometimes seems to mean “agent” and “actor” in the sociological systems sense: something that causes effects in a system. Even an earthquake or a hurricane or a perfect balance between rainy and sunny summer days can be an agent—an actant—in a social system, because it produces tangible effects on people’s “meshwork of symbiotic relationships.” This means that we are not just affected by beings around us, but they are part of us, or create us. What’s more, it’s not that our essential, original nature is finally revealed as we unfurl into the finished, thereafter changeless persons that we were always meant to be, but that we change continuously as we interact with different, similarly dynamic people, institutions, beings, and environments, most of which we do not control.

We do not have a fixed identity or preexisting self that is simply expressed, and which must somehow be recognized through others as already existing. Each person comes to be in and through others, both human and nonhuman, we are summoned into and enabled to act in this world through practices of care and communication. We become through a process of reception and response (157).

Presumably, this dynamic process never stops.

In other places Bretherton implies that not just our agency—our often-involuntary effect in the world—but our moral agency involves co-agents: people, other beings, and our surroundings.

Individual agency is dependent on others and determined in part by things we did not make, such as night and day and our digestive system. Autonomy—or better, my ability to act purposefully [moral agency]—is dependent on and constrained by a meshwork of prior relations and factors that make possible the ability to act (85).

This does not mean that my co-agents fully determine my moral actions; it is more that they condition and accompany me. I can decide to take myself, which includes my network of interdependence, closer to flourishing, or I can damage us (48) by giving myself “over to forms of authority or desire that constrain purposeful action directed to flourishing” (85).

But what—and this is a question I explore, as a feminist ethicist—does moral autonomy mean then? How do we make sense of non-individualist, interdependent moral agency, especially when many of our co-agents are not even human?

Third, for Bretherton “to metabolize” sometimes means “to incorporate something in a process of creative production” or “to transform a good into something useful.” In resonance with early twentieth century Catholic thought, Bretherton says that work metabolizes “creation so as to provision a common life in ways that participate faithfully in God’s oikonomia” (311). As part of “a common life with others,” “covenant and command provide the context and conditions within which metabolizing creation can be fructifying and moral agency realized” (170). Analogously, we must integrate God’s call into the very processes of living: “On a Christian account, becoming a disciple entails being baptized into and learning how to faithfully metabolize God’s call to and communication with us” (157). Expanding the note on Gregory of Nyssa’s Eucharistic theology on page 48 might further enrich this vision of holy incorporation, in which the good thing—whether literal bread or a vocation or the Body of Christ—becomes part of me and helps me attune to God and the conditions of interdependence.

Fourth, recalling the challenge of history above, Bretherton warns that it matters how we metabolize the heritage of “wrecked and accursed ways of being alive” (360) that are also ingrained in our interdependent, dynamic identities and moral agency. We are invariably in the “middle” between a problematic past we did not choose and a future we can help to shape (36–37). We can elect to continue to set “in motion metabolic processes that produce toxicity rather than flourishing” (142), as we have with the violent afterlives of enslavement, or we can “[metabolize them] in ways that acknowledge and seek to convert” the destructive realities that we inherited (37–38).

Following in the way of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the right, if risky path is to metabolize our wrecked and accursed ways of being alive into ways that bring blessings through loving God and our human and nonhuman neighbors (360).

Metabolizing destruction and injustice by breaking it down rather than incorporating it (returning to the analogy of the river, sewage plant imagery springs to mind) is not quite the same as metabolizing the goods of creation or our very particular, individual call to discipleship. How can we describe our metabolism of evil, theologically? Is it a matter of grace, willed decision, or both? Might a more developed Christology help us describe God’s power to purge these toxins?

Many other insights deserve attention: for example, instead of trying to separate the effects of our fallenness from the effects of our given human finitude, Bretherton suggests developing practical ways of living that take the whole knotty mess into account without disentangling it (133–155). But for now, two final questions:

1. How might a developed and expanded account of “metabolism” renew theological anthropology, ethics, and soteriology?
2. Those whom violent and unjust people victimize are all too aware of the evil that history bequeaths to the present. They also have less leverage than their victimizers—and presumably than Bretherton’s main audience—to metabolize “accursed” institutions and practices into “blessings.” How might victims of historical oppression view Bretherton’s metabolic vision of theological ethics?

Luke Bretherton’s A Primer in Christian Ethics is an extended deliberation on the task of living well as human beings who share a common life with the rest of creaturely being. He writes, “Christian ethics asks about the nature and form of the flourishing or shalom-like life in light of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ” (10). There is, of course, much to commend in the work, as is to be expected from a scholar of his caliber. Bretherton deftly integrates large swaths of sources, presents a clear methodology, and the inclusion of case studies is sure to provide the prospective reader with the ability to see the value of his proposal. Yet in reading it a certain discomfiture begin to settle in, one that has troubled me with much of the way in which we talk about creaturely well being within a devastated world. In reading the book, I was left wondering about the coherence of intra-species accounts of flourishing as well as our epistemological grounds for articulating what it means for any creature to inhabit shalom-like conditions within the context of the devastation. In order to highlight it, I will focus this response primarily on Bretherton’s overarching goal of creating a theocentric account of Christian ethics, attending to the manner in which life in the devastation affects how we conceive of human and nonhuman flourishing.

First, it seems to me that, on more than one occasion, creaturely flourishing is competitive, at least across species lines in the time of the saeculum. Bretherton writes in the book’s introduction that “a truly good, meaningful, shalom-like way of living cannot be built on the domination and exploitation of others or of the rest of creation” (10). Yet while such a description may be applicable to the members of the human family, and undoubtedly the intended audience of this book is human beings and not Orcas and Kunekunes, I wonder how extendable it is to the rest of the created order. Bretherton avers that we need to attune ourselves to creation and the manner in which our actions create shared worlds with nonhuman creatures, a necessary step for envisioning the possibilities of our common life. “Frameworks that suggest that we stand over and above nature are a fantasy,” he posits (32). At work here, seems to be a latent critique of a so-called anthropocentrism that elevates the human subject above the rest of creaturely kind (39). And, on his account, “we must ask how nonhuman life should participate in human society, how human society should participate and adapt to nonhuman ways of being alive, and how both may enjoy communion with God” (39). For Bretherton, this theocentric vision of creation allows us to move “beyond a conflict paradigm to one of coexistence, emphasizing the need for mutual adaptation between human and nonhuman forms of life” (39). But while I can imagine, and imagine is a key word here, what it might mean for the rats of New York City, the cockroaches of Waco, TX, or the korukoru of New Zealand to flourish, it seems to me that I am still superimposing a vision of what our common life should entail upon them from above, even as I claim to listen to, with and alongside them. For, again, it seems to me that the various flora and fauna of creation might be more inclined to a lifestyle of eating, drinking, and being merry, “knowing” that tomorrow they will die. And insofar as we direct them otherwise, it seems to me that the human creature stands “over” creation to an extent.

But a thornier issue presses itself to the forefront here. For while I can envision some semblance of “rat-kind’s” flourishing, what does it mean for me to pursue the flourishing of, to choose two more flagrant examples, a species such as the variola virus or the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica, the latter of which has nearly eliminated the American chestnut population in its entirety? While Bretherton proposes that “a conception of human flourishing necessitates accounting for the symbiotic relationship between humans, other species, plants, and the microbial world” (33), these two particular species do not exist in symbiotic relationships with other creatures, but parasitical relationships. For either of these creatures to flourish or even live at all, it seems to me that some other creature must suffer at cost. And as an increasing number of the particular microbes that constitutes these two species flourish, there will be a degree of almost direct correlation with the diminution experienced by their hosts. While I agree, in large part, with Bretherton’s impetus and the need to think more through Christian ethics in light of our enmeshment in larger communal and environmental frameworks, I worry that this risks becoming more a dream than an aspiration. Put differently, it seems that Bretherton’s account of creation and creation’s flourishing is abstracted from the specific and concrete beings from which a category like “creation” emerges.

This objection may appear to be, admittedly, somewhat small potatoes as they say. But it is indicative of a larger issue, an epistemological one that lurks within the sediment: how do we ascertain the content of intra-species flourishing and what meaningful role does the revelation of God in Christ play in this endeavor? It is not that Cryphonectria parasitica or Orcas are evil per se, as no substance is intrinsically evil insofar as it is given being by God, the author of life. Rather, that there is a kind of disorder that permeates throughout the entirety of creation, one that affects our use of one another and the manner in which we organize our common lives. Yet it seems to me that we must throw up our hands, to a degree here and accept significant limitations with respect to our understanding of the manner in which God relates to nonhuman creatures. As Karl Barth writes, “The Word of God is silent on this point. It tells us how things stand between God and man. But it does not disclose the inner nature of the relation between God and the rest of creation . . . . There is no serious reason to suppose that we shall necessarily fathom and penetrate the nature of these inner relationships.”1 And it seems to me that in many cases this would apply to some of the more prickly features of creaturely kind. We simply do not know the manner in which God relates to, say, Botrytis Cinerea (a Redwood fungus), or how our common lives could be ordered so as to cultivate their flourishing and communion with God. It seems to me that in a devastated world we are epistemologically constrained. We know that fungi, viruses and Orcas alike are his creatures and the objects of his affection and love. And we know that in many ways these creatures require an impending divine action that will lead to their radical transfiguration, one for which we too await in hope.

These two questions are, of course, intertwined. It is curious to me that Bretherton generally avoids appeals to natural law and has elsewhere criticized the various articulations of the common good, but does not demonstrate how creaturely flourishing, in the broadest strokes, is to be constructed without appealing to these interwoven conceptual frameworks. This is all the more important when his communal understanding of human flourishing is taken into account. As Bretherton states early on, “We are not individual atoms bouncing against each other but mutually vulnerable, interdependent creatures. We cannot survive without others. And to thrive depends on being embedded in some kind of loving and just form of common life. Our individual flourishing is symbiotic with the flourishing of a wider ecology of human and nonhuman relations” (9). Repeatedly he refers to our pursuit of a common life as one that strives for something that is “shalom-like,” presumably to avoid overrealizing the eschaton or transmuting any present, political order into the stuff of the heavenly kingdom. Indeed, he dedicates an entire chapter to the manner in which finitude and fallenness limit the possibilities of our moral agency. But what does it mean to flourish as devastated creatures, wrapped in damaged flesh, inhabiting a devastated world?2 For the most part, Bretherton’s use of the qualifier “like” at the end of shalom significantly delimits any utopian aspirations one might try to build off of his project. Yet and still my discomfiture remains. For pursuant of an agenda to build something that approximates “shalom” it seems to me that there is something like a scale on which common lives might be organized, with some being more or less ideal for human and nonhuman well-being. But does this not risk underselling the radical transfiguration that all of creaturely being must undergo in order for “the wolf [to live] with the lamb, the leopard [to lie down] with the kid” (Isa 11:6)? Furthermore, what does it mean to approximate or approach creaturely wellbeing, human or otherwise, knowing that danger and the threat of damage lurk around every corner? What does it mean to pursue a “shalom-like” community when human life is circumscribed by its disposition to fall apart and this kind of ultimate catastrophe is the inevitable end to all of our stories? I can scarcely imagine what it might mean to listen to creation or cultivate the requisite virtues of my tradition when I’m bedridden, suffering from chronic pain, and experiencing the advanced stages of dimension. But is this not the final stop where most of our lives are headed?

I must admit that, at this point, the language of human flourishing and shalom, within the context of the devastation often leaves me feeling underwhelmed. We live in evil days, as Ephraim Radner has noted, within a present age of suffering (Rom 8:18–21).3 The catastrophes, pandemics, and ecological disasters that lurk around the corner are not novelties. And it seems to me that God in Christ reveals what it means to navigate the present age of suffering as an act of devotion and offering. What we see in the Incarnation is a picture of a human life in which shalom lies off in the distance (Heb 12:1–2). Even at the end of his life we see pain, suffering, and lack, as Christ thirsts (Jn 19:28), is abandoned by his loved ones (Ps 41:9), screams in agony (Mk 15:37), and dies (Lk 23:46). To call this flourishing of body, mind, or person, to borrow categories from Eleonore Stump, seems to stretch the very fibers of that word to the point of breaking.4 But while we might be reticent to identify Christ’s death as the epitome of human flourishing, we can rightly identify it as a life offered back to God, as a life that strives to find its fulfillment in God and in the service of God (Heb 5:7–8).5 Suffice to say that the navigation of one’s arc of life must account for the fact that we are creatures of the devastation that are disposed to fall apart and find our bodily, mental, and personal powers, not to mention our memories and relationships, in a rapid, ever quickening spiral of unraveling. And yet the Son condescends into this devastated world and assumes this devastated flesh.

So, to return to the epistemological question, what meaningful role does the revelation of true humanity in Christ play in the construction, formation, and articulation of what it means to live well? Indeed, this is the larger concern I have with Bretherton’s account of Christian ethics: there is startling little attention devoted to the event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, an event that not only serves as the revelation of Godself but also the revelation of what it means to be and live humanly. And if it is indeed the case that theological anthropology is normative in any robust sense for our account of what it means to live in the world God has made with our fellow creatures, it seems to me that Christology should be both the starting and endpoint of such deliberation.

None of this, of course, is to detract from the immense merits of Bretherton’s text. It is broad in scope and generative of the kinds of questions that Christians should busy themselves with. Yet until one attends to the particularities of creaturely existence, especially in its arc from dust to dust, I wonder if more attention must be devoted to what it might mean for us to merely carry on as mortal, devastated creatures from one generation to the next who long for an end to their sojourning.