NEVILLE CALLAM from the

General Secretary

Negotiating Disagreement on Ethics and Morals

When I addressed the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, which took place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1993, I warned that the emerging frontier for church disunity was in ethics and morals. As I said then, “whatever the risks involved, the time is ripe for the church to launch into the sea of moral pluralism and examine whether and how the reality of ethical pluralism strengthens or hinders the expression of ecclesial oneness with and under the Lord God.” I made this call on the basis of a certain reading of developments

affecting church and society and argued that “the divisions the church helps to entrench by conflicting positions adopted on moral issues [needed] urgently to be addressed.” This was partly because “the contradictory positions the church adopts on moral issues are a hindrance to the visible unity of the church” and partly because those positions may be understood as reflecting the church’s failure in discernment and discipleship. Since that world conference, the engine of church vitality

has stalled on the mound of ethical uncertainty in many church congregations and denominational groups. Severe divisions have emerged around issues related to an understanding of what constitutes a responsible lifestyle. The problem is not merely that Christians disagree on several moral subjects, but that many Christians and churches have not even been able to find a way to engage in an honest and peaceful discussion on some of the issues. Why is this so?

In 2006, a group of theologians from a wide spectrum of

Christian World Communions met in the incredibly beautiful setting of Crans-Montana in southwestern Switzerland. There they started a new phase in the process of mapping out a way to assist the churches in their search for common discernment over the multiple factors influencing their disagreement on moral and ethical issues. The multi-year efforts of the Faith and Order Commission have resulted in a recent publication, Moral Discernment in the Churches. This is not the first praiseworthy effort aimed at assisting

churches and Christians to find a way to negotiate the dense cloud of moral confusion that surrounds many today. During the 1990s, bilateral and multi-lateral church conversations produced several reports with the same aim. Within the World Council of Churches, discussion of the

relation of ecclesiology and ethics resulted in three publications, Costly Unity (1993), Costly Commitment 1994) and Costly Obedience (1997). International bilateral dialogue between Anglicans and Roman

Catholics produced Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church (1994), a report I found rather useful for a course I once taught on Christian Social Ethics in a multi-denominational seminary. On the Way Together: A People Created for the Common Good (1998), produced by the Anglican/Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada designed to aid the reception of the Life in Christ text, is a helpful resource. The Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches produced The Ecumenical

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Dialogue on Moral Issues: Potential Sources of Common Witness or of Division (1996). The issues on which the report focused include the church as moral environment for discipleship, common sources and different pathways of moral deliberation, and different authoritative means of moral discernment. Since then, Faith and Order also produced Christian Perspectives on Theological Anthropology (2005) with its proposed 10 common affirmations considered as providing a basis for the churches’ “common reflection and action on the challenges facing humanity.” More recently, Formula of Agreement Churches in the United States and Canada – the Christian Reformed Church in North America; the Moravian Church in North America, Northern and Southern Provinces; and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) – met in 2011 and 2012 and produced Scripture and Moral Discernment, which reflects participants’ conviction of shared “points of consonance and commonalities in [their] ecumenical expression of Christian faith and practice.” The recent report, Moral Discernment in the Churches (2013), which is available online, has undoubtedly harvested the fruit of earlier discussions and, together with fresh thinking on the subject, is an invaluable resource for Christians and the churches. The report does not attempt to develop affirmations on which all churches could presumably base their conclusions. Nor does it examine the substance of the disagreements that exist. Instead, like the report of the Joint Working Group referred to above, Moral Discernment elucidates the reasons behind the disagreement within and between churches on issues of morality. It offers helpful suggestions to assist those who traverse the muddy waters of discourse among Christians on morality. The report offers a description of the sources churches

actually use for moral discernment and identifies many of the factors that contribute to the diversity of opinions within churches and between church communions over moral issues. It raises numerous issues of enormous importance and I urge seminaries, pastors’ fellowships, churches and church groups to set aside time to study the text in detail. The promise of the work lies in its resourcefulness for those who truly care about church unity around moral and ethical issues. One of the many valuable insights the study provides for those involved in moral discernment at regional or worldwide levels is its delineation of the way cultural values and traditions impact the decision-making process.

DISAGREEMENT