Our culture is in trouble today, and the weakness of the evangelical church, the evisceration of its theological character, is therefore all the more troubling. How is it going to address the large questions that arise over the meaning of our life?
The language we use to understand ourselves and our world is not simply a matter of words. It is the result of the interactions of many other factors: the particular social pressures to which we are subject; patterns of behaviour into which we have settled; how our collective life is shaped politically; how our most deeply felt anxieties and perplexities are understood; how we conceive of our gender and ethnic differences; how we relate to our things, to the past, to ourselves, and most fundamentally, to God. In this sense, our everyday language is the outcome of our engagement with life at very deep, complex and sometimes painful levels.
It is this engagement that is now framing life in such a way that the most important part of self-understanding - that we are moral beings - has been removed from the equation. That is the beguilingly simple thesis: functionally, we are not morally disengaged, adrift, and alienated; we are morally obliterated; we have become morally vacant.
Few subjects have received more attention over the last 25 years than the declining moral literacy in our society. In our US schools, no doubt out of good intentions, we shifted from teaching character formation to values clarification. Now we have moved on to a plethora of new but confused agendas, and we are genuinely nonplussed by all of the practical consequences. Our children are not only more lawless in school, as evidenced by the astounding increase in crime, but are too often without any apparent moral consciousness regarding their actions. And this will not be easily remedied, since, as William Kilpatrick, the education specialist, argues: 'Without the sense that life makes sense, all other motives for virtuous behaviour lose their force.'(1) Life in a post-modern world does not make sense, so the recovery of virtue will, as a result, be constantly frustrated.
Our concern that society is rapidly losing moral altitude, however, goes far beyond our concern about the schools. The problem is not that we cannot discuss moral theory, the problem is that our talk is now empty.
Plato to post-modernism
For over 2,000 years, moral conduct was discussed under the language of virtues. First Plato and then Aristotle talked about the cardinal, or foundational, virtues. These were justice (or rectitude), wisdom, courage (or fortitude), and moderation (or self-control). Subsequently, of course, other lists were drawn up, and the discussion of the virtues has followed numerous paths. However, it is important for us to understand that the change in our language reflects changes in who we think we are.
The importance of the classical view of the virtues was that moral conduct was seen to be the outcome of character and it was considered entirely futile to divorce inward moral reality from its exercise in society or community in which a person lived. In time, this discussion about the cardinal virtues passed into Catholicism, where it was incorporated into a structure of thought in which these virtues were seen to be the basis for, and as becoming finally realised in, the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Luther, of course, was quite impatient with this line of thought, because Aristotle, he said, had introduced into the church a theory of natural virtue that took insufficient account of sin. The texture of the discussion was different, but when Protestant and Catholics talked of moral conduct they both rooted it in internal spiritual reality that had to be practised in external relationships.
In wider society, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the classical virtues came under fire from Enlightenment ideology, the Christian virtues in particular came under heavy bombardment, and slowly our language began to change.
Virtues to values
These classical virtues had always been thought about in relation to the community in which a person lived. To act justly was not an internal attitude but the practice of what was upright in a context where that moral virtue had been put to the test. When we come into the modern period, and as communities begin to disappear, the virtues come to stand alone, out of the social context in which they had formerly been understood. Thus, as MacIntyre points out(2), the virtue of honour increasingly comes to be understood in terms of a social status that is not awarded because of moral desert, but gained through wealth or birth. When the virtues were thus privatised, when they were disengaged from public life, that life had to be governed, not by morality but by social rules that became etiquette. It was these rules that replaced the virtues, and these rules have now been replaced by government regulation and by litigation.
By the end of the 19th century, the virtues (plural) had also contracted into virtue (singular). And virtue was an altogether thinner and vaguer matter; indeed, it was increasingly reduced simply to sexual matters. To say that a woman had lost her virtue could no longer mean that she was a habitual liar or that she had often acted in a cowardly or dishonourable way. It meant that she had lost her virginity. Some of the Victorian voluntary associations concerned with vice, like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had no interest in suppressing avarice and injustice. Their focus was on prostitution. In the transition from Aristotle to our post-modern world, the language we have used to talk about moral matters shows how withered and diminished our understanding has become.
At the turn of this century, Nietzsche pioneered what, by a different route, has come to be embraced in popular culture today. Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose principal field has been Victorian England, has observed that morality became so thoroughly relativised and subjectified that virtues ceased to be virtues. They had also ceased to be virtue. They had become 'values'.(3) In Nietzsche, this transition was the deliberate outcome of his belief in the death of all truth and morality. Virtue had to be replaced by values. More recently, as this habit of thought has passed into the wider culture, the change appears to have been more unconscious and inadvertent. Yet it is clear, as Himmelfarb notes, that today values may mean nothing more than a preference, belief, feeling, habit or convention - 'whatever any individual, group or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason.' Thus our values have, in a strange way, become 'value-free'. That, though, is hardly a surprise, for values can have no universal value if truth has died.
Godliness abandoned
Our society talks of values in this way because relativism has triumphed and because the constant rubbing against post-modern life has had the almost inevitable effect of emptying us out morally. It is because we have lost our virtue that we are left to talk about values. And this has an interesting parallel in the church. If it is true that values divorced from character become empty in society, it is even more true in the church. The character of which we speak here is not simply the cultivation of natural virtue but the intensely conscious sense of living morally before God. Without this sense, built into character, our moral conduct disintegrates. That is happening today. We often have little sense of the Holy as something Other that presses in upon us and demands that we give it our most earnest attention. In consequence, the older quest for spiritual authenticity, for godliness, has often been abandoned and been replaced by newer quests for psychological wholeness. This transition commends itself to us because the outcome, a more whole and psychologically integrated person, seems to us to be far more attuned to the dangerous and jarring world in which we live than are the older concerns about piety. And a more relaxed and amusing atmosphere in church seems like a better compensation for what we find in the world than that older piety which called for seriousness and self-examination in the light of God's Word.
Despite this earthquake, this shifting of the plates beneath our moral world - and the resulting movement in the church - America continues to exhibit some social virtue. We are certainly more humane and less cruel than most other societies have been. America continues to be generous in so many respects, and its influence is exercised in remarkably benign ways when contrasted with the way other dominant powers have exerted their wills in the past. At the same time, we are probably less honest than many other societies have been and undoubtedly we are more self-indulgent. But in one matter we stand almost alone, along with other parts of the West. This is the first time that a civilisation has existed that, to a significant extent, does not believe in objective right and wrong. We are travelling blind, stripped of our moral compass. And this is true not only in society, but increasingly in the church as well.
Silent revolution
This situation has stolen up on us so quietly that its real nature is largely obscured. I believe that what Camille Paglia, provocatrice extraordinaire, has said with respect to our pop culture is correct. We are witnessing, she asserts: 'An eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the West.'(4) Her thesis, which she developed in some detail in her Sexual Personae, is that there are always in culture two principles at work - the Apollonian and the Dionysian - one whose urge is to expand and the other whose work is to restrain, one that undoes shape and the other that demands definition. What is now at work, which she believes was recovered in the 1960s, is the pagan impulse to expand, an impulse that commonly meets us wrapped in what is earthy and sensual. This is liberating us from most social taboos, a circumstance that she thinks is very happy. In fact, what it is doing is eviscerating our moral understanding, with the result that the whole of our society is now caught up in a fatal contest: will our moral license be allowed to triumph or will we have to save ourselves from its consequences by more and more recourse to law and litigation? We are now teetering between these impulses, one wanting endless expansion and the other being called upon to provide increasing contraction. Our society will not survive this conflict.
Two kinds of church
Can the church recover its moral character enough to make a difference in a society whose fabric is now so frayed?
In my book, I argue that there are two kinds of spirituality in the evangelical church; what distinguishes them is not so much different doctrinal belief, but the different significance that the moral has in each. In the one, what is moral has weight, while in the other it does not. The inevitable consequence is that the one has the capacity to be counter-cultural, while the other does not.
(1) William K. Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 27.
(2) MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 211-17.
(3) Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p.9.
(4) Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p.vii.
This article is taken from the introduction to Losing Our Virtue: why the church must recover its moral vision, by David F. Wells, recently published by IVP at £9.99, and reprinted with permission.
David F. Wells is the Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theolopgy at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, Massachusetts, and is the author of No Place for Truth and God in the Wasteland.
