Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Von William SchweikerIt is an honor for me to be part of this celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik. I want to thank especially Professor Johannes Fischer, the present editor, for the invitation to join this conference. It would be difficult to name another theological journal in the German speaking world that has been as important in addressing the pressing ethical and political issues of our time. What is more, in a period dominated by dogmatic and ecclesial theology, the very idea of focusing on »ethics« was radical and far-sighted. The early work of the journal was also set against the traumatic reality of war, both Hot and Cold, a reality exemplified in this great and historic city of Berlin. In our world, ethical questions that surround political, economic, ecological, and bio-medical realities, just to name a few, demand attention. The ways in which those questions are answered will determine the fate of life on this planet. It is time that we assess the current situation. That is, I suppose, the deeper purpose of this conference. And it is why I have been asked to speak on »theological ethics and global dynamics«. Again, thank you for the honor of the invitation to be at this event.
I must make a confession. When I visit this country I am embarrassed by the fact in scholarly settings that I am more easily understood in English than German, although I can use my German abilities reasonably well in a conversational setting. Still, if I want to be understood at this conference, I must give this lecture in English! Because of the theme of my remarks, maybe that fact makes some sense. One important aspect of global dynamics is the dominance of certain languages that interface with the global market and media systems; the main one, of course, is English. Daily one witnesses the extinction of languages and cultural forms. My use of English is more than an admission of weakness; it is also the recognition of the ambiguous power of the dominant languages in our age. I am deeply thankful for your understanding of these matters. Let me now explain the theme and structure of my lecture.
1. Theme and Structure
The assignment I have been given in this lecture, if I understand rightly, is to answer this question: what ought to be the form and task of theological ethics for the global reality of the 21st century? That is a rather daunting question, and in order to answer it one must be willing to make some bold statements. I will leave to you the judgment about the adequacy of my proposal, but I contend that in order to meet the challenge of the 21st century we need a theological ethics of responsibility for the integrity of life from the perspective of theological humanism. Of course, each term in this proposal will need to be explained in due course.Yet it seem clear to me that the moral challenge facing people around the world is to transform destructive and dehumanizing forces within their religions and cultures in light of relations and reactions to others and the whole community of life endangered on this planet. I admit that much more detailed work is
needed in order to sustain my position. Still, this lecture seeks to discern the sign of the times, as it is often put, and to propose a vision of theological ethics.
Now, in order to set forth this vision some precision about terms is needed. What do we mean by »theological ethics«? What are the forms it has taken, from (say) divine command ethics to Thomistic natural law ethics to the myriad forms of »theistic ethics« seen among some philosophers, and also nowadays the kinds of tradition based patterns of moral reasoning found in the various Abrahamic religions? There are also ongoing debates about how best to conceive and define the current age: e.g., globalization, postmodernity, postcolonial, high or reflexive modernity. Even the dating of this conference with reference to the 21st century signals a specific religious and cultural orientation that might need to be questioned, if not challenged, from a global perspective.
Let me briefly note some definition of the terms I will be using. Theological ethics, on my account, is the analysis and articulation of the lived structures of reality in order to orient human actions and relations with others and before God. Theological ethics will always draw on and critically assess religious resources, like the treasures of Christian Protestant faith or some other system of belief and action. Yet this conception requires one to engage the current situation and the topic of this conference, since, per definition, theological ethical thinking requires clarity about the structures which impinge upon and shape life and also provide the conditions and limitations of human action and relations to others. Theological discourse, to be ethically relevant, must discern God’s relation to the structures of lived reality and what that relation means for the orientation of human relations and actions.
While my constructive proposal is different than his, I think Professor Fischer is correct, in Theologische Ethik: Grundwissen und Orientierung, that the question of the »Proprium« of Protestant ethics must be defined in our time in terms of the contribution it can make to more general ethical debate.1 It is no longer sufficient to attempt to isolate the essence or distinctive point of theological ethics devoid of reference to an increasingly interdependent world of which we are obviously a part. This means that we must move beyond the distinction beyond the Old Protestantism and the New. If the Old Protestantism was defined by the faith and theology of the 16th century reformers, the New began with the great 19th century liberal theologians and, depending on one’s account, came to its heights or crashing end among the so-called NeoOrthodox theologians.2 In our age, we are searching for yet another expression of Protestant convictions, a form of faith and way of life enabled and required by the reality of the global age. That is what my proposal is meant to suggest.
The question then becomes, what is the contribution of theological ethics to the ethical debate in this age? Of course, from the ancient Church through the so-called Middle Ages, from the Reformation and to the great Papal Social Encyclicals, and with the work of the World Council of Church and various liberation movements, Christian have always sought to contribute to the ethical challenges of an age. They have done so in very different ways. As Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, H. Richard Niebuhr, and many other have noted, the strategy of engaging the »world« is decidedly different in, say, medieval Roman Catholic thought than in some of the Protestant sects. Importantly for my lecture, all of these historical options are now defunct given the distinctive dynamics of globalization. Global dynamics challenge the empirical possibility and the moral desirability of strict boundaries between »Church« and »world«. Social boundaries
are more fluid, more permeable, and this is both the challenge and the possibility of our time, or so I will argue. I will call those challenges posed by our situation »overhumanization« and »hypertheism« as responses to the permeability of social identities.
The remainder of this lecture moves progressively through three interrelated levels of reflection. First, what is the present situation to which theological ethics can and must make a contribution? In order to answer this question we need to understand dynamics currently structuring the global field. What type of theological ethics can and ought to guide Christian faith in these global times? On this second level of reflection I intend to outline an ethics of responsibility centered on the integrity of life. Finally, we must ask how my proposal for theological ethics in the 21st century stands in continuity with previous accounts of the Christian moral outlook and, especially, historical Protestant ethics. The continuity but also discontinuity is inscribed in an outlook that I call »theological humanism«. These three levels of reflection – the descriptive, normative, and hermeneutical – structure the lecture.3
I now want to turn to the first level of reflection, namely, the description of globalization as a moral and religious situation.
2. Globalization as a Moral and Religious Situation
In order to grasp the meaning of »overhumanization« and also »hypertheism« as terms for basic moral and religious challenges of our day, we need to explore some features of globalization. Some scholars like to speak of globalization as the McDonaldization of the world.4 The relentless press of Western consumerism runs rough shod over distinctive, traditional forms of life. On this reading, global dynamics destroy previous markers of identity and draw new ones; they define the world’s peoples within the logic of the consumer market. Other scholars disagree. The condemnation of economic globalization as market tyranny is not so easy. Behind the supposed »sameness« of economic globalization are surprising forces of difference. People around the world are fashioning lives in new and different ways. If you have ever gone into a McDonald’s or a church in another country or observed the worldwide use of commodities, you know how these change within global flows. From a cultural perspective, globalization does not mean bland uniformity.
Additionally, there are extensive debates about the so-called clash of civilizations and also the collision of faith. The idea is that the main forms of conflict that will characterize the age of globality are cultural, ideological, and religious, and that one cannot and ought not to expect an easy resolution to these forces. The age is described not in terms of the dialectic of sameness and differences within global flows, but, rather, the titanic clash of incommensurable forms of human civilization.5 Of course, the religions have, in fact, been forces of globalization for a very long time, and, in their missionary forms, aspire to form a distinctive kind of global totality. The religions are drivers of globalization but are also shaped by interactions with other global forces, like the market. The question we now face, accordingly, is whether global dynamics are modernity at large, that is, the spread of the »modern« differentiation of society around the planet, or a new phenomenon, say the clash of civilization or the emergence of a global system.6 However, matters are more complex than these well-know accounts of the present world situation. It is helpful to isolate several dynamics or forces at work within globalization. These
dynamics are at work in the various drivers of globalization, like the global economy or political interactions or even the global spread of the religions. Furthermore, three dynamics are especially important in order to understand the moral and religious significance of globalization: deep connectivity, global reflexivity, and recognition. These forces bring about a »compression of the world«7. That is, global dynamics of deep connectivity, reflexivity, and the longing for recognition means that world is becoming »smaller« and also increasingly seen by people around the planet as a whole, a shared destiny. And all of that leads, as we will see, to what is now called the deterritorialization of identity and also authority. Peoples’ identities are no long situated or localized just in their nation of birth or residency or religious and ethnic community. Many people work in one country and yet have their defining relations and commitments in another land; many people cobble together novel and variant forms of religious identity and community. Increasingly, human identities are being fashioned from resources, some commercial and so not, that are carried by global cultural flows. It is not always easy to explain »where we are« within the whirl of global dynamics. Let me explore these matters in some detail.
First, as the theorist John Tomlinson has helpfully noted, globalization »refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterized modern social life«.8 »Deep connectivity«, as he calls it, is forging, for good or ill, the future of planetary life. There is an increasing sense among many people that we have a shared planetary destiny even as global dynamics also foster powerful senses of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference.9 In other words, the compression of the world brought through deep connectivity is for many both a sense of the smallness of the world but also an expansion of human imagination and sympathy. A clear example is globalized cities like Berlin. These are »places« in which people’s identities, sense of others and the wider world as well as values and desires are locally situated but altered by global dynamics. Saskia Sassen writes that the »city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an »organizational commodity«, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, which in large cities are frequently as internationalized a presence as is capital«10. Massive cities can be a boon for the formation of new self-understandings, especially for dislocated peoples. They also create problems: how to relate to those who are »other« and yet enter into our lives.
One element in the current structure of life is the quickening pace of deep connectivity that drives the compression of world. Yet these processes and dynamics also mean peoples’ lives are increasing shaped and formed by how they are perceived by others. This brings us to a second dynamic that leads to the deterritorialization of identity. Theorists call this dynamic »global reflexivity«. Reflexivity is the many ways social entities act back upon themselves to adjust to information about their internal and external working.11 It is rooted in the distinctive human capacity to be aware of one self while interacting with others. Political entities, for instance, have to adapt reflexively to developments in the market or world opinion. Individuals and groups see themselves in terms of how others see and react to them. Think of the massive global response to political cartoons that depicted religious leaders and therefore the reflexive dynamics that shaped how people reacted, often violently. So, we can decode the structures of experience amid global dynamics in terms of deep connectivity and reflexivity that brings about the compression of the world along with the expansion of consciousness and the deterritorialization of identity.
Deep connectivity and global reflexivity are closely related to third dynamic, and one that brings us to more distinctly religious and moral features of globalization. In our time it is hardly surprising that the question of »recognition« has become central in political theory and ethics. Most simply put, recognition is the perception and acknowledgment of moral standing, that is, the rightful claim to moral respect and enhancement. Peoples’ identities and self-understandings arise within or are effaced by patterns and structures of recognition of self, other, and cultural forms. This is of course not a new idea. It is important, for instance, in Hegel’s moral philosophy and many others, including Marxist thought. It is found in debates about multiculturalism and »identity politics« and also among feminist theologians who chart the effacement of women’s agency within patriarchal systems.12 Patterns of recognition are thereby central in discussions of truth and reconciliation after intolerable acts of violence and war and abuse. Indeed, one of the crucial conditions of such act of intolerable violence is the breakdown of capacities of moral perception and imagination needed to recognize the moral standing and worth of other human beings.13
The full force of the challenge of recognition as a structure of lived experience in our time must be grasped. The dynamics of deep connectivity and global reflexivity mean that people begin to understand themselves in and through the ways they are recognized or denied recognition by those who are really different. It is as if other peoples’ worlds and minds enter into our own and we enter their minds and worlds. Human identity – our sense of who and what we are – is thereby increasingly deterritorialized, that is, the link between who one is and where one is and so too the bonds of community are transformed within the forces of globalization. And this creates both possibilities and problems. The dynamic of recognition at work within reflexivity and deep connectivity can expand a sense of moral identification with others and also threaten to overwhelm a people’s identity in ways that park negative, violent, reactions. Fundamentalist religious movements would seem to be a response to the dynamics of recognition by imposing one form of belief and one uniform moral code on everyone in a society. In other situations new hybrid forms of identity become human possibilities.
So, the idea of »recognition« is trying to capture at the level of social processes the sense of distance and yet identification that appears when we reflected on felt reactions to the compression of the world. And this leads to a deterritorilization of human identities. Importantly, the dynamics of recognition are interwoven with the other processes of globalization.
The global media, for instance, intensifies but also blocks patterns of recognition. Global markets forge patterns of deep connectivity but can efface recognition of distinctive ethnic and cultural identities. The spread of disease is a reflexive process that compresses the world in much the same way that global warming does; but the horror of epidemics and the fear it breeds often deprive those who suffer of moral recognition. It would take a good deal more time that I have in this lecture to sort through the connections among these dynamics and processes as well as to address the many moral and political challenges they pose.
The basic point is that the age in which we live is one in which different cultural, religious and ideological outlooks and systems of life are interacting and reflexively shaping each other. The reality of globality is what I have called elsewhere the »time of many worlds«. It a shared time, an accelerating global present, in which the diverse human »worlds«, or spaces of meaning, collide, conflict, and interact. This is not a clash of civilizations precisely because the dynamics
of deep connectivity, global reflexivity and recognition mean that one cannot so easily distinguish one civilization, like the »West«, from another one, say Islamic civilization. The deterritorialization of identity and also authority challenges the boundaries of communities.
Deep connectivity, reflexivity, and recognition are global dynamics at work within the various drivers of globalization.Yet in my judgment they do not identify the greatest moral and religious challenges of our age. I call these challenges overhumanization and hypertheism. To borrow a term from Ernst Troeltsch, hypertheism and overhumanization are types of cultural syntheses in response to the compression of the world and the deterritorialization of identity and authority.14 They designate visions of the world in which either human or divine power alone is seen as the ground and source of all value and hence motivate actions and policies to order social life in specific ways. To use traditional theological claims, they are both forms of idolatry in that they make a specific finite form –human power or human beliefs about the deity – the source, ground, and term of ultimate worth. Hypertheism and overhumanization are ideas and ideals about how to draw together the complexity of global existence through a normative outlook. Let me explain this in more detail.
By »overhumanization«, then, I mean the belief that all value finds it source in human power and the project to impress human purposes over all life in and through the global dynamics of connectivity, reflexivity, and recognition. This belief is due in part to the explosive growth in human technological and scientific power over the last centuries to the point that endangers life on this planet. Not only does the spread of human power threaten non-human forms of life, including the planetary ecosystem, but it also seems to undermine the dynamics of recognition insofar as distinctive moral identities are swept up into the flow of global reflexivity. This renders identities increasingly homogenous, say, in the spread of English as the language of globality, but also dangerously different, as with the images of terrorists. Thus, the reality of overhumanization carried by global reflexivity and deep connectivity generates a demand for recognition or fails to meet that need. This is seen, for instance, in widespread and often violent responses to globalization in the name of local identities, say, in attacks on World Trade Organization meetings and other international and transnational organizations. It is also found among the many ethnic and national challenges to the forces of deep connectivity that seek to preserve traditional customs, languages, and values even in the face of their dangers, like traditional sexual practices and ritual markings among African tribes that contribute to the global spread of HIV/AIDS.
Hypertheism, the second challenge of the global age, represents the response of certain religious communities to overhumanization. The idea is not another term for the reality of worldwide fundamentalism in the various religions, although it is obviously related. Hypertheism is also a vision of the world as a whole, a kind of globality or global cultural synthesis. It is grounded in the belief that one community’s conception of divine power and worth is alone the necessary and sufficient condition for rightly understanding and orienting social life. The aspiration to a hypertheistic world synthesis takes various forms: the drive for theocratic states in many nations of the world, especially the Islamic world; attacks on modern science among some NorthAmerican Evangelical Christians; global terrorism driven by religious ideology; horrific strategies of ethnic cleansing in service of money, power, and race. These developments define and secure the conditions of moral recognition by reference to divine power as the sole source of worth.
We live in an age of the endangerment of life. Overhumanization and hypertheism are concepts for dominate forms of moral and religious endangerment: the loss of our humanity within the fantastic spread of »overhumanization«, which threatens recognition of human distinctiveness, and also the threat to human commonality that transcend religious and ethnic differences found in the forces of hypertheism. What is needed, it would seem, is a way to think beyond the dialectical opposition but mutual implication of the celebration of human and divine power as the only sources of worth. Even better, what is need is a way to recognize the rightful place of power in human existence and also in a conception of the divine without thereby making power itself, human or divine, the ground, source, and term of worth. Thus, the current structure of lived reality—the processes and dynamics of globalization—poses a fundamental challenge, namely, how can human consciousness be transformed in order to foster recognition of and responsibility with and for others that does not devolve into the horrific equation of power and worth? On many fronts, the challenge is to foster the capacity to recognize and respond to the moral claim of diverse forms of life.
With that challenge in hand, we can now move into a second level of inquiry, the distinctly normative one. What type of theological ethics can and ought to contribute to ethical reflection in these global times?
3. Responsibility and The Integrity of Life
Given the complexity of the structure of current life, it is not surprising that various types of philosophical and theological ethics claim greatest adequacy for guiding life in the time of many worlds. In order to understand why we need an ethics of responsibility for the integrity of life, it is necessary to show how other options in current ethics are flawed. They provide little, if any, means to stop the spread of overhumanization or hypertheism. These options are well-known to all of us who work in the field of theological ethics, but they are due brief consideration on the way to my own proposal.
There are, first, some theologians and philosophers who argue that it is possible to generate from communicative acts necessary and sufficient norms for justice within societies and a global context in which people hold diverse and even seemingly incommensurate comprehensive beliefs about the good. The tactic is to generate norms of justice while leaving in place the ideals and beliefs about the ultimate good that constitute a peoples’ moral identity. The claim, as John Rawls might put it, is to sever the connection between, on the one hand, norms of justice and the right to moral recognition from, on the other hand, any actual identity and social status.Yet in our situation, as we have seen, the challenge is precisely the reflexive interaction of peoples marked by deep connectivity that threatens moral recognition. The idea that one can bracket comprehensive goods in order to determine norms of justice runs aground within the flow of global dynamics. From the perspective of our analysis, procedural arguments rooted in generic features of communication too easily further the enterprise of overhumanization in which distinctive commitments and identities are elided through a generalized normative vision. Put otherwise, identity and authority once established through communicative rationality are deterritorialized in a way that cannot and does not answer the major moral and religious challenges of globalization.
In this light it is not surprising, second, that other thinkers, represented in the USA by communitarian philosophers and postliberal theologians, insist that in global times the task is to foster distinctly civil or Christian identities through a range of moral practices. The job, in a word, is to re-locate Christian identity within the tight boundaries of the Church. Only when the Church is the Church, these theologians argue, can the full witness of peace and reconciliation in discipleship to Christ be truthfully lived.Yet, much like the first strand of thought, the full depth and power of global reflexivity and with it the challenge to moral recognition are ignored. The concern to solidify Christian identity within the glow of global reflexivity is not an option in our global times. In fact, the attempt to escape global dynamics means that an ethics of Christian identity feeds the outlook of hypertheism. Everything that is not »Church« is defined as sinful, pagan, the »World«, and so the object of the Church’s action.
Given the problems we have just isolated in dominate forms of contemporary ethics, it would seem that another kind of theological ethics is needed. We need another vision of how to inhabit the world – the globalized world – morally. And here, I believe, we can retrieve but also revise ideas within modern Protestant thought about responsibility, and for two related reasons. First, responsibility is about »responsiveness«, that is, how we can and ought to recognize and respond to others and complex situations. As the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr understood, responsibility entails an interpretation of a situation aimed at recognizing those to whom and with whom one is responsible. Clearly, the global scene, especially in its reflexive dynamics, is a situation of »responsiveness« even as the crisis of recognition, as I have called it, requires that we foster moral sensibilities, imagination, and insight in order rightly to discern the moral standing of others. Second, current global dynamics, as we have noted, rely upon the fantastic growth of human power made possible by modern science and technology. From genetics to space exploration, from ongoing massive deforestation around the world to atomic power in all its ambiguity, from hideous economic inequality to hi-tech warfare, we live within an age of human power. Are we able to apprehend, to sense, to recognize the vulnerability of the weak, the poor, and also planetary life? Can we hear the »cry of mute things«, as Hans Jonas beautifully and pointedly put it, or unborn generations.15
Importantly, »responsibility« is not only about responsiveness and recognition; responsibility is also about power. That is, responsibility entails the recognition and response to complex situations and to others, but also ascribing and imputing accountability for the use of power. This makes responsibility an apt concept for ethical reflection in our global age. Responsible action enacts the reality of relationality, or deep connectivity, and is concerned with the recognition and response to others within patterns of ascribing accountability for the exercise of power. There is a problem, however. While responsibility is obviously a relational and even reflexive concept, which makes it suited for contemporary ethics, previous theological accounts of responsibility all suffer from a difficulty that demands revision if we are to meet the challenges of the global age.
One crucial debate within Christian ethics over the last century was whether or not the ground and source of moral responsibility is an immediate and direct command of God to whom one is called and empowered to respond, or if the theological source and ground of responsibility is mediated through intra-human relations. Whereas Karl Barth, for instance, spoke of the command of God constituting responsibility and Dietrich Bonhoeffer defined responsibility as vicarious
action like Christ for others, H. Richard Niebuhr insisted that God is a »third« acting in all actions upon one. Responding to others, for Niebuhr, is always within the context, the theological horizon, of God’s action in and through all other actions. This theological debate about the sources of responsibility always meant that the ethics of responsibility could veer in the direction of overhumanization or hypertheism. Theological ideas about responsibility, and especially Protestant ones, could be reduced to the range of intra-human powers or a kind of Divine ethics, as Barth called it, that efface human agency. Is it any wonder, then, that the ethics of responsibility waned in the late 20th century only to be replaced, as we have already seen, by forms of ethics focused on the distinctiveness of ecclesial identity, among postliberals and communitarians, or shared norms of justice, among some liberal political theorists and theologians? Yet each of those options, I have argued, is increasingly problematic in the face of the moral and religious challenges of global dynamics. So, a revision in needed in the ethics of responsibility drawn from Christian sources. And the revision, I suggest, is achieved by making the »integrity of life« central to ethics. What do I mean?
Despite the whirlwind of global dynamics there is a human commonality in the kinds of goods needed for human life to endure and flourish, even as there are profound differences in what people do with those goods, how their relate them in some plan of life. There are basic goods of sensibility and experience (sexuality, pleasure, play, etc), social goods (friendship, family, political or communal involvement, etc.), and also reflective goods, like self-understanding, meaningfulness, and cultural activity.16 These goods form a realistic and naturalistic background for ethics. What we want for ourselves, I judge, is to integrate or bring into some coherence the diversity of these goods so that our lives are rich and deep. We ought to expect that other people aim at some integration of their lives as well, even if (as is usually the case) they do so in ways that differs from us. Being responsive to others and being responsible for the power at our disposal means, then, using capacities to respect and enhance projects of fashioning coherent, integrated lives.
The normative question turns on how we can and ought to recognize and response to the vulnerability of these human goods. And this is important because the kinds of goods just noted are not grounded in our power to acknowledge or promote them. In fact, the task of responsibility is to render human power in the service of those goods. We can, in other words, formulate a norm for moral choice, an imperative of responsibility, with regard to the vulnerabilities of existence: respect and enhance the integrity of life. And the Christian will add: respect and enhance the integrity of life before God. In other words, the religious and moral space of life – where our moral and religious identities are formed – is within the nexus of responsible relations aimed at the integrity of life with others and before God. Yet because the integrity of life substantively includes a range of basic goods, human life, morally speaking, is neither re-located in communicative practices nor limited to the ecclesial community.
Living by this imperative is not an imposition of our values on others, as far as I can see. In fact, it means working for the conditions necessary for others as well as one’s own community to live integral lives at all. We should oppose actions, policies, and institutions that undercut, demean, or destroy the goods, and access to goods, needful for integrated existence. Further, insofar as human beings share in the realms of sentient, mortal life, we are responsible for the integrity of non-human life. My point, then, is that in the »time of many worlds« we need to think ethically
in terms of responsiveness to others and accountability for the proper use of power in terms of what will respect and enhance the integrity of life. In doing so, one heeds the call to moral integrity – a unique human good that arises in terms of how we use our power to respond to the range of goods in life, even the cry of mute things. Moral integrity is the aim or purpose of the responsible life; it is power in service to the integrity of life.
Religiously conceived, the integrity of life is the divine reality which enables and requires the right integration of the various goods of existence with and for others.Analogically speaking, the integrity of life is a theological claim about the being of God. For Christians the divine reality is a living integration of life in relations of responsiveness and recognition, relations designated as love. Most Christians think of this in terms of the Trinity as a way to conceive of divine life. But for every Christian there is a human commonality in the kinds of goods needed for human life to endure and flourish, even as there are profound differences in what people do with those goods, how their relate them in some plan of life. Wherever life is integrated against forces of disintegration, forces that demean and destroy living beings, there the reality of God is active and present in ways that empower and require responsible action. It is thereby possible, and in fact required in theological ethics, to say that the divine life is at work within global dynamics combating the disintegrative forces of overhumanization and hypertheism which thwart responsible existence. The structures of lived reality analyzed before entail a theological claim as well, which backs the imperative to respect and enhance the integrity of life. This also means that in our age not only human and non-human life are endangered by global forces, so too is the divine life. Of course, God’s life is not endangered by the relentless press of disintegration called mortality whereas finite life carries within itself the wound of mortal death. But the divine life is also vulnerable to destructive power. God’s will and way can be and usually is thwarted by human viciousness and recalcitrant features of being also at work within global dynamics.
Once we see that an adequate theological ethics for our global times must take as its theme responsibility for the integrity of life, then it becomes obvious that Christians must work to transform their own commitments and communities whenever and wherever they devolve into forms of hypertheism or overhumanism. The reason for Christians so acting, we now can see, is that on theological grounds the being of God is defined by the integrity of life even as, analogically speaking, the human and moral good are forms of integrity. It is important for contemporary Christian theological ethics to grasp the analogical structure of the idea of the integrity of life and thereby to link faith in and beliefs about the divine with a realistic conception of human goods. One hopes that people in other communities will find similar arguments within their traditions and thereby have the means to revise moral and religious convictions towards recognition of and responsibility with and for others. In any case, if we are to respond to an age in which all forms of life are endangered, then a theological ethics of responsibility for the integrity of life seems most meaningful and credible.
That realization brings to my third and final level of reflection. What does this all mean for Christian life and how does it relate to previous, especially Protestant, account of Christian ethics? The answer is what I call »theological humanism«. Given the length of these remarks already, my comments on this idea will be brief.