UP FRONT
The Shifting Landscape of Moral Theology
Richard M. Gula |  Spring 2009

How has the Catholic approach to moral theology developed over recent decades? In this special feature, Richard Gula gives an overview.

“What’s changed since we were taught moral theology, and who’s responsible for it? Can you give us the highlights of the landscape of moral theology today?” These questions, or some variation of them, are frequently asked by participants in sabbatical programs and study weeks. This article aims to serve as a primer for the perplexed inquirerers. I have organized the major changes in moral theology according to four shifts: the historical, the personal, the virtuous, and the spiritual.

A brief survey article like this cannot do justice to the richness of the Catholic moral tradition or catch the nuances of different schools of thought that would contribute to a better understanding of the developments and tensions in moral theology today. The four shifts that structure this article, however, are presented by way of enhancing a rich tradition. In that light, they should be seen not so much as innovations but more as changes in focus and emphases of aspects already rooted in the tradition.

Shifting toward the historical

Perhaps the greatest shift in the landscape of moral theology is what Bernard Lonergan characterized as the shift in mentality from the classicist worldview to historical consciousness. This shift has caused seismic tremors throughout the theological landscape with the highest magnitude registering on the tectonic plate of historical consciousness. Doing moral theology today is something like what Linus of the Peanuts comic strip had to face in dealing with the new math. In his frustration, he exclaims, “How can I do ‘new math’ with an ‘old math’ mind!” Linus has it exactly right. The issue is his “consciousness” or “worldview.” Something like the old math/new math has occurred in moral theology, too.

The classicist view as represented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ rationalist, neo-scholastic manuals of moral theology deduced moral conclusions from fixed, abstract essences expressed by universal principles. By contrast, the historical worldview houses attention to experience, inductive reasoning, and seeing everything as part of a dynamic whole that we grasp a little at a time from our limited perspective. The shift towards the historical cautions us about making claims that the Church has taught, x, y, or z with exactly the same meaning that we would have for it today. For example, is it possible that what was once morally acceptable (slavery) is now regarded as a moral evil, whereas what was once declared intrinsically evil (usury) is no longer so? How can that ever be? The notion of “intrinsic evil” is a key concept of Catholic moral theology. An historical understanding of when and how this concept was developed, how it has been used in different eras, and of its assumptions about human action raise questions about its meaning and usefulness in contemporary moral arguments.

History has a way of deflating moral claims that soar too high or inflating those that fly too low. For the historically minded, what bears a date is dated. What we thought morally evil in one era may prove to be beneficent in another (e.g., religious freedom), and what we once thought love demanded may not translate into the most beneficent act in another era (e.g., capital punishment). Classicism emphasizes the unchanging and permanent. It rejects in principle the possibility that we only know from a limited viewpoint. By contrast, historical consciousness recognizes both permanence and development. Minimally, it accepts these features of knowledge: all knowledge is historically grounded; what we know is in some way informed by our social location; we grow in our understanding of the truth; our grasp of truth and our expressions of what we grasp are affected by all the limitations that come with being historically conditioned.

The shift towards the historical underpins the way moral theology today speaks of the unfinished character of the moral life and the ambiguity of moral choices. Some today feel considerable discomfort with this shift, for it strikes them as becoming subject to the arbitrariness of relativism. But the shift to historical consciousness does not leave us with the dangers of the hopeless relativism about which both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have warned us. Lonergan clearly distinguishes between a relativist way of constructing truth and the historically minded way of recognizing truth.

This distinction between construction and recognition is the key to the development of moral teaching. Values are real. The essential first step is to experience objective values as they reveal themselves, not as we wish they were. Moral judgments can be true or false because they are rooted in our experience and understanding of these values. Since we discover moral value and gain insight into what it means to be human slowly and partially, we sometimes must reformulate our moral norms or even revise our positions. Yet the historicist worldview does not leave us wandering aimlessly with nothing reliable to give us direction. Discovering moral value and naming it does not mean that we have a complete grasp of it. What we can recognize gives a foothold in our journey. The great gift of historical consciousness is that the truth we recognize along the way is less like a comfort station and more like a launching pad sending us on to new discoveries.

Two good examples of the historically conscious approach to moral theology are found in John T. Noonan, Jr.’s distinguished study Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and in the comprehensive work of Charles E. Curran Catholic Moral Theology in the United States (Georgetown University Press, 2008). Noonan’s book meticulously documents the development of teaching on slavery, usury, religious freedom, and divorce. From developments in these areas we learn how we have taught one thing in the past and teach another thing today. Noonan shows that change in moral teaching is necessary if we are to fulfill the rule of faith that does not change: the twofold love of God and neighbor. Curran’s work is a virtual compendium of those who have shaped moral theology and the issues that have been shaped by historical consciousness not only in fundamental moral theology, but also in sexuality, bioethics, and social ethics. Both books together offer a judicious reflection on the fallibility of the church in teaching on moral matters, on the importance of change, and on how experience, empathy, analogy, and inductive reasoning have become tools of the development of moral doctrine.

Shifting toward the personal

Of morality’s two points of reference—actions and persons—more often than not, we associate morality with actions: “What is the right thing to do?” This should come as no great surprise once we look in the rearview mirror and see where moral theology has been. Shifting from action to the person is not abandoning our interest in right action, but it is prioritizing the personal context that gives meaning to the action.

Moral theology has its roots in the emergence and subsequent practice of private confession in the sacrament of penance. Penitential Books, dating back to the fifth century, were created as handbooks to assist those who heard confessions. These handbooks enumerated sins with their corresponding penances. Even when moral theology became a separate discipline after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), its manuals were designed to train priests as confessors to parse sins. The act-centered, sin-oriented, seminary-controlled character of moral theology remained until the renewal encouraged by the Second Vatican Council.

In the years immediately following the council, moral theology was no longer taught by the manuals, but it was still dominated by an interest in analyzing actions and solving problems by means of the objective principles of natural law. The first generation of post-conciliar moral theologians, such as Bernard Haring, Josef Fuchs, Bruno Schuller, and Louis Janssens in Europe, and Richard McCormick and Charles Curran in the United States, were largely concerned with clarifying the rightness and wrongness of actions and solving moral problems. But they were beginning to make this analysis in a personalistic, rather than legalistic, context.

Shifting the axis

One of the great contributions of this first generation of revisionists was to shift the axis of the moral life away from the law-obligation model that focused on individual acts and toward the personal, relational-responsibility model that gave centrality to the person. The theological foundation of this shift was to conceive the moral life as a response to God’s initiative of love. These early revisionists believed that moral imperatives (the “oughts” of moral behavior) do not come from some externally imposed rules. The “ought” in “This is what I ought to do” comes from being in relationship to another—ultimately to God, mediated primarily through Jesus but also in and through all the relationships that make up our lives.

Call-response is the structure they proposed for the moral life. It reclaims the exitus-reditus motif and structure of St. Thomas that got lost in the neo-scholastic seminary manuals. First there is love, God calls; then there is response, the moral life. This relational structure makes God’s loving us the first step in moral living. It is not what we do but what God first does for us (grace) that is the bedrock upon which to build a moral life. The primary referents of morality are God’s relation to us and ours to God. God’s call coming in and through every encounter is the invitation to love God not only in our worship but also in the way we love one another and care for the earth. This theological structure calls us to live out this grace by developing our gifts that lead to our personal flourishing and, by moving out of ourselves, to promoting the well-being of others and of the earth. The sign of living by grace is the quality of our relationships. Do our actions build up or tear down the life-giving dynamics within the network of relationships that make up human life?

Within this relational model of the moral life, to take God’s call seriously is to take the human person seriously, since we are made in the image of God who became incarnate in a personal way in the humanity of Jesus. Creation, incarnation, and redemption are the great mysteries of faith that give a special value to the human person as the immanent criterion for determining right behavior.

The shift toward the personal was endorsed by Vatican II when Gaudium et spes identified the person and his or her acts as a legitimate source of objective morality (#51). This personalist criterion has been explained most comprehensively by Louis Janssens of Louvain in his notion of the “human person adequately considered.” This criterion contrasts with the approach of natural-law reasoning that determined right and wrong behavior on the basis of the finality of bodily structures and functions taken independently of the totality of the person. Janssens moved away from using an isolated dimension of the person as the objective criterion to favor a more holistic anthropology. For him the person is adequately considered when taken not just in the bodily features but also as an historical subject who stands in relation to the world, to other persons, to social structures, and to God, and who is fundamentally equal with all other persons but also uniquely original. From this perspective, the finality of impersonal physical structures could not take precedence over personal acts considered holistically.

Louis Janssens took into account multiple dimensions of the person when formulating the personalist criterion: an action is morally right when it benefits the person adequately considered in himself or herself (i.e., as a unique, embodied subject) and in his or her relations (i.e., to others, to social structures, to the larger world, and to God). The paradigm of right behavior is behavior that serves the dignity of the person adequately considered. Wrong behavior violates the dignity of the person. Much of the work of the revisionist era went into drawing out the implications of this criterion for all areas of the moral life.

Shifting toward the person as the basis of objective morality stimulated considerable discussion of moral method, especially in trying to work out the implications of accepting the limitations of human finitude. A love ethic calls us to love everyone, yet because of finitude, we cannot act beneficently toward everyone equally. When we accept the fact that we live in a finite world, we realize that every choice will cost us something. We can’t have everything; life is full of trade-offs. When we choose to act toward one value, we inevitably say, “No, not yet,” to others. Finitude makes us face the fact that every action has about it aspects that enhance and aspects that hinder the full flourishing of persons. To live a right moral life we need to discern through the exercise of prudence the best of what is possible in a morally ambiguous world where we cannot do everything that is good.

These revisionist personalists showed that an adequate account of actions must include consideration of the agent and the context. The holistic consideration of action raised questions about using the notion of intrinsic evil to describe an action in itself (sexual acts provide a fertile field of examples), and it questioned the possibility of formulating concrete negative moral absolutes (is contraception always wrong?). The holistic view also focused moral reflection on the proper relation of means to ends within circumstances (illustrated well in the just-war theory). The drive toward being inclusive of the totality of the action aimed to give proper place to each aspect of moral action without absolutizing any one of them.

This expanded way of evaluating actions brought to light dimensions of moral agency and resources for moral knowledge that had been obscured by act-centered ethics. For example, moral theology began to pay more attention to the experience of persons across cultures and genders. This fit very well with the shift to the historical. Valuing experience opened dialogue with the sciences, which sheds light on how we are equal but unique. For example, genetic science helps us to understand the influence of biological givens on a person’s predispositions. This has had a significant influence on the way we understand heterosexuality and homosexuality, for instance. Moral theology is also benefiting from research in the cognitive and social sciences on the dynamics of moral development. These sciences are helping us understand better the processes of transmitting moral values by bringing greater clarity to how emotions, the imagination, the community, and role models help to form character—all important aspects of the recent shift to virtue ethics.

Learning from experience has been one of the hallmarks of the contribution of a very active group of women reflecting on the moral life: Margaret Farley, Lisa Cahill, Anne Patrick, Christine Gudorf, Jean Porter, Cristina Traina, Cathleen Kaveny, and others. Women were not involved in moral theology prior to the Second Vatican Council. The full effect of taking moral reflection out of the hands of men, primarily clerics, and involving women in moral reflection is still ahead of us. But feminist reflection in moral theology has already taught us that we do not properly understand what it means to be human without giving full attention to the personal and social experience of women.
A good representation of the personalist turn in moral theology as focused by feminist thought can be found in the reassessment of the natural-law tradition by Cristina Traina in Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas (Georgetown University Press, 1999). Her work introduces some new emphases to revitalize natural law. The patriarchal model of the person that dominated the neo-scholastic manuals emphasized left brain features: isolating the individual from the context, rationality, breaking down the whole into parts, working with formulas, and being objective. The feminist contribution, by contrast, emphasizes right brain features: seeing things whole and interdependently, being attentive to context, trusting intuition and imagination as sources of knowing, appealing to emotion, being subjective, and inviting dialogue.
Feminist ethics helps us to see details of the moral self that have been neglected by an overly rational use of natural law and an overly restrictive understanding of the person. From a feminist perspective, to be human is to be mutual as well as autonomous, relational as well as equal. Feminists help us to appreciate that, while affective knowing unaided by critical reflection can lead to moral chaos, reflection without affect leads nowhere. Distance and detachment do not always help us see clearly. The feminist value of embodiment helps us to see how emotions, intuition, and somatic reactions can bridge the gap between what is going on and how we respond to it.

While there is a diversity of feminist thought, minimally it seems safe to say that feminist ethics promotes relationality, equality, mutuality, and embodiment as important components of human well-being. We must take these values into account along with nonlinear ways of knowing if we are to understand better what it means to be a moral person. Incorporating feminist insights regarding human well-being into moral reflection fits well into virtue ethics, the next shift in the landscape of moral theology.

Shifting toward virtue

The sun has set over the horizon of the act-centered ethics of the first generation of revisionists. Their search for an appropriate method for an act-centered ethics made moral action more hospitable to the personal context of action. By expanding the way actions are to be evaluated, they highlighted how making a decision is more than judging between competing values. It is also responding to God’s call by creating a self, shaping a community, and embodying a vision of life—all concerns of virtue ethics. As a result, the first generation of revisionists paved the way for moving the spotlight from behavior to the person’s character and virtues.

The sun is now rising over a new generation of Catholic moralists, such as James Keenan, Ed Vacek, William Spohn, Paul Wadell, Lisa Cahill, Margaret Farley, Jean Porter, Lisa Fullam, and others who are completing the discussion about right actions by focusing on the dispositions, affections, perspectives, and habits of the person who acts. Whereas the first generation of revisionists focused largely on the rightness or wrongness of actions, this new generation of virtue ethicists focuses primarily on the goodness and badness of the person. Are we striving to answer God’s call by discovering what is right (goodness), or are we failing to strive and so rejecting the call of God (badness)? Goodness-badness is the more basic language of morality since it defines our relation to God. Since the Christian moral life is fundamentally an orientation of the self, the real moral truth of our actions lies in the sort of persons we are becoming in our striving (or not) to answer God’s call.

When virtue ethics shifts the attention from acting to being, it does not do away with moral theology’s interest in action. Moral problems will not go away. Problems confront us with decisions to make and actions to take. But far more profoundly, they force us to be in a certain way. After we have pulled the plug or dropped the bomb, what happens to the decision-maker? Virtue ethics takes seriously the proposition that who we are affects what we do, and what we do affects who we become.

The shift toward virtue further develops the shift toward the person by focusing on the depth and quality of the person who is acting. “Character” is the term used in virtue ethics to express moral identity. We see this side of ethics demonstrated most graphically, for example, by Thomas More as portrayed by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons. When explaining to his daughter why he cannot sign the Act of Succession, More says, “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands.) And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.” This scene emphasizes how our choices to act involve not only self-knowledge but also some degree of self-determination. Moral choices express our identity. We act in character or out of character. Action follows from character and in turn reinforces or diminishes it. In addition to Thomas More, we experience character-shaping behavior in a profound way in the Amish who know only forgiveness and not revenge toward the shooter of their school children, and we see it in a conscientious objector, a corporate whistleblower, or a politico-religious agent of change, from Jesus to Mohandas Gandhi to Rosa Parks. They act the way they do because to act otherwise would betray their moral identity.

Character helps explain not merely why we act in a certain way now, but also why we can be counted on to act that way in the future. We recognize character by certain traits, or virtues. “Virtues” are both the inclination to act in a certain way so that the action is virtually “second nature” to us, and they are the ability to act that way. For example, a person who is hospitable, friendly, courageous, or prudent has the ability to make judgments that will bring these virtues to life seemingly effortlessly.

In contrast to the act-centered approach that asks, “What is the right thing to do?” virtue ethics asks, “From what inner place are you doing it?” Just doing the right thing is not enough to be virtuous. The action must spring from the right place within us to carry its virtuous quality. Playing with our children out of guilt for having neglected them is not the same as playing with them out of love for who they are. The difference comes from emotionally charged dispositions that define our moral character. Virtuous actions express more than the rules that give a reason for them. They express the inner reality of the person—emotion, motivation, desires, habits, and commitments. These inner realities are at the level of the “heart” in the biblical sense of the word. This is where virtues have their home (vices also), as stable dispositions to do good (or evil). These inner realities of the self put the stamp of personal identity on our actions.

One of the great contributions of the shift toward virtue is that it restores the moral quality of everyday living. If we restrict the meaning of morality to determining right actions, then we can easily get the impression that we enter the realm of morality only when we face hard choices. A problem-oriented ethics moves in the episodic realm of a controversial case that comes along now and then. In such an understanding of morality, we don’t think of ourselves as being involved in the moral life apart from those times when we are searching for the right thing to do by appealing to universal principles.

For virtue ethics, by contrast, there is no moral free zone. The moral life goes on continually. We don’t step in and out of it with the occasional tough choice. Virtue ethics reminds us that the continuous, ordinary, uneventful actions of the day are the place where the moral life happens. Morality does not lie in the occasional, dramatic decisions that we sometimes have to make, but in the character that we are forming by living from day to day and doing things over and over. How we behave in the tough times is born out of the habits we form in the day-to-day course of our lives. We are, after all, what we do habitually.

From the point of view of virtue ethics, one of the finest treatments of the moral life is Paul J. Wadell’s Happiness and the Christian Moral Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Drawing upon the insights of Aristotle and Aquinas, Wadell shows that the heart of the moral life is not about rules and obligations, but about growing into a way of life designed to help us become good people whose character enables us to think and choose wisely. The virtues provide us with the skills and dispositions that make this possible.
Wadell’s vision of the virtuous life sees every purposeful action we do as having an effect not only on the world but also on who we are becoming. The way we live from day to day creates moral momentum. If we treat another with respect, chances are we will become respectful. If we feel that we have to correct everyone’s mistakes every time we see them, chances are we will become control freaks. Character is always a work in progress. No one is finished. We are all on the way to becoming a fuller realization of the kind of person we are practicing to become.

Virtue ethics fits well with the shift to historical consciousness for it respects the dynamics of history by taking change and development seriously. We acquire virtues little by little through practice over time. Moreover, since we exercise virtue in changing circumstances, virtues take different shapes according to what the situation demands. Prudence is the central virtue that mediates all others. As both a moral and an intellectual virtue, prudence is our ability to perceive the distinctive features of the situation, determine their moral relevance, and decide the best way to respond when we know that we can’t do everything that is good. In the end, virtues link us to action out of the internal, self-directing commitment we make to the value at stake, whether or not that value is prescribed by a rule and whether or not anyone is watching to make sure we act rightly. After all, the test of how virtuous we really are is how we act when no one is watching to supervise us, or how we act when we face the unexpected and have no time to rehearse our part.

Shifting toward the spiritual

Lying behind judgments of the rightness of actions and the goodness of persons is an unexpressed vision of the good life, or of what life is ultimately all about. This is a matter of spirituality. We may affirm the same moral principles, follow the same moral method, but differ in our moral judgment because we have a different outlook on life, different assumptions about what promotes human well-being, different priorities of value, different depths of passion and zeal for shared values, and a different vision of where life ultimately ought to be headed. These all reflect differences in spirituality influencing our moral judgments.

The spiritual and the moral converge in character and virtue. This shift is significant for it reverses nearly four hundred years of practice. The longstanding functional relationship between moral theology and the sacrament of penance that underlay the moral manuals confined moral thinking to determining where sin starts and stops and to educating consciences to resolve conflicts of obligation according to the objective principles of natural law. As such, these manuals hardly pass as theology but were more properly works in moral philosophy. The challenge to the moral life put forth by the manuals was less about one’s commitment to a personal God and to the imitation of Christ and more about a Stoic correctness in discovering the appropriate principle governing each situation and assessing its binding force in a given circumstance.

Safe and sound as these manuals were, growth in faith was relegated to another set of manuals, those in ascetical theology, or what we today call spirituality. That has changed. While not abandoning natural law or the necessary preparation of seminarians for their ministry as confessors, Vatican II endorsed and encouraged efforts to enlarge the scope of moral theology beyond its preoccupation with sin as governed by principles of natural law. Since Vatican II, moral theology has become declericalized so that it is no longer a discipline for confessors but a critical understanding of faith for Christian living. The primary reference text for morality is no longer a manual of principles but the gospel, which provides the master narrative (the paschal mystery of Christ) that governs the way we make sense of life and fulfill it.

The shift toward the spiritual was already occurring prior to the Council in the pioneering work of Gerard Gilleman, Fritz Tillman, and Bernard Haring, whose The Law of Christ first appeared in German in the 1950s. It is the well-known work proposing the call-response model of morality adopted by the first wave of revisionists immediately after the Council. For Haring, spirituality and the moral life were inseparably intertwined. It is no wonder that his model contributed to reconstructing moral theology from the perspective of the experience of God and the implications of our convictions about God.

The new generation of moral theologians retrieving virtue ethics stands on the shoulders of these giants from earlier years to reconnect morality and spirituality. While differing somewhat in particulars, their work shares the common conviction that spirituality is the wellspring of the moral life. Their thesis is that morality without spirituality is rootless, and spirituality without morality is fruitless. Spirituality is our lived experience of faith. Its starting point is our experience of God. Its goal is union with God. Morality shares this starting point and goal. Our experience of God’s love evokes moral responsibility as our grateful response to that love. So whether we experience God and how we experience God will exert a great influence on the content and quality of the moral life. The gospel criterion “by their fruits you will know them” is the test for showing the integration of morality with the experience of God.

The shift toward the spiritual underscores God as the ultimate object of our loyalty, and the beliefs we hold about the mystery of God are foundational to the moral life. For example, our convictions about God as Trinity, a community of persons bound together by love, can be a rich resource for social ethics in its search for the implications of the sacred and social nature of being made in the image of a triune God. The mystery of God as Creator can be the starting point for appreciating the intrinsic dignity of the person, for claiming global solidarity and a common morality, and for assuming a shared commitment to care for the environment. The mystery of the Holy Spirit can be explored as the energy for moral living and the inner guide to the exercise of prudence in moral discernment. The mystery of God incarnate makes Jesus of Nazareth the norm of the moral life, discipleship the vocation of the Christian, and the imitation of Christ the way of expressing what life is ultimately all about.

In short, shifting toward the spiritual makes the moral life theocentric through and through, with Jesus as the key to understanding what loyalty to God looks like. Consider, for example, the position of the Golden Rule in the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. While this rule may be shared by other great religions, in the Christian tradition it bears a theocentric quality. In the Gospel of Matthew we read, “Therefore, in everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Matt 7:12). The “therefore” connects what we should do to what God is already doing. Therefore, we need to learn how to take after God. Christian morality in this view becomes the matter of discerning the kind of life that best fits what we believe about God revealed in Jesus. We call this living as a disciple. By imitating Jesus, we show our loyalty to God.

That Jesus ought to be the guiding pattern for our lives is set forth in John 13:34, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Moral theology’s shifting to the spiritual is becoming an extended meditation on the “as” because “as” links who we ought to be and how we ought to live to the paradigmatic life of Jesus the Christ. Living morally is a matter of relishing this gift of God’s goodness and love for us in the person and action of Jesus of Nazareth. We live morally when we give freely in love what we have received freely in grace. In Jesus the Christ, Christians claim to know something about what God wants a good human life to look like, and something about how we must live in order to achieve it. So the Christian moral imperative is not simply, “Be good!” or “Be human!” The Christian imperative is “Be good, or be human in the way Jesus was.”

In harmony with Jesus

If we are to be disciples today and live faithful to Jesus, then our actions ought to resemble, rhyme with, or harmonize with the pattern we find in his story. The call to discipleship and to the imitation of Christ is the call to let our imaginations be stirred by his parables and actions. In what ways does our character harmonize with the good shepherd, the good Samaritan, or the merciful father of the prodigal son? Are our actions analogous to those of forgiving the sinful woman, having compassion on the crowds, washing the disciples’ feet, going the extra mile, sacrificing self as at the crucifixion? The challenge before us now is both to be faithful to Jesus back then, as mediated by the Gospels, and to be creative in our response to the challenges of life today.

This shifting toward the spiritual is developed quite extensively in William C. Spohn’s major work, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (Continuum, 1999). In this work, Spohn shows how spirituality informs the moral life through nurturing affective dispositions that transform the believer’s identity so as to take on “the mind of Christ,” as the Pauline idiom has it. (Phil 2:5)

Three aspects of spirituality are at work in this process of “sanctification.” One is intentionally to engage in such spiritual practices as self-examination, fraternal correction, forgiveness, works of mercy, or the Eucharist. These practices center one’s life on God’s love for us and our love for God. If practices do not lead to moral living, then one’s spirituality is like an incomplete sentence. It lacks a predicate. Spiritual practices ought to open us to moral responsibilities, and moral living ought to return us to our spiritual practices, where we give praise and thanks to God. Such reciprocity affirms the inseparability of love of God and neighbor.

Second, these practices nurture our love for God and others not through new ideas or by way of argument, but by deepening the affections, those deep emotions that are the abiding dispositions inclining us to act in a certain way. The inherent dynamics of the practice shape our lives with virtues that express what it means to love God and neighbor. For example, the regular practice of forgiveness disposes the Christian to show mercy rather than to retaliate against wrongdoing.

Third, the practices and dispositions work together to transform the character of the believer with the virtues or patterns of behavior that were manifest in the life of Jesus. Take, for example, the practice of beginning each day with prayer—whether prayer with Scripture, praying for others, or praying in silence. Praying with Scripture may leave us open to unexpected ways of meeting God, as one might when praying with a parable. Praying with others may deepen our empathy and ready us to meet others with affirmation rather than judgment. Out of the silence may come an openness to listen and to learn. Spiritual practices like these can be morally formative to the extent that they help us to see and judge all things in relation to our experience of God and our commitment to care about what God cares about.

This transformation of discipleship happens by participating in the community of the church. Believers learn these spiritual practices in the community of faith through its teaching, worship, and witness in serving the world. The wisdom and traditions of the community guide the practices of its members not only toward personal growth in the Spirit but ultimately toward bringing the whole world closer to living in justice and peace under the reign of God. But there is no guarantee that this transformation will happen through spiritual practices. Many personal and cultural forces are at work to compete with the influence of these practices to shape moral character. While spiritual practices may not be the sole determining factor shaping our moral life, they do carry a rich potential for moral formation personally and communally.

Conclusion

This then is the shape of the landscape of moral theology today. We have shifted toward the historical to appreciate the dynamic unfolding of the world, of moral truth, and of our limited grasp of it anywhere along the way. In shifting to the personal, we have enlarged the context for understanding moral action and have made the person holistically considered the reference point for objective morality. The shift to virtue makes character matter. What we do comes out of who we are. By turning to virtue we enlarge morality to a way of life beyond occasional episodes of hard cases. The shift to the spiritual brings morality and spirituality back together in a critical dialogical relationship with one another. The moral life is the public face of our spirituality and acts back upon our spirituality to test the authenticity of our experience of God and our convictions about the way life ought to be lived. As Christians, our character and action ought to be the dynamic expression of our experience of being loved by God. By living morally, we express in love our gratitude for being loved.

The Rev. Richard M. Gula, SS, is Professor of Moral Theology at the Franciscan School of Theology/Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California.