Você está na página 1de 2

My 2019 Opening Convocation Address (Part I): A Way Forward for Our Time

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Every year, as President of Asbury Theological Seminary, I have the privilege of


delivering a major address to the entire community which formally marks the kick
off of a new academic year. I am going to be sharing this message (with some
adaptations) with you in four parts. The first part is a diagnosis of one of the
deepest problems we face in society, and the remaining days I will propose three
solutions, or ways forward.

Since 2002, The Gallup polling group has been issuing an annual report regarding
American perceptions of the moral climate in the country. Gallup tracks attitudes
about 19 moral issues, ranging from abortion, to doctor-assisted suicide, to extra-
marital affairs, as well as general perceptions about the overall moral climate.1
This year American overall perceptions about the moral climate of our country have
slipped to its lowest point. In the Gallop Poll, more than 4 in 5 people (81%) now
rate the state of moral values in the United States as only fair or poor.

A recent PEW study also asked Americans about their perceptions regarding the moral
climate of the country. An astonishing 77% of Americans believe that the moral
climate in the country is not only in decline, but they are either �very worried�
or �fairly worried� about what this means for the future of our country.2 Studies
have been conducted in other countries around the world with similar findings.

The decline in the moral fabric of our country is a serious concern for us all.
However, it may not be the biggest challenge we face. Could it be that our dilemma
as a nation is actually deeper than even our friends at Gallop or PEW fully
recognize? Our problem, more fundamentally, has been the loss of moral categories
and, therefore, the loss of a proper moral argument.

One of the more insightful philosophers who has thought about our situation is the
Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his classic work, After Virtue. He
argues that while there is plenty of evidence of declining morals in Western
society, the more profound challenge is the inability to even frame a moral
argument.3 We no longer have sufficient shared assumptions as a culture to reach
any kind of consensus on moral questions, whether based on a broad Judeo-Christian
ethic found in Holy Scripture, or even Aristotle�s account of virtues and human
flourishing, in his Nicomachean Ethics. Therefore, with the loss of any foundation
for moral argument, the only path for contemporary society is to find new ways to
accommodate endless human preferences within an increasingly fractured society.

This loss of a moral framework means that, despite the ongoing use of moral
language in various cultural arguments, there can be no final resolution, or what
MacIntyre calls a �terminus� point.4 He cites various common moral debates within
society, demonstrating that because there is no shared moral framework in these
national conversations, they end up not being �conversations� at all, with pros and
cons evaluated based on a shared moral framework. Rather, they end up as staged
shouting matches where we just yell at one another. MacIntrye calls this descent of
ethics into shouting in the 21st century Western world �emotivism.� He describes
emotivism as the point you reach when �all morals are nothing but expressions of
[personal] preference� or �expressions of attitudes or feelings.�5 Chastity, for
example, was long held to be a shared virtue in our society. However, MacIntyre
argues that chastity �in a world uninformed by either Aristotelian or biblical
values will make very little sense to the adherents of the dominant culture.�6

Consider the sheer force of moral questions which are posed to our society today:
Is it morally permissible for the state to execute someone for a crime? Are State
Lotteries morally acceptable? What is the definition of marriage? Do we have a
moral obligation to protect someone who flees a murderous regime and arrives at our
border seeking asylum? Is profiling a legally-permissible method of law
enforcement? Is it permissible to utilize the services of a doctor to end your own
life? Should race be a determinative factor in college admissions? Should insurance
companies pay for gender re-assignment surgery? Are reparations for past sins a
form of just resolution? This list goes on and on. These are just a few of the
questions which have presented themselves to our culture in recent years, and we
know how these questions play out.

Quite tragically, our deepest moral questions today are �resolved� not through
moral argumentation on either side at all, but through the exertion of my will over
your will by means of power. This is probably best exemplified in our culture by
the now all-too-familiar 5-4 vote on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the church
has not been immune to this loss of moral argumentation. Similar will-to-power
votes have happened in churches under conflict. A recent, well publicized example
of this can be seen in the 438 to 384 vote on human sexuality at the General
Conference of the United Methodist denomination this past February. While I was
pleased that the church stood for historic orthodoxy, I was disappointed that
despite over two years of special study on the topic the church never engaged in
anything remotely close to a proper moral argument where a case was laid out
biblically, historically, exegetically and pastorally, etc. Instead, we only got
what all moral argument has become in our day, namely, what MacIntyre calls the
�clash of antagonistic wills.�7 This is the deeper malaise which I am highlighting;
not merely the decline of morals, but the collapse of the very categories which
might make any kind of moral argument possible. We are actually not simply in a
crisis of moral epistemology, i.e. how do we know whether something is right or
wrong, or the meaning of moral sentences and how they interact one with another
which is the hard work of ethicists (that has always been with us). Rather, more
profoundly, we are in a crisis of moral ontology. Moral ontology asks whether or
not morals objectively exist independently of us. Or, as some might claim, are
morals merely mental and societal constructs with no objective foundation? It
seems, as a society, the retreat of the Christian worldview has left us in a deep
mire, with no objective foundation for the very concept and framework of morality.

Certainly, part of the mission of Asbury Theological Seminary is to recognize the


inherent problems with emotivism as a moral solution in our culture, but also to
resist the temptation to simply accept this collapsed moral state and engage in
some form of power politics, some Christianized version of Nietzsche�s �will to
power.�8

Beloved, this is not some esoteric article which has nothing to do with your
ministry. This challenge lies at the heart of what you are facing in your lives and
ministries, because what goes on in the halls of congress, or the floor of your
denominational national meetings, is also going on in Sunday School rooms and homes
and schools and in the workplace across America and, in various degrees, around the
world.

In future installments, I will explore solutions for addressing this dilemma.

Você também pode gostar