Abstract

I am a Christian theologian who teaches ethics. I could alternatively say I am a Christian ethicist, with the hope that most people would concentrate on the noun and not the qualifier but that probably wouldn t help matters much. In fact many people have become and still do become Christian ethicists because they do not like theology. They think justice is something worth thinking about or even advocating or doing, but they do not like or they see little point in thinking about matters as obscure and seemingly as irrelevant as the Trinity. Such a deliberately non-confessional view of ethics, moreover, appears more acceptable in the modern university where it is generally thought to be a ‘good thing’ to study ethics, but it is not a good thing to be a theologian or to do theology. These days, theology just doesn t sound like a discipline appropriate to the university.Yet I prefer to be a theologian. Or better, I simply cannot think of myself as anything but a theologian despite the fact that a theologian is not a good thing to be if you also want to be a respected academic. Yet being a theologian has become a habit for me that I cannot nor do I wish to break. I am also an ethicist, but I do not make much of that claim. After all, ‘ethicist’ is such an ugly word. Of course, there are also intellectual reasons why I do not desire to claim the title ‘ethicist.’ Quite simply, ethics too often names what many take to be the useful remains of past Christian practices and beliefs. Such a view of ethics serves liberal social orders well, but it distorts the character of Christian convictions. Accordingly, I have tried — through my teaching and my writing — to show that ‘ethics’ cannot and should not be abstracted from ‘theology.’Yet even given such an understanding of theology and ethics, it would be reasonable to assume that I might have some useful insights to offer about theology s contributions for the recent call for a renewal of moral inquiry in the contemporary university. After all, moral inquiry surely must be at the heart of what anyone does who teaches Christian ethics. That, however, is not the case. Why that is not the case involves a complex history of an equally complex interrelation of theology and the modern university, something I cannot fully develop here, but I can offer one or two cursory remarks