Feature Article

Twenty-first-century sin

Moral theology, once the preserve of priests, has changed profoundly. Gone are the confessors' manuals and instead there is debate among its students and scholars about the way we live our lives. But how much division can be tolerated?

For the first time in its history, moral theology has the chance to become truly catholic and ecumenical. In the last 50 years, the subject has undergone seismic changes in its shape and structure. It has become an extraordinarily broad interdisciplinary enterprise, making use of tools and methods from the full range of the human, social, political and life sciences.

Perhaps key to these changes is the rapid transformation in those studying and writing moral theology. The number of people engaged in studying it has grown to its highest-ever level and these scholars are more diverse than at any other time in history. Previously, moralists tended, almost exclusively, to be priests teaching in an apologetic mode in seminary and clergy contexts.

Today moral theologians are much less homogeneous. Many are laypeople and many are women, having been introduced to the subject not through an ordination training programme but through study of theology at degree level. Large numbers of moral theologians are now based in universities, many teaching students of all faiths and none, and publishing research in an academic climate of freedom of inquiry.

There is another, highly significant change in the subject - a change influenced by geography. Moral theology today is far more than a specialism of Western academia; it has also been influenced by new voices from the developing world contributing their own distinctive experiences and insights. Sometimes that has meant correcting previous culturally blinkered assumptions and categorisations. Given this influx of moral theologians and the proliferation of writings that has followed, moral theology is now better able to reflect upon and represent the enormous range of human experience.

Fifty years ago it could still plausibly be claimed that in Catholic Christianity the raison d'être of the discipline was the development of priests as confessors. Through confession, the priest assumes responsibility for legal, moral and pastoral judgements concerning matters such as personal wrongdoing, culpability and sin. Moral theology developed as a particular sort of theological response to a particular sort of pastoral need. Today, moral theology is no longer anchored in this confessional tradition which, in its sacramental manifestation - at least in the West, while not extinct is certainly endangered.

The catalyst for change was undoubtedly the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. By the time of the Council the moribund nature of seminary-based moral theology was apparent, rooted as it was in a non-Christological, overly negative and pessimistic theological anthropology that owed its pathology to distorted genuflections to Augustine and Aquinas. The Council Fathers diagnosed a need for theological supplements and prescribed accordingly: theological education should have "more living contact with the mystery of Christ and the history of salvation". A renewed moral theology was created through a scripturally enriched revived anthropology that saw the human person's vocation in glorious theological Technicolor.

The Council's call for an improved moral theology came in the Decree on the Training of Priests, betraying traces of the old school even as the new one was heralded. This was before moral theology was devolved to, and made the joint responsibility of, the whole people of God, rather than reserved, occult-like, to an initiated clerical caste.

This plural people of God has produced, not surprisingly, moral theologies in the plural. And this de facto plurality - while potentially one of the most fruitful opportunities for the Church - has become one of the major challenges of the post-conciliar era.

Instead of being reduced to a canonically informed confessor's guide to qualifying and quantifying human failings, moral theology has developed into open-ended responses based on Christian understandings of the many ways of living out the human vocation in a world of constant change. But this means certain difficulties for teachers, who face no easy task in selecting appropriate material that will offer a fair and sufficiently comprehensive introduction to the discipline rather than a standardised account based on select authors. Even though this theological pluralism gives rise to many difficulties, few theologians would wish to turn back the clock to the days of the confessors' indoctrinating manuals.

Varied readings of Christian tradition and vastly differing theological agendas can lead to difficulties of course and moral theology is as characterised by disagreements and divisions as is the rest of Christianity. But how much internal division should the Christian Communion tolerate? This is the deepest source of disagreement among moral theologians, who believe that debate and disagreement are essential modes of human inquiry without which truth cannot emerge. An ecclesial community suppresses these dimensions at its peril, yet not everything can be tolerated.

Some moral attitudes that purport to be Christian may be judged by others to be neither Christian nor moral, to the extent that they are considered to undermine Gospel witness or promote inhumanity. But on what basis should churches decide which matters are non-negotiable features of their moral identity, and what degree of disagreement should be tolerated?

Each denomination draws its own line in the sand. The Anglican Communion, which has purposely cultivated a broad-church ecclesiology, has tolerated the coexistence of conflicting perspectives on a variety of moral matters including remarriage following divorce, embryo research and abortion, but this ecclesial breadth is currently being tested to its elastic limits by concerns over the blessing of gay unions and the appointment of gay bishops.

Even in the strongly regulated Catholic Church, which accommodates around 15 times the number of adherents as Anglicanism and has been less accommodating of difference, a degree of moral pluralism is considered legitimate. For example, at Vatican II, Catholicism retained its moral approval of just wars but also affirmed pacifism as an appropriate expression of the Christian vocation. There has also been scope for disagreement on matters such as which instances of the use of force comply with just war doctrine.

In 2002, as the United Kingdom debated whether the invasion of Iraq was morally legitimate, leaders of the Catholic Church in the UK expressed conflicting opinions. While Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster questioned whether the invasion conformed to just-war principles, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow saw armed intervention as justifiable, despite the anti-war stance of the Vatican.

Other moral issues, however, expose raw theological nerves. Christians are nowhere near agreement on matters such as what the Bible teaches us about homosexuality, what a supposed natural law might reveal about maleness, femaleness and human sexuality, or how far scientists should manipulate the human genome or intervene into human reproduction. Disagreement can exist not just on the moral matter in hand but on the theological understanding of reality that informs the moral conclusions.

If Creation reflects the wise ordering of the Creator, then certain human activities, it is argued, overstep nature's boundaries and disturb its patterns to encroach upon and devalue the biological givens that are replete with divine meaning and moral significance. Yet Christians cannot agree on which types of behaviour wilfully reject the Maker's instructions and flout God's will. Thus, artificial contraception, direct sterilisation and artificial insemination by husband are proscribed in official Catholic teaching, but are considered morally unproblematic across most of mainstream Christianity (including by large numbers of Catholics).

Part of the difficulty is that the way these questions and issues are dealt with by moral theologians is affected by pointedly different models of the Church. They become inseparable from ecclesiology. However, that Church authorities continue to respond to such disturbing pluralism through attempts to control the content of moral theology and the writings of moral theologians, damages the state and health of the discipline. Moral theology - indeed, all theology - can only ever thrive and bear fruit when it is an open conversation (rather than a last word) and a communal enterprise of discernment to which all are invited to participate, listen and respond in fellowship as the people of God.

Just as Christians must recognise the Holy Spirit's gift of koinonia in their midst, and actively work towards realising its potential, so too should one consider the koinonia of moral theology that unites in fellowship - across space and time - those who through its study have engaged in the search for truth and the eschatological koinonia that this involves. Moral theology in the twenty-first century must renew its commitment to making this search for truth as constructive as it can for the life of the Church and for humanity as a whole.