Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Welcome. I've been thinking all week that it would be really interesting if someone would attempt a fifth description of the practices of the academic community. I didn't have time to even begin this week, so I instead tried to come up with an analogy to the practice of multiple introductions. The first thing that came to mind was a ritual mating dance.
I certainly didn't want to get into that this week, so I moved to the second one which was that, what we do in this little practice is something like a tennis player does as he or she gets ready for the opposing player to put the ball in play. Gets the player focused and gets all systems go,
as NASA would say. The introducer doesn't have much to do except give you time to do that; to get set, and you've had it for today. We are ready for the fourth lecture. I remind you that the fifth and final lecture will be given this evening at 7:00 p.m. Dr. Browning's lecture is titled, "Feminism, the Therapeutic and the Ethics of Equal Regard."
We're ready for your serve, Don.
BROWNING: I have to get hooked up again. One projects titles for a series of this kind a year in advance and you'll not be surprised to know that things get reshuffled a bit.
This was the lecture that was originally scheduled for the third lecture, and indeed, the discussion of the therapeutic will be somewhat slighted. That probably got shuffled into some earlier discussions. This is really going to have a lot to do with a revised critical dialog between the position I've been developing and at least one alternative interpretation. So far we have illustrated three of the four movements of the fundamental practical
theology. We've talked a lot about scriptive theology, some about historical theology, and at least part of what's involved in systematic theology. I've done this around the crises of families in Western societies. There's much more to be said about all of these movements, but methodological discussions are boring, to say the least. In addition, there are limits in time. I already have stated a systematic theology as broadly practical
and closely related to theological ethics. The distance, systematicity, and perhaps generalized ability achieved in systematic theology and theological ethics are overcome, though, to a suitable extent I think in the ethical sub-moments of strategic practice theology. In strategic practice theology it is important to return to the full concreteness
of the original situations driving practical reflection. It has been my argument over the past 10 years that theological ethics is somewhat different in character from the ethics in systematic theology is central to what I'm calling strategic practical theology. The traditional practice of theological disciplines reflect on practices of various kinds; education practices, preaching practices, liturgical practices, care practices, social action,
and mission practices. Each of these practices entail projecting normative images of humans and societies in which they live. When these disciplines forego concern with these normative ethical issues, as I think the practical disciplines have to some extent in recent decades, they lose much of their substance. I'm point then to two forms of theological ethics. One
is closely related to systematic theology and participates in a somewhat distanced, general, and systematic although still decidedly practical character of that discipline. The other form of theological ethics is much more concrete. It returns to the full situation from which the animating questions of theology first come. I thinks about the norms of practical action within that initial concrete context.
It reflects on the norms of action with an eye toward means to ends, transformative strategies, and rhetorical sensitivities. Finally, it reflects on the norms of action with a further concern with advancing critical practical reasons supporting the actions advocated. The line between systematic and strategic practical theology is difficult to draw. Part of the task of
strategic practical theology is the continuation of the critical dialog that must necessarily begin in systematic theology. The critical dialog I refer to is that between Christian interpretations and answers to situations, and alternative perspectives that are part of the cultural experience of pluralistic societies. A revised correlational view of fundamental practical theology is not simply confessional, although its first impulse is, indeed,
confessional as is the case with all theology. A critical correlational practical theology must assume the responsibility of a critical and apologetic conversation with both the questions and answers that come from alternative interpretive perspectives in our society. Although this critical conversation begins in systematic theology it must continue after we return to the specific context in systematic
practical theology. The question that has driven our fundamental practical inquiry is this, as you will recall: Is it possible within the resources of the Christian tradition to reconcile the tensions between individualistic and self-sacrificial models of love neither of which seem able to stem the family's increasing in capacity to discharge its primary task of caring for children.
Our tentative answer has been to recapture a concept of love as equal regard. This view of love has within it a place for self-actualization, and individual fulfilment, but balanced with a rigorous equal concern for the self-actualization of the other. There is a role for self-sacrifice in this model, but not as an end in itself. I have added a further twist, you may recall.
Love as mutuality and equal regard must be seen as a life cycle concept. Its task is to order fundamental human pre-moral goods, human needs, tendencies, and basic human rhythms over the entire life cycle. Among the pre-moral goods that equal regard must organize across the human life cycle are the pre-moral goods associated
with parenthood. Furthermore, it must organize the goods of parenthood within the context of the streams of societies in transition from modern to post-modern patterns. To point to the importance of the goods of parenthood and their ordering by life cycle concept of equal regard strikes several new chords in the history of the theology of the family. The values appropriation, a traditional
good associated with marriage, is now broadened to the wider concept of parenthood. The goods of parenthood are now ordered by an ethic of equal regard rather than an ethic of self-sacrificial love generally worked out within a doctrine of male spiritual authority and female submission. The values of mutuality and the values of parenthood are held intention.
In close association these two values are the primary purposes of families. In putting forward this position I am intentioned with aspects, not everything, but aspects, Medieval Catholic views that placed a greater emphasis on procreation, a much narrower concept than parenthood. My equal regard model is intentioned with patriarchal and sacrificial models
of both Medieval Catholic and Reformation Protestant views. Nonetheless, as I've argued earlier, the emphasis upon love as equal regard brings to fruition, if Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza is correct, seeds sown in the earliest levels of Christian history. That Christianity has an investment in love as equal regard may be more obvious to some of you than its investment
in the good of parenthood. It must be admitted that the good of parenthood holds a complex and nuanced status in Christian history. It is affirmed often as fundamental to God's plan for humans, a point that Luther wrote about with great passion and remarkable eloquence. Yet it is also relativized; salvation or redemption are not
in Christian views, as they are sometimes thought to be in ancient Judaism, bound up with parenthood. In the days before the contraceptive pill, Mark 10:2-9 and Matthew 19:3-9, the picture there of Jesus reaffirming the Genesis 1:27 male-female, one-flesh union must also, I think,
be interpreted as an affirmation of parenthood. It is further and more profoundly an affirmation of the centrality from the foundations of God's creation of the pair bonded, male-female couple. By pair bonded I use a phrase quite popular in anthropology to refer to a phenomenon that may be unique to the human species. Paired bondedness results when
reciprocal emotion, emotional, sexual, and practical exchanges develop a high degree of trust and dependence between a man and a woman. It is this environment of mutual dependence that is required, many anthropologists believe, to provide the security, the emotional trust, and the endurance necessary to sustain the long years of childhood dependence required to raise infant humans
to adults. Although parenthood is not equivalent to salvation, it is clearly affirmed as a basic good of life and part of God's plan from the beginning. Although the communities from which Mark and Matthew came, doubtless affirmed families, they guarded against the sin of what we today call familism. Familism is the temptation to make one's family the end of life.
Familism puts husband and wife, daughter and son, ahead of all other human ends. Familism does injustice against the common good in an effort to enhance the advantage of one's family. Familism justifies one's life through the family. The idolatry of familism was particularly tempting for the powerful extended household of the ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman world with their
household gods, altars, and family-centered rituals. It is the sin of familism that Jesus may have had in mind in Matthew 10:37 when he was reported to have said, "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." It is not families, I think, and parenthood that he is criticizing as such; it is the close association of family and
a familistic household religion ubiquitous in the ancient world that is at issue. It was the household religion of the family that both defended the family, but kept it from responding to Jesus' call to life in the Kingdom. Families who dedicate themselves and their children to the Kingdom are not the object of criticism in these early Christian communities. We must acknowledge
this in order to comprehend the sharp limitations on divorce that are assigned to Jesus, and that are interestingly enough, continue by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. Almost anything was OK as long as people did not rush into the splitting of the male-female bonded marital relationship. You sometimes wonder why Paul is laboring
this so much. This must also be acknowledged to understand the symbolic association of children with the trust and faith of the Kingdom of Heaven. My point is that families, parenthood, and children can be affirmed as goods in early Christian communities, but not ends in themselves. They are goods to be dedicated to the greater ends of the Kingdom of God. They are goods in the earliest strata of the Jesus movement to be
ruled possibly by a love ethic of equal regard. This ethic is to be renewed by God's grace which empowers the capacity for self-sacrificial love, a sacrifice that serves mutuality, as I've argued before. Families and parenthood are goods that are themselves to be dedicated to the self-transcending ends of the Kingdom. We are now in a position to contrast the very striking difference between
the context of families in the early Jesus movement and the situation of the family in modern societies. The analysis of family decline presented in the early lectures points to an enormous difference between the situation of families in the modern world and from situation of families in the ancient world. The close association of family
and cult in the ancient world produced a familism intentioned with the demand of the Kingdom. Individualistically oriented technical reason functions in modern societies to loosen family ties so decidedly that families are severely limited in their capacity to parent. If familism and the power of the household cult kept families from the Kingdom
in the early days of the Jesus movement, individualism and the centrifugal forces of technical and instrumental rationality do so today. These are radically different kinds of social forces and implicate the structure of human sin in very different ways. Families today hardly have enough cohesion to raise children to decent citizenship, let alone raise them
to participate in the grace and demands of the Kingdom of God. The criticism of families that many contemporary theologians believe existed in the early church is doubtless misplaced. When this mistaken view is imposed on the New Hermeneutic situation facing families and the church in post-modern societies, the consequences to the church's ministry to families has been costly indeed.
Familism may be, it may have seemed to be, a major problem facing churches in the 1950s. Whatever familism existed then probably was the last gasp of the struggle in families to resist the acids of individualism and technical rationality. Familism seems not to be the way to formulate the problem with families today,
at least not the cultic familism which we must assign to large sections of the ancient world. Hence, a love ethic of equal regard centered on parenthood will have quite different practical emphasis and emphases in the context of today where it is so decidedly being challenged and so difficult to fulfill. My goal now is to illustrate what I mean by
a critical correlation of the conversation within a fundamental practical theology. A strictly confessional approach for practical theology would feel that its work was done once it had established the central witness of the Christian classics and found some effective way to to communicate it. But a fundamental practical theology is fundamental precisely
because it accepts the critical and apologetic task. It assumes that it must take other perspectives seriously and enter into a conversation about the relative adequacy of the Christian interpretation in relation to other perspectives. On the subject of the family, the competing interpretations are myriad. There are Marxist perspectives, a host of feminist perspectives, classical, liberal perspectives, sociobiological
perspectives, and conservative Christian voices. I've had an implicit dialogue in these lectures with some of these conservative religious voices. I do not have the time to enter into dialogue with all the alternative interpretations. My goal will be more limited. I hope only to illustrate what a critical correlational dialogue looks like. In short, it looks for analogies and differences between interpretations from a critical Christian perspective
and selected alternative non-Christian interpretations. It tries to test with critical reasons these differences. It does this in order to determine, not necessarily what is right in an absolute sense, but what may be more relatively adequate. Adequate not only to the Christian witness, but to what can be seen as philosophically convincing, as well.
To make this illustration, I want to look at the work of Susan Moller Oken in her highly-regarded "Justice, Gender and the Family." It came out in 1989. Oken is one of a new group of feminists who addresses the questions of family as a central concern. Oken is a political scientist and her message is a political message. Her central point is that the category of justice
is not simply a concept to be applied to the public realms of government, politics, and economics. This has been the view of much of Western political thought according to Oken. It is also the position of important critics of liberal political theory, such as Michael Sandel, and John MacIntyre, and Roberto Unger. This is not Oken's view. Oken believes that the category of justice applies equally to both the public matters of government
and the so-called private matters of the family. Oken is a follower of the great liberal political theorist of our time, John Rawls. Although Oken criticizes Rawls for failing to take his theory of justice into the ordering of family affairs, she believes his views are basically correct. For Oken, justice applies to both the public and the private realms. Both political theorists who believe that the family,
rather than being a sphere of justice, is a realm of feeling, or love, or trust and emotion are in Oken's view, both sentimental and pernicious. Certainly the family is a place for love and trust, but its love and trust must also bear the structure of justice. This, according to Oken, families have seldom if ever done. The reason families
do not enjoy justice is because they are structured, according to Oken, along gender lines or gender roles. They have been structured especially in the 19th and 20th Century for men to have most of the authority in the economic and political realms outside the home, while women manage the housework and socialize the children in the so-called traditional, or modern, or bourgeois family. Although this situation is changing, gender structuring of the family
still very much exists, Oken believes. It does not, however, function only in the home. All of society is structured along gender lines, according to Oken. Some careers seem more for women than men, as indeed some are more for men than women. There are very few women in Congress or the Senate. There is only one woman on the Supreme Court and she is the first in its history. Gender inequality exists both in the public and private familial realms.
Oken believes they cannot be eradicated in the one without being eradicated in the other. Oken follows John Rawls' famous theory of justice. The mean of justice could be illustrated through a mental exercise which Rawls put forth in his 1971 book, "A Theory of Justice." In that exercise we are to imagine going behind what Rawls called the veil of ignorance.
Behind this veil we lose our memory and forget who we are. We forget our race, our age, our wealth, our education, and our class. Justice for Rawls is imagining the fairness we would design in this state of amnesia if we did not know who we would be when we come back from behind this veil of ignorance. If we did not know how to calculate our advantage
we would design a world, according to Rawls, in which class, race, age, etc. would not be impediments to fairness and to equal access to the good of our society. Oken likes Rawls' liberal contractarian view of justice. She has only two complaints. Rawls often overlooks sex, whether we are male or female, in formulating the list of characteristics to be forgotten
behind the veil of ignorance. She wants those using the veil of ignorance to forget which sex they are and which sex they would return to after their mental experiment. Were we to do that we would all, male and female, begin again to design a fresh, a society completely fair to both. Such a society, Oken believes, would eliminate the significance
of gender and certainly all of the discriminatory factors associated with it. Oken has in her mind the great vulnerability in women in all past societies and especially in our present society. She is aware of the feminization of poverty that we discussed in the earlier lectures. She is also aware how this has contributed to impoverishment of children. Women are vulnerable in a multitude of ways. Gender roles, and family, and economy contribute to this vulnerability, she believes.
Women are vulnerable before marriage and the sacrifices they make in taking their education less seriously, and foregoing preparation for economic advance. They do this is anticipation of marriage and the hope that their husband will assure their economic security. They are vulnerable during marriage, according to Oken, because the economic power and public prestige invariably rests with their husbands. If they work their jobs are less prestigious and they are dependent upon their husbands for both money
and self-esteem. They are vulnerable after divorce. In most cases they gain custody of the children, equal property settlement sounds fair at first glance, but often leads to impoverishment for the simple reason that they do not have equal earning power, and child support is both inadequate and often not paid. All of this we covered. We saw all these vulnerabilities in the case of Pam (inaudible) Stacy told us about.
Oken's solution is the radical eradication of gender distinctions in education, the economy, and the family. The place to begin is the family. The family is the source of moral education. Justice must first be learned there if it is to permeate the rest of society. Shared responsibility for parenting and the
non-paid housework would be the first step and would start prior to birth. Society would make massive investments in high quality daycare. Gender distinctions would be eliminated from the workplace in both roles and the pay received. Furthermore, paid pregnancy leaves for both men and women would become mandated by law. For larger firms on-site daycare would be provided. Paychecks -- oh,
this is the suggestion that appeals so much to my wife that I referred to earlier. For couples where husband or wife remain home with the children, paychecks would be divided and mailed to each separately. A novel suggestion. This would assure that home work and childcare were recognized as an economic contribution to the family and duly compensated.
This would equalize power relations between wage earner and stay-at-home partner. It would make the stay-at-home partner less economically and psychologically dependent and vulnerable. Oken believes that this organization of family and society would lower divorce by involving men more deeply in the care of their children. It would increase their investment in children and make them less inclined to leave. Women, on the other hand, would have more supports and feel more justly
treated. Her vision and plan, she argues, would be a great remedy for the declining family. A critical correlational approach to practical theology is dedicated to an honest conversation where the questions and answers of alternative interpretations of the various issues that confront us. Oken's is a decidedly
secular voice. Of this there can be no doubt. It is not enough for a fundamental practical theology to either agree or to disagree simply because alternative voices are not avowedly Christian. A critical correlational practical theology must take full responsibility for the dialogues into which it enters. Oken's questions are
similar to my own. She is clearly concerned with the family's decline in its capacity to parent. She is concerned with the feminization of poverty and what this means for both women and children. Even her answer has some similarities to the answer I had been evolving. She is interested in a new ethic for families. She does not call it a love ethic, as I have in discussing my proposals, in (inaudible) however, they're
very much the same thing. She does not want to distinguish between the love, trust, and feeling that bonds families in what she calls justice. In fact, this love, trust, and feeling should have the formal structure of justice when justice is arrived at through Rawls' veil of ignorance. Hence for Oken, justice and love must be intimately connected. In view of this, Oken's position must be seen as close to
the one I have been putting forth as capturing the most reliable strands of the Christian tradition. It is close to the love ethic of [Louie Jonson's?] and his subscription of love as equal regard and mutuality. It is close to the formal emphasis upon justice implicit in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's discipleship of equals that she discerns in the early Estrada of the Jesus movement. There are some genuine analogies and correlations
between Oken's views and the practical theological position being elaborated in these lectures. Furthermore, Oken's gender analysis of the situation of the contemporary family is illuminating. It uncovers the power relations that do exist in families and shows how, in most instances, they subtly work against women and children, but there are important differences. Oken's emphasis on the pervasiveness
of gender inequality of a welcome insight, but probably overstated. She fails to adequately place this important point -- and it is important -- within the context of the many other factors that are contributing to family decline. She does not discuss the rise of individualism, the sexual revolution, the impingement of technical rationality and market forces to family life in the subtle ways
it leads us to think of intimate family relations more and more in terms of cost-benefit analysis and market contracts. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that that's exactly the way in which Oken thinks about it in relationships. Increasingly cost-benefit analyses strongly influenced by market analogy, she wants justice within that, but that's the framework she accepts for her work. She's a liberal in that sense. As important as gender analysis is, it is only one of many interlocking
factors that are leading to the decline of families and their increasing inability to perform their parental vocation. This overstated interpretation of the problem influences the plausibility of the solution. Although more gender justice is clearly a major part of the solution, when overstated in a nuance, it can further contribute to the problem. As important as Oken's employment of Rawls' theory of justice is
for this problem and as close as this is to Jonson's theory of love as equal regard, there are important differences. Although Oken is less thoroughly Kantian in her theory of justice than is Rawls, the teleological role for pre-moral values is not worked out in her theory. This is clearly seen in her discussion of gender. Gender for Oken is purely, thoroughly, and totally a social
construct. The differences between men and women, and role differences that these might seem to imply are strictly a result of socially conditioned perceptions. These perceptions are the consequence of male power and how this has functioned to shape role definitions to their own benefit. Oken's radical denial of all gender differences is somewhat excessive and finally, self-defeating. It overlooks the tremendous difference it makes that women,
and not men, give birth to infants. This alone is a huge gender difference and must be fully acknowledged, even if Oken is to accomplish some of the special considerations for women that her agenda requires. But there are other differences that have been well-researched and well-established. Because of the relative difficulty of conception for women in contrast to the relative ease of men to impregnate, and
because of the long period of pregnancy during which women carry the developing embryo in their bodies, women on the whole simply have more investment in infants at birth than do men. Psychoanalyst John Bowlby, sociologist Alice Rossi, and sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe have all argued that because of this investment women are simply more bonded with their infants than are men. Furthermore, this bonding is crucial for the sense of security
and wellbeing so essential to the later development of the child. There is possibly no substitute for this bonding on the part of mother-infant. Any substitute may simply break or lessen this bonding with uncertain assurances that it will be replaced by anything else at the same depth. Now, there's every reason to believe that husbands and others need to be included in this bonding as deeply as possible.
It may be wrong, however, to hold that the bonding on the part of the mother is unimportant and can easily be replaced by others. Although there are other documentable behavioral, cognitive, and motor differences between men and women, it is also true that in advanced technological societies these differences have little significance for the range of roles and tasks to be performed. But there are modest yet important differences in the
area of parenthood and to deny these makes Oken's use of Rawls' justice in terms of the family flat and un-nuanced. As you recall, the concept of love as equal regard as defined by Jonson is a mixed deontological concept. From my reading, Oken's theory of justice is more strictly purely deontological. A mixed deontological theory of the kind I believe
implicit in Christian neighbor love brings forward teleological and pre-moral values to be ordered by equal regard. When this view of equal regard is filled out by life cycle theory, we are left with the challenging awareness that the different members of the family; parents, children, infants, and grandparents have different needs at different times and somehow or other justice over all must take an account of these realities.
My proposal, which is consistent I believe with the full meaning of neighbor love, is to see equal regard and mutuality as applying to the life cycle of families as a whole, and not to flat and precisely measure the moment-by-moment, mathematical conceptions of equality and justice. They are rhythms which must be respected when love with equal regard is applied to the pre-moral goods of parenting and children. Most of Oken's
concrete social program has much to recommend it, but for slightly different, not profoundly, but slightly different reasons than she suggests. She has ideas worthy of consideration, not because gender differences must be totally eliminated; they are worthy ideas because the small differences in gender that are relevant for modern societies must indeed be respected and justly accommodated. It is a special role that
women play in childbirth that requires these special considerations and protections that she proposes. It is because women do give birth and need the time to establish deep bond with their infants that they need the time and protections to do this without rendering themselves vulnerable to economic and psychological losses, which is what tends to happen. It is because men cannot give birth that they have slightly different
responsibilities of support, protection, and loyalty to lessen the vulnerabilities of childbirth by the mother. It is because they do not give birth that they must work hard, very hard, to establish the bonds that may come somewhat more naturally for the woman who experiences the long period of time of carrying the baby during the
maturity of the embryo. Therefore, and here Oken and many others are completely correct, fathers need the leisure and economic protections necessary to also become deeply bonded with their children. This is a supplement and not a replacement to the bonding of the mother. Indeed, the slightly specialized,
and they're only slightly, roles that father and mother play in the early life may be mitigated as time goes on, children grow, and parents gradually resume wider responsibilities. Human tendencies and needs shift throughout the life cycle. David Gutman shows that in a variety of different cultures fathers and mothers reclaim powers and capacities that are temporarily suspended on both sides during what he calls, the parental emergency;
the challenge of the early years of infant and child dependency. This is why love and justice as equal regard and mutuality must be seen to apply to the cycle as a whole, as a present reality, as future expectation, and as past remembrance. It can never be fully actualized at any given moment. It is the standard by which we measure our practices, not a standard perfectly realized at any one time.
Oken's vision of a genderless society and her lack of appreciation of a life cycle nature of justice tends to undermine this more dynamic understanding. Furthermore, Oken has no understanding of the role of sacrifice and by implication, forgiveness as transitional moments within equal regard and justice. The modern secular mind is afraid
to talk of sacrificial love. They have gained sufficient distance from Christian perspectives to point out with some force the way appeals that self-sacrifice can be used to legitimate ethics of subordination and domination. Nonetheless, her philosophy of justice has marks of superficiality without insight into these uniquely Christian truths. But the sacrifice that Christians are asked to perform is an
active, not a passive, sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of effort, endurance, and patience needed to actively change a relation of imbalance to a relation of mutuality and equal regard. Often such sacrifice requires forgiveness. It is the Christian conviction that the strength of this forgiveness often difficult to enact comes from the grace of God.
It is a grace that strengthens us to actively work to transform the other and transform circumstances so that greater and more perfectly balanced equal regard and mutuality can emerge. The sacrifice required here is not the sacrifice of passive endurance. It is, as Louis [Chartroff?] has so eloquently suggested and as I referred to in the question-and-answer session yesterday evening, it is a sacrifice
even in the New Testament more nearly like that of Martin Luther King's ethic of nonviolence. It is a sacrificial love designed to transform the others so that he, or she, or they will be more genuinely capable of love as equal respect and equal regard. These are insights Oken's application of classical liberalism to the family, as admirable as it is,
fails to fully comprehend. These imaginary exchanges between Oken and my position illustrates some of the responsibilities of a critical correlational approach to a fundamental practical theology. In this conversation we have been operating on the boundary between systematic theology and strategic practical theology. In my next and final lecture this evening at 7:00 we will move more directly into the complexities of strategic or
fully practical theology as we move into dialog with the family ethic of an African American Pentecostal church. Thank you.