By David Gushee
Follow David: @dpgushee
Many factors lead me to reflect these days on the painful inevitability of moral conflict — and what, if anything, we can do about it, especially in Christian life.
By “moral conflict” I mean sharp disagreements between people on issues that the people involved consider morally significant.
By “inevitability” I mean that among any community of human beings one can expect moral conflict as a regular feature of life.
By “painful” I mean that moral conflict causes suffering. This suffering can be intrapersonal, as when a person involved in moral conflict experiences significant cognitive dissonance or emotional distress, and interpersonal, as when family members, friends or faith communities get entangled in moral conflicts that stress or break relationships.
So, I pose five questions about moral conflict:
1. Why is moral conflict inevitable?
2. Why is moral conflict so painful?
3. What do we do with our moral conflicts in Christian communities?
4. What do we do when we cannot reason or argue our way through a moral conflict?
5. What difference does all this make?
1. Why is moral conflict inevitable?
Moral conflict is inevitable because human beings are not omniscient and because human beings are sinners. We do not know everything. We see through a glass darkly. We see from a particular perspective, from one angle of vision rather than all. Everything we see is affected by what we bring to the seeing, including various distortions and deceptions and blind spots.
Human beings have limited access to reliable knowledge. In some arenas of knowledge, it is, in principle, possible to know what is “true” and “factual” through sufficient study of universally recognized relevant data. Thus I can tell you right now the pitching rotation of the 1971 Baltimore Orioles (Palmer, Cuellar, Dobson, McNally). I know the truth about that extraordinary quartet. I can even “prove” it in various ways.
In other arenas of knowledge, such as morality, it is not possible similarly to know and prove what is true or right through sufficient study of universally recognized relevant data. Conflict over the pitching rotation of the 1971 Orioles is resolvable through direct appeal to available data whose relevance is universally recognized. Conflicts over the morality of whether Christians should get rich, or go to war, or divorce, are not resolvable through direct appeal to relevant universally recognized “data,” both because of the nature of the data and because of the nature of the ones making the appeal.
But human life is ineradicably moral, by which I mean that issues that most people consider morally significant simply must be decided on a regular basis both in individual life and in communities. And these decisions often matter very deeply to us. Our views on such matters might even become convictions.
Convictions, as contrasted with mere opinions, are those persisting beliefs that in many ways make us who we are. Convictions are tied to our identity. If we are untrue to these, we feel that we have betrayed ourselves and our communities. This arouses not just our intellect but our passion.
Moral conflict is inevitable, then, because moral issues cannot be avoided — but disputes about convictions related to these important issues matter deeply to us. And such core disputes cannot be resolved through direct appeal to available, universally recognized data.
In the Christian community, we have a repertoire of knowledge sources that have functioned for centuries as resources for our moral truth claims. In some combination, we have sacred scripture, Christian tradition/s, spiritual experiences, communal wisdom, life experiences, rational reflection, religious leaders, and the entire array of knowledge claims available in the wider world.
It ought to be possible, we might think, for godly, mature, and well-trained Christians to resolve moral conflict about an issue by appeal to our available sources. We might believe in this possibility of certain knowledge or communal consensus because we believe certain things about the Bible and where it comes from, or about the Holy Spirit and what the Spirit says, or about the wisdom of the Tradition, or about the practices of our congregation/s, or about the insights of our leaders or ourselves — or some combination thereof. But a moment’s reflection reveals a hundred reasons why individuals, congregations or denominations are not able to resolve moral conflicts through appeal even to knowledge sources agreed to be authoritative or even divinely inspired in any particular faith community.
Just taking scripture as our focus for a second, we might find moral conflict about an issue unresolvable because of different understandings of the meaning/s of the specific biblical texts; or because of different interpretations of the authorial intent behind specific texts; or because of how different ones of us reconstruct the historical and social context in which a text was originally written; or because some of us might consider some texts more relevant to an issue than other texts; or because we discover different approaches to the move from what the texts meant when written to what they ought to mean to our particular faith community today. And that is not even to specify all the permutations that might affect what particular contemporary readers might bring to all of these tasks related to the Bible, such as social location differences or dramatically different life experiences or even the need to self-deceive. And however much we shame each other or raise our voices at each other when we face such impasses, the impasses remain.
In light of all of this, what is actually surprising should probably be how often human communities, including churches, are able to get through a day without descending into moral conflict.
2. Why is moral conflict so painful?
Moral conflict is so painful because moral issues matter greatly to people. Indeed, few people would come to blows over the Orioles pitching rotation in 1971. But many would come to blows — verbal or otherwise — over a whole host of moral issues.
I venture the rather disturbing hypothesis that reality (in a fallen world, or in our human experience) turns out to exist in such a way that there often is an inverse relationship between the personal significance of an issue under discussion and the capacity of finite sinners to actually “know” the “truth” in relation to that issue. And to the extent that convictional certainty is important to people, and convictional unity important to communities, to that very extent moral conflict is painful and causes suffering. Indeed, in some cases the suffering associated with moral conflict is far more acute than that associated with physical suffering.
This is a reminder of just how important our ways of seeing are to us existentially. To interact with others, especially close others, who knowingly flout our deeply-held convictions is taken as a personal offense in addition to an offense to God.
3. What do we do with our moral conflicts in Christian communities?
We can begin by always acknowledging that we are not omniscient or morally perfect. This means that when we make moral claims, which we still must do, we should offer them as correctable, fallible statements of perspective, belief and even conviction, not as God’s Own Truth. We can entertain other people’s conflicting moral claims on the same basis. We can seek to understand conflicting moral convictions and seek to pinpoint how those convictions were arrived at and where precisely their sources or outcomes differ from our own. We can seek to be fair in our vocabulary choices, not using loaded terms or other rhetorical tricks. We can attempt to keep our emotions under control when we feel ourselves offended or threatened by differing moral convictions, even when we do in fact find others’ convictions offensive. And we can take full responsibility for the moral convictions we arrive at and their consequences, while asking others to do the same.
Another part of our answer could be that we can help each other sort out those convictions that we hold at the “particular” level that are not so important as the ones that we hold at the level of “doctrinal” or “presiding” convictions (to borrow James McClendon’s terms for the three levels of convictions). We need to learn to temper our impassioned responses especially when the conviction in question is actually not part of the “hard core” of what we believe; in fact, many of our convictions are actually in the protective belt around that hard core, and many of those have been added ad hoc and might not stand up to the tests of consistency with more important convictions.
Within the Christian community, or any particular congregation, we can recognize that we have only a somewhat greater possibility of having a coherent conversation about moral issues than in the general public, because of that shared repertoire of knowledge sources and preexisting shared commitments. We can develop best practices related to how appeals to these authority sources should be made. Similarly, we can develop best practice discourse rules related to how moral conflicts are discussed and if possible adjudicated in our various communities. And we can avoid any quick resort to communal exclusion when “our side” has the power to eliminate moral conflict by excluding those whose views differ from our own. Obviously the New Testament offers plenty of teaching about how Christians ought to conduct themselves in relation to one another; these all apply in moral conflict situations.
4. What do we do when we cannot reason or argue our way through a moral conflict?
There are only so many options. We can stay in community as a dissenting voice, continually articulating our convictions as long as we are allowed to do so. We can stay in community as a majority voice, continually allowing dissenters to remain in community with us as long as they are willing. We can ratchet up our dissent through more aggressive community-disrupting actions, in an effort to create the conditions for broader convictional change, such as during the Civil Rights Movement. We can, if we must, leave a community of faith when our moral conflicts are too painful or the majority takes a position we find repugnant. We can create new communities where at least at the beginning we share moral consensus. Or of course we can just say that we know the Truth, that God is on our side, and anathematize everyone else. I do not suggest the latter option, though I myself have sometimes fallen prey to it.
In Christian community, we need to develop an understanding of the catholicity of the church that helps us see God’s overriding role in guaranteeing the belonging of those who are a part of the church community — humans are not really vested with that power, and to seize it is a great sin. To be part of “the elect” is not to be pure in belief or righteous in behavior; this refers to God’s ongoing activity, and for this reason we simply are in solidarity even with the unfaithful. We must find ways of being in community together nonetheless.
5. What difference does all this make?
In our epidemically conflicted era in society and church life, it helps to draw a distinction between God’s Own Truth and even our most heartfelt convictions. This enables us to avoid identifying our view with God’s and our enemy’s view with the Great Deceiver. It helps to consider moral conflict inevitable and to be grateful for those rare moments of equilibrium where nobody in our little world is at each other’s throats. It is spiritually instructive to learn that absolute certainty, and a world in which everyone shares our absolute certainties, is simply too much to reach for in this dispensation. We do not have certainty. We have convictions. Even where such convictions are powerful enough that we would die for them, they are still convictions. And even as we are dying for them they will still be derided, as Jesus was mocked at the Cross. There are no unchallenged convictions in this life, no belief too sacred that someone won’t mock it.
In the end, no Bible quote, no claim from Tradition, no creedal formulation, no pastor, no local congregation, no spiritual experience, and no combination of the above can give any person absolute, unassailable claim on the Truth in a situation of moral conflict. Ratchet up your claims about the truth of scripture, tradition, creed, or whatever as high as you want, it is still human beings who are interpreting these valued knowledge sources in the moment of decision. What we have is our convictions, for which we must take responsibility before God and neighbor – and we believe in God, who is judge of all but has not revealed said judgment in this life.
We have to learn to live with the painful inevitability of moral conflict, and with those who most starkly disagree with us, and with a God who does not swoop down and resolve our disputes but leaves us to them — or, perhaps, is present precisely in our convictional adversaries, and in the growth and even breakthroughs that our painful engagements with them sometimes makes possible.